Catching Up

      No post yesterday.  I chaired the fiction writer's critique group, and that really takes it out of me.  Not because they're a particularly difficult bunch, especially as writers go -- in fact, they're remarkably pleasant -- but because of me.  The isolation during the pandemic, following on the heels of marked political division during Mr. Trump's Presidency, has left me far less able to cope with social interaction.  I didn't exercise that set of skills and they have atrophied.

     Idly browsing social media afterward, I happened on a factiod that sounds made up but isn't:  SF writer Gene Wolfe, a prolific writer of complex, interestingly-told tales, a prose stylist of considerable merit (according to the fans and critics, and I agree), worked for many years as an industrial engineer, designing the things that make things, and he's the father of (according to the company) or a considerable contributor to the machine that make Pringles®.  Seriously -- click on "Who invented Pringles®" or check his Wikipedia entry.

     "We invented the future" is an often-hyped claim made for SF writers, and it isn't always true.  Jules Verne was an "If This Goes On..." writer, who kept extensive files of clippings and usually described perfected (or over-hyped) versions of things that already existed, from big guns and propellants to submarines to airships to the use of compressed air for energy transport and storage.  H. G. Wells made up impossible technologies from whole cloth -- with one terrifying exception.  On the other hand, a young Arthur C. Clarke was an electronics technician for the group that developed ground-controlled approach radar, and George O. Smith helped develop the radio proximity fuse during WW II -- a vacuum-tube radar system small enough to fit an artillery shell! -- but such specific examples are rare.  More often, there are things like James H. Schmitz showing how to use text-to-speech in the 1960s/70s* and Robert A. Heinlein roughly describing -- and as a result, naming -- the waldo, or writing about online search engines and how to construct a search string in Friday (1982), long before Google or even Archie.  But just as I was about to write that Gene Wolfe was surely the only SF writer to have been involved with snack foods, I remembered E. E. "Doc" Smith.

     You see, Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., was a chemical engineer.  He worked in explosives during World War II, but the majority of his career was spent in food engineering.  Specifically, food mixes.  He developed doughnut-batter mixes, among others, and did so long before the first cleverly-shaped chip ever slid neatly into a metallized-cardboard tube. The next powdered-sugar doughnut you enjoy may well be a Child of the Lens!
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* Young Telzy Amberdon adds punctuation on the go when using her voicewriter, comma, period, paragraph, open and close quotes.  You will find your phone or other device works very smoothly with those inputs, with a single exception: I have yet to find one that will start a new paragraph on command.