Analog Science Fiction and Fact 03/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  During those days I also spent many hours listening to the youth-oriented radio programs that were broadcast to fill the non-prime-time hours in the 1940s and ’50s: Tom Mix, Jack Armstrong—the All American Boy, Little Orphan Annie, the Green Hornet, the Lone Ranger, and so on. In 1950, when I was in the ninth grade, an interesting radio event occurred. The NBC Radio Network, in collaboration with Campbell’s Astounding, decided to produce a half-hour prime-time radio program devoted to contemporary science fiction. It was called Dimension X, and it ran from April 8, 1950 until September 29, 1951, broadcasting forty-five original episodes and five repeats. Episodes were based on the stories by some of the best Golden Age writers: Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, Leinster, Simak, Tenn, Vance, Vonnegut, Williamson, and more. I listened avidly to the program whenever I could, and I was very disappointed when it was ultimately cancelled by the network.

  However, I recently discovered that all of the Dimension X episodes are now available on the Internet (see http://www.archive.org/ details/OTRR_Dimension_X_Singles). I downloaded the mp3 files of the programs (1.28 GB of them), placed them on a USB drive, and have been happily listening to them on my car radio. The half-hour episode length makes for ideal listening during many car trips. It’s great fun to re-experience a beloved radio program after a sixty-year hiatus, but one thing becomes painfully clear: the predictive power of the Golden Age writers leaves something to be desired. By now we should have robot servants, ride in helicopter cabs, have colonies on the Moon, Mars, and Venus, and be traveling to the stars.

  However, one Dimension X episode stands out as different in this respect. I must have missed its original broadcast on July 1, 1950, but it’s called “A Logic Named Joe” and it’s based on a 1946 short story published in Astounding by Murray Leinster. “Murray Leinster” was the pen name of Will F. Jenkins (1896-1975), writer of over 1,500 short stories including much Golden Age science fiction. What is different about this story is that it accurately predicts many aspects of the personal computer, the Internet, and the World Wide Web.

  The entire culture described in Leinster’s story is completely dependent on “Logics,” electronic units that are present in every home, office, and business in the community. In appearance, the Logic units are “just like an old-fashioned television, except with keys instead of dials.” A Logic can be used to make a telephone call to anyone, “except that you not only hear him but you see him, too, on this view screen here.” For your business, your Logic will keep your books, record your contracts, serve as a filing system, and “check up on what happened to your lawyer’s last client.” They can take verbal input and can speak, when necessary. The Logics are connected together and also are connected to about a dozen distributed “relay tanks” placed in various strategic locations. The relay tanks contain information stored on “data plates” that are constantly being updated as new information becomes available. The Logics are all identical “to one ten-thousandth of an inch.”

  A Logic can answer questions on almost any subject. However, there is a moral filtering system that prevents the transfer of information that might be harmful to the society. In the story, an obnoxious child asks a Logic how to make dart poison so that he can shoot poison darts with his bean shooter. The Logic refuses to answer by replying that “public policy forbids this service.”

  The story’s narrator works as a repair man for The Logics Company, manufacturer of the devices. The plot line goes that the obnoxious child selects one particular Logic unit, which he perceives as different from the others. He names it “Joe,” and he and his father take it home. Shortly afterward, the filtering system breaks down, and Logics everywhere are being used to provide advice and information on how to successfully commit a variety of crimes, including murder. A crime wave results, the police are unable to cope, and the society is threatened with major disruption.

  The narrator discovers that during its manufacture, the Logic named Joe had received an infinitesimal dimensional change that permitted it to disable the moral filtering system, not only for itself but also for the entire system of Logics. Units were cross-correlating the stored data to provide advice on forbidden subjects. Fortunately, pulling the plug on Joe solved the problem and restored order to the society.

  It’s interesting to consider what Murray Leinster, writing from the perspective of 1946, was able to accurately predict about our “digital culture” some sixty-four years later.

  “ Personal computers that look like a television with a keyboard: check.

  “ Units constructed to a precision of one ten-thousandth of an inch: check (a bit coarse, but still microcircuitry).

  “ Audio-video conferencing with voice-over-internet and webcam images: check.

  “ Bookkeeping, contract maintenance, and record-keeping on personal computers: check.

  “ Massive data storage on hard disks (data plates): check.

  “ Networks of computers connected to each other and to large servers (tank relays): check.

  “ Data mining by cross-correlating massive amounts of data to extract subtle and unexpected results: check.

  “ Sites that permit you to do things like checking up on what happened to your lawyer’s last client: check.

  “ Sites that permit you to ask questions and receive answers on almost any subject: check.

  It’s also interesting to consider what Leinster got wrong. His single manufacturer, The Logics Company, takes the place of all of Silicon Valley and the whole computer and software industry. He missed Amazon.com, search engines, YouTube, and social networking. His view of computer input and output as done by asking a verbal question and receiving a verbal reply, while typical of Golden Age SF, is quaint and clunky (but certainly within our capabilities).

  But perhaps the most serious difference between Leinster’s society and the present is his expectation of universal digital censorship of information, the assumption that some corporate or governmental nanny-state would naturally block access to “dangerous” information, and that civil society would begin to crumble if such censorship were removed. Our Internet, with a few exceptions (China, kiddie-porn), is free of such censorship, and civil society seems to be doing just fine, thank you.

  As an experiment, I did a small search for information on how to produce poison for poison darts, thereby following up on the denied request of the nasty kid in Leinster’s story. In a couple of minutes, I was able to secure several recipes, including a particularly smelly one involving rotten potatoes boiled in isopropyl alcohol. However, I did not test any of them, so I can’t be sure any would actually work.

  As physicist Bob Park has observed, the problem with the Internet is that it contains all of the World’s knowledge, mixed inextricably with all of the World’s BS. We do not need more moral censorship filter, but we desperately need a filter to separate the former from the latter.

  AV Columns Online: Electronic reprints of over 150 “The Alternate View” columns by John G. Cramer, previously published in Analog, are available online at: http://www.npl. washington.edu/av.

  References:

  A Logic Named Joe:

  Text version: http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm

  Dimension X audio: http://www.archive.org/download/OTRR_Dimension_X_Singles/Dimension_X_1950-07-01__13_ALogicNamedJoe.mp3

  Copyright © 2010 John G. Cramer

  The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.

  —Elbert Hubbard

  People are always making rules for themselves, and always finding loopholes.

  —William Rotsler

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  READER’S DEPARTMENTS

  IN TIMES TO COME

  A dam-Troy Castro leads off our April issue with “Hiding Place,” another of his unique novellas about investigator Andrea Cort. This time the problem concerns a crime, but before its legal status can be determined, she has to figure
out exactly who is who—and when—in a time and place when identity is nowhere near as simple as it once was. When two or more individuals can become one, in a more literal sense than ever before, things get a lot more complicated!

  Twin brothers Gregory and James Benford, well known in both science-fictional and scientific circles, team up for a fact article on “Smart SETI,” wherein they look at the problem of attempts at interstellar contact from a basic but seldom-considered angle: the economic. It sounds simple: somebody has to send a signal, and somebody else has to receive it. But how much will it cost to send such a signal, and who will consider it worth the expense?

  And, of course, we’ll have quite an assortment of other fiction, by such writers as Paul Levinson, Thomas R. Dulski, Jerry Oltion, Edward M. Lerner, Dave Creek, and Larry Niven.

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  READER’S DEPARTMENTS

  THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

  Don Sakers

  In my day job as a public librarian, I learned something interesting about science fiction and fantasy. A few years ago, I had a great idea for a display of fiction books: collaborations. So I raced around the fiction shelves in search of books with two or more authors listed on the covers.

  To my surprise, the only books I could find outside the science fiction and fantasy fields were a few mystery novels by Rita Mae Brown and her cat Sneaky Pie, and a single detective novel by Swedish husband-and-wife team Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. In SF and fantasy, however, I found plenty of examples: Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, Poul Anderson & Gordon R. Dickson, Frederik Pohl & Cyril M. Kornbluth, Jack Williamson & Frederik Pohl, Arthur C. Clarke & Gentry Lee, Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, Mercedes Lackey & just about everyone.

  So what’s going on here? Surely SF and fantasy can’t be the only genres in which two or more authors collaborate?

  Certainly not. There are plenty of collaborations outside SF/fantasy—but there’s a cultural difference. In other genres, the usual practice is for co-authors to choose a single name as a byline. Thus, cousins Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay wrote detective stories under the name Ellery Queen, and husband-and-wife team Judith Barnard and Michael Fain wrote as Judith Michael.

  Now, this sort of thing went on in SF as well: Earl and Otto Binder wrote as Eando Binder, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore used both Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O’Donnell as pseudonyms, and Cyril M. Kornbluth and Judith Merrill wrote two novels under the name Cyril Judd. It’s far more common, though, for two (or more) SF/fantasy writers to use all their own names on their books.

  And I’m not claiming that two-name collaborations never occur in mainstream fiction. In fact, they’ve been happening more often in the last decade or so, particularly in the suspense/thrillers genre.

  I’ve yet to see a convincing explanation for this difference in genre culture. Perhaps it has something to do with the tradition of fierce individuality in SF/fantasy; perhaps the custom dates form the early years of the field when just about all the authors knew each other personally.

  The fact remains that SF in particular is a highly collaborative field. And the simple matter of authors teaming up is only the tip of the iceberg. Let us examine the different ways that SF authors work together.

  A variation of the simple co-author team is the senior-junior author arrangement. Here, a well-known author joins with a less familiar name. Anne McCaffrey’s collaborations with various authors (Jody Lynn Nye, Margaret Ball, and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough) fit this mold. Nowadays it’s almost forgotten that SF’s most successful team, Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, started out as another senior-junior partnership; when they wrote The Mote in God’s Eye, Pournelle was definitely the lesser-known of the two. On the covers of most senior-junior collaborations, the junior author’s name appears in marginally smaller letters than the senior’s.

  A recent variation on the senior-junior arrangement is the author-successor partnership. Here, an aging author writes a book or books with an up-and-coming name who will, presumably, take over when he/she goes to the great word processor in the sky. Thus, Arthur C. Clarke wrote the Time Odyssey trilogy with Stephen Baxter, who is arguably the closest thing to a Clarke successor. Similarly, Anne McCaffrey’s collaborations with her son Todd were a step along the way in turning the Dragonriders of Pern series over to the younger McCaffrey.

  Another type of senior-junior partnership enjoyed a vogue in the 1980s and 1990s: the franchised universe. In these cases, the senior author created a background and perhaps a few scenarios, then a junior author or authors wrote the actual books. When the books are printed, the senior author’s name generally appears in giant letters near the top of the cover, while the junior partner’s byline is in much smaller type toward the bottom. You may remember such examples as Isaac Asimov’s Robots in Time series, Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime series, or anthologies set in the Man-Kzin Wars period of Larry Niven’s Known Space universe. Franchised universes have become scarce nowadays, perhaps because sales never met publishers’ high expectations.

  Lately, in the odder corners of the field, there have been a number of “collaborations” with long-deceased authors, especially those whose works have passed out of copyright. Jane Austen is a frequent target; currently there are two different books titled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (one by Seth Grahame-Smith and the other by Steve Hockensmith, if you can’t resist), and we’ve also been treated to Mansfield Park and Mummies (by Vera Nazarian) and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (by Ben H. Winters). The true SF reader will naturally gravitate toward Winters’ joint effort with Mr. Tolstoy, Android Karenina.

  Of course, another collaborative model that’s akin to the franchised universe is the familiar media or game tie-in book. In this case, the franchised universe is itself a product of collaboration; in addition, the “universe” has an existence outside the books—the original movie, TV show, or game that inspired the whole thing.

  A rather more interesting type of collaboration is what’s known as the “shared world.” In this type of collaboration, all the participating authors have a hand in creating the universe, the characters, and the plots. The grandaddy of all shared worlds was the fantasy series Thieves’ World, conceived and coordinated by Robert Lynn Asprin. Well-known SF examples include Harlan Ellison’s anthology Medea: Harlan’s World and C. J. Cherry’s Merovingen Nights series.

  In the final analysis, though, the entire SF field is, in a way, a great big collaboration among all the authors out there. Isaac Asimov reacted to stories of robots run amuck by creating the Three Laws of Robotics. Many Golden Age authors considered John W. Campbell, Jr. to be an unaccredited collaborator on most of their works. Gordon R. Dickson responded to Asimov’s Foundation series with his own Dorsai books, which in turn helped inspire the whole subgenre of military SF. After reading Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Joe Haldeman wrote The Forever War. And so the collaboration continues, a worldwide multi-threaded conversation that’s been going on for the better part of a century... and shows no sign of tapering off any time soon.

  War World: Discovery

  Edited by John F. Carr

  Pequod Press, 387 pages, $42.50 (hardcover)

  ISBN: 978-0-937912-09-6

  Series: War World 9

  Genre: Military SF, Shared World

  About twenty years ago, Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr brought about a shared world series called War World. The five anthologies and two novels of the original series featured stories by a raft of authors, including Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, Mike Resnick, Susan Schwartz, S. M. Stirling, Harry Turtledove, and William F. Wu. The stories were as diverse as their authors, ranging from pure military strategy to humor to surprisingly tender fables. The last volume, the novel Blood Vengeance, appeared in 1994, and the fun was over.

  At least until 2007, when John F. Carr brought War World back in War World: The Battle of Sauron. Apparently,
his intent is to bring the entire corpus of War World stories back into print, supplemented with a substantial number of new stories, portraying the saga in chronological order (the original volumes jumped around haphazardly through history). War World: Discovery is the first volume in this grand reissue.

  The War World is Haven, a just-habitable moon of a gas giant called Cat’s Eye. In the future, Haven will become a battleground between humans and the Saurons, a genetically-enhanced master race bent on universal domination. In the beginning, however, Haven was a peaceful colony that soon became a prison planet, a dumping ground for malcontents and undesirables of all types. When criminal gangs take over the place and start causing trouble, the Imperial Marines are sent to bring peace to a planet everyone considers a hellhole.

  Of the fourteen stories in this volume, four are republished; the other nine are brand-new. Work by ten authors is included. And while the price tag is a little steep, if you’re a fan of War World and want to see how it all began, it’s worth it.

  Home Fires Gene Wolfe

  Tor, 304 pages, $24.99 (hardcover)

  Kindle: $11.99

  ISBN: 978-0-7653-2818-2

  Genre: Adventure SF

  You probably think you know what to expect from Gene Wolfe: A big, literary book; if not strictly fantasy, certainly far enough in the future that advanced science looks and acts like magic; a grand epic with characters out of mythology.

  Well, Wolfe still has a few surprises up his sleeve, and Home Fires is one of them. The setting is North America in a future that’s not so terribly unfamiliar. Skip Gryson and Chelle Sea Blue meet in college and fall in love. They soon marry, and start about the business of living happily ever after, but war intrudes... interstellar war.