{"id":2372,"date":"2009-04-11T00:42:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-11T05:42:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-03-27T21:23:20","modified_gmt":"2020-03-28T02:23:20","slug":"checking-my-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/2009\/04\/11\/checking-my-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"Checking My Memory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was just reading the <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wired.com\/wiredscience\/2009\/04\/memoryedit.html\">Wired article<\/a> on memory altering drugs when I had to stop and deliberately recall which of my stories with similar drugs, and similar ethical issues, were already published.  Hmm, yes, <b>Roswell or Bus<\/b>t with the MIB&#8217;s rollback drug was published last year, as was <b>Extreme Makeover<\/b>, with the characters debating whether to remove a friend&#8217;s memory of torture.  Good.  While I can&#8217;t claim that I predicted the future, because my versions were simply rehashes of themes others had used long ago, I still hate to appear to be someone that jumps on a bandwagon. <\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>It is interesting to observe real-world versions of something you wrote about in a fictional context.  And it&#8217;s definitely better when you did it years ago.  The worst kind of prediction is in an unpublished manuscript.  Then you&#8217;re faced with the question, do I re-write it to make it closer to what&#8217;s in the news, or do I abandon the whole thing?  If it&#8217;s published, then you get Writer Bonus Points for futurism, but even if you wrote it twenty years ago, unpublished predictions don&#8217;t count.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>There&#8217;s no big official scoring system for making good science fiction predictions, and even if there were, I&#8217;d never be able to compete with Clarke&#8217;s geostationary satellites or Heinlein&#8217;s waterbed, but is fun to be right.  I&#8217;ve had my share.  <i>Catacomb<\/i>, a short story published in Dragon magazine back in 1985 racked up a few WRB&#8217;s for real-world money in online games, and <i>Forget It!<\/i> from 1977 was all about PDA&#8217;s and copyright issues.  You can go read these on my website.  They&#8217;re <a href=\"http:\/\/www.HenryMelton.com\/0\/Free.html\">free<\/a>.  <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was just reading the Wired article on memory altering drugs when I had to stop and deliberately recall which of my stories with similar drugs, and similar ethical issues, were already published. Hmm, yes, Roswell or Bust with the MIB&#8217;s rollback drug was published last year, as was Extreme Makeover, with the characters debating&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/2009\/04\/11\/checking-my-memory\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Checking My Memory<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[8,81],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4t90x-Cg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2372"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2373,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372\/revisions\/2373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}