Henry Melton provided this wonderful analysis of the role of computers in the world of science fiction literature. Read on and see if you recognize any of the authors mentioned in this
April 1977
offering:
Why Aren't There Any Altairs on Ardurus II?
As in all prophecy, only the correct predictions are remembered, and even those aren't outstandingly accurate...compare the actual nature of the first moon flights with the predictions.
by Henry Melton
I have been writing science fiction for some time now, and I've been re
ading it forever, so it doesn't strike me as being very odd that I'm now into computers. If you mention your computer to a friend, you're likely to get a HAL joke back. It's an automatic association: Computers and science fiction just seem to go together. It's logical, too. For as long as I can remember, the science fiction stories I read had ideas. Spaceflight, nuclear power, robots and a hundred other marvels were accepted features of those adventures. A good science fiction yarn would drag me off to some strange time and place where there would be far too much going on for me to ponder over the particular space drive involved, or to puzzle about the program that might be running beneath the robot's polished skull. But when I got back to Earth, how things had changed. So many marvels seemed so possible in what had been such a drab mundane world.
Well, the moonflights and the nuclear power plants and the Viking Lander robots happened. Everyone speaks of today as being a science fiction world. And, in
a sense, the wonders of today were spelled out years ago in the books and magazines of science fiction. Science fiction writers are treated as modern day prophets and people expect them to have a handle on the future.
In another sense, however, a closer look at some of these predictions shows a less flattering picture. Only the correct predictions are remembered, and even those weren't outstandingly accurate. Nobody predicted such a complicated first moon flight, with command modules and orbiting stages, descent and ascent staged landers. Few stories gave the first moonship an onboard computer. None included television cameras.
But no one worries too much about that. After all, one person sitting at a typewriter can't really compete with a team of engineers in working out the best way to put a man on the moon. A science fiction writer isn't a true prophet; all he or she can do choose a possible future to write about. Just as the human race, by its actions, chooses a possible future in which to liv
e. If a writer knows humans well enough, he/she can second guess the race and look like a pretty fair prophet. Such is the way of the game.
Looking back at the hundred million words of science fiction I have read to date I think I have gotten a good return. Future shock holds no terror for science fiction readers. No new technological marvel can sneak up and go 'boo'. The science fiction reader has seen it all before.
Or, rather, almost all of it.
There does seem to be a big black gap in this flood of prophecy. The science fiction reader who is familiar with the common picture of a computer as portrayed in science fiction is due for a big shock whe he/she runs up against the powerful little critter called a microprocessor. It's here now, with a potential to open up society to private initiative in a manner almost unprecedented, and nobody wrote a story predicting it.
That is frightening in itself. What is wrong with science fiction that something so technological as a revolution in com
puters could go unheralded? Are science fiction writers losing their touch? Is technology developing too fast for them to keep up?
An overview of modern science fiction, however, indicates that this gap seems to be a strange, localized thing. In other areas of human knowledge, science fiction is still riding high on the far edge of the barely possible. Interstellar ramjets, galactic core explosions, Kerr black holes, gene grafting, just about any conjecture of physics, cosmology, biology, or whatever, is likely to be found in a modern science fiction story.
Particularly in physics, some stories have come out in the science fiction magazines before the original research on which they were based has even made it to the professional journals. Science fiction can still make its claim to be the literature of ideas.
But, Alfred Bester's excellent novel,
The Computer Connection
, has a room-sized malevolent computer trying to take over the world. Roger Zelazny's "Home Is The Hangman," which
has just won the Hugo award for the best science fiction novella of 1975, has the main character hunting down a possibly murderous robot, before the robot can find his creators. Isaac Asimov s "The Bicentennial Man" follows a robot, originally designed to be a butler, in his lifelong quest to become a human being.
Now, these are good stories, some of the best of the past couple of years. But the computers and robots in them are no more sophisticated than those in science fiction stories of twenty years ago.
Science fiction has had its stereotypes. The two computer types constantly used are either the huge device, something that would have been a good university computer back in the sixties, except for its disconcerting tendency to chuckle evilly when no one is looking, and the robot. The robot, moreover, usually has some kind of magical (ie: Asimov's positronic) brain that is really nothing more than technological handwaving on the author's part to let him have a human brain sized computer inside
a human looking robot body.
The real shame is that these stereotypes haven't changed in the twenty years that they have been used. A reader of BYTE can sit down with one of today's science fiction books and rest his/her reading arm on top of a logic machine considerably more sophisticated than anything he/she is likely to encounter in the pages of the book. It is a shame, if for no other reason than some otherwise good stories are going to be unpalatable to a lot of personal computer owners. This mental gap in science fiction writing really shows up in some places. Can you imagine what Spock would have done if there had been a microprocessor in his tricorder as there should have been?
The more one thinks about it, the clearer it becomes that science fiction writers are really behind schedule when it comes to computers; actually behind the times, when they should be well ahead. It is a blank spot in science fiction, and it has been there for years. It might have stayed blank for manny more years if
it hadn't been for the invention of the microprocessor. The only people who can notice that blank spot are those who know better. In other words, only you and I and the people we talk to.
But there are signs that the writers are waking up. I think the pocket calculators caught us all off guard. Poof! There it was, a gadget with major sociological implications in everybody's pocket, and nobody had really predicted it. I can remember only one old story that used pocket calculators, and even then, they were finely machined motorized slide rules. The story was good, though. It explored what a world would be like if everybody had forgotten that math could be done in one's head. If the story had come out only five years ago, it would have been hailed as a prime example of the predictive value of science fiction. But no modern story had even considered the concept.
That was a shock for the writers; and signs that this stagnation is breaking up are starting to appear in print. But why was that mental blo
ck there at all, and why has it persisted for so long? Was it just a fluke?
I don't think so. I'll tell you why.
A quick look at all of the computer stories that have come out since computers and science fiction writers discovered each other back in the forties will show one dominant theme: artificial intelligence.
A writer of fiction stories has to be concerned with people. Even a gadget story is only a story inasmuch as it affects people. For a writer to write anything worth reading, he/she has to consider the characters above all else. When the intelligent computer first appeared on the science fiction scene, everybody took the concept to heart.
The intelligent computer made a beautiful character, from the storyteller's point of view. The full range of personalities, from purely logical to insanely demonical, were all available for use, and all essentially believable. Believability is a prime quality in science fiction. It has to be there if the story Is going to be any good. And an
yone can believe a computer with a bad case of misprogramming.
And so the computer became part of the stable of characters available for a science fiction writer, right up there with human beings, mythological creatures, and aliens from the planet ____________.
[The symbolic name of your favorite mythical planet is a parameter to be supplied by the user of a science fiction writing program.]
A computer was a character. The concept became so fixed that writers forgot that real computers exist because they are beautiful tools. And while science fiction writers told their tales of pensive robots and planet killing Berserker machines from some war lost long ago and light centuries away, the macro computers begat minicomputers, and minis begat micros. Out of the same labs came the pocket calculators, which jumped out on the market and gave us all a little taste of future shock.
The shock has done some good. Some of the better writers are already into the swing of things. Take two examples: You
must read
The Mote In God's Eye
by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and
Imperial Earth
by Arthur C. Clarke. In both of these novels everyone has a pocket computer. These gadgets are pocket sized with large memories and very easy to program. They can store text, graphics, and sound, occasionally tying into larger computers by radio, thus serving as diary, library, calculator, and who knows what else. This pocket computer is such a logical development that you can bet that other writers will pick up on the idea. Here is a beautiful tool in science fiction, and not a hint of an evil chuckle out of it.
Here is another example:
Shockwave Rider
, by John Brunner, extrapolates a world where any computer can be reached and programmed from any telephone. (This is an extrapolation?) In this future world, the programming genius with the right password is like the one eyed man in the country of the blind. What can be forbidden to the man who can change his identity, profession, and financ
ial status, with just a couple of hours tapping touchtones on his phone? Shades of stories we've read about in
Computerworld
! In this story, Brunner introduced the concept of a tapeworm to the science fiction readership.
A tapeworm is a software life form. It lives in memory space, eating processor time. And they exist. I've seen them. So have you if you've watched a program blow up, using a video display as a window into your memory space. I've watched about five naturally occuring species in a friend's 8080. If you are doubtful that they are alive, go back and reread the definition of life and think again.
Exciting things are starting to happen as science fiction takes another look at computers and what they can do. But only you can determine how fast these stories can come out. You can't wake up a writer if you haven't met him/her. So put on your BYTE tee-shirt and go to the next science fiction convention and meet the people. Talk about your machines.
The computer as a beautiful
character will never go away; you can be sure of that. But the beautiful tool is here, and all it takes is for science fiction writers to realize it. Then, finally, you might see an Altair on Arcturus II.
photo_link (242 Kbytes)
Henry Melton, 7307 E Riverside Dr, Lot #13, Austin TX 78741
20 Years Ago in BYTE
