Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

Cell Me A Phone
Phlogiston Forty-Three, 1995
If there is an icon for the 1990s it is a picture of someone with a cellphone glued to their ear. Nothing
typifies the decade quite like it. Once only the wannabe yuppies sported them, but nowadays everybody
has one of the infernal devices. Even I've got one.
You can tell when a gadget has truly arrived in the public consciousness by the urban legends that
accrete around it. By now probably everybody has heard the one about the person striding round in a
public place, talking loudly into his phone when suddenly it rings. In the legend he is supposed to blush
and creep away, but in my opinion anyone caught in such a predicament ought to say (Very Loudly!),
"Excuse me, there is somebody on the other line.", thereby convincing his audience that his cellphone is
infinitely more technologically advanced than theirs is. I have never quite had the courage to try this out,
but one day I will. Of course, by the time I get round to it, cellphones will have multiple lines and nobody
will be impressed at all.
When I consider the big, black, chunky bakelite telephones of my childhood my science fictional sense of
wonder gets turned on at the advances that gave us the sleek pocket cellphone. I shouldn't really be
surprised though. The cellphone is an obvious (in retrospect) extrapolation from the clunky 1950s
monsters I grew up with. Why did nobody spot it before?
Well consider this, from a novel published in 1948:
Matt dug a candy bar out of his pouch, split it and gave half to Jarman, who accepted it
gratefully.
"You're a pal, Matt. I've been living on my own fat ever since breakfast -- and that's risky. Say,
your phone is sounding."
"Oh!" Matt fumbled in his pouch and got out his phone. "Hello?"
"That you, son?" came his father's voice...
[There is a long conversation]
Matt broke in, "I'll have to sign off, I'm in a crowd. Goodbye, thanks for calling."
"Goodbye son, good luck."
Tex Jarman looked at him understandingly. "Your folks always worry, don't they? I fooled mine -packed
my phone in my bag."
Space Cadet, Robert Heinlein
Robert Heinlein got it exactly right (as he so often did) and this prediction is spot on. Mind you he blotted
his copybook. The space cadets may have portable phones, but they still do all their calculating with slide
rules!
If you wanted to you could use this incident as a perfect example to support the thesis that science
fiction predicts the future. You would, however, be completely wrong. Science fiction does no such thing
though many naive critics seem unconvinced of this. Somebody once dismissed one of Brian Aldiss'
short story collections on the grounds that it contained no useful predictions at all; a criticism which
amused Aldiss mightily.
For almost all of its life people have assumed that because it often deals with future settings and as yet
uninvented devices science fiction must be considered to be a sort of literary crystal ball telling us how
the future will be both in terms of the gadgets we will be using and the type of society in which we will be