On 20 Jun 2020 at 18:49, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 11:19 AM David Johnson <xxxxxx@zarthani.net
> > wrote:
>     Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org > wrote:
>
> I tried to find Rodenberry's Axiom, but Google and DuckDuckGo give me
> blank stares.  
>
>     You had me at "no more consideration than 'what do I need to make
>     this story work'" but, unfortunately, lost me at "engineers."
>     Frederik Pohl--who Wikipedia says dropped out of Brooklyn
>     Technical High at 17 and served as an air corps enlisted
>     weatherman--had an interesting editorial about this sort of thing
>     in ~Galaxy~ way back in 1968:
>
>     https://archive.org/stream/Galaxy_v27n05_1968-12_modified
>
>     I love the last bit about "a good science-fiction story" being
>     "able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
>
> To be fair though, if you don't sufficiently understand the
> automobile, you can't predict the traffic jam.

Actually the traffic jam didn't *need* to be predicted as they
existed at least as far back as Rome (Rome had laws forbidding wagons
and the like inside the city dost the day *because* they caused
traffic jams)

On the other hand Larry Niven *did* predict flash mobs...
--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com