Setting, Research, and a Telephone Directory

This post really does get around to the topic of writing. But first:

Minimum Standards and Scraping By

My household's cable got cut while a contractor was removing a couple trees from my back yard. Not his fault, I think. Turns out the cable service provider is under the impression that as long as the cable is (just) under the sod, it's okay. Which works fine, until somebody with a Bobcat comes by.

Live and learn.

The point is that I had quite a lot of time on my hands yesterday afternoon. With the cable cut, I couldn't get online - which meant that my blog writing and research (other way around, actually) was a 'once and future' set of tasks.

So I drove over to my father-in-law's, used his phone to contact our ISP/phone/cable television provider, talked, took a few photos - all of which still left with me with time on my hands.

Fairly Normal: For a Guy Who Reads Dictionaries

Some fifty-something guys, in my position, would get out the golf clubs, or watch a replay of the Super Bowl. I transcribed a telephone directory.

It wasn't a very large directory: I ended up with a spreadsheet that's less than 700 lines, top to bottom.

One of my daughters, at least, has been impressed that I read dictionaries. For fun. I don't do so all that often, but sometimes I enjoy going through the pages, looking for interesting words and noting where they came from.

In the case of the phone directory, it was more work than fun - but I'll admit to enjoying the data-entry process.

Getting to Know Another Way of Life

This wasn't just any phone directory: One of America's naval bases has a telephone directory that's available to the public, with what appears to be a modestly-complete list of offices, desks, schools, and stores. Along with, in many cases, which building they're in.

I'm not entirely clear on where Building 160 is: but I don't need to. I've learned that it's the building to go to with questions about vending machines, recreational vehicles, and cable television.

On a naval base? Isn't that, you know, military?

Yes.

I also know how to call someone with questions about child care for kids age six weeks to five years, and the bowling alley's number.

The assumptions I made, taking data from the directory, have me with the bowling alley and a barracks being in the same building. Which either means that my assumptions are wrong - or some sailors aren't getting much sleep.

Why Would Any Sane Person Deconstruct a Phone Directory?!

I wasn't seeking "to expose deep-seated contradictions in a work by delving below its surface meaning" by tweezing apart that phone directory. (deconstruction, Princeton's WordNet) I figured that, once I mined its data and put it into a spreadsheet, I'd be able to see what sort of activities happened on the base, and - in very general terms - how they were organized.

I found out that there were quite a few schools on the base. That wasn't a surprise: I knew that one of its functions was training, and training happens in schools.

I found out that a sailor stationed there could rent recreational vehicles on the base. That was a bit of a surprise.

M*A*S*H, College, and the Real World

I've enjoyed watching reruns of "M*A*S*H." Because of the show's wide and lasting popularity among American audiences, I've used Frank Burns as an example of a particular sort of mindset in another blog.

But "M*A*S*H" isn't real. It's a moderately well-researched television series - of the 'relevant' sitcom variety. There's an element of truth to many of the show's characters, but I'd no more use it as a reliable reference for military life than I'd watch Star Wars to learn about astrophysics.

I could draw from my own life experiences: but I know better. I'm old enough to have picked up my limp in Vietnam, but my draft classification is 4F - by the time I was in my teens, an x-ray of my left hip joint looked like the last stages of arthritic decay. Which is a topic for yet another of my blogs.

I have no first-hand experience of what life is like on a military base.

I'm certainly not going to trust the sort of impressions I picked up, going to college in America during the seventies and eighties. That was a colorful and strange era in our history - which I strongly suspect will appear in articles on abnormal psychology in centuries to come.

Which is yet again another topic.

So, very little of my own, personal, experience is useful in my research.

Analysis of a phone directory won't give me much of an emotional picture of what it's 'like' to live on an American naval base in the 21st century - but it will, I think, help me build a structure that I can hang more touchy feely information on.

Why Bother?

I've spent about five hours, so far, on this 'phone directory' project. I think it's worth the trouble.

I now know that at least one large American naval base really is like a small town in many ways, with its own 'downtown,' and even a movie theater of sorts.

Nobody would mistake it for a 'real' small town, of course. For example, the analogues to civilian functions seem to be on a smaller scale than what I'd expect in a town of that size that grew naturally.

I also learned that there may be a certain amount of humor in - of all things - the numbers assigned to buildings. This particular base's marina/summer equipment rental facilities are in Building 13.

All This - For Galaxy Cadet?!

I'm doing the research now, because I've been developing background and settings for a story or five about Galaxy Cadet. (March 28, 2010)

I wrote, earlier this year, that I should probably "loosen up" by writing a distinctly non-epic, lightweight story. Being the sort of person I am, my notion of 'loosening up' has now involved analysis of a telephone directory.

It's not as crazy as it sounds: I'll probably be able to use the same research for at least one other setting that's 'back burnered' right now.

Daniel Boone and the Megalopolis

I've been thinking quite a bit lately, about the world of 3650 or thereabouts.

Since I'm making some moderately non-pessimistic assumptions, I figure that people won't be any stupider in the next few thousand years than they have in the past. Also that we'll have around 780,000,000,000 people on Earth by then.

Not a typo. And not, really, all that much more than the 6,790,062,216 or so we have now.

Overpopulated? That depends on your frame of reference.

Daniel Boone and Manhattan's Lower East Side

Although Daniel Boone apparently didn't move each time he could see the smoke from a neighbor's chimney,¹ I suspect that he'd not feel at home in the Washington, D.C. - Boston megalopolis.

I lived in San Francisco, a few decades ago, mostly in an area that was between five and 15 levels deep, apart from streets and sidewalks. I thoroughly enjoyed sharing the end of a peninsula with a sizable fraction of a million other people.

My children grew up in a small town in central Minnesota: the population topped 4,000 recently. I love it here, too: but the ambiance is very different. And some of my kids are acutely uncomfortable even in a relatively lightly-developed area like the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area.

A great deal depends, I suppose, on what you grow up with. But then, I grew up in the town that's across the river from Fargo, North Dakota: and I loved living in a rather built-up city.

The appeal that San Francisco had for me were the opportunities to directly experience the micro-cultures in the city. I lived on the edge of Chinatown (the real one: not that tourist strip), where folks don't have the Western aversion to bright colors on buildings; I could - and did - walk or take public transport to book stores, museums, art galleries - you get the idea. To manage that sort of activity here in the upper Midwest, I'd have to have access to my own aircraft - and even then I'd be eating up too much time going from place to place.

Yeah: There are advantages to having a lot of people in a small area. We're social creatures, and there's a lot of energy generated when we're able to meet each other.

The Internet has helped me keep in contact with the world: I 'drove' around the lower east side of New York City earlier this week, via Google Maps. It's not the same as being there, of course - but I was able to take a good look at my surroundings, which I wouldn't have been able to if I were driving. And I could move a whole lot faster than I could, walking. Or driving, for that matter.

Back to New York City, ca. 3650.

My, How You've Grown!

The megalopolis we know today has grown. North America has what's essentially a new mountain range, running from Florida northwards: several miles high in most spots.

And yes: That'd have an effect on weather patterns. My guess is that there'll be 'reverse wind farms' here and there, forcing winds 'uphill' to maintain what we think of as 'normal' climate. Weather control? I suppose you'd call it that.

New York City itself would be one of the higher areas, I suspect. It's an excellent natural harbor: and ocean-going vessels would still be a reasonably efficient way to transport large volumes of material. There'd probably be more than a hundred times as much traffic, though: so we're probably looking at offshore port facilities, too.

How would I feel about living in a city that was essentially one building, several hundred miles long by about three miles deep?

Today, I live in central Minnesota, where water is a mineral for a large part of the year: and I'm not a winter sports enthusiast.

Don't get me wrong: I love it here. But the prospect of living inside 24/7/365, in a place that'd 'feel' like the Mall of America, with climate-controlled pedestrian access to analogs of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Grand Ole Opry, Broadway, the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

Plus whatever people come up with in the next sixteen centuries?

If I did a 'Buck Rogers,' woke up in that era, and wound up living near the east coast: I might find it a bit crowded. Also extremely exciting.

Old MacDonald Had a Farm

All those people will eat. I've mentioned this before.

I don't think today's sewer system could handle the load of a three-mile-deep New York City. But then, I don't think that Rome's system, two thousand years back, could handle the volume that contemporary systems do: and the Romans were good engineers.

The point? People aren't stupid. We adapt. When what we're doing doesn't work, we improve our methods, or develop new ones. Some of us do, anyway. Others complain and wait for someone else to fix things. That's a different topic.

I really don't think we'll be dumping all that waste into the Atlantic. Remember: all those people are going to want to eat on a regular basis. That sewage just about has to get treated and sent back west to the farms.

Disgusting? I don't think so: but then I live in a town where we can tell when someone upwind has turned their manure bed. Let's get real: Everything on Earth has been eating recycled, ah, stuff for hundreds of millions of years. All that's different about my world of 3650 or so is that we're managing the process a lot more than we are now.

Those farms won't look like those quaint old fields you see in 'visit Ireland' brochures. Think a greenhouse, many levels deep, with "sunlight" generated locally for all but the top level. Livestock? that'd be elsewhere, but not too far away: you don't want to have to haul silage any farther than you have to.

Horribly artificial? Artificial, yes. Horribly? That's a matter of taste. I think Ord ("The Dream") wouldn't like the world 16 centuries out - at all. Or today's world. Me? It'd take getting used to. But then, my ancestors would have had a few adjustments to make, if they'd been taken out of Roman Europe and dropped here in 21st-century Minnesota.

Where's all that energy coming from? Well, that's another topic, for another day.

And I haven't even gotten into the specialized gourmet/recreational business of free-range cattle.

More-or-less-related posts:

• "New York City, 3650"
  (March 1, 2010)
• "London, Londinium, Electropolis, and New York City: Names of the Far Future"
  (February 26, 2010)
• "Food, Agriculture, Technology, and City Folks"
  (October 2, 2009)
• "Predicting the Future: a Look at a Will Be that Was"
  (June 26, 2009)
• "Getting Details Right: The Vast, Huge, and Very Large City Of The Future"
  (June 25, 2009)

---

¹ "Daniel Boone: Myth and Reality," Gregory McNamee, Encyclopedia Britannica Blog (October 23, 2007).

New York City, 3650

I've been thinking about New York City quite a bit more lately than I usually do. Partly because one of those nifty ideas that's been wandering somewhere in my brain's infrastructure popped out into the front office last week.

The basic idea isn't anything new: it's a setting for what could be a sequence of 'club tales.' Sort of like the 'Mr. Mulliner' short stories by P. G. Wodehouse (which are not speculative fiction at all); or A. C. Clarke's "Tales from the White Hart" (which is).

The best location for this place, I decided, would be on Earth, in a major city, and about 16 centuries from now. Almost any period after the advent of the short circuit would do: but that's roughly when my 'Blue Buzzard' stories are, so I'd only have to do background research once for both sets.

So, what would a "city of the future" look like? Probably not quite like this:

"This painting by Frank R. Paul's of a city of the future and is pretty typical of such predictions. The city is a massive pile of steel, plastic and glass put together in a way that not only has no past, but actively rejects it. It is a place of heroic technology with skyscrapers the size of whole districts, roof-top aerodromes, wide pedestrian boulevards, and metal roadways strangely devoid of traffic. There are even urban space launch pads where giant rockets are winched upright before blasting off to the heavens. Noise regulations, Shmoise regulations...."

"...If there is one thing that united the artist-prophets, it was a fascination with gigantism. Since the most impressive engineering feats of the early 20th century were bigger and better dams, bridges, canals, and whatnot, it seemed only reasonable that the cities of future ages would look as though they needed a round of thyroid treatments...."
("Future City," "Skyscraper World," Tales of Future Past)

David S. Zondy, creator of Tales of Future Past, has a point: those illustrations from the 20s and 30s of cities of the future showed huge buildings. And, quite often, elevated roadways.

Now that megamalls are news only when something newsworthy happens in them, maybe it isn't quite so cool to imagine megastructures.

Cool or not, New York City in my 37th century is going to have to have some fair-sized buildings. Or I'll have to radically change what I've got planned for Earth in my stories.

Starting with a population somewhat northwards of 100 times what we have now.

Flint Knives to International Harvester: Change Happens

We couldn't feed that many people today. But I've done a little research: and that's not a crazy-high figure. Of course, it would mean bringing agricultural technology up to 1975 state-of-the-art around the world. Just as important, we couldn't have too many countries where the primary function of most people was keeping dear leader supplied with fresh lobster. But I'm getting off-topic.

A Hundred Times as Many People? However Will Earth Survive?

My 37th century Earth won't look just what we've got today: but I'm not talking about the 'dying planet' stuff mentioned in "Avatar" (2009).

What I think many doomsters forget is that human beings are biological entities. We consume organic material, water and oxygen. But it doesn't stay inside us. On a time scale of seconds to hours, most of what went in comes out again. We can't consume what we excrete, at that point, but quite a few organisms can: and eventually we, or someone like us, will get the same molecules again. It's a system that's been working for hundreds of millions of years: and I think is likely to keep recycling, whether trilobites, dinosaurs, or we are pushing part of the process along.

Will it be different, with more than a hundred times as many people around as there are now? Of course. It's different now, compared to the 'good old days' when there were only a few million of us. (See " 'The Dream' - a Short-Short Story," for a look at today's world as a hideously-overcrowded future)

Back to New York City, ca. 3650

As it stands today, New York City can't handle another 99 people for everybody who lives and works there now. But quite a bit can be changed in 1,650 years.

I did a little checking, and found that many (most, where I looked) buildings around New York City's Central Park were about 15 stories tall, with some around 20. Near the south end of the island, they're taller, of course. But that 15-story range gave me something to start with.

You can't just add more floors to a building and leave it at that. Aside from structural considerations, people in the upper floors will want to get down to ground level now and again. We manage that in today's skyscrapers with elevators. Which takes up floor space - books have been written on the subject: the bottom line is that there are limits with the technology we have now. 'Sky lobbies' are a partial solution.

We might wind up with something like those old aerial roadways, after all.

With a blithe wave of the hand, I took New York City's skyline, and multiplied in by a hundred. Vertical transport? I'll figure that out later.

Those buildings around Central Park would be 15 x 10 x 100 = 15,000 feet tall. That's almost three miles. The park is less than a mile across. The place would be a trench: "scarier than it is now," as my oldest daughter put it.

Just How High Will We Build?

I did a quick check, and found out that five kilometers is almost the limit for how far up you'll find cities - Wenzhuan is 16,730 feet, or 5,019 meters, above sea level.

People can live there, obviously - but I'm not sure how much higher we'd go before the air was uncomfortably thin.

So my Central Park is surrounded by buildings around 15,000 feet tall? No problem: Air's breathable at that altitude, and I'm still not worrying about vertical transport.

Central Park's being at the bottom of a three-mile-deep trench is an aesthetic issue - which I'll ignore for now.

Incremental Growth?

There was a story where New York City was destroyed and rebuilt as a cube, two miles on a side. ("City Cube," Tomorrow's Skyline, Tales of Future Past)

That could probably be done. Napoleon III's government leveled good-sized parts of Paris, laying out the groundwork of what we've got today. ("Streets of Paris," James Chastain (1999, 2004)) There's pretty good reason to believe that the streets of Paris today are so wide and straight because the civic leaders wanted the citizenry exposed to light, air and cannon fire.

The mid-1800s were a colorful period. And another topic.

Apart from phenomena like Napoleon III and urban renewal, though, cities tend to grow one piece at a time. That's why today's New York City has brownstones, modernist architecture, and a jumble of other styles being used side-by-side.

I rather like the effect, myself.

Right now, I'm playing with the idea that 1,650 years from now New York City will have grown more-or-less gradually. No two-mile-high cubes.

A quick sketch of the south end of Manhattan with a height limit of about 15,000 feet didn't look too crazy. I don't know whether to look at making that end of the island taller - or spreading out the 'downtown' area.

To keep the buildings from looking like improbably elongated mega-pencils, I've assumed that Manhattan will continue to be high-value property: valuable enough for organizations to buy several blocks and build a single structure over them.

We've got something like that happening in Chicago. But that's yet another topic, and it's getting late.

Vaguely-related posts:

• "London, Londinium, Electropolis, and New York City: Names of the Far Future"
  (February 26, 2010)
• "Food, Agriculture, Technology, and City Folks"
  (October 2, 2009)
• "Predicting the Future: a Look at a Will Be that Was"
  (June 26, 2009)
• "Getting Details Right: The Vast, Huge, and Very Large City Of The Future"
  (June 25, 2009)

Making a Plausible Setting

I watched "2001: A Space Odyssey" last Saturday. It's been almost 42 years since I first saw the film, and quite a bit has changed. Including me.

So, I took a trip down memory lane by viewing a movie I liked in my late teens? So what?

Stanley Kubrick's film is still (fairly) convincing science fiction cinema today. In large part, I think, because he understood that his 'futuristic' gadgetry and settings had too look like people actually used them. And, he made an effort to make sure that sets which were filmed as if they connected to each other - would actually connect, if placed side-by-side. And that live sets matched (more or less) the miniatures used for spacecraft exteriors.

I spent quite a bit of time today, working out the deck plan for part of the Blue Buzzard, a ship that's the setting for what I plan as a sequence of stories. For (some) written fiction, that'd be a waste of time. All an author would have to do is make sure that - if any numbers were given - there was enough cubage to accommodate whatever the action called for.

I'd be uncomfortable with that - I've read too many stories where willing suspension of disbelief was stretched when, say, a hallway had three doors on each side in one chapter, with pictures hung between them - and was three paces long in another.

Besides, what I'm aiming for is a story involving quite a few pictures, drawings, whatever. That means that I need to have at least a rough idea of where things go.

That deck plan? I can't use it. The good news is, I know what won't work, know a few features that will - all before making a single sketch or rendering.

Why all this fuss over deck plans today? My imagination had taken a sabbatical. Which is another topic.

Sort-of-related posts:

• "Science Fiction in the Movies: 'The Satan Bug' to 'The Matrix' "
  (January 26, 2010)
• "Futuristic? Or Just Cutting-Edge?"
  (January 23, 2010)
• "Thought for the Day: Computers and Human Brains"
  (August 15, 2009)
• ""The Future, Far as Human Eye Could See" - Hollerith Cards and Anachronisms"
  (August 2, 2009)
• "Predicting the Future: a Look at a Will Be that Was"
  (June 26, 2009)
• "Getting Details Right: Cityscapes"
  (June 25, 2009)

Thought for the Day: Computers and Human Brains

Computers are designed to achieve accurate results based on very large amounts of information, all of which is correct.

The human brain is designed to achieve accurate results based on very small amounts of information, most of which is wrong.

Like a Backpack With Balloons: the Moon is Unearthly

"How to Maneuver in a Space Suit Using the 'Apollo Number' "
Wired Science (August 14, 2009)

"Next time you're stuck on the moon and running out of oxygen, you'd better run, not walk, back to your lunar module — especially if you're wearing a space suit.

"Scientists say those giant, bulky suits actually make running easier and walking more difficult on the moon. By combing through video and audio recordings from Apollo moonwalks, researchers have devised a mathematical method to explain how space suits affected lunar gait during the Apollo missions, and how future space suits might change the way we get around on Mars.

"'Space suits are effectively reducing the gravity level by supporting part of the weight of everything that's being transported,' said space physiology researcher Christopher Carr of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who co-authored the paper published Wednesday in the journal PLoS ONE. 'When you're out there, it's like wearing a backpack with a bunch of helium balloons attached to it.'..."

Not all science fiction stories take place on other worlds, in space, or in the future. But, some do. An author would be well-advised to think about what effects the different environments - and technologies - would have on everyday activities like standing, sitting, and moving around.

I think it was Arthur C. Clark who pointed out in a story that snapping to attention in free fall would, like as not, result in distinct discomfort when the person's head hit the overhead.

"Self-Supporting Space Suit Makes It Hard to Bend"

wired, YouTube (August 14, 2009)
video 0:52

"During this scene from the Apollo 16 mission, astronaut Charles Duke drops a hammer on the lunar surface and has a tough time picking it up. To overcome the self-support of the space suit, he has to jump repeatedly in order to compress the suit's knee joint and pick up the hammer."

"The Future, Far as Human Eye Could See" - Hollerith Cards and Anachronisms

Science fiction, or speculative fiction, Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon notwithstanding, doesn't always deal with The Future. But quite a bit does.

Including a set of stories I'm hoping to create.

Writers haven't had to think very hard about what The Future (capitalized) would be like, provided that they didn't mind using off-the-shelf settings. During the 20th century, The Future would be filled with gigantic buildings and sweeping elevated roadways with no obvious entrances or exits, electric biplanes and spaceships held together with huge rivets.

Later, a more (sophisticated?) standard-issue vision of the future was a post-(nuclear, bio-weapons, whatever)-apocalyptic wasteland that bore a remarkable similarity to parts of the American southwest and southern California: inhabited by desperate nomads in leather underwear and/or Rambo-styled costumes, mutant frogs, mutant people, mutant things. You get the picture.

Entertaining (or, if required, relevant) stories could be set in variations on any of these.

My intention is to be a trifle more imaginative than that.

By the way, if this post's topic looks familiar, it should. About a month ago, I started writing about my take on fictional futures and themes. ("...Into the Future..." - Excerpt; Attitude; Comment and Theme (July 3, 2009))

Today, the topic's technology, and avoiding anachronisms.

Technology, Change, and Wood-Burning Computers

Nobody (I hope) would write about someone in the far future lighting a fire in a computer's boiler - unless there was a very good reason for using an oddly anachronistic blend of technologies. On the other hand, it's easy to forget just how much technology changes. And, sometimes, doesn't change.

"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;..."
Locksley Hall, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1835)

When Tennyson wrote that, the Kitty Hawk test flight was about 68 years in the future. The poet, in all probability, imagined his "pilots of the purple twilight" to be sailing lighter-than-air ships.

Today, roughly 174 years after he "dipt into the future," we do use lighter-than-air craft for some specialized applications, but fixed-wing aircraft are the dominant air travel technology.

My point is that it's difficult - maybe impossible - to predict with any degree of accuracy what technology will be like more than a few years down the road.

Except for one thing.

It's almost certainly not going to look a whole lot like contemporary technology, or what's on the horizon: with some exceptions.

Dials and punch cards on a spaceship?

"...The dim dials had shown like blazing suns upon his tired retinas before he was able to turn his eyes away. From time to time he had looked out at the black nothing to see the silhouettes of his dials, almost-blackness against total blackness...."
The Lady Who Sailed The Soul, Cordwainer Smith (1960)

I think that's pretty good writing: but one detail jumped out at me: dials?

This story is set in the far future - about 4,000 years from now, given some reasonable guesstimates about the timeline Cordwainer Smith developed.¹

A few pages later, we get another look at astronautical technology of the 60th (or thereabouts) century:

"...She broke out a repair robot and sent it out to effect repairs, punching out the papers as rapidly as she could to give instructions...."
The Lady Who Sailed The Soul, Cordwainer Smith (1960)

About a quarter-century after that story was written, I earned about half a degree in computer science. At that time Hollerith Cards and paper tape were the way that programs were stored. It wasn't a particularly new technology at the time: Punched cards had been used to analyze census data for the 1890 American census.

They're not all that common these days, but dials actually do make sense for readouts of cyclic data: like the hands of a clock that rotate once every minute, every hour, and every 12 hours (or, sometimes, every 24), indicating where we're at in the daily cycle.

Other sorts of data are a bit easier to read when presented as a point or points on a scale, as a pie chart, with alphanumeric characters, or as a picture or diagram. (I hope you'll trust me on that: I worked in graphic design for about a decade, and that's part of what I picked up.)

I'll accept that idea that some of the instrumentation on that interstellar spaceship used dials. But add something like Hollerith cards to the mix, and my willing suspension of disbelief had to be hauled back to the tracks and tipped back in place.

The lesson? Don't assume that technology is static. As a rule, Cordwainer Smith does a pretty good job with keeping descriptions of future tech to what the stuff does and what it looks like - with just enough of the 'how' to keep the reader convinced.

I think that's a good idea.

Sometimes Technology Doesn't Change - All That Much

Not too long ago I ran into an article that mentioned a valve that was dug up in Italy. It was, as I recall, made of brass (or was that bronze?): nothing at all unusual. The metal is in very common use, and the design was a simple, effective one that's been common for years. The valve was 'obviously' something fairly contemporary.

Until an someone noticed that it was the wrong size. Long story made short, the valve was of Roman manufacture, and somewhere in the dozen-plus centuries that had passed since a plumber had installed it, standard sizes for valves had changed.

Technology Will Change - People, Not So Much

Although I'm pretty sure that we'll continue to add technological enhancements and implants to our basic design, like reading glasses and pacemakers, there won't be all that much change to what human beings are for the next thousand years or so. Not successful change, at least. I'm pretty sure that from time to time someone will get the bright idea of improving on the basic design. But that's another topic.

Technology, I think, will continue to be something used by human beings. That puts some very definite constraints on one part of future tech: the interface. We've already gotten to the point where our telephones are about as small as they can be, and still have buttons that (many) people can push. They'll probably get thinner, but I think we've got the keyboard down to a minimum size.

I'll admit to a bias. I have a little trouble with some of the smaller keyboards today: but my daughters don't. (Note: Human beings come in two basic models, which is yet another topic.)

So, my guess is that fifteen or so centuries from now the analog of a computer keyboard might be a bit of open space where you'd use some sort of sign language, and the analog of television might be data loaded into your sensory cortices. Whether it's a 'pay per view,' a government service (or requirement), or something else would depend of what sort of society is envisioned.

But the bathroom plumbing? My guess is that Julius Caesar wouldn't have any trouble using it - although his plumber might understand it a bit better.

¹Source:

• "The Best of Cordwainer Smith"
  Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by J. J. Pierce
  © 1975 Nelson Doubleday, Inc., Garden City, New York

Green Lantern Oath: Something to Think About

The Green Lantern oath goes something like this, I understand:

"...and I shall shed my light over dark evil.
For the dark things cannot stand the light,
The light of the Green Lantern! "

Or

'In brightest day, in darkest night,
No evil shall escape my sight
Let those who worship evil's might,
Beware my power... Green Lantern's light!'

(Wikipedia)

The Wikipedia article indicates that there were several versions of the oath: hardly surprising, since Green Lantern Stories have been made for decades.

The Green Lantern, Plausible Superhero - Really!

The Green Lantern, and the Batman, have struck me as the less-improbable superheros.

Superman, although the quintessential superhero in many ways, requires quite a stretch of that willing suspension of disbelief. It's not his X-ray vision, leaping tall buildings in a single bound, and all that so much as the wild improbability that Earth would be the closest, most practical, or most promising refuge for Krypton's last survivor.

The same goes for so many superheroes: their origins rely, if my memory serves, on their powers being possible in the first place - and then on the wildly improbable chance that someone on Earth, in or near the 20th century, just happened to get them.

In the case of the Green Lantern, the big stretch for the imagination is the existence of Green Lantern powers - essentially very high-tech involving extreme levels of energy and impressive miniaturization. The other hurdle on the way to a willing suspension of disbelief is the existence of something like the Green Lantern Corps.

After that, someone on Earth being assigned as the local Green Lantern becomes a matter of routine. What's a little surprising, given the starting premises, is that it wasn't done long ago - or maybe that's covered in the stories. As I said, I haven't read that many.

The Green Lantern Oath: Okay, it Reads Like Something in a Comic Book - - -

The Green Lantern Oath reads like something you'd find in a comic book - because that's what it is. The oath is also an example of how an author can tell a great deal about a culture or an organization, without descending into a morass of exposition.

In the case of the Green Lantern Oath, we discover that the Green Lantern Corps has traditions, is somewhat formal (it has an oath, after all, that's said at regular intervals), and is based on a code of ethics.

All that, in three or four short lines.

Cordwainer Smith, in Scanners Live in Vain, shows a world about 4,000 years ahead of where we are now, in which interstellar travel is made possible by the efforts of Habermans and Scanners.

"Scanners Live in Vain" is notable for several points, including a sort of prediction of contemporary texting

"... He dramatically flashed his tablet at them:

" 'Is Vmct mad?'

"The older men shook their heads...."
("Scanners Live in Vain" Cordwainer Smith 1950)

More to the point, for this post, Cordwainer Smith's Scanners have a code: a set of statements and responses which summarize who they are, what they do, and why they're proud of it. A fairly large part of "Scanners Live in Vain" is devoted to a recitation of this code. I think it's worth reading, because it shows a great deal about the scanners.

"...'Are we habermans then?' Vomact's eyes flashed and glittered as he asked the ritual question.

"Again the chorused answer ... 'Habermans we are, and more, and more. We are the chosen who are habermans by our own free will. We are the agents of the Instrumentality of Mankind.'

" 'What must the others say to us?'

" 'They must say to us, "You are the bravest of the brave, the most skillful of the skilled. All mankind owes most honor to the scanner, who unites the Earths of mankind....' "
("Scanners Live in Vain" Cordwainer Smith 1950)

Get the idea that scanners have at least a sufficient supply of self-esteem?

An English professor I had - and a capable one - said that "Scanners Live in Vain" was far from the best short story ever told. He was right - although part of his criticism was, I think, due to aesthetic preferences which Cordwainer Smith insulted with his writing style.

Great literature or not, though, I think it's helpful to study works like "Scanners Live in Vain" and the Green Lantern stories. The authors of works like this manage, somehow, to describe complex societies which don't exist - and which cannot be evoked with intellectual shorthand like 'he had a German's love of beer,' or references to West Point.

The Green Lantern Oath and the scanners' code are examples of how a great deal can be shown, by describing a ritual.

Source:

• "The Best of Cordwainer Smith"
  Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by J. J. Pierce
  © 1975 Nelson Doubleday, Inc., Garden City, New York

Digital Housekeeping

I've added tracking code (don't worry: I'm not collecting data on individuals) and advertising to this blog. It's a bit of a chore, but part of the process.

About the tracking code: I use WebSTAT and Google Analytics to keep track of how many browsers view each blog post, how long the page is displayed, and other non-personal information. I'm neither equipped, nor interested, in tracking individual visitors. On the other hand, I do need to know what sort of traffic my blogs and websites experience.

About the advertising: Being independently wealthy, or have an obliging brother like Vincent Van Gogh's, might be nice. But since I'm not in either position, I have to make money somehow. Providing advertising space has a pretty good effort-to-income ratio.

A blog by my alter ego, Narcissus-X, expresses the views of someone who is more conventionally 'artistic.' Judging from the latest post, "Narcissus-X Broods on Anguish and Art," I think Narcissus-X may be losing it.

But I'm getting off-topic.

Getting Details Right: Cityscapes

I spent part of today studying - and rejecting - a setting in a series of stories I hope to create with my oldest daughter. The period is a little over 14 centuries from now, and this specific setting is a (for the time) mid-size city.

I'd first thought of a design based on the Shimizu Corporation's proposed 'pyramid' for Tokyo Bay: an outsized space frame of struts running along the edges of a matrix of octahedrons. Like many visionary designs, the Shimizu pyramid looks very cool, requires materials that aren't available yet - at least not commercially - and, in my view, vastly underestimates how much infrastructure needs to be devoted to moving people around.

I made a pretty good start, I think, on a transportation system/building ration that looks reasonable: when I realized just how complicated the model would be.

Here's the deal: these stories are, as currently imagined, going to be comics. "Graphic novels," if you want to sound grown-up, or manga, if you're looking at some of our inspirations.

That means that, at a minimum, some of the settings will have to be drawn. And, since I plan to make heavy use of 3d modeling software, 'virtually' constructed.

I've created a moderately complex setting or two, but nothing approaching the Shimizu pyramid. Since it's an open framework, at least a rough model of the entire structure would have to be constructed.

Back to the drawing board.

I'm using some of the research I did for the pyramid: including the traffic circle and (even better) roundabout. Those systems of handling intersections are visually interesting, give a moderate degree of flexibility for 'serious' design, and could - in principle - be automated.

A real-world example of a roundabout is The Magic Roundabout in Swindon (between London and Bristol). There's a pretty good writeup about Swindon's roundabout in the Wikipedia.