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Carpal Tunnel
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Re:your rue de gra dea
"Road of fa(t) god". Hmmm.
Lost me here, Mr Washington, sir!
Oh one of milum clever bits i got first time round..
not a coup de grace but a rue de gra dea
or at least that what i think.. Milo plays at intensionally make spoonerism..and when you get them, they are so witting and fun.. but half the time.. i think about them, and ponder them, and then some time months later, i finally catch on..
trouble with Milum is, he keeps unrating himself, or overating us.. and we keep missing his jokes and not realizing how clever he is by half.. (still i don't mind too much that Milo thinks i am quicker on the uptake, and twice as clever than i really am.. )
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Brilliant thread, folks! Coming to this late, I found many of my ideas and questions unfolding in the succession of posts. I was going to ask if a non-fiction, empirical foresight like Toffler's Future Shock," would be included in this equation; if Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, while concerned with experimental vivisection, was prophetic to some of today's new medical techniques (i.e. pig's hearts, etc.); and if a far leap of future prophecy, as in Heinlein's extra-dimensional space travel in The Time Tunnel is only a seeming leap until it's plausible, and then becomes a linear prediction.
However, the one direction of futurology not heavily mentioned is the sociofuturists, as in Orwell's 1984 (once regarded as science fiction.) Many of his "predictions" there are, alarmingly, already in place, and the vestiges of many others are increasingly appearing on the horizon. In like manner Huxley's Brave New World. And how would we categorize the allegorical teechnique of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, where he depicts the Morlock society of the far future as a metaphor for the sad vulnerabilties of human nature? Is he saying human nature will never change, or just highlighting our present dilemma by using the future? And where does his vision of the machine, itself, fit into this discussion if it were possible? (in fact, the parallel of Wells and Huxley seems to be, "give people their 'paradise,' give people their 'soma', and you can do anything you want with them...in 1920 or in 4020). Then there is, for instance, the gracious and free-spirited sexual mores of Robert A. Heinlein's "Future History" (most notably in Time Enough for Love; the Notebooks of Lazarus Long), set in a far future world, but predictive of current trends in sociology?
Then there is also psycho-spiritual frontiers of C. J. Jung and others.
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Praps, The Eternal Return? (already coined)
Why do I read the above and think immediately:
"April is the cruelest month."
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And as if that weren't enough to stamp the seal of melancholy, I just read toward the end:
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet,
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
And, again, there's that number nine...
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enough to stamp the seal of melancholyBut Eliot is a brilliant poet, WW - and, sometimes unwittingly, shows that from the depths of despair something infinitely precious and beautiful (yet also fantastically commonplace) can be retrieved. Classic examples of this could be the great Blues performances, but continuing on the Eliot theme, The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.htmland Preludes: http://www.bham.net/soe/arclight/orb2.htmand The Hollow Men: http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~evans/hollow.html-will all do nicely. It seems to me that in conjuring up infinite despair, Eliot nonetheless conjures up infinity. And his eloquence and use of often surreal and dream-like imagery is amazing. His despair is rooted in a tremendously powerful realisation of what we all could be, and what he himself longs to be. So - to the extent that he communicates his longing and to the extent that we share the feeling, his is a powerful affirmation of humanity. Returning vaguely to the theme of this thread (ha ha! turning an oil tanker..) Eliot projects a dismal present into eternity, the only way out being a revolutionary leap into the unknown. That's also the underlying meaning of W'ON's (or rather Nietzsche's) Eternal Return. If Now is Forever it can be infinitely depressing or infinitely wonderful. Or, indeed, both at the same time. 
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the one direction of futurology not heavily mentioned is the sociofuturistsYes, W'ON, not dealt with yet, although I did say - in response to tsuwm's article about SF becoming truth so rapidly it made SF almost redundant - that recent SF dealt more with the cultural and social implications of people having god-like powers (for instance). 1984, Brave New World and The Time Machine (and Ira Levin's This Perfect Day, incidentally) could all be classed as the intentional projection of (then-)present aspects of life into the future, thus enabling them to be observed as if from afar. This is a very powerful and effective writing technique, and maybe proves my point that a concise term for projecting the present into the future would be generally useful! Making a fairy-tale story of current events is effective in a very similar way, and indeed, Animal Farm takes exactly that approach. What would we call that? Allegorizing?  the gracious and free-spirited sexual mores of Robert A. Heinlein's "Future History"...set in a far future world, but predictive of current trends in sociology?Hmmm, but is it? I see Heinlein's stuff as more of a straightforward projected wish-fulfilment. "Wouldn't the world be a happier and healthier place if we could all cast off our outdated sexual hang-ups?" kind of thing. But maybe I'm just an outdated prude. 
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Brave New World
I just happen to be reading this right now, and the sexual mores in that society are pretty free, if not non-existent. Though I'm not sure they could be classified as free-spirited. That seems to go against the theme of the book.
Huxley did though predict, perhaps logically, that flight would become the main mode of transport. They use plane-like vehicles seemingly in the same manner as trains, though they have propellers. In fact, he has a flight from London to New Mexico taking about 6.5 hours. Pretty impressive for a prop plane if you ask me.
I would hope that we're moving in the opposite direction of his society in the area of social stratification, but who knows what cloning will do.
As for 1984, I'm not sure how common TVs were in '48 (when it was written), but he seems to have predicted fairly well the wide-spread usage of them (telescreens), even if not for recreational purposes.
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