By Any Other Name

by Spider Robinson

  For a much fuller discussion of this technology’s staggering possibilities, see K. Eric Drexler’s seminal Engines of Creation (or its slightly more accessible followup, Unbounding the Future). It includes sober discussion of the possible downside—the dread “gray goo problem,” for instance—along with rational solutions and safeguards. But in summary, nanotechnology’s enthusiasts say its full utilization may well make us all immortal and infinitely rich—eventually. (By the way, I claim credit for coining the first shorthand term for “nanotechnology’s enthusiasts.” If cyberneticists are “computer weenies,” and astronomers are “star weenies,” then it seems to me nanotechnologists must be…teeny weenies.)

  How soon? Best guestimate, nanotechnology should begin coming on line somewhere between 20 and 50 years: within the projected lifespan of most of my readers. At least one prominent teeny weeny—Keith Henson, one of the founders of Alcor, the cryonics outfit—is so sure he personally is going to live to be immortal and infinitely wealthy that he’s already painstakingly worked the math to reassure himself that, even if it turns out the speed of light IS an absolute speed limit, there will in fact be just enough time for him and a few friends to tour the entire universe, in person, before it expires in heat death. There’ll even be time, he calculates, for one Grand Memory Merge. Last I heard Keith was, with great seriousness and in exhaustive detail, planning the Party At The End Of Time. (He describes it as a “non-trivial problem.” He expects, for instance, that he’ll need to disassemble an entire solar system or two just to build enough beer cans.)

  I find it enormously comforting that someone is thinking in these terms. I don’t know about you, but I’d hate to arrive at the Last Party and find that somebody forgot to stock the beer nuts.

  3) How about a warm dry place to spend your money?

  There seems every reason to hope that the dreaded horror, Global Warming, will continue to stave off the latest in a long and startlingly regular series of Ice Ages—which, by an interesting coincidence, has been theoretically overdue since…about the time the evil Industrial Revolution got underway.

  Despite all the above reasons for hope, most of the bright, educated people I know are expecting Apocalypse any time now. These must be The Crazy Years.

  The Fall-Guy Shortage

  I don’t know whether civilians have begun to consciously notice the problem yet…but I can tell you that we writers are in a state approaching panic. It is our function to be the canaries in society’s coal mine, identifying problems before they affect anyone important…and what we are beginning to sense in the air is not just the end of civilization, or even the end of fiction, but the potential end of the only thing that could possibly compensate us for either: humor itself.

  See if you can work it out for yourself. It’s right under your nose, really. What do civilization, fiction and humor all require to exist?

  That’s right: a fall-guy.

  There can be no civilization without scapegoats. Unspeakable things must be done to make a civilization flourish, unforgivable things…and somebody has to carry the can. In fiction the need is even more pressing: no matter how endearing you make your characters or settings, in every single story someone must be punished—the protagonist, if it’s Serious Literature, or the villain, if it’s Trash. And as for humor…well, it is not exaggeration to say that humor is the fall-guy, and vice-versa.

  Picture that most enduring evergreen of the field: a man slipping on a banana peel. Funny? Eternally so. But now imagine the slippee is your favorite grandmother. Still funny, to be sure…but noticeably less so. Imagine it’s you. Hmmm—not very funny at all, is it? Now imagine the victim is your boss. See what I mean? Now it’s twice as funny. The more deserving the fall-guy, the riper the joke.

  For us to endure as a society, we desperately need people that we all agree it is alright to hate. And these days the cupboard is damn near bare.

  In a vain and reckless attempt to make ourselves more likeable, we no longer permit ourselves to hate people who speak a different tongue—or those with a different complexion, or politics, or superstitions, or habits, or any of the old stand-bys. Hell, half of us have even stopped insulting the other gender (in public)! The only large groups still fair game are fat people and white males. (Oh, bosses are still good, and politicians—but both of those still tend to come under the heading of “white males,” don’t they? Besides, it’s not so much fun laughing at someone you know is probably going to have the last laugh.)

  Society requires fall-guys—untouchables, on whom we can all unload our own random rage and contempt. These days witches and Jews and cripples and Gypsies and native people and people of color all have apologists—and good attorneys. We need whores (how dare they sell what is most desperately sought, at a fair price?) and queers (how dare they offer to give it away?) and welfare mothers (how dare they get stiffed for it?) and junkies (how dare they avoid the problem?) and the homeless (how dare they not die when their credit fell to zero?). This civil rights nonsense has to end somewhere.

  In fiction, the problem is even worse—since so many of us writers have at one time or another been whores, queers, supported by the NEA or Canada Council, junkies, or homeless. Screenwriters, teleplay writers, novelists, dramatists, political speech-writers—all of us are crying out for acceptable villains. It’s worst in the adventure field, where they need someone so universally agreed to be vile that any conceivable brutality inflicted on him by the hero will elicit applause—people we want to see Arnold blow into chopped meat. And the supply is dwindling. Gooks won’t do, any more.

  It began back in the ’50s, when the TV show The Untouchables was forced to stop giving its mafiosi Italian names—and that opened the floodgates. We’re almost down to terrorists, serial killers and drug dealers, these days. And sadly, they’re all beginning to wear a little thin as literary devices. Despite our best efforts at publicizing them, there just aren’t many actual terrorists or serial killers—since both gigs require so much effort and risk, and pay so poorly. And drug dealers tend to turn up on many writers’ own Rolodexes, so it has to be crack or heroin.

  But society, as always, has shown us artists the way, and brought us the ideal villains, just as we needed them most:

  Thank God for child molesters.

  Apparently society wants them so badly it’s decided to focus an immense, glaring spotlight of attention on them, to inspire others—and we writers are delighted to help. Child molesters are perfect: they sanctify total rage. Nothing Arnold could do to one is bad enough. There’s no possible excuse or mitigation, no annoying shades of gray. Even a rape-murderer in prison can feel morally superior to a short-eyes. Even that damn ACLU might hesitate to defend one. Betraying the trust of a child is so self-evidently evil that not even a Senator or O.J. Simpson could get away with it, and you have to draw the line somewhere, don’t you?

  Best of all, it’s like Commies in the State Department—you can find as many as you’re willing to look for. People will believe in day-care sex rings and wide-scale commercial kiddyporn even when every single prosecution comes up empty. It’s a secret, see?

  So if you’ve been wondering why every single damn movie, TV show, novel, play, short story and country-western song you can locate this season features a child-molester theme or subplot, there’s your answer. We may be traumatizing every child in the land, and every adult who is reckless enough to smile at (or, God forbid, touch) one, and glamorizing what must after all be a fairly lame and pathetic pleasure at best, and giving demagogues and lynch mobs something to work with, and we may even be making the problem itself substantially worse, and hampering efforts to deal with it—

  —but hey, that’s a small price to pay for drama.

  Or so it seems, in The Crazy Years.

  Seduction of the Innocent

  Paul Simon once said “…the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls/and tenement halls…” I have myself seen the future writ large upon my own sidewalk.<
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  A few years ago, that sidewalk became so damaged as to require repair. The freshly poured concrete naturally attracted graffitisti with popsicle sticks, determined to immortalize themselves. How few opportunities there are these days for a writer to have his or her work literally graven in stone! Inevitably, one of these was a young swain who wished to proclaim his undying love to the ages. His chilling masterpiece of…er…concrete poetry is located right at the foot of my walkway, where I must look at it every time I leave my home. It reads:

  Tood + Janey

  Now, I don’t know about you, but I decline to believe that even in this day and age, any set of parents elected to name their son “Tood.” I am forced to conclude that young Todd is unable to spell his own flippin’ name…despite having reached an age sufficiently advanced for him to find Janey intriguing. (Assuming her name is not, in fact, Jeannie or Joanie.) As I make my living from literacy, I find this sign of the times demoralizing.

  I was going to argue the case that illiteracy is on the increase, next—but on reflection, I don’t think that’s necessary. I don’t suppose there’s a literate human alive who doubts it. Let’s move on to the more pressing questions: why is this happening, and what if anything can be done about it?

  The late great John D. MacDonald, in an essay he wrote for the Library of Congress, put his finger on the problem: the complex code-system we call literacy—indeed, the very neural wiring that allows it—has existed for only the latest few heartbeats in the long history of human evolution. Literacy is a very hard skill to acquire, and once acquired it brings endless heartache—for the more one reads, the more one learns of life’s intimidating complexity and confusion. But anyone who can learn to grunt is bright enough to watch TV…which teaches that life is simple, and happy endings come, at 30- and 60-minute intervals, to those whose hearts are in the right place.

  Literacy made its greatest inroads when it was the best escape possible from a world defined by the narrow parameters of a family farm or a small village, the only opening onto a larger and more interesting world. But the “mind’s eye” has only been evolving for thousands of years, whereas the body’s eye has been perfected for millions of them. The mind’s eye can show you things that no Hollywood special effects department can simulate—but only at the cost of years of effort spent learning to decode ink-stains on paper. Writing still remains the unchallenged best way—indeed, nearly the only way except for mathematics—to express a complicated thought…and it seems clear that this is precisely one of its disadvantages from the consumers’ point of view. Modern humans have begun to declare, voting with their eyes, that literacy is not worth the bother.

  It is tempting to blame the whole thing on the educational system. But that answer is too easy, and the only solution it suggests—shoot all the English teachers—is perhaps hasty. By and large they are probably doing the best they can with the budgets we give them.

  Nor can we look to government for help. Even if a more literate electorate were something politicians wanted, they are simply not up to the job. I’ve given up trying to get anyone to believe this, but I swear I once saw a U.S. government subway ad that read, “Illiterate? Write for help…” and gave a box number.

  Those of us who are parents, however, can do some useful work. We can con our children into reading.

  I offer two stratagems.

  My mother’s was, I think, artistically superior in that it required diabolical cleverness and fundamental dishonesty; it was however time- and labor-intensive. She would begin reading me a comic book—then, JUST as the Lone Ranger was hanging by his fingertips from the cliff, endangered-species stampede approaching, angry native peoples below…Mom would suddenly remember that she had to go sew the dishes or vacuum the cat.

  By the age of 6, I had taught myself to read, out of pure frustration. So Mom sent me to the library with instructions to bring home a book. The librarian, God bless her, gave me a copy of Robert A. Heinlein’s novel for children, Rocket Ship Galileo…and from that day on there was never any serious danger that I would be forced to work for a living. Mr. Heinlein wrote stories so intrinsically interesting that it was worth the trouble to stop and look up the odd word I didn’t know. By age 7, I was tested as reading at college Junior level.

  The only problem is, you cannot simply hand the child the comic book: you must read 80% of it to her, and then stop reading with pinpoint timing. With the best of intentions, you may not have that much time or energy to devote to the task of seducing your child.

  If not, try the scheme my wife and I devised. From the day our daughter was old enough to have a defined “bed-time,” we made it our firm policy that bed-time was bed-time, no excuses or exceptions—unless she were reading, in which case she could stay up as late as she pleased. The most precious prize any child can attain is a few minutes’ awareness past bedtime. She went for the bait like a hungry trout…and was invariably chosen as The Narrator in school plays because of her fluency in reading. Today she is one of those rare 22-year-olds who owns as many books as she does CDs.

  Doubtless there are other schemes. But one thing I promise: if we leave the problem to government, or the educational system, or a mythical animal called society—to anyone but ourselves—we will effectively be surrendering the battle, and giving our children over into the hands of Geraldo Rivera. As Mr. Heinlein said in his immortal Stranger in a Strange Land, “Thou art God—and cannot decline the nomination.” Our only options are to do a good job, or not.

  And the consequences of a bad job will make The Crazy Years look good…

  Bloomin’ Yoomins

  Join me now as we beam down to a strange new planet. Our five-minute mission: to determine whether intelligent life exists here. And since we’ve only five minutes, there is no time for a proper study of the large-scale organization or behavior of the planet’s dominant species—we must simply drop in, take one quick technology sample at random, assume it is representative, and draw the best conclusions we can. Ready? CUE THE SPECIAL EFFECTS—

  God, that always tickles.

  Okay. We’re in a typical dwelling of this race—Yoomins, they’re called. We’ve tried to bias the test in their favor as much as possible, by choosing our sample from one of the most affluent regions of the planet; surely here will be found their most intelligent technology. Tricorders ready? Let’s look around.

  The room we’re presently in—the name sounds like a sneeze—is the one in which yoomins store and prepare their food. The largest two items in the room are a heat-making machine and a heat-losing machine. They sit side by side…yet careful sensor readings indicate they are not connected in any way. Hmmm.

  Let’s look closer. The heat-loser is—bafflingly—designed to stand on its end, so that you must spill money on the floor every time you open it to access or even inspect its contents. And they put the coldest part on top.

  The heat-maker is complementarily designed to spill money on the ceiling. Not just the four elements on top (one of which is always defective): the central module, called an uvvin, has a door which—inexplicably—opens from the top, so that you cannot touch the contents during cooking, even momentarily, without wasting all the heat. The whole unit is utterly unprogrammable, and lacks even the simplest temperature readouts: everything is done by guess.

  Perhaps some sort of cultural blind-spot is at work here. Let’s examine the water-recycling facilities.

  Uh…there are none. Yoomins throw potable water away. They throw hot water away. And look at the temperature control system: there is none. No sensors, no thermocouples, taps completely uncalibrated—though all these technologies are trivially cheap here. They keep a large, almost-uninsulated tank full of water heated at all times to skin-scalding temperature (using none of the waste heat to warm the pipe, so that hot water will always be slow in arriving when needed), and then mix it with cold water to a safe temperature, by hand, adjusting the result by testing it with their own skin. With every use.

 
Well, perhaps yoomins customarily eat in restaurants, and this room is only intended as a fallback—in case, let us say, a wave of psychosis passes through the restaurant industry, and they all start turning away a quarter of their customers rather than run a fan. Let’s try another room.

  And let’s make it as fundamental and essential a room as we can. A yoomin need not necessarily sleep in its bedroom, nor relax in its livingroom, nor work in its study—but there is one room in which every yoomin must spend some time, at least twice a day. Surely there, if anywhere, we will find the most thoughtful applications of intelligence.

  The first and largest thing we find is a combination shower and bath. It cannot be used comfortably to bathe, and cannot be used safely to shower. Its principal purpose appears to be to kill the elderly, unfit and unlucky, which it does with ruthless efficiency. The shower head is generally fixed, impossible to train on the areas where it is most needed. It has worse temperature control than the sink in the other room, and is tested with the whole body. No provision is made for hair accumulation in the drain—or, usually, for venting of steam or gradual equalization of ambient temperature after a shower.

  Let’s move on to the central fixture: the commode. It enforces an unnatural, inefficient and uncomfortable posture, presents about the most uncomfortable sitting surface possible, has absolutely no facilities for cleansing or disinfecting either the user or itself—and after use, it takes the precious irreplaceable fertilizer and throws it away, using gallons of potable water to do so with no attempt at recycling. The obvious one-way valve, to prevent it backing up, is not present. And for a full 25% of its purported purpose—as a male urinal—it is completely and manifestly worthless, a constant source of domestic strife.