So what? Nostradamus aced him by centuries:

In the reign of the Chimp who lives in the white tree, a death card will deal daily in lose feces.

loose feces

Man, I hate that.

Yeah, I dunno what I'd do without my magnetic telegraph.

This guy was way off.

I don't know of any bloggers who have been invited to a reception at the local prime minister's house.

Yeah, but I bet there were some howlers in there, too. Like, "in the future, cathedral windows will be cleaned by monkeys in nightdresses, which will be attached to glass purely by the suction of their shaved bottoms and flail about helplessly wiping the window with flannelene."

I know it isn't as old, but Ender's Game indicated how bloggers may have an effect on the national discorse and political will of a country, and, eventually, the world.

Did this Russian guy mention my blog? Not directly, of course, but maybe in that section where the monkeys are wiping their butts on the stained glass.

Friggin' Russkis claim to have invented everything, even baseball and jazz.

Dont forget JULES VERN wrote many sci fi stories like FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON in which a spacecraft blastoffs from FLORIDA and splashes down in the PACIFIC and he submarine from 20:000 LEAGES UNDER THE SEA was the NATULUS> and although they got into space first we beat them to the moon

Frank Zappa offered up an idea in his "The Real Frank Zappa Book" which sounded a lot like what the Apple I-Tunes store is today.

who cares if this asshole predicted the internet, It represents capitalism. It represents freedom. It represents everything America is about. And to bring those two buildings down would bring America to its knees." --Line from the original script for Nosebleed, a Jackie Chan movie involving a terrorist plot against the World Trade Center, which i have no idea who wrote because the title of the movie is in Chinese and i have no idea what the Chinese word for nosebleed. and i am not about to translate every title of his 92 films.

I call "bullshit" on this one. He supposedly wrote this in 1837, right? Predicting that photography and telegraphs would be in every home. Problem is, those two devices hadn't quite debuted yet. Encyclopedia Encarta on photography:

"On January 7, 1839, Daguerre's process, called the daguerreotype, was announced to the French Academy of Sciences, and hence to the world. The announcement by respected French scientist François Arago was brief but nonetheless created a sensation. Newspaper accounts spoke of pictures "given with a truth which nature alone can give to her works." Half a year later the French government gave Daguerre and Niépce's son, Isidore, lifetime pensions in exchange for their release of all rights to the invention and public disclosure of the process. The daguerreotype was to become France's gift to the world."

About.com on the telegraph:

"While a professor of arts and design at New York University in 1835, Samuel Morse proved that signals could be transmitted by wire. He used pulses of current to deflect an electromagnet, which moved a marker to produce written codes on a strip of paper - the invention of Morse Code. The following year, the device was modified to emboss the paper with dots and dashes. He gave a public demonstration in 1838, but it was not until five years later that Congress (reflecting public apathy) funded $30,000 to construct an experimental telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore, a distance of 40 miles."

Yeah, but inventions are conceived of before they're reduced to working form.

We talked about sending a man to a moon at least ten years before we actually did it. 100 years or more, if you count that dorky French silent film.

Your call of "bullshit" is like saying that a prediction I make which includes mention of hand-held laser weapons is obviously a fake because hand-held lasers won't be invented until (let's say) 2030.

True, Ace, but Daguerre was the first to think of using a "camera obscura" for photography. He made his first prints in 1837, but they faded too quickly to be of any use. Once he found a way to make them permanent, that was when he unveiled his invention to the world.

I don't see how the good Prince could've known that a camera obscura was the secret to photography, when at the same time Daguerre was still figuring out the process.

I think it's just another case of historical revisionism.

It is actually feasible that he could've guessed at the telegraph, though. Telegraph just means writing from a distance. And it's possible that he could've guessed magnetism would be involved somehow. So I'll concede that the telegraph prediction could be legit. But I just can't buy that camera obscura prediction.

Look, if you've got the camera obscura, the idea of photography is kinda a gimme.

The full text of the (unfinished) novel doesn't seem to be online; but I found the magnetic-telegraph quote in a bunch of other, unrelated places. In particular, there's a couple that (purportedly) mirror the complete text of a compilation entitled "Entranced by the book: Russian writers on books, reading, and bibliophiles," published in 1982. It's a huge bunch of quotes from various books by various writers, including that one (and a few more) by Odoevsky. Looks legit to me.

http://www.filipark.ru/lib/CULTURE/LITSTUDY/bibliof.txt

I'm wracking my brain trying to come up with a good parallel to illustrate my point, but it's escaping me right now.

But what I'm really trying to say is that Daguerre was still inventing the camera obscura in 1837, and revealed it to the world in 1839. Prior to that, photography involved putting a flat object, such as a leaf, on a piece of leather, brushing some sort of acid on it, and leaving it out in the sun. This would get you a fine picture of a leaf, but it wasn't adequate for, say, a family portrait. It was really hard to get the mother-in-law to sit still while she was being doused in acid. And all it'd get you was her silhouette, anyway.

It's a real stretch for me to believe that Prince Vladimir came up with the same idea, at around the same time, and called it the same thing, as Daguerre did.

Then again, a certain beloved chief engineer on the Enterprise once talked about transparent aluminum, and that's a reality now. And Robert Heinlein predicted cell phones. On the other hand, they couldn't accurately predict just how these things would be made, or how they'd function.

If Prince Vladimir actually used the words "camera obscura," as opposed to "instant portrait machine" or something to that effect, that would require him to have fairly precise technical knowledge of something that was in the process of being invented over a thousand miles away by someone it's highly unlikely he knew personally.

Stumbo, thanks for trying to shed a little more light on the subject. Unfortunately, I can't read Russian. And I can't get Babelfish to display that page.

To be fair, I can believe the rest of that story. I guess my disbelief, then, hinges on two words. Ah, never mind; I hereby retract my "bullshit" call.

Then again, a certain beloved chief engineer on the Enterprise once talked about transparent aluminum, and that's a reality now.

Well, it's aluminum oxynitride (which is possible to make transparent) as opposed to aluminum (which it's not).

Nate:

Google for "term camera obscura".

P.S.: Babelfish can't display the whole page, but it can do excerpts if you cut and paste. You can check the opening (which describes the book), and then search for "4338" in the text and translate the next few paragraphs.

So, the term had been around in a different but similar use for a couple of centuries by then. And certainly in a form that a sci-fi writer of the time could use in the context of imagining a blog.

Well, I stand corrected. I could've saved us all a lot of time by googling that along with "history of photography" and "history of telegraph."

Sorry, Ace.

You were right; I was wrong. You're smart; I'm stupid. You're very good-looking; I'm not attractive...