Is there a place in the real world that gave you the impression that it was ripped out of the pages of a science fiction story?

To cap off the Blue Corner dive day we visited Jellyfish Lake. I heard about this place about ten years ago, when I went to the “Planet of the Jellies” show at the Monterey Aquarium with Bruce Sterling later we wrote a story “Big Jelly” together about giant flying jellyfish. These special Palau jellyfish barely sting, they don’t eat anything, they get their nourishment from algae cultures that live inside their bodies. All they do all day is pulse their bells so as to move themselves into the sunniest part of the lake to make the algae in their tissues grow. Shades of my moldies in Freeware!

More pieces of Rudy Rucker’s brain can be found here

The first thing that pops into mind is the inspiration for the first scifi story I ever wrote. I was spending at summer at a college in High Point, NC, and it had long, immaculate brick walkways. One brick on one walkway was crooked. So noticeably crooked that I became utterly convinced that it was a trigger to a portal somewhere, and all I had to do was learn how to use it.

Not necessarily space age, but it entranced my little 16 year old mind that was otherwise obsessed with boys.

Mur Lafferty, is a writer and podcaster who should be writing

At some point, the fiction/idea becomes more than just a meme and breaks through into active reality, and the fashions that adorn the bodies of the “agents” of this meme (people)act as aspects of living world-contexts for the successful compiling of this meme-program. So if fashion is a fiction, then I would venture to say that the genre found on the bodies of the denizens of these clubs is science fiction, and so is the music. Science fiction is often associated with warnings about potential future trajectories. Are these places celebrating the seemingly dystopian world that they would seem to fit with, or is it one giant,living attempt to divert the course of the future into something better?
In other words, what I’m saying is, we’re a kind of army from the future!

We suspect Omniresonant is an escapee from a Science Fiction story

I work for a company called Welch Allyn. We manufacture medical monitoring devices. Every time I see one, I think of Dr. McCoy’s medical bed from Star Trek. Then I look at the computer I’m working with and think of Spock’s workstation. Then I flip open my cell phone and think of Kirk’s communicator, and I envy my co-worker with the Bluetooth wireless earpiece and think of Uhura’s earpiece. I walk in the front door which opens as I approach and I think of the Enterprise bridge door.

Now if they could just finish Mr. Scott’s transporter so I can bypass this awful commute…

Radical Russ is humorous

Most of those images from the Hubble Space
Telescope and others feel pretty science-fictional to me.

But the funny thing about the real world feeling as if
it’s lifted from science fiction is how quickly things
*stop* feeling that way, and instead come to feel
ordinary. The net, for example–even what we’re
doing right here, right now. Totally science fiction
come to life. And yet it’s now hard to imagine life without the net.
When I was involved not long ago with a consulting-editor job, I was
working at home on my computer, my wife was at her office on
another computer, and still another editor was at her home in
another state. The three of us were trading questions and comments
and wisecracks across the net in a completely comfortable and
collegial way that would have been impossible ten or fifteen years ago.

Then there’s the fact that we all routinely walk around with Star Trek
communicators now. Except that on Trek they weren’t always going,
“Can you hear me now?”

Jeffrey A. Carver is a science fiction writer who among other things pushes a snake up a hill

Sitting in a sleek restaurant atop Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak one night, looking down at the myriad skyscrapers outlined in fiery neon, I truly felt transported into a BLADE RUNNER future. The hybrid Anglo-Asian crowd around me confirmed the sensation. All that was missing was a replicant or two.

Paul Di Filippo is a science fiction writer known for being a prolific, wide-ranging writer of everything from steampunk to cyberpunk, and for his gonzo writing style.

The Hirschhorn Museum in Washington D.C. is an imposing swoop of drab concrete set in a huge field of drab concrete, studded with weird and abstract modern art. It reminds me of those depressing post-apocalyptic 1970’s films where all that’s left of our culture is bad vestiges of the 60’s and 70’s.

I’m so glad the 70’s ended.

Brent P Newhall is a writer and programmer

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