Analog SFF, March 2012
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Analog SFF, March 2012
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Science Fiction
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Dell Magazines
www.analogsf.com
Copyright ©2012 by Dell Magazines
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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Cover Art by Tomislav Tikulin
Cover design by Victoria Green
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CONTENTS
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: WHAT'S TECHNOLOGY FOR? by Stanley Schmidt
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Novelette: THE EDIACARIAN MACHINE by Craig DeLancey
Science Fact: THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING: RADIATION THREATS FROM BEYOND by Adrian L. Melott
Novelette: MOTHER'S TATTOOS by Richard A. Lovett
Department: BIOLOG: ALEC NEVALA-LEE by Richard A. Lovett
Novelette: ERNESTO by Alec Nevala-Lee
Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: MU NEUTRINOS AS TACHYONS? by John G. Cramer
Novelette: UPON THEIR BACKS by Kyle Kirkland
Novelette: TRIGGERS: PART II OF IV by Robert J. Sawyer
Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
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Vol. CXXXII No. 3
MARCH 2012
Stanley Schmidt, Editor
Trevor Quachri, Managing Editor
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Published since 1930
First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)
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Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: WHAT'S TECHNOLOGY FOR?
by Stanley Schmidt
It depends. Are you buying or selling?
For most of us, technology is to help us do something better, faster, or more easily, or to do something we couldn't do at all without it. The horse collar enabled people to plow fields more efficiently, to go places faster and with less personal exertion, and to haul heavier goods longer distances, than they could with only their own muscles. The automobile gave the same advantages, but to a dramatically greater degree. The airplane gave us a whole new ability: to fly, to move much faster than by any ground- or water-based conveyance, unencumbered by obstacles such as mountain ranges or oceans, and without the need for roads or other large-scale infrastructures. Computers gave us (among other things) the ability to do huge amounts of computation in a time that would have been impractical without them, which led in turn to brand-new lifesaving abilities like CT scans.
For other people (developers and entrepreneurs), technology is a way to make money, by making it possible for the first group (users) to have access to the tools they need to do things like those I've just mentioned. Companies like Ford, General Motors, Toyota, and Honda have revolutionized our cultural landscape by providing the general public with access to sophisticated, efficient means of transportation. Companies like IBM and Apple not only developed big, powerful computers for industry, but made little (yet still powerful) computers into common household appliances for a wide range of applications.
Both groups—users and providers—need each other. Sometimes they're the same—sometimes people develop new technologies to serve their own needs—but if the new technologies are really good at serving their own needs, other users will soon adopt them and developers will profit from selling them. Usually, or at least often, that mutual feedback benefits both groups. Developers have an incentive to keep improving their products, and users have access to better and better tools.
Occasionally, though, developers get carried away, so caught up in the fun of developing or the lure of selling snazzy new products that they become cavalier about the importance of what users actually want. They develop what they'd like to sell, try to persuade users to buy it, and ultimately force it upon them by discontinuing earlier stuff and refusing to provide support for it long before it becomes unusable.
Sometimes that's not a serious problem, particularly with “standalone” technologies. How satisfactory an automobile is, for instance, is essentially independent of how earlier models were built or what they could do. Within rather broad limits, cars as different as a 1910 Ford Model T, a 2011 Lexus, and a 2012 Hummer can use the same roads and serve many of the same functions. If you decide to adopt one of them as your primary mode of transportation, it doesn't matter what you were driving before or what you did with it. If a company makes changes in its new models that improve fuel efficiency, safety, and comfort, while reducing emission of pollutants and keeping prices comparable to what they were, people are likely to embrace the changes eagerly, with little if any grumbling about “This isn't like the old ones.” (Of course, there are other considerations, mainly psychological: to some people style is important, and almost anyone may resent having to pay extra for unnecessary features that they don't want.)
When technologies interact, things get a little more complicated. If a manufacturer of railroad cars decided to start building cars with six inches more space between left and right wheels, he'd find it impossible to sell them. Railroad cars have to be able to run on existing tracks, and cars that don't fit them would be completely useless. They could be used if all the existing tracks were replaced, but that would be a huge, expensive job that I seriously doubt anyone would consider worth doing just to get cars six inches wider. [1]
That example probably strikes you as so patently ridiculous that you can't imagine that any businessman would actually try to sell such cars and get people to invest i
n thousands of miles of new track to use them. But there's an analogous situation, in some ways subtler but in others even more bizarre, involving a whole broad category of technologies that practically all of us use, and frequently depend on. I refer to the whole collection of fields, long regarded as distinct but rapidly merging into a more or less unified whole, dealing with the collection, storage, accessing, and processing of information.
The most familiar historical examples include sound recording, photography, cinematography, word and graphics processors, and database systems. Until recently, at least some of these were complementary sets of recording and playback equipment, like cameras and projectors or recorders and phonographs. Now all of those functions, along with word processing, graphics, and database management, are often combined into a single system incorporated into or built around a computer.
And manufacturers keep developing new versions of those systems, which are often incompatible with work produced using earlier versions, and forcing users into a position where they have to buy the new ones whether they want them or not.
In the short term, this is fine and dandy for those who think the purpose of technology is to help them make money by selling it. It's not always so good for those who see technology as a tool for doing something else—a means to other ends, not an end in itself.
What developers too often forget—and many users let them get away with it because of their own shortsightedness—is that information technologies are an inherently and crucially special case. One generation of technology creates records that may still need to be used much later, and the utility of later generations must be judged in part by how well it preserves access to those. On that test, many of our most impressive new technologies—and the companies that make them—fail dismally, while older ones do much better. Stone tablets from thousands of years ago are still readable, by those who know how. I can still read books, or look at photographic prints, that my grandparents acquired in their youth. I can easily combine 35-mm slides from two years ago with others from fifty years ago, using projection equipment made anytime in that period (assuming, of course, that it has been well maintained). If no projector is available, the images are still viewable with a simple light source and a simple hand lens.
Digital pictures, on the other hand, are completely dependent on a complex technological infrastructure. If that collapses, or manufacturers decide to promote “new, improved” software incompatible with the old formats, those pictures may become unusable in just a few years, unless they are converted to a new format. That process is a time-consuming nuisance at best, and practically impossible at worst. The same consideration applies to all records stored in digital form—which, these days, means practically all of them. A great many have already been, for all practical purposes, lost to posterity simply because they're stored in old electronic formats and nobody has the time or equipment to translate them to new ones. In creating a civilization with far more information-handling ability than any before it, we may also be creating the most ephemeral civilization in history.[2]
Let no one misread any of this as meaning that I oppose progress or change. Many upgrades really do incorporate multitudes of impressive and useful new features. But the people developing them need to be reminded periodically that the primary purpose of their technologies is not to make them money, but to serve the needs of people who use them. In the case of information technologies, this means ensuring that records created with older versions remain at least as accessible and useful as when they were created. The fundamental reason for storing information is that you think you or others may want or need to use it later, and “improvements” that make that more difficult or impossible are, to the extent they do so, not improvements, but the opposite.
That's why I find it disturbing to read things like an article called “Last word on Lion[3] and application compatibility,” by Christopher Breen, which appeared on Macworld.com, an online magazine for Macintosh users, on June 27, 2011. In part, it's a useful piece, giving users of older operating systems advice on how to make sure they can continue using their older applications and files if they switch to the new operating system. But toward its end, it admits that, while sometimes they can do that pretty easily, sometimes they can't. After conceding that salvaging some kinds of files—including some of the kinds most likely to need long-term accessibility—will be “challenging,” Mr. Breen says his proposed way of dealing with the problem is, “Not a perfect solution, but at least it's a more forward-looking solution than clinging to an old OS (and, perhaps, old hardware) to keep a zombie application shambling along.”
I've been a Mac user myself for a long time, by choice; I recommend Macs to anybody who asks; and on the rare occasions when I've had to use Apple tech support I've been impressed by its quality and efficiency. But I find the sneering attitude implicit in Mr. Breen's closing remarks, frankly, offensive. He seems to believe, and to imply that Apple also believes, that users have some obligation to welcome a new tech just because its developer wants them to buy it, with little or no regard for what it's going to do to their ability to keep using old records. But if the hardware and software a person has is doing a good job of serving his or her needs, why should he cheerfully accept the “need” to waste time and money on an “upgrade” that makes his job harder rather than easier? If the old system still works, it's only a “zombie” because the company that made it chooses to treat it as one, hoping the user will feel obliged to buy a newer one.
That expectation seems to me a blatant case of misplaced priorities. Technology is to do useful jobs, not just to provide income for people who would like to sell us ever-newer versions of it. Information is special, and an “upgrade” that removes access to data we still need is no upgrade, no matter how many snazzy new bells and whistles it has. It is, to the extent that it does that, a giant step backward.
Copyright © 2011 by Stanley Schmidt
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1 For an idea of what our lives might be like if automobiles had developed that way, see Christopher Anvil's story “Bugs” (June 1986).
2 This is not a new problem. I discussed it earlier in “Continuity” (August 1991), which was in turn inspired by a real news story about the difficulties the National Archives were having in keeping old documents readable.
3 For the non-Mac-users among you, Lion is Apple's pet name for yet another new operating system released near the time of the article.
[Back to Table of Contents]
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Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
In recent years there has been much talk and concern about invasive species—and countertalk about whether “invasive” species are necessarily bad. Susan Forest leads off our April issue with a thought-provoking novelette about “The Most Invasive Species” and the elusive relationship between quality of intentions and quality of results. Craig DeLancey also has a novelette, “Ecce Signum,” which is the latest (and last?) in his series about “Marrion's Children,” bred and raised for a unique and very special quality—with, of course, the best of intentions.
Richard A. Lovett offers a fact article which is far out in the most literal way: It's about Pluto, recently demoted from official “planet” status, other Pluto-like objects, and all the other stuff making up the Kuiper Belt, way out on the fringes of the Solar System—but offering new insights into the origins of the part we live in.
We'll also have stories by Kevin J. Anderson, Stephen L. Burns, and Jerry Oltion, plus Part III of Robert J. Sawyer's novel Triggers.
[Back to Table of Contents]
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Novelette: THE EDIACARIAN MACHINE
by Craig DeLancey
Ancient history may be much more ancient—and more contemporary—than you think.
Karen Regan found me out in the parking lot, where I shouted orders at the security guards who carried bulging cardboard boxes onto the U-Haul. The guards ignored me. They had somehow figured out that all my authority had ev
aporated, and they were the type to switch in an instant from obeisance to contempt. They dropped my boxes roughly onto the hard steel bed of the truck, and shuffled off resentfully for the next cartons.
When I saw Karen coming towards me, her smart black pumps clacking on the tarmac, I suddenly felt very sorry that I had worn sweatpants and a hoody to work. It no longer seemed to announce that I was so hip and necessary that my clothes didn't matter. It seemed instead to just announce: unemployed.
“Hey, Worry,” she said. Worry was a college nickname that stuck for a few semesters, a consequence of my excessive studying. But for years since I had been just Steve.
“Ah,” I said, “now this really is the worst day of my life.”
She frowned, hesitating, eyes flicking around as if looking for something.
But, just like in the old days, I never could bear feeling that she was uncomfortable. I broke the silence. “Your hair is short now.”
“Has been for years.”
“It's been years? You've managed to avoid me that long?”
She let that pass with an easy laugh. She still emanated that same charisma. Even standing on the pale old pavement behind the factory, she seemed a person with a direction, a person on her way somewhere, and you instinctively felt you'd be lucky to tag along.
She pointed at the boxes and said, “Moving?”
“I was fired, just fifteen minutes ago. These somber gentlemen, who used to show me daily deference, are now forcibly ejecting me. These boxes contain the swag of a thousand trade shows, which is all that I have been allowed to keep for myself. My files and my designs and my prototypes are property of the company.” I brushed my hands together. “What do you want, Karen? You picked a very bad time to show up again.”
Her forced smile collapsed.