Robert Silverberg | 1903 words
Today I mean to sing the praises of Google, which I think is the most important single component of the phenomenon that is the Internet. That is no small statement, and, lest I be thought to be in the pay of that vast search-engine organization, I will quickly offer some disclaimers. I am not a Google stockholder. I am not a Google executive or a Google employee. (I have never been anybody's employee since the day, fifty-eight years ago, when I graduated from college.) I don't even know any Google executives or employees, even though I live just a hop and a skip from Silicon Valley. What I am, just as most of you are, is a Google user, day in, day out. I understand that some of Google's expansionist ways as a corporation have drawn criticism. But my concern here is with Google as a search engine, not as a corporation. That search engine is essential to modern life. Without it, we might very well drown in our own data. It has rescued us from that dire fate, and, in so doing, I believe it has changed the world.
Isaac Asimov outlined the problem of information retrieval in an essay, "The Sound of Panting," Astounding Science Fiction, June 1955. He tells of the difficulties that biochemists had, even back then, in keeping up with the scientific literature of their own field. He was then a professor of biochemistry at Boston University, writing science fiction on the side. "There are literally thousands of journals printed. The aristocrat of biochemical journals is the Journal of Biological Chemistry. It comes out once a month.... The September 1954 issue contains 480 pages and 45 articles." Coping with it was a major chore. Then, also, there were the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Science, its British equivalent Nature, the British Biochemical Journal, and.... He lists another column and a half of English-language scientific periodicals before he gets to the French, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Swedish, and Japanese journals, all of which the biochemists of that day needed to follow in order to stay in touch with current research. These were summarized twice monthly in Chemical Abstracts, a bulky tome printed in microscopic type. Its annual index alone occupied three big volumes totaling more than a thousand pages. "There is now a whole branch of human effort devoted to attempting to coordinate the accumulating data of the physical sciences at a rate roughly equivalent to that at which it is accumulating," Asimov said. "This includes the formulation of special types of indices and codes, the use of screening programs, the preparation of special punched cards, micro-card files, and so on."
Special punched cards! Micro-card files! And yet it was all hopeless. No one could stay current. If you were to go past his lab at the university, he said, you would hear "the sound of panting.... It is just I. Asimov trying to keep up with the literature."
The great fantasist Jorge Luis Borges, who for many years was director of the National Library of Argentina, gave us in his story "The Library of Babel" a depiction of the universe as a library made up of an infinite number of hexagonal galleries on whose shelves all books that had ever been written or ever would be written were stored. "Everything is there: the minute history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, a demonstration of the fallacy of these catalogs... a version of each book in all languages, the interpretation of every book in all books...."
And how does one find one's way around in an infinite library? With difficulty, and only if one has an infinite amount of time at one's disposal: "In order to locate book A, first consult book B which will indicate the location of book A. In order to locate Book B, first consult book C, and so on ad infinitum.... I have squandered and consumed my years in adventures of this type."
Murray Leinster, that early master of science fiction, offered a solution to the information-retrieval problem so vividly depicted by Asimov and Borges in a brilliant 1946 short story called "A Logic Named Joe." Leinster conjured up a future in which everyone was linked to an interconnected network of home computers—"logics," he called them—capable of instantaneously serving up any information one might require if one merely punched a few keys. In one glorious swoop he had imagined the PC, the Internet, and the omniscient search engine, decades ahead of their actual existence.
By the late twentieth century the Internet was here, and with it came the first search engines, replacing Asimov's punched cards and other prehistoric scanning methods. The earliest, it seems, was a Canadian entity called Archie (for "archive") in 1990, followed by Gopher in 1991, Aliweb in 1993, WebCrawler and Lycos in 1994, and then many more—AltaVista, Inktomi, Infoseek, HotBot, etc., some of which are still active.
But the arrival of Google around the year 2000 swept them all into relative obscurity. Like the rest, Google sent web-crawlers everywhere in the Internet to slurp up the nearly infinite amount of information it provided; but the key difference was a Google algorithm, PageRank, which classed web sites according to the number of other web sites linked to them, on the theory that the most useful Web pages were those with the most links to other sites. Thus—within seconds— Google could deliver a huge bundle of links to whatever subject you were asking about and arrange them in their most probable order of usefulness. At once Google became everybody's favorite search engine, and still is, though others now, like Bing, do pretty much the same thing. Its name itself has become a generic verb meaning "to search," just as such brand names as "kleenex," "xerox," "band-aid," and "zipper" have passed into generic use.
You all have Google stories to tell. Like Borges' beleaguered librarian, you dip into its infinite resources every day for all sorts of information, and at the speed of light it sends back to you, almost without fail, links to some web site that will tell you what you want to know.
My own most recent Google story involves an obscure professional basketball player named Bato Govedarica, who played a couple of dozen games for a team called the Syracuse Nationals more than half a century ago, when I was a college sophomore. I am not much of a sports fan now, but until I got to college in 1952 I did pay some attention to the doings of the teams in the city where I lived—New York. And even in the winter of 1953, despite the rigor of my undergraduate studies and my soon-to-besuccessful attempts to sell stories to the science fiction magazines, I listened occasionally to broadcasts of the games of our basketball team, the Knicks. And the strange name of Bato Govedarica landed in my memory and stuck.
And stuck. And stuck. Like most writers, I have a more than usually retentive memory (becoming a little porous these days, as I start getting up into my Very Senior years, and more about that in a moment). Years went by, decades, even, and from time to time the name of Bato Govedarica would float up into my consciousness. What team had he played for? What kind of name was "Govedarica"? Why did I care?
Not even Google could answer that third question—I don't know the answer to it myself—but the first two continued to plague me, and a week or two ago I fired up the computer and asked Google to tell me about "Bedo Gobedarika," which was my approximation of the spelling of his name. But Google does have some limits. It's pretty good at coping with misspellings, but it could tell me nothing about Bedo Gobedarika. There is always a workaround, though, in the Google cosmos. I asked that infallible engine to give me the rosters of every team in the National Basketball Association, and—poof!—there they were. I scrolled through 1951, 1952, 1953—and there was Bato Govedarica, Syracuse Nationals, 23 games played, 1953-54. Now I could go back to Google with the correct spelling, which I did, and—shazam!—I had hundreds of links to web sites providing information about Bato Govedarica.
First came his Wikipedia entry (and how Borges and Leinster would have loved Wikipedia!) with the dates of his birth and death and a summary of his career, and the interesting information that his name was of Serbian origin. Then the basketball league's own compilation of his statistics; and then the Chicago Tribune's 2006 obituary, and something in Serbian that indicated that his middle name had been Zdravko, and an account of his college basketball career at DePaul, and the report of the scout w
ho had checked him out as a possibility for the Syracuse pro team (six feet tall, 190 pounds), and on and on and on and on.
Too much information, all right. I didn't really need to know his middle name or how tall he was or where he went to college. I simply had had his name buzzing around in my head for sixty years, until I had begun to think that I had invented it myself, and now a few minutes with Google had confirmed that he had really existed, which was all that I had wanted to know.
As I said, I'm getting into Very Senior territory, and my memory isn't all that it used to be, despite the obstinate perpetual presence of Bato Govedarica in it. Lines of poetry that I once could quote verbatim have vanished. So have details of my own rather extensive list of stories and novels. I don't remember if the Detroit science fiction convention took place in 1959 or 1960, and there was a moment recently when I needed to know. I've been on this planet for nearly eight full decades, and my head is crammed with so much data that I feel that I'm carrying Borges' library around in it. But things fall out. Google puts them back in. So long as I remember approximate spellings, or some other vestige of a clue to what I want to look up, Google will tell me.
Consider Algis Budrys' story "The End of Summer" ( Astounding Science Fiction, November 1954.) I had forgotten the name of the story, but Google would have given it to me had I asked for a Budrys bibliography, because I could remember the year of its publication. This time I didn't need Google, though, because my fluky memory also remembered that the issue containing it had had a bright yellow spine, unusual for that magazine, and I went right to it on the shelf. The Budrys story is about an era when humans are immortal, but the price of that immortality is short-term amnesia. So they carry their most recent memories around in a sort of external hard drive that Budrys calls a memory vault, chained to their wrists. At the end of the story the protagonist unchains his memory vault and throws it away, and the final line, which, like the name of Bato Govedarica, sticks in my memory after sixty years, is, "He flexed his curiously light arm."
We don't need memory vaults nowadays. Google is the memory vault for everybody. It's the key that opens everything—the true index to the library that is the universe in Borges' little fantasy. It gives us admission to the breathtaking immensity of humanity's accumulated store of information. Without it we'd be lost.
* * *
NEXT ISSUE
303 words
JUNE ISSUE
Our June 2014 issue leads off with "Shatterdown," Suzanne Palmer's heart rending new novelette about planetary exploration and exploitation. While catching our breath from that shattering experience, we can ponder the mysterious "Murder in the Cathedral" that occurs in Lavie Tidhar's intriguing alternate history of science fiction novelette.
ALSO IN JUNE
Careful pruning unearths the affect that botanic advances have on a young couple's romantic and financial future in Ian Creasey's "Ormonde and Chase"; the silver lining to nature's terrible wrath can be found in new to Asimov's author Kara Dalkey's science fiction fairy tale about the "Philosopher Duck"; and, while that duck isn't so bad, James Van Pelt shows us exactly why we don't want to mess with the dangerous "Turkey Raptor"; esteemed French author Sylvain Jouty's first story for us attempts to explore the mystifying "Finges Clearing"; David Erik Nelson's convoluted time-travel tale reveals why this time "There Was No Sound of Thunder"; and Nancy Kress's young mother gets the reassurance we could all use on the "Sidewalk at 12:10 P.M."
OUR EXCITING FEATURES
Robert Silverberg's Reflections column describes the ins and outs of "Another Transition"; James Patrick Kelly's On the Net proclaims "It's an Honor Just to be Nominated"; Peter Heck's On Books takes a look at a couple of short story collections by Asimov's authors— Kage Baker's posthumous publication, In the Company of Thieves, and Bruce McAllister's latest, The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic; plus we'll have an array of poetry and other features you're sure to enjoy. Look for our June issue on sale at newsstands on April 1, 2014. Or subscribe to Asimov's —in paper format or in downloadable varieties—by visiting us online at www.asimovs. com. We're also available individually or by subscription on Amazon.com's Kindle and Kindle Fire, BarnesandNoble.com's Nook, ebookstore.sony.com's eReader, magzter.com/magazines, and from Google Play!
COMING SOON
new stories by Allen M. Steele, Sandra McDonald, Nick Wolven, Tochi Onyebuchi, Alexander Jablokov, Evan Fuller, Jeremiah Tolbert, Jay O'Connell, James Patrick Kelly, Doug C. Souza, James Gunn, Karl Bunker, Jason Sanford, Susan Palwick, M. Bennardo, Tim McDaniel, and many others!
* * *
ON BOOKS
Paul Di Filippo | 2605 words
Chalk Goddesses
I don't think I will be too far off the mark if I say that Margaret Brundage (1900–1976) was the James Tiptree of her era. An independent, enigmatic, secretive, sophisticated, highly talented woman from outside the genre whose path intersected briefly with the field as she gifted us with her transgressive creations. Pretty good description of both women—on the surface.
Of course, parallels extend only so far. Brundage did not possess Tiptree's gritty cynicism (realism?), but was instead, in her art anyhow, a lush romantic (in the sense that "romance" equals "outré adventures"). Nor was Brundage as self-destructive and conflicted as Tiptree (unless you count Brundage's smoking habit, which eventually killed her). Also, she could dismiss her art as central to her life, when circumstances dictated, and still flourish, whereas Tiptree seemed unable to separate her mundane existence from her therapeutic writings and secret identity.
These thoughts came to me as I gloried in the sumptuous new volume that offers the best perspective yet on Brundage and her too-brief career. The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage (Vanguard Productions, trade paper, $24.95, 128 pages, ISBN 978-1934331507), by Stephen D. Korshak and J. David Spurlock, assembles gorgeous, creamy reproductions of Brundage paintings, but also accumulates the biggest mass of factual material on her ever compiled. The result is supreme eye-candy plus scads of revelatory biographical fascinations.
The elevator-pitch version of Brundage's life is well known. A Depressionera, income-seeking single mother enters, unsolicited, the Chicago office of Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright and shows him a sample of her work. She is commissioned to do one cover, it meets with success, and she goes on to do scores more over the next eight years, to great acclaim, until Weird Tales relocates to New York. Because Brundage worked only in a fragile medium—pastel chalks, not oils—her artwork does not tolerate postal shipment to the new publisher, and she loses her sinecure, thereupon vanishing into anonymity, except for receiving a few visits from fans of her work, decades later.
All this is conveyed in just the opening pages of the new book. What follows—after those brilliant reproductions of the famous covers, at a nice large size and on heavy paper with crisp inks—is some great detective work by Korshak, Spurlock, and others. Brundage's pre- WT and post- WT history is elucidated in great detail, and it's as fascinating as her artistic triumphs.
Brundage spent her formative young womanhood in an ultra-Bohemian atmosphere prevalent in Chicago intellectual and artistic circles of the 1920s, and then in the 1940s and 1950s she was part of a multiracial social justice scene. I won't steal the book's thunder by providing details—you'll want to read the carefully laid-out and research-rich timeline yourself. I'll just say that Brundage emerges from these pages as a fully fleshed and articulated person.
As for those famous covers (plus some never-before-seen stuff) —well, they hold up incredibly well. Sure, there're elements of camp and nostalgia about them. But beneath that lie solid techniques and a unique pagan sensibility and a masterful sense of composition that stands eternal. The eerie and sensuous and decadent atmosphere they evoke continues to haunt.
And that toothsome redheaded gal who crops up again and again, looking anachronistically like Lucille Ball in her glamour-girl years? Insert wolf-whistle here.
Hollywood is Hell
>
Michael Shea is a phenomenal writer whose career has been vastly undervalued and kept in the shadows, despite a major award here and there, and despite such encomiums as John Clute's description of his work (in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia ) as "witty and disquietingly sophisticated." Almost a cult favorite, he is one of those authors who, once you are hooked on his tales, compel you to rush out and buy anything new by him. But the trouble—trouble, that is, in the marketplace, public-profile sense—has been that Shea is not ultra-prolific. Yes, the past few years have seen a couple of new story collections by him. But if I am reading his bibliography correctly, his last novel—till these two newest—came out in 1993.
Happily, though, the Shea drought ended in 2010, with the publication of The Extra. And now we get the sequel, Assault on Sunrise (Tor, hardcover, $25.99, 288 pages, ISBN 978-0765324368), with the concluding volume, Fortress Hollywood, projected soonish. The series is, on its most basic level, a savage satire on Hollywood, mixed with action-adventure tropes. SF has done many such, from Henry Kuttner's 1939 "Hollywood on the Moon" through Harry Harrison's The Technicolor Time Machine (1967). But, just like Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, Shea's take offers so much more— riffs on friendship, ambition, societal inequalities, the future of civilization, a sense of community—that the satirical armature, while adamantium-strong, becomes almost secondary.
In the near-future—say, thirty or forty years ahead—the population of Los Angeles is half what it is now. The dangerous free-for-all area known as the Zoo hosts the bulk of the citizens, while a slightly better lifestyle is available in the 'Rises, giant self-contained towers. Two of our many viewpoint characters, Curtis and Japh, come from the towers, while a third, Jool, hails from the Zoo. (Shea's shifting perspectives in both books, with Curtis getting first-person narration, enlivens the telling.)
Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 Page 33