The Crazy Years

by Spider Robinson

  When it becomes possible for you to buy an antigravity flight belt, you will find that fresh out of the showroom it requires expensive repair; that the warrantee is worthless; that the resale value plummets with every passing second; that the device wastes immense amounts of precious resources, has inadequate safety features and requires expensive licensing, registration, insurance and inspection rituals every year; that parts are unobtainable; that the roofs are full and there’s no place to park; and that some little pipsqueak Third World country makes a much better one for cheaper. Presently you’ll notice that the sky is full of idiots. The wise will tend to stay indoors.

  When fusion power finally starts to come on-line, its implementation will be delayed, and its costs exponentially multiplied, by a vocal environmental lobby angrily demanding a return to something safe, clean and natural, like fission.

  When you can afford a TV linkup that offers you 245 channels in 3-D with digital stereo surround sound, there won’t be a damn thing worth watching on any of them.

  About the time they complete a Unified Field Theory, someone will identify a fifth, incompossible force. You’ll never be able to understand it. Your teenager will grasp it at once.

  When they perfect a method for keeping people sexually vigorous into their nineties, they will simultaneously extend the lifespan to a hundred and fifty. (And you won’t be allowed to retire much before a hundred.)

  If intelligence-enhancing drugs are ever perfected, they will for some reason fail to work within the city limits of Ottawa or Washington. (Note: the same may not be true in Tokyo…or Beijing…or…)

  When the whole world is linked together by computer network, and you have a billion petabytes of information available to you, you will not be able to find the little piece of matchbook cover on which you jotted down that essential access code.

  Finally—perhaps most ominously—as computers become smarter, as they reach the threshold of human intelligence, it will become possible…and soon after that, necessary…to bribe them.

  Myself, I take a peculiar comfort from one final rock-certainty: no matter how weird the world of the future may get, laughter will always be—just barely—enough to get you through it.

  Intellectual Property

  St. George, We Need You Now!

  FIRST PRINTED APRIL 2000

  IT’S SOMEWHAT LIKE MENSTRUATION: once a month, I bleed a little and grow melancholy for a few days.

  Every month LOCUS arrives in my mailbox. You simply can’t function as a science fiction professional without a subscription to LOCUS. Twelve times a year it tells you just how much better than you most of your colleagues are doing, lets you know which of your editors have just been fired, reveals what your agent has been indicted for, fails to review your new hardcover and features a glowing cover story/interview with some punk who got in the business fifteen years after you did. And none of that is the bleeding and melancholy part I mean.

  No, I’m talking about the sick sinking feeling that comes when, having delayed it as long as possible, you finally flip to the stats in the back. The monthly bestseller lists.

  Yes: lists, plural. Seven of them. My flip remarks a couple of paragraphs ago notwithstanding, LOCUS really is an unparalleled cornucopia of priceless data, and legendary publisher/editor Charles N. Brown takes his job seriously. Each month he brings you four genre bestseller lists, plus three separate overviews of genre titles that showed up on mainstream lists.

  In the issue I’m looking at right now, for instance, the biggest and to my mind most useful chart is the LOCUS Bestseller List. Compiled with data from twenty-six different sf and fantasy bookstores in the US and Canada, it gives the month’s top ten hardcovers and paperbacks and the top five trade paperbacks, media-related titles and gaming titles. Below all that is a large and insightful New & Notable list compiled by the LOCUS staff. On the facing page are three more genre bestseller lists: from Barnes & Noble/B. Dalton, Waldenbooks and Amazon.com. Finally below those are notations of genre titles that appeared that month in the Bestseller lists of the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, plus PW’s Children’s Fiction list.

  Guess what all these lists have in common?

  Almost nothing. Agreement between them is oddly uncommon. This month, for example, the four main lists of top ten paperbacks (LOCUS, B&N/Dalton, Waldenbooks and Amazon.com) contain a total of almost thirty different titles between them, and no title appears on all four lists. This puzzling disparity of consumer behavior is typical.

  One thing, however, the lists always have in common (and now at last we come to the bleeding and melancholy part):

  Month after month, fantasy kicks science fiction’s ass.

  And has for so long I can no longer recall the halcyon days of yore when it was otherwise. In three of the four lists I’m looking at now, seven of the top ten paperbacks and six of the top ten hardcovers are fantasy. And that makes it an unusually good month for sf.

  It’s the same in film and television: sci fi has faded badly of late. R2-who? Last year’s Star Wars prequel feels conflicted in retrospect, Lord of the Rings with WWII dogfights grafted on: aerial combat, in an airless environment. Even the venerable Star Trek franchise is starting to show signs of boldly going where Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon went long before. As with Star Wars, its latest incarnation seems to be a retro look back at what happened before all the interesting stuff. This is the storytelling equivalent of Cheyne-Stokes breathing.

  Science fiction as a genre has spent most of the last century trying to cajole people into thinking seriously about the future, to teach them how to cope with technological change. And now that the new millennium is finally here, and the pace of change has increased to the point that even the dullest citizens realize they must think seriously about the future at regular intervals or else go under, now that they actually have Star Trek communicators hanging from their belts and take for granted that they will live forty years longer than their grandparents…people seem to have decided en masse that they’d much rather think about wizards, elves and enchanted swords. The Potter and Baggins empires battle for dominance of movies and merchandising; the question seems to be whether you prefer your cartoon battle of Good Versus Evil performed by plucky individuals or by great stupid armies with pointed sticks.

  We apparently want to be transported back to an earlier, simpler, more magical age. You know: back when those few ignorant peasants who didn’t die in childbirth, starve, succumb to an infected cut, catch smallpox, become bear-dung or disembowel one another over some obscure point of theology could reasonably hope to die of old age, toothless and terrified, in their thirties. Phooey. Where I come from, the Mightiest Wizard in the Whole World is always a pissant, for his world is an insignificant backwater in a third-rate galaxy. In my universe, everyone can be immortal, rich and beautiful, and the stars are their stepping stones.

  It’s a new millennium, and what dies must be replaced, renewed. Paul Krassner just ceased publication of his legendary counterculture journal The Realist after fifty years, and The Onion is simply an inadequate substitute. The last hope for one more Beatles song died with George, and this generation’s Beatles has yet to emerge. Well-meaning nitwits are trying to brick all us Canadians up inside Fortress Canada, with a cask of Amontillado perhaps but with only the most provisional rights or freedoms. And I am disturbed by the growing realization that today’s bright teenagers—always science fiction’s bread and butter—no longer want to know what the future is going to really be like; they are willing to imagine no more, no better, no further, than their great-grandparents did.

  “The worm on the skyhook”

  FIRST PRINTED OCTOBER 2003

  A FUTURIST IS SOMEONE who ponders exciting future developments…twenty years after the science fiction writers have exhaustively discussed them and definitively settled most of the major questions they raise. Since he is unaware of their work and knows nothing whatsoever about human
behavior, he always gets the story wildly wrong. He brings you either terrifying warnings of horrors that are never going to happen, or breathless hype for wonders that are never going to happen. Soon, you conclude that anyone who thinks about the future loses IQ points for some reason, and go back to reading about trolls, Orcs and wizards. And we sf writers sigh and go back to what we were doing: examining the problems you’ll be facing in twenty-five years, solving them and placing the solutions into thoughtful, wildly entertaining stories you will never read even if someone puts a gun to your head.

  It happened recently with cloning. Suddenly you all woke up and noticed something called cloning had existed for a quarter of a century. Rather than go to the library and learn the solutions long since found for all the problems it creates, you consulted a futurist. He assured you the sky was falling, the race was doomed and the biosphere was toast. Naturally you shrieked for your lawmakers to protect you. Since there was no actual doom to protect you from, and thus no special interest group outbidding you, they were delighted to take your money, and now iron laws prevent you from realizing any benefits whatsoever from cloning technology while providing multiple avenues for abuse.

  Sf writers want to explore how humans interact with the technology they now require to survive, so they range far ahead and study—study both technology and people. Futurists know little about either: they just want to make you say either “Wow!” or “Yow!” They’re like lookouts on the prow of a ship, yelling either “Iceberg!” or “Open water!” back to the crew on a bullhorn, quite unaware that the boys up on the bridge with the radar have already done a far better job of plotting course. Problem is, the crew would rather listen to the lookouts.

  The most recent example I’ve seen is the skyhook: what the Led Zep generation calls the stairway to heaven.

  To give you an idea what a fresh new story this is, bear in mind that the trigger incident for it is the second annual international conference on the subject, co-hosted by the Los Alamos National Laboratory…which was held over a month ago. If the idea of a space elevator were any more novel, it would be forgotten. And I don’t just mean that Jack’s Beanstalk is one of our oldest myths. It was first proposed as a serious technological possibility in 1979 (remarkably, simultaneously but quite independently) by two different sf greats, Sir Arthur C. Clarke and the late Charles Sheffield, in their respective novels The Fountains of Paradise and The Web Between the Worlds, and has since featured in at least seventeen other novels (see http: //jolomo.net/sf/beanstalk.html).

  It’s certainly easy to see why we were excited twenty-four years ago: for the life of us we could never figure out why you weren’t. An elevator to space can mean literally better-than-free access to orbit: in theory, for every ton of payload you want to lift, you can simply send down the cable as counterbalance a ton of raw ore from the asteroid belt, so it won’t even cost anything to run the elevator. Think of it! Instead of spending $670 a pound to lift something to Low Earth Orbit, barely over your head, in a space shuttle, you could take your whole family and a covered wagon to High Earth Orbit for free. And HEO is literally “Halfway to Anywhere”—from there, the same rocket blast that takes you to the Moon will take you to Pluto, or Arcturus—it’ll take longer to arrive, is all. For the fuel required to fly from Toronto to Boston, you could put yourself in orbit around Jupiter and start terraforming Ganymede.

  Then, of course, we sf writers all thought the matter through…and quietly put the concept of a beanstalk away with other childish dreams that can’t work in the real world.

  I’m not talking about the technical difficulties its new proponents keep glossing over, like nobody having a clue how to produce, let alone cheaply, the incredibly strong, thin, lightweight “carbon nanotube” fibers needed to keep a beanstalk from snapping like string. Never mind that if such strong, thin, lightweight substances existed, cost of launch to orbit would instantly plummet to a fraction of its present value anyway. Let’s also ignore the million nontrivial engineering problems…because they’re irrelevant. No beanstalk can or will ever be built. Believe me, I wish with all my heart that it could, and the reason it can’t makes me so sad and ashamed for my race I want to cry. But in this post-9/11 world there’s simply getting around two adamantine facts.

  One, it is not even theoretically possible to protect a beanstalk, with 100 percent certainty, forever, against terrorism. (Or, for that matter, design failure.)

  And, two, if one were ever brought down, it could be a whiplash of fire laid on the earth, a scourge of Biblical proportions wrapped round the globe, a thirty-five-kilometer-wide swath of total destruction with no hope of escape for anyone in its path. Even Hollywood has never dared contemplate a nightmare of such magnitude. It would leave a mark on the planet that would still be clearly visible from space by the time our sun goes red giant.

  If, implausibly, you were both rich enough and dumb enough to build a beanstalk, your neighbors would stop you.

  So can we put this charming fantasy away with antigravity belts and food pills now, and talk about some of the really interesting stuff ahead—nanotechnology, gene hygiene, brain/machine interface, immortality, SETI—before some damned futurist gets hold of them? It’s all waiting for you down at your local sf bookstore, or library.

  They Don’t Make Unreality Like They Used To

  FIRST PRINTED JUNE 1998

  I’VE NEVER SEEN The Truman Show, but, as with so many big budget films nowadays, I feel as though I have. Part of this is because since the film was so successful, the contest began immediately to identify what earlier work it was ripped off from. In a letter to the Globe and Mail, reader Martin Bott noted that the film’s premise is strikingly similar to that of an episode of The New Twilight Zone which ran “about ten years ago.” A CBC radio commentator whose name I missed found a considerably earlier antecedent: The Peeping Tom, a 1960 movie so controversial he claimed it destroyed the career of Michael Powell (who’d previously directed The Red Shoes).

  Longtime readers of mine will be unsurprised to hear that I trace the source of Truman’s premise to the dean of science fiction, Robert A. Heinlein. In 1941, Mr. Heinlein published a science fiction classic, “They.” I can quote large sections from memory; I think it safe to say that no one who’s read it has ever forgotten it. It shares the underlying notion of The Truman Show—an over-literal reading of Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

  “They” follows the thoughts of an unnamed mental patient as a succession of people try to argue him out of the delusion for which he’s been committed. He’s a paranoid solipsist: he believes that the whole world genuinely revolves around him, for some unknown and presumably evil purpose. He feels his entire life has been an elaborate plot, carefully choreographed to keep him too busy and distracted to ever get any serious thinking done about the many obvious and blatant internal contradictions in what he’s been told about reality. A shrink tries to reason with him…but of course part of the joke of the story is that solipsism is invulnerable to assault by logic. Then his wife is allowed to visit him, and tearfully begs him to give up his silly fantasy and come back to her…and the emotional approach nearly works. But he cannot erase the memory of that day they were both leaving the house in a driving rain, and over her protests he went back inside for something, and glancing out a window, happened to see…a bright sunny day. A glaring continuity-error, like Jim Carrey’s Truman nearly getting creamed by a falling stage-light. So he rejects her, too, and, “The creature he knew as Alice went to the place of assembly without stopping to change form. ‘It is necessary to adjourn this sequence. I am no longer able to influence his decisions,’ she reported.”

  In June of that same year Mr. Heinlein’s only peer, Theodore Sturgeon, published another classic, “Yesterday Was Monday,” with a different and much lighter spin on the world as elaborate fake. Harry goes to sleep Monday night, and wakes up in Wednesday. The problem is, Wednesday hasn’t started yet.
It’s still being built: an army of workers is in the process of assembling it, making it look just like Monday did, only one day older—trimming the grass to the correct height, for instance, putting just the right increment of grime on all the buildings, getting everything ready for the cast. Harry spends the story trying to find the producer, so he can get back to Tuesday—currently in progress—and resume his life.

  The notion that reality is a vast con-game probably predates both Heinlein and Sturgeon. I won’t be remotely surprised if someone can name much earlier antecedents for the premise: what makes great literature is generally not original ideas but original treatment of ideas a thousand years old. But it is instructive to observe how two different eras treat the same idea.

  Positing that the world is faked raises two obvious questions: who could pull off so elaborate and difficult a hoax, and why would they bother? In “They,” the nameless protagonist has no answer to either question, and the reader is given only elliptical hints that his tormentors are incomprehensibly alien creatures with unimaginable motives. In “Yesterday Was Monday,” Harry ignores both questions: he doesn’t care who’s writing the script, or who the audience might be; all Harry wants is to get back into character and slip back into his comfortable life as a garage mechanic.