[Update: It looks like Monica was also in a sci-fi mood yesterday, although she wrote about the subject rather eloquently, whereas I was just up to my usual word barfing (as you can see below)...]

To pass the time in cabs, airplanes, and the cordoned-off high security cavity strip search area of airports (where I've been spending so much time as of late (got nailed again today)), I've been reading a lot of Arthur C. Clarke.

I don't read much sci-fi, but he has me hooked. Book after book, and short story after short story, I'm blown away by the completeness of the presentation of his ideas (if not by the quality of the prose). His books seem less like your typical fictional romp than they do incredibly cool showcases of Worlds-That-Could-Be-If-We-Only-Find-the-Funding-Damn-It.

There have been some disappointments among the stories, but only because they haven't actually come true - I think most of us were a little bummed when 2001 came and went without a HAL in every home.

But, except for the monolith in 2001, the technology itself was perfectly plausible, and even realistic half a century ago when the book was written.

I find this fact very interesting.

And, the more I read, the more I find that Clarke's ideas were nearly universally realistic (when they weren't realistic, he made it pretty clear by throwing in little comments about the "unknown workings" of a "space drive" or whatever).

But, where the various denizens of the not-too-distant future come into play, zipping around the solar system between recently founded colonies on the safer planets aside from our own, I don't doubt for a moment that we could do it now. The technology in the books is almost always the same old rocketry mumbo-jumbo that we've been playing with since the Chinese began using gunpowder to launch paper tubes into the air in the mid 11th century (and with the technology taking many large steps forward since then).

I don't know if it was a lack of interest or a desire to remain as true to life as possible when writing about future technology, but Clarke only rarely seemed to dabble in where computers might be decades and centuries down the road.

The result is that he often told stories of small interplanetary ships that could pretty much fly from planet to planet at will, but which housed tape based storage systems. He even mentions tubed computers, on spaceships, in a couple stories.

Tubes.

What an interesting idea - that in the year 2200, we'll have small craft capable of hopping back and forth between Earth and Mars, but we aren't going to have anything better than tube based computers and giant tape systems for data storage and retrieval.

The really funny thing is that the future turned out almost exactly the opposite of what Clarke imagined.

Rather than having our personal spacecraft and tape drives in the back like this:

...and probably recording over the BeeGees in the process

We instead have some pretty slick storage options like DVDs, compact flash, and secure digital cards, but nothing much nicer than Toyota Tercels in which to drive them around:

I know - this isn't really a Toyota Tercel, but I only know how to draw one kind of car, so just deal with it and pretend

We've traded convenient interplanetary travel and colonization for iPods and digital cameras.

I kind of wish we hadn't.