From Arthur C. Clarke
More modest coughs from a minor prophet: I described the emergence of the
“global brain”
(24 June, p 22)
in Dial F for Frankenstein, published by
your competitor, Playboy magazine, in January 1965 and now in my
collection The Wind from the Sun. It was actually written in 1963, and
I assumed that as soon as communications satellites started operating (which
they did in 1965), the global telephone system would reach criticality.
The slightly dated opening sentence reads: “At 0150 on December 1 1975, every
telephone in the world started to ring.” If I was writing this story now, I
would have “Access denied” appearing on the world’s computer screens.
Colombo, Sri Lanka
