A vision of the future in Shadow Puppets

[Naumann]

This has already been noticed, and in fact I hope it has. However, in the long-odds chance it has not, I wanted to alert people to OSC's sense of prophecy. Or at the very least the existance of his time machine.

In his book Shadow Puppets, toward the beginning of Chapter 3 "Mommies and Daddies" when Teresa Wiggin is talking to Graff after Peter's letter to Graff, pg 35 in my copy of the book (Hardback). Graff is informing Teresa that Achilles is coming to Ribeirao Preto, and then surmises that Teresa already knows this. Teresa responds "Gossip flies around here, since there's nothing else for the parents of geniuses to do but twitter to each other about the doings of their brilliant boys and girls." The book was published in 2002. Twitter was not developed until 2006. I thought this was really cool, and like I already said, wanted to tell somebody in case this fact wasnt widely known. Ive read this book, as well as pretty much every other OSC book published at least 5 times, ***I go through laps. Start on one shelf of my bookcase, read through them all until I get to the end of the OSC section, take a break, read some other stuff for a few months, then go back and do it again.*** however I never noticed/acknowledged it until now. This revelation has made my weekend. And I dont care if someone else has the credit for already noticing it. It still makes my day.

 

[Mulcebar]

I would agree that orson Scott card does
Create a realistic plausable vision of the future
However. I think the expression. "twitter" existed
Before the Internet. Birds twittering and all.

 

[Vault Dweller]

I don't know why I feel I must crush your discovered prophecy, but here I go, I just can't stop myself.

Really it isn't all that strange, here is the dictionary definition of twitter:

Twitter:
–verb (used without object) 1. to utter a succession of small, tremulous sounds, as a bird.

2. to talk lightly and rapidly, esp. of trivial matters; chatter.

3. to titter; giggle.

4. to tremble with excitement or the like; be in a flutter.

The very word itself means to talk or chatter, and that is the very reason that Card used it in his novel. The website itself is named that because esentially thats what it does: share people's words and chatter.