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Analog SFF, July-August 2007
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Science Fiction
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ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT
Vol. CXXVII No. 7 & 8, July/August 2007
Cover design by Victoria Green
Cover Art by David Mattingly
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Novellas
LOKI'S REALM, C. Sanford Lowe & G. David Nordley
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME, Bud Webster
Novelettes
QUAESTIONES SUPER CAELO ET MUNDO, Michael F. Flynn
A TIME FOR LAWSUITS, Amy Bechtel
THE CAVES OF CERES, Joe Schembrie
Short Stories
THE LAST OF THE WEATHERMEN, Richard A. Lovett
JIMMY THE BOX, Scott Virtes
POLITICAL SCIENCE, C. W. Johnson
DO NO HARM, John G. Hemry
Science Fact
DE REVOLUTIONE SCIENTIARUM IN ‘MEDIA TEMPESTAS', Michael F. Flynn
Probability Zero
THE TEST, Kyle Kirkland
Reader's Departments
THE EDITOR'S PAGE
BIOLOG: JOE SCHEMBRIE, Richard A. Lovett
THE ALTERNATE VIEW, John G. Cramer
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY, Tom Easton
ANALYTICAL LABORATORY RESULTS
BRASS TACKS
IN TIMES TO COME
UPCOMING EVENTS, Anthony Lewis
Stanley Schmidt Editor
Trevor Quachri Managing Editor
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Click a Link for Easy Navigation
CONTENTS
EDITORIAL: THE CAPACITY OF DREAMS by Stanley Schmidt
QUAESTIONES SUPER CAELO ET MUNDO by MICHAEL F. FLYNN
SCIENCE FACT: DE REVOLUTIONE SCIENTIARUM IN ‘MEDIA TEMPESTAS’ by MICHAEL F. FLYNN
THE LAST OF THE WEATHERMEN by RICHARD A. LOVETT
A TIME FOR LAWSUITS by AMY BECHTEL
THE CAVES OF CERES by JOE SCHEMBRIE
BIOLOG: JOE SCHEMBRIE by RICHARD A. LOVETT
THE ALTERNATE VIEW: COOLING OFF GLOBAL WARMING FROM SPACE by John G. Cramer
PROBABILITY ZERO: THE TEST by KYLE KIRKLAND
JIMMY THE BOX by SCOTT VIRTES
POLITICAL SCIENCE by C. W. JOHNSON
DO NO HARM by JOHN G. HEMRY
LOKI'S REALM by C. SANFORD LOWE & G. DAVID NORDLEY
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME by BUD WEBSTER
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton
IN TIMES TO COME
THE ANALYTICAL LABORATORY
BRASS TACKS
UPCOMING EVENTS by ANTHONY LEWIS
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EDITORIAL: THE CAPACITY OF DREAMS
by Stanley Schmidt
A device that has often figured in science fiction, and many of us have sometimes thought we'd like to have in reality, is a dream recorder. In Kristine Kathryn Rusch's “Paparazzi of Dreams” (Analog, November 2004), for example, recorded dreams are a profitable form of entertainment—and surreptitiously recorded dreams of celebrities even more so. Other possible uses, some of them more benign (but all subject to misapplication), might be found in research (e.g., about dreams themselves and their relationship to the “external” world), psychotherapy, and forensics.
But what would the technical requirements for such a device be? I don't intend to try to guess at all of them. The logistical details of getting the necessary information out of one brain and into another are probably a thorny problem in themselves. But I do have some purely speculative thoughts on one aspect of the problem: How much information storage would we need? And even if we had it, would it really be adequate to do what we want?
It's not as simple a question as it might seem, and I'm not going to come up with any exact numbers and claim they're correct. But I can make some semi-quantitative guesses about what the problem might involve. We might start by considering the dream just as a series of pictures, and considering the data requirements of a digital camera. Most people think a 3-megapixel picture looks good, as long as they don't blow it up too much, but for big enlargements most professionals would want at least 10 megapixels. Even that can't match the detail of fine-grain large-format film, but that's not an intrinsic difference between film and digital photography; at the rate data storage technology is evolving, it won't be long before sharpness is a non-issue in choosing between the two media.
How sharp an image would you need to reproduce a dream to anybody's satisfaction? Probably most people have had dreams that seemed so real that they weren't sure whether they were dreaming or awake. That would seem to imply a pretty high-quality picture, so perhaps that 3-megapixel figure approximates a minimum (though I have reservations about that to which I'll return later).
How many bytes that requires depends on how much information you need to record about each pixel. If you only need a black-and-white picture, you don't need as much information as if you want to specify a full range of colors. And that leads us to something that has long puzzled me about people's accounts of their own dreams. I have heard some people say they always dream in black-and-white. I have also heard people—sometimes the same people—say that a dream was so vivid they thought it was real. How can a person with normal color vision hold both these views? Since we always see the real world in color (except under abnormally poor lighting conditions), it seems to me that dreaming in black-and-white would be a dead giveaway that what was being experienced was not ordinary reality.
So my suspicion is that most people normally dream in color, and those who think they dream in black-and-white think so only because dreams normally fade from memory very soon after awakening, and the memory of color is the first part to go. Personally, I know that my dreams are always quite colorful. (With one conspicuous and perhaps humorous exception. I once had a lucid dream—one in which I knew I was dreaming—during which I thought about this paradox. Since I normally dream in color, I wondered what it would be like to dream in black-and-white—so I switched the color off, and then back on. I toggled back and forth several times between color and black-and-white, then settled back into color to rejoin my normal program, already in progress.)
So I think we should figure, at least for a first approximation, that a dream recorder needs to be able to capture a pretty high-quality, full-color image. Since dreams include motion, it needs to be able to do this many times a second. How many, I'm not sure; commercial movies run at about 30 frames per second, but subjective time rate in dreams is not always the same as that recorded on the clock beside the bed.
If we accept that a dream should give a convincing illusion of reality, the images must also be three-dimensional. (Again, I know mine are, but I have no idea how representative they are of those experienced by others.) And some data will be needed to represent other kinds of sensory input, since a dreamer can also hear, smell, taste, and feel things.
And then there's the question of what sort of format will be used to store all this data. For recording, it will have to be extracted in a form shaped by how the brain stores information, and for playback i
t will need to be put back into a compatible form. Computers typically store data as a pattern of bits in a specific location on some device such as a hard drive, but there is evidence that brains do something quite different, storing a memory not in a single location (so that if that part of the brain is damaged the memory is lost completely and permanently) but in a distributed way qualitatively similar to that in a hologram. In a hologram, information about all parts of a picture is stored in all parts of a film or plate, which has the desirable effect that even if part of the film is destroyed, a complete (albeit not quite as good) picture can still be reconstructed from what's left. A cranial counterpart of that would clearly have big evolutionary advantages, but as far as I know, nobody has yet figured out exactly how it works. If and when somebody does, they may find that it means recording thoughts or dreams requires more storage space than a computer engineer might expect. (Or less: maybe the information is stored redundantly, but a single input can get it into the system for processing.)
Nonetheless, the data requirements for conventional hardware storage of three-dimensional moving images with sound (plus other senses) will probably give at least a fair first approximation of what a dream recorder might need to be able to do. And those would appear to be quite large.
On the other hand, they may not be as large as they first seem. Is it really necessary to record minute detail in all parts of the image? Maybe not; after all, in waking reality we're seldom, if ever, conscious of anywhere as much detail as our surroundings contain. For example, even if we have eidetic memory and store a mental “videotape” of all the scenery we pass in driving from New York to Dubuque, I strongly suspect the images will be much more detailed in regions we were paying particular attention to (like an unusual billboard that interests us) than those that we weren't (red barns may register only as a vague impression of red barns, with no detail about the arrangement of doors, windows, and trim). Also, much of what we see goes into short-term memory only and soon dissipates (like dreams) without ever being transferred to long-term “archives"; but that's irrelevant to the question of dream recording since there we're concerned with simulating real-time experience.
So it would seem that a dream recorder could get away with storing a lot less information than a fully detailed picture of everything in its setting. It only needs enough to store detail about the parts of a scene the dreamer is paying attention to, and only a vague, generalized suggestion (dare I compare it to a French Impressionist painting?) of the rest.
Or does it?
That analysis may be valid if the dream recorder in playback mode works by forcing the user's mind to mimic exactly the mental activity of the dreamer—but that would seem to require suppressing any independent thought by the “redreamer.” I suspect that's difficult to achieve, and would likely be so unpleasant that no one would want to experience it voluntarily (though some people might have nefarious reasons for wanting to do it to someone else). I suspect most users of a dream player would like the experience to be more like “virtual reality,” wherein they can choose for themselves what parts of the scene to concentrate on—even parts that the original dreamer didn't.
But the ability to do that gets us back to requiring lots of memory, so that there's adequate detail to provide verisimilitude wherever in the played-back dream the user chooses to look.
However, I anticipate one more catch. Even if you have enough memory storage in your equipment to capture a fully detailed dream sequence, can you even get one to record? My suspicion is that you can't—because the original dreamer is likely only generating much detail in the “central” parts of the scene. So no matter how much detail the machinery could record, the user trying to look elsewhere in a played-back recording may find there's nothing there except vague suggestions of shapes. And that would be rough on the whole illusion of reality, because in reality you can always shift your attention to look closely at new things. In dreams, that may be intrinsically impossible, and the moment you look away from the original dreamer's focus, the illusion goes away.
So ... I'd still like the chance to play with a dream recorder, but it may be a very hard thing to build—and even the best possible may be less than I'd hope.
Copyright (c) 2007 Stanley Schmidt
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Published since 1930
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Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
—Gertrude Stein
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Jayge Carr
1940-2006
Margery Krueger, better known to science fiction and fantasy readers as Jayge Carr, died of cancer on December 20, 2006. Born (July 28, 1940) and raised in Houston, Texas, she spent her last years back in Texas after living in several other states. Despite such indignities as being denied membership in her high school's rocketry club because she was a girl, she studied physics at Carnegie Institute of Technology and Wayne State University, earning one degree there and being well on her way to a doctorate at Case Western Reserve University when she left to raise a family—and write.
Her first published story was “Alienation,” in the October 1976 Analog, and her subsequent output included three novels (Leviathan's Deep, Navigator's Sindrome, and The Treasure in the Heart of the Maze) and a wide range of short stories and novelettes, many of them in this magazine. Though recurring themes in her stories included such weighty matters as bigotry and pollution, there was also a perennial element of fun in them. In her own words, “Writing is fun ... and ... I can always hope, that if it's fun to write, it's also fun to read.” Critics sometimes regard her as a feminist writer, but she preferred to think of herself as a “peoplist,” adding, “Everyone should have equal opportunities and no one should be shoehorned into a role unfitting or barred from a role desired because of sex—or age, creed, color, or what-have-you."
She is survived by her husband, Roger; daughters Cynthia and Sharon; sisters Carol, Joan, and Patsy; and granddaughters Carina and Alanna, to all of whom we extend our sincerest condolences.
—Stanley Schmidt
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QUAESTIONES SUPER CAELO ET MUNDO
by MICHAEL F. FLYNN
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Illustrated by William Warren
When big events happen can depend on little things...
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What happened before.
If you stand on the mountain peak of any great age and gaze toward the past, you may spy in the purpled west the jagged range of another great age. And make no mistake: those distant peaks mark as great an age as any, and there were giants on the earth, men whose names ought never be forgotten:
Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux; Blanche of Castile and Good King Louis; Hildegarde of Bingen, “the Sybil of the Rhine.” Robert of Chester, Adelard of Bath, Peter of Cluny. They are all “of” somewhere, but they go everywhere. Abelard has returned to teaching and at his
aged feet sit Arnold of Brescia and John of Salisbury. Young Eleanor of Aquitaine is the Queen of France and patroness of the troubadours. Oh, those were names to conjure with!
Something is happening. Something is in the very air. Adelard of Bath has inhaled the Elements of Euclid in Arabic and exhaled them in Latin. Robert of Chester has translated the Al jabr of al-Khwarizmi—and Peter of Cluny desires he do the Qur'an while he's at it. And what about this Aristotle person?
In the center of the maelstrom: Toledo, glorious Toledo. They are all there, or they come there—eager, bustling, busy—to Archbishop Raymundo and his translation school. Gundisalvo is there. Robert of Chester has come, and Hermann of Carinthia. John of Seville and Plato of Tivoli. The names alone tell the tale: Spaniard, Englishman, German, Frenchman, Italian, all of Europe has gone mad for reading. They rub shoulders with al-Battani and ibn Sina, with Jacob ben Mahir and Moses ibn Tibbon. There has been nothing like it in all the world since the storied House of Wisdom in old Baghdad, before what once there flowered died.
These are no stolid peasants, gawping at wonders collected by their betters. They've been schooled for generations by the encyclopediasts of decaying Rome, by Macrobius and Pliny, by the Old Logic of Boethius. They know their Plato, and those tantalizing fragments of Aristotle that had drifted West before the old imperium fell. Thin soup, maybe, but they have a taste for soup!
Gerard of Cremona has dipped his pen, and when he is done, Europe will be drunk with Pierian spring-water. He has come to Toledo in search of Ptolemy's Almagest, and there, as his students would one day write of him, “seeing the abundance of books in Arabic on every subject, and regretting the poverty of the Latins in these things, he learned the Arabic language, in order to translate. To the end of his life, he continued to transmit to the Latin world, as if to his own beloved heir, whatever books he thought finest, in many subjects, as accurately and as plainly as he could."
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