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Failures of the future
May. 23rd, 2010 09:10 pmI'm working on some NYRSF articles, and I was just amused by this comment about Robert Silverberg's 1973 story, "Getting Across" by reviewer Robert Bee:
This reminds me of my experience a couple of years back of reading "Studio 5, The Stars", a 1961 J. G. Ballard story, part of the loose collection Vermillion Sands. This story revolves around automated poetry-generation machines--feed them a topic and some vocabulary and they will produce hundreds or thousands of polished lines of verse, technically superior to anything a human can write. Late in the story, the protagonist has to assemble an issue of a "little magazine" of human-written poetry for publication--and he gets out the scissors, glue, and roller and starts making mechanical paste-ups.
Yep, computing machines can generate The Iliad from scratch, but desktop publishing doesn't exist. And it proves that even New Wave writers were as bad at predicting the shape of future technology as any of the Campbellians they were pushing against.
The protagonist is the chief deputy to the District Commissioner of Nutrition, whose month-wife stole the program the district computers depend on, sending society into utter collapse. . . . Without the program, the narrator's district cannot effectively run the air conditioning, distribute food, pick up the trash, or even run the robot police, leaving the district defenseless against looters and thieves. The major flaw in the story's logic for today's reader is that this futuristic system doesn't back up its important programming--they should have multiple back-up drives--but if you can manage to suspend disbelief on that point, the story holds up pretty well.
This reminds me of my experience a couple of years back of reading "Studio 5, The Stars", a 1961 J. G. Ballard story, part of the loose collection Vermillion Sands. This story revolves around automated poetry-generation machines--feed them a topic and some vocabulary and they will produce hundreds or thousands of polished lines of verse, technically superior to anything a human can write. Late in the story, the protagonist has to assemble an issue of a "little magazine" of human-written poetry for publication--and he gets out the scissors, glue, and roller and starts making mechanical paste-ups.
Yep, computing machines can generate The Iliad from scratch, but desktop publishing doesn't exist. And it proves that even New Wave writers were as bad at predicting the shape of future technology as any of the Campbellians they were pushing against.
