Progress catches up with sci-fi prescience

SAN FRANCISCO — Perhaps it's fitting that Linden Lab's office is on Green Street, just steps from the spot where Philo Farnsworth transmitted the first electronic television signal in 1927.

Like Farnsworth's achievement, Linden Lab's virtual Second Life stems from converging technologies — as well as converging ideas from an entire genre of speculative fiction.

The popularity of virtual worlds such as There.com and Second Life represents the present catching up with science fiction.

"There's a long history of science fiction literature influencing technology projects," wrote science fiction author Neal Stephenson in a rare e-mail interview. "It's nice when it happens, because it suggests that the vision described in the book made sense, at some level, to engineers."

In 1899, H.G. Wells wrote about air conditioning and video recorders in "When the Sleeper Wakes" long before they were invented, and Robert Heinlein described a waterbed in 1961's "Stranger in a Strange Land" — seven years before the real thing debuted.

Authors such as William Gibson ("Neuromancer") and Vernor Vinge ("True Names") pioneered writing about cyberspace and its possibilities, but Stephenson's 1992 novel "Snow Crash" provides the clearest vision for technology like Second Life.

In that book, Stephenson's characters interact in the "Metaverse" (also used as a slang synonym for Second Life), a virtual reality world much like Linden Lab's creation. Residents built a few Second Life islands modeled after scenes from "Snow Crash."

Stephenson said he's never used Second Life and has requested that "Snow Crash" site builders make clear that he has no affiliation with the world.

"I have nothing negative to say about it," Stephenson said. "There are lots of unread books on my shelves and many interesting parts of the real world I haven't visited yet. Every hour I spend in a virtual reality is an hour I'm not spending reading Dickens or visiting Tuscany."