Once More With Footnotes

I'm told the BBC has forbidden people to take Discworld as a subject on Mastermind, which may show unusual common sense on the part of the BBC. But at least you can now demonstrate your prowess in Discworldology in the comfort of your own home.
     
                  What more could anyone reasonably require?
     

(First published in The S unday Times under this title, 24 December 2000.)
     
    Journalists in the UK, and in my experience practically everywhere else in the world, find it hard to distinguish between fantasy writers and science fiction writers. I'm down in their contacts book as "guy to talk to about sci-fi". When possible signs of life were discovered in the famous Martian meteorite ALH84001, I was the person they came to for a comment. Since they had room for a sound bite of about twelve seconds, though, it hardly mattered. Anyone t rained as a journalist can be an expert for twelve seconds.
     
    For similar reasons, I was asked to write this. I could polish it up now, all the tech is hugely or subtly out of date, but that's the trouble with the future. It doesn't stand still for long eno ugh. Anyway, this is journalism, which doesn't have to be true forever. It just has to be true until tomorrow morning. But 1 rather enjoyed writing it.
     
     
     
     
     
2001: T he V ision and the R eality
     
                  Dah ... DAH ... DAAAH! (bing bong bing bong bing bong bing .. . bong ...)
     
                  There had never been a science fiction movie like it. Few have approached it since. You couldn't see the string. Everything looked right. Even the dialogue worked, even though it sounded as though people were softening up one another to sell them life insurance. They didn't say, "Eat electric death, Emperor Ming!" They said, "How's that lovely daughter of yours?"
     
                  And the science was right. Space wasn't busy and noisy. It was full of dreadful, suffocating silence, and the sound of a human, br eathing.
     
                  It was glorious, and we were so enthralled we spent several minutes just watching a spaceship dock with a space station. No explosions, no aliens, no guns at all. Just ... grandeur, and technology turned into a ballet.
     
                  I remember that spaceshi p. We had proper spaceships in those days, not like the sort you get now.
     
                  Not that we actually get many now, come to think of it. I grew up expecting to see the first man land on the moon. It never occurred to me that I'd see the last one. We thought the re'd be a moon base. Then ... onward to Mars!
     
                  The future was different back in 1968. Cleaner. Less crowded. And more, well, old-fashioned. We expect the future to be like a huge wave, carrying us forward. We expect to see it coming. Instead, it leaks in around our feet and rises over our heads while we are doing other things. We live in a science-fiction world, and we haven't noticed.
     
                  Of course we didn't get the moonbase. That was because we realized that the Race for Space had been a mad bout in intern ational willie-waving. So we left the exploration of space to a bunch of flying Lego kits and, instead, filled Earth orbit with dull satellites that do dull things.
     
                  Remember the trans-Atlantic phone calls, usually made at Christmas, which were a matter o f a vast sum of money and a lot of technical negotiation? And then we spent a lot of time saying, "It's dark here, is it dark where you are?" and marvelled at the fact that you could have two times at the same time. But recently I rang home while walking t hrough Perth, Australia, to check that the cat was okay. I just dialled the number. It wasn't very exciting. I didn't even ask if it was dark.
     
                  The price of a very cheap video recorder now buys us a little GPS device that'll pinpoint us anywhere on the pl anet. You read Longitude? The sheer excitement of humanity trying to find out exactly where it is? A little black box now does the job better than the man with the sextant and the chronometer ever could. It's rather dull. Even my car knows where it is and in a pleasant voice, rather like HAL's sister, can navigate me through Swindon. We don't have to be lost any more.
     
                  Remember the weather forecasts? They used to be one step above a lottery, rather than