More cluefull geeks have gotten that long ago, and have switched to a Einstein-friendly posthuman “leave it all behind” future of mind-uploading and turning the universe into computronium.
Charles Stross’s takes on this seem to get the full implications of this-all. Others . . . well, on more than a few online venue I’ve come accross arguments that boil down to “the Singularity will happen before global warming really gets bad so why bother trying to fix it now?”
Like the others here I don’t understand celebrating a story in which characters just shrug their shoulders and do what it seems like they have no choice but to do.
Getting out of a scrape that seems inescapable, saving the girl that it seems can’t be saved, now that’s a good story.
I like Cory’s essay though. Davin Brin has been ringing this bell for a while, warning us against the dreary dystopic visions that pervade the best seller lists.
Edit: A quick search leads me to find that you are referencing their experimental television broadcasts in 1932, but note those were on an electromechanical 30-line system. The first live television broadcast was the 1936 Olympics, and the same year the BBC started the first regular “high definition” tv service.
Mechanically scanned, 30-line television broadcasts by John Logie Baird began in 1929, using the BBC transmitter in London, and by 1930 a regular schedule of programmes was transmitted from the BBC antenna in Brookmans Park.
Okay, I’m prepared to just say “screw it”, I don’t know when television “first” was introduced, because there’s so many conflicting claims I’m finding.
My real point, however, was that adoption was slow. For however long it may have technically existed, it wasn’t in widespread household usage until the late 40s and early 50s, when miniaturization dropped the price dramatically, and when it began to have nationwide cultural impacts.
It’s like the difference in time between the very first motion pictures, and the point at which they were an everyday phenomenon that had embedded itself into the norms of everyday society.
This is similar to a point that I have been trying to make when I teach others about Security. Here is a talking point from a presentation I made to a local security conference:
Effective Security and Defense comes from the Future.
Security is a meaningful assurance that your goals are being accomplished.
The details are transitory. But, without goals, security has no point.
Sticking to your goals when attacked is the heart of defense. Ultimately, it is the only thing that matters in security.
Your organization adds value by sticking to it’s goals. But this is more than just a matter of value added.
Goals are the spirit of the organization.
If you don’t stick to your goals when attacked, then you have lost. The attacker may not have won, but you have lost.
We begin to create security when we teach Security folks how to support institutional goals.
One way we can do this is by going to meetings, keeping our mouths shut, listening to others, and occasionally asking:
I read “The Cold Equations” in high school. At the time, it struck me: it was science fiction about people, whereas almost everything I’d read up to that point (Arthur C. Clarke being a notable exception) was emphatically not.
But it lost a lot of its luster for me when I realized it was basically an inferior version of Jack London’s classic short story, only in space. I always wondered why the pilot couldn’t have thrown out something that might be essential to the functioning of the spacecraft in the long term but not the short (say, maintenance panels, or his bed.)
Science fiction may well be a way we create the future, but if we look back at SF of the past, it certainly looks like it tends to tell us more about the time it was written in, rather than how things turned out. There are innumerable stories out there which have technology changing incredibly rapidly, but society remains stuck in one place. I mean, just look at all those zeerusty 50’s stories populated by walking film noire clichés and hysterical housewives.
I think that SF can’t help but produce flawed futures. Stories always tend to go to conflict to provide the plot. No matter how shiny and perfectible the technology is, we can’t get away from the characters being human.
Anyway, I’m rambling now, but in conclusion, SF has a chance to be both a profoundly revolutionary genre which tells us what we can change and what we can achieve, while at the same time being doomed to being profoundly conservative, when it tells us that some things are unchangeable, whether by accident or design.
Yes, “The Ungoverned” that’s it. Maybe it was ‘hedgehog’ not ‘turtle’? Unimportant.
Anyway the turtle (or whatever) is sort of an off stage hero of the book, but quite possibly this person has very good reason to ensure that nobody else can see what is happening inside his compound, to whoever he brought in with him… or whoever was born in there. And quite clearly the private security system they have set up is not even going to attempt to do anything about it, ever.
Ugh.
Blindspots.
I think I heard ‘cold equations’ as an old radio show a few years ago (‘x minus 1’ or something), can’t remember if they saved the girl there.
I think it is a good story. I find it to be very much the kind of story where the light it sheds on its author and his society is probably more interesting than the story itself.
Today we see a lot of similar stories about ‘ticking time bomb’ terrorist scenarios that justify torture. (Hey at least they didn’t have an actual government policy of tossing women out of spaceships back then!)
They tend to be rather (hah) tortured. As the point is that ‘there is no other option’ you end up with a strained mixture of giving the protagonist perfect information, yet absolutely no options in the end which tends to be pretty unbelievable. The real world is much more mired in probabilistic outcomes.
I once read part of “the decline and fall of the roman empire”. Written by an Englishman during the ascendency of the British Empire. The worldview of the author, Edward Gibbon, is fascinating.
Love all the 70’s short pulp sci-fi about bizarre sociological experiments accidental and intentional.
contrivance: a thing that is created skillfully and inventively to serve a particular purpose.
To accuse the situations presented in any story as being mere contrivances of the author, is accusing them of being part of a story. You might as well proudly walk up to Grumpy Cat and go “Hah, you’re a feline!” All stories are contrivance, including Lord of the Rings, and Little Brother–worlds created deliberately for conflict.
I think Doctorow can’t appreciate the moral hazard genre because it doesn’t align with what he values in science fiction. Godwin wasn’t writing design fiction. He created that particular universe, and set events in motion, to explain how humans can come to the reluctant conclusion that they must do something awful.
It may be true that Godwin leaves loads of unanswered questions–this isn’t “design fiction” after all and a detailed description of every policy, procedure, and engineering detail would fast bore the reader. However you do him a disservice when you dismiss the situation presented as mere contrivance. The moral of such tales is generally that stuff happens, and things break in the right circumstances–even if they’re ethical constructs.
History has shown that is that people will do distasteful, awful, and horrible things given the right set of circumstances. Godwin is simply pointing out that people will retain that capacity in the future.
This sort of story is not there to provide convenient ideological fodder for wannabe lifeboat captains. Rather they are cautions against getting ourselves into positions where “lifeboat rules” are a real necessity. They are the futurist equivalent to a shop teacher graphically describing what can happen if your clothes get caught in an engine lathe.
Yes, indeed! To Build a Fire is indeed another Greek tragedy, with the traveler as the protagonist, his tragic flaw being the hubris to go alone in the Alaskan winter, the antagonist being Mother Nature herself, and the dog as the Chorus, foretelling what is to come next. I’m not sure that The Cold Equations, though, draws on it particularly; rather, they both draw upon Sophocles, Euripedes, and Æschylus.
Maybe I am misremembering, but wasn’t the story Cold Equations about facing an unavoidable death with dignity. Sure it was contrived, but most fiction is. Oh, there just happens to be a comet heading to hit earth and THIS character with these particular problems has to hook up with her ex husband to save the day?
Sure, you can pull some misogynistic overtones, but you have to put it in the context of the time. For the time, it was about a naive woman mastering her courage to face death. This is like going back to look at Mark Twain and finding the racism in it, and utterly ignoring how progressive it was for the time.
