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Cover art by David A. Hardy
Cover design by Victoria Green
CONTENTS
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: CONTROL by Stanley Schmidt
Novelette: FORMIDABLE CARESS by Stephen Baxter
Science Fact: PLATE TECTONICS, GOLDILOCKS, AND THE LATE HEAVY BOMBARDMENT: WHY EARTH ISN'T MARS OR VENUS by Richard A. Lovett
Probability Zero: A FLASH OF LIGHTNING by Robert Scherrer
Short Story: THE JOLLY OLD BOYFRIEND by Jerry Oltion
Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: OPUS 150: DARK FORCES IN THE UNIVERSE by John G. Cramer
Short Story: THE UNIVERSE BENEATH OUR FEET by Carl Frederick
Novelette: WILDERNESS WERE PARADISE ENOW by H. G. Stratmann
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Serial: TO CLIMB A FLAT MOUTAIN: CONCLUSION by G. David Nordley
Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
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Vol. CXXIX No. 12, December 2009
Stanley Schmidt Editor
Trevor Quachri Managing Editor
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Published since 1930
First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: CONTROL by Stanley Schmidt
One of John W. Campbell's most famous editorials in Astounding looked at what was once a popular basis for science-fictional plots—and why it probably wouldn't work in reality. He was right, but I don't think he went far enough.
The idea was that human scientists or engineers would get their hands on a technological artifact from their own future, or from an alien civilization, and figure out how it worked and how to duplicate or even improve on it. In “No Copying Allowed” (November 1948), John demonstrated the improbability of this premise with a simple hypothetical example.
Suppose, he suggested, that a late 1940s guided missile screamed across a 1920 sky and into the hands of a team of U.S. Army Signal Corps engineers. It represents a technology less than thirty years beyond their own, but it's full of things they can't understand. It flies much faster than anything they've seen, yet doesn't seem to have an engine—just a simple pipe, open at both ends. We'd recognize it as a ramjet, but they don't yet have that idea—not surprising, since a ramjet won't even work unless it's already moving faster than anything that could be built in 1920. It's made of alloys of unfamiliar composition and structure, and contains electronic components that they can recognize, in a general way, but not reproduce, such as printed circuits and tiny vacuum tubes, resistors, and capacitors. There are also mysterious little objects made of solid germanium and functioning as amplifiers, but exact copies made with the purest available germanium do nothing (because, we would say, they lack the necessary “doping” with tiny amounts of just the right impurities).
And so on.
Looking back at John's scenario from sixty years after he wrote his editorial, we have a different perspective in at least two major ways. First, wildly advanced and incomprehensible as his 1948 missile would have seemed to engineers of less than thirty years earlier, it now looks pretty quaint to us. It used vacuum tubes, for one thing—a technology now so widely forgotten that many young scientists and engineers have never seen one. (Several years ago, a young physicist at Bell Labs told me he'd always regarded vacuum tubes as rather mysterious substitutes for transistors; which, in reverse, is pretty much how I felt about transistors after having learned vacuum tubes first.) Those mysterious germanium amplifiers in Campbell's hypothetical specimen were transistors, but they were discrete transistors, something we seldom see anymore. If the engineers who built and launched that missile in 1948 got hold of one of our missiles—or even many of our toys!—they would have found it full of high-level integrated circuits, each the size of one of their transistors, but incorporating millions of them (plus associated circuitry). But they would have been hard put to recognize them as such, and had no hope of building anything similar.
The second way in which John's example looks different to us is that his engineers were trying to analyze and reproduce the inner workings of the gadget that had fallen into their midst. I think they would have had trouble long before that point. Even the external controls—what we would now call the user interface—would have been less than intuitive. And even if those of 1948 would have been reasonably easy for a user of 1920 to figure out, the ones we use now would surely have been baffling for at least a goodly while.
Consider what controls on electronic devices typically looked like in 1920 or 1948. In 1920, most units would have a simple set of functions and a simple set of controls, each with a single function and a straightforward correlation with that function. A radio, for example, would be designed to receive a signal within a single rather narrow band of radio frequencies, demodulate it to extract the audio-frequency signal the radio wave “carried,” and amplify that audio signal to drive a headphone or speaker at the desired volume. The controls would be an on-off switch, a tuning dial, and a volume control. Tuning was typically done with a variable capacitor rotated by a knob directly coupled to a circular dial to indicate frequency, or driving a string to move a pointer along a linear frequency scale. Either way, there was one knob that did nothing except select frequency and one indicator that did nothing except show the frequency. If other indications were needed, such as signal strength, that was done by an analog meter, with a needle pointing to the current value of that variable on a printed scale. The on-off switch could be a toggle or slide, or a push-button, or a rotary switch that clicked off counterclockwise and on clockwise. The closest such a device was likely to get to combining functions in one control was fairly common but simple: a rotary or push-button on-off switch might be combined with the volume control in a single knob. That made straightforward sense since “off” can be thought of as the ultimate stage of “down” and “on” as the first step “up.” With that semi-exception, each control did one and only one operation, and there was no other way to do that.
Things hadn't changed all that drastically by 1948, which is probably why Campbell didn't mention the additional difficulty I
'm pointing out today. But they had changed significantly. Electronic devices had become more versatile and controls had begun “multitasking” to accommodate that fact. A radio might now cover not just a single AM band, but several of widely different frequency ranges (broadcast and shortwave), plus another using frequency modulation (FM). It might also have an input allowing a phonograph record to be played through its audio stages. So it would need at least one selector switch, most likely a rotary switch with a knob pointing to AM, FM, SW1, SW2, SW3, or PHONO. The tuning dial would still have one pointer but several parallel scales, each labeled to correspond to one of the selector positions, so it wouldn't be too hard to figure out which of the several simultaneous indications was relevant. The volume control would still be a volume control, regardless of the selector position. There might also be a tone control, or perhaps two (treble and bass). If the radio was powered up and working, the function of each control could quickly be determined by experiment, even if the experimenter couldn't read the markings. If it was not powered, there'd be more guesswork involved.
But now, fast-forward to 2009 and try to imagine one of our radios, computers, cellphones, or iPods falling into the hands of Campbell's 1920ish engineers. First off, a radio that's just a radio is something of a rarity these days. The one in my car is also a CD player and an audiocassette player, and it only has two knobs: one labeled VOLUME and one labeled MODE. Everything else is push buttons and a couple of rocker switches, and most of the indicators are digital liquid-crystal displays that aren't even visible when the thing is turned off. When it's on, what the displays show is completely different depending on which modes of operation are chosen with the push buttons—and even what the push buttons choose is different depending on what other choices have already been made.
Given suitable power to operate the thing, a good engineer from either 1920 or 1948 could eventually figure out how to use it, but I think he'd go through a good deal of head-scratching and hair-pulling first. Its whole psychological framework for relating controls to functions is radically different from what he was used to. He'd probably start with the VOLUME knob, the only thing there that looked and sounded like anything familiar. He would be reassured to confirm that it does indeed control volume, and pushing it turns the unit on or off. But eventually he'd discover that it can also be turned on—but not off, and only sometimes on—by any of the pushbuttons labeled AM, FM, CD, or TAPE. (If there's a CD or tape in the relevant slot, pressing the corresponding button turns the system on and starts playing the indicated object wherever it was last stopped. Pressing CD while playing a tape immediately switches to playing the loaded CD, if there is one. Pressing CD when the unit is off and no CD is loaded does nothing.)
Not knowing about CDs or tapes, our intrepid engineer (at least the one from 1948) would probably start by trying the FM or AM button, since those are at least recognizable terms. He still wouldn't see a recognizable tuning dial; just, say, “FM1” and a single number like “96.3.” The 1948 engineer might say, “Aha! That sounds like an FM frequency,” and rightly conclude that he was on the right track; for the fellow from 1920, it wouldn't ring any bells (or bring in any stations). Either of them might discover by experiment that the rocker switch labeled TRACK/TUNE would make the displayed number go higher or lower (depending on which end was pressed), and that for some numbers sound came from the speakers, presumably from different radio stations. At that point he might start feeling a little smug, thinking he'd discovered “the future's” version of a tuning dial—until he noticed that the SEEK button caused the frequency numbers to scroll up automatically and stop on any signal strong enough to lock in; while SCAN made it scroll up, pause for a few seconds whenever it found a usable signal, and then resume scrolling unless he pressed it again right away. He'd also find that a row of pushbuttons labeled only with single-digit numbers printed on them each jumped immediately to a different frequency—and pressing FM again caused those same buttons to yield a whole different set of frequencies.
If he was lucky enough to find a CD or tape along with the radio/player, he probably wouldn't take too long to figure out where to put it in and discover that it also made sound came out if he pressed the right button (or, in the case of the CD, even if he didn't). He would also discover that the display had completely changed. Now, instead of “FM1” or “FM2,” part of it would say “TAPE” or “CD"; part would be a number like “3” or “11"; part would look like the reading on a running stopwatch, counting seconds; and part, at the very bottom, would be a series of geometrical shapes, like single or double arrowheads, squares, and parallel vertical lines, each above one of those numbered push buttons. In these modes, the numbers printed on those buttons have nothing to do with their functions; now, instead, of jumping to preselected radio stations, they do things like PLAY, REWIND, FAST FORWARD (within a track, for CDs), or SWITCH TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TAPE, and the display icon above each button tells which of those things it now does. And that TRACK/TUNE rocker now jumps to an earlier or later track on a CD.
If the tone quality didn't suit his tastes, he still wouldn't see a recognizable TONE, TREBLE, or BASS control; but he might eventually discover that repeatedly pressing the MODE knob caused it to cycle through displays including TREB, BASS, BAL, and FADE. When one of those was showing, rotating the same knob would vary the treble, bass, and relative amounts of sound coming from left or right and front or back. Except if he didn't start rotating it within a few seconds, that display would vanish and turning that knob would do nothing.
Most of us now are used to this sort of thing, so it seems relatively natural. There's enough variation in detail among models and manufacturers that it can still be helpful to read the instructions, but we're sufficiently accustomed to these general ways of doing things that most of us could figure out the details of an unfamiliar model without too much trial and error if we had to. But I can well imagine that the initial reaction of anybody in 1920, or even 1948, would be to think that somebody had put an awful lot of effort into making this thing fiendishly complicated and hard to use.
And just imagine his reaction if all he found was the remote for a television set, without realizing that it was just a control box for something else rather than a self-contained device intended to do something useful on its own!
Or an iPod, which would seem at first glance to have almost no controls at all. Or the laptop computer on which I'm writing this.
The kind of computer most of us now take for granted is an extreme example—at least, by past and present standards—of a simple-looking device that can do so many different things that probably no individual has ever been thoroughly familiar with all of them. At first glance, it's just a small box with a display screen and what looks like an old-fashioned typewriter keyboard, with a few extra keys with cryptic labels like “ctrl,” “esc,” or pictures of fruit. So how can it do so many things, each of which can be accomplished in at least two or three different ways? Part of it is by combining the regular keyboard keys with the special ones to make executable commands, but what a particular key combination does depends on what application (program) is currently active and even what part of it you're using. In one database program, for example, “Command-N” can mean “Create a new record” in “Browse” mode or “Make an additional search request” in “Find” mode. In “Finder,” an application used for switching among applications and documents, the same keyboard command means “Create a New Folder.” In at least one word processor I've used, it means “Create a new blank document.” Most of these commands can also be given by choosing a verbal description from a pull-down menu on the display screen, using a mouse or trackpad; or by clicking on one of the colorful little icons that abound on the screen (and vary from program to program).
I suspect all this would have been wildly intimidating to those engineers of 1920 or 1948, even though to many of us now it seems refreshingly straightforward compared to the computer interfaces we had to deal with, say, three
decades ago. That's because, depending on our age and background, we've either grown up with this sort of interface, or coevolved with it so we can appreciate what an improvement it is over its predecessors. Most of us are now so accustomed to seeing hyperlinks on a screen that will take us to information we're seeking, that if we're using an unfamiliar website, we'll automatically look around on the screen for something that sounds likely to take us where we want to go. But ‘twas not always thus. When I bought my first computer, more than twenty years ago, it came with a printed manual that went into great detail on such basics as how to use a mouse. New computers can do far more, but come with skimpier manuals that take most of that for granted. The “real” manual is the onscreen help menu, and readers are pretty much expected to be able to use the keyboard and mouse or trackpad to find their way around that. For an adult starting from scratch, I suspect getting started with a new computer can still be intimidating.
And something from sixty years in our future, or from an independently evolved but comparably developed civilization, would likely be a real challenge for any of us. Considering how radically the ways we interact with our machines have changed in the last few decades, and how many things are evolving faster now than ever, I see a good chance that control systems from the latter part of this century will be so different from the ones we use now that it might be hard for us to recognize them, much less figure out how to use them. As Arthur C. Clarke famously observed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
But it will still be fun to see our science fiction writers trying to imagine what such systems might be like.
Copyright © 2009 Stanley Schmidt
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Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXIX, No. 12, December 2009. ISSN 1059-2113, USPS 488-910, GST#123054108. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One-year subscription $55.90 in the United States and possessions, in all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks of receipt of order. When reporting change of address allow 6 to 8 weeks and give new address as well as the old address as it appears on the last label. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. (c) 2009 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. Protection secured under the Universal Copyright Convention. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or character. Any similarity is coincidental. All submissions must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope, the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.
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