Day Million, today's installment
Jan. 25th, 2003 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaOne of the formative texts of the notional universe in which I live is Fred Pohl's quirky and charming short story "Day Million". (There's a copy of it here, almost certainly violating Pohl's copyright without his consent, but let's whisper around that for now.) It tries to do what most science fiction agressively doesn't--present a future world which has just barely enough touchstones in common with our present world to give a sense of the uncommunicable strangeness that will be generated by technological and cultural changes. It's a gentle and happy story, gleefully pointing out the foibles of science fiction as it was (is) practiced without rubbing anyone's face in the sheer inadequacy of stories which assume that cultural mores of the future will be remarkably similar to suburban America of the 1950s. It would have been very easy for Pohl to have written an angry story, bitter and pitying as (my memory of) William Gibson's "The Gernsbach Continuum", but Pohl seemed clearly more interested in making people look forward with hope for the wonder of the future instead of looking backwards with contempt.
On Friday nights, I often go out to Long Island for board gaming, getting back anywhere from 2 to 4 AM. I usually check my e-mail immediately upon return before going to bed; this is particularly important this week and next, as the company I work for is about ten days away from launching our first product (which is still under wraps until it launches). I sent out an important e-mail just before leaving for gaming, and wanted to see if there was any urgent feedback on it. However, sometime overnight, someone released a worm which targeted a known security hole in Microsoft's MS SQL implementation for Windows 2000; an estimated 22,000 machines worldwide were turned into zombie attack drones, flooding a wide array of targets with TCP/IP noise. My e-mail and Usenet provider, Panix, was completely inaccessible overnight because their name-server was knocked out.
The frustration of not being able to reach my e-mail was tangible--it was like reaching out to pick up a book and discovering that my arm ended at the elbow. After forty-five minute or so of thrashing around on the net, trying to find a way to force the world to allow me access to my dear, tantalizingmorphine mail, I gave up and went to bed.
Pohl's story came back to me today strongly. His final question:
rings around my brain. Here I was, staying awake for nearly an hour in the dead of the night, furious because I couldn't get my computer to read a text file on another computer 25 miles away. What would Tiglath-Pilester do?
On Friday nights, I often go out to Long Island for board gaming, getting back anywhere from 2 to 4 AM. I usually check my e-mail immediately upon return before going to bed; this is particularly important this week and next, as the company I work for is about ten days away from launching our first product (which is still under wraps until it launches). I sent out an important e-mail just before leaving for gaming, and wanted to see if there was any urgent feedback on it. However, sometime overnight, someone released a worm which targeted a known security hole in Microsoft's MS SQL implementation for Windows 2000; an estimated 22,000 machines worldwide were turned into zombie attack drones, flooding a wide array of targets with TCP/IP noise. My e-mail and Usenet provider, Panix, was completely inaccessible overnight because their name-server was knocked out.
The frustration of not being able to reach my e-mail was tangible--it was like reaching out to pick up a book and discovering that my arm ended at the elbow. After forty-five minute or so of thrashing around on the net, trying to find a way to force the world to allow me access to my dear, tantalizing
Pohl's story came back to me today strongly. His final question:
And you--with your aftershave lotion and your little red car, pushing papers across a desk all day and chasing tail all night--tell me, just how the hell do you think you would look to Tiglath-Pileser, say, or Attila the Hun?
rings around my brain. Here I was, staying awake for nearly an hour in the dead of the night, furious because I couldn't get my computer to read a text file on another computer 25 miles away. What would Tiglath-Pilester do?
