On Tue, Jan 02, 2001 at 07:18:49AM +0000, Tony Finch wrote:
> Neal Stephenson wasn't the first author to use that idea -- I think it
> dates back to an 80s short story who's name and author I can't
> remember right now and my books are 6000 miles away.
If the trigger pattern can be aural rather than visual, how about Arthur
C. Clarke's 1956 short story, "The Ultimate Melody"[1]? That blew my mind
when I was a kid. The connection to Snow Crash has been noted by
others[2].
But I also stumbled across this course description:
"THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF CYBERSPACE (graduate course)
The thesis of this course is that the history of cyberspace reaches back,
not to 1984, when William Gibson coined the word, nor to when ARPANET
first came online in 1968, nor even to 1945, when ENIAC's tubes first
heated up, but rather to the 4th century B.C., when Socrates was
discoursing on Ideal Forms. Indeed, it can go earlier than that: the
tropes of bodilessness, abstraction, modeling, and immortality that so
characterize cyberspace today can be found in the Gilgamesh legend of 3000
B.C. " [3]
-Matt Jensen
NewsBlip.com
Seattle
---
[1] http://www.geocities.com/~sandcastle/sf-book1.htm
[2] http://www.dromo.com/fusionanomaly/arthurcclarke.html
[3] http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~syverson/388/fall95/courses.html
See the reading list there.
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