Black Gate

When I was a kid, 2011 was science fiction. We’d all have personal jet packs, robot servants and colonies on Mars.  Instead, we’ve got Facebook and  iPhones. Harlan Ellison is selling his first typewriter, a Remington made in the late 1930s.  Kodak stopped making the chemicals needed to develop its famed Kodachrome color film, and the last batch was finally used up by Dwayne’s Photo in, appropriately enough, Kansas.  My six year old iMac that’s been clugging along since it was state-of-the-art oh so long ago (2004) blew out its logic board, and now I’ve got a new 27″ screen with an Intel Core i7 processor  that should be the coolest desktop Apple makes until probably this spring.

I don’t know if anyone may be interested in buying my old Kaypro II, though it’s not for sale, and, besides, I’m not Harlan Ellison so what would be the point.  It was one of the earliest “portable” computers, weighing in at something like 9 pounds.  It had a 9 inch screen that displayed green characters on a black background, and a dual 5 1/4 inch floppy drive.  You’d stick the program (word processor, database manager, a couple of games more primitive than Pong) in the top drive, and save your files to the bottom drive.

My first word processor was PerfectWriter, which didn’t quite live up to its name (but, then, nothing ever really is perfect).  That relationship didn’t last,  any more than my personal relationships did at the time, when I fell in love with WordStar  because I could depend on printing out exactly what I saw on screen instead of keeping my fingers crossed with PerfectWriter that the print out would vaguely resemble the way I thought I had formatted it.  I believe WordStar was the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) program.  For years I resisted the switch to Microsoft Word until I could no longer be out-of-step with the corporate hordes.  At the same time, I had to give up my beloved Kaypro II (currently residing in a closet along with all my other obsolete techno-junk).

Once upon a time, in my early youth, I actually composed on both manual and electric typewriter, so  I know how to type.  Consequently, I tend to still use keyboard commands rather than mouse clicks.  For Windows users, that means some keyboard combination of the CTRL key with another letter or character. Today, things are better now that Word (and its various web emulators) is the de facto standard since you don’t have to worry about writing a document in a format that’s incompatible with someone else’s program back in the ancient days when a thousand word processors bloomed. However, there’s a lot not to like about Microsoft Windows, which is why I joined the Mac cult.  Guess what?  The CTRL key function doesn’t work the same, you have to use Apple’s Command key, instead, so I had to get used to a whole new way of keying a program command.  I use my thumb.

These days, the only way a new generation seems to produce text is with their thumbs, on tiny keyboards that in many cases lack real pushable keys, and faster than I can do with 10 digits on a full-sized keyboard.

We’ve become a culture of all thumbs.  Who’d have thunk it back when we were dreaming of maids on Mars?

That’s progress for you.

Happy new year.

Over at Locus Online, Lois Tilton reviews short fiction so I don’t have to.

Of particular interest this week is that in addition to the wide range of print and on-line magazines, she takes at look at Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, a collection of hard SF with the sort of authors you’d expect, e.g., Stephen Baxter, Peter Watts, and Karl Schroeder.  

Looks interesting.

There’s an interesting discussion (69 comments the last time I looked!) over at Torque Control about book reviewing.  The whole thing got started when Niall Harrison responded to a blog post by Jason Sanford titled “Why we write literary reviews.“ Jason posts a follow up on “Why It’s Worth Expressing Opinions on Literature.”

On the heels of Mark Twain’s best seller, we now also have this memoir from Anne Rubenstein Dick, third wife of five of the only science fiction writer so far to gain literary legitimacy for inclusion in the Library of America series.  Originally self-published, The Search for Philip K. Dick has been re-edited by Tachyon Press; it covers the five years of Rubenstein’s “courtship” and marriage to one very weird guy during what might be called his “mellow years” in the early 1960s, also the time when he wrote his Hugo award winning (and only award winning) novel,  Man in the High Castle. According to Anne, “I’m not saying he wasn’t a very nice person too; he was. He just had a very dark shadow.”

The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

This was Ray Bradbury, quoted in Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell, in observing that the “seashells” he had made up for people to listen pressed against their ear had actually been invented with the transistor radio (a very, very, very primitive iPod, for you youngsters).  Ray’s point was that the seashells transported people into artificial environments that imperiled human interaction.

This quote appears on the back of my Ballentine Books 1962 paperback edition of Fahrenheit 451 (purchased when I was in sixth grade for the enormous sum of 50 cents).  As you should know, the novel is an indictment of a media-obsessed dystopia that burns books so people aren’t exposed to disturbing ideas and can be kept “happy” with mindless entertainment.  This was written in the early 1950s, and while Bradbury may not have had the details right (and that’s never been his interest), he certainly anticipated our Internet Age (which Ray has described as a “waste of time”).

While the transistor radio may have been the first step, the real giant leap in which we’ve beomce technological islands unto ourselves was the invention of the portable cassette player, the  Sony Walkman, in 1979. With the transistor radio, you listened to what someone was playing for you, usually for the purpose of selling you something. With this clunky piece of machinery, you could choose what you wanted to listen to, wherever you wanted to listen to it. Not quite as passive as today’s MP3 player as you actually had to load into it a a cassette tape, the contents of which you may actually have put some effort into creating as your own personal playlist, without the assistance of a computerized “genius” that’s supposed to know your tastes for you.

The Walkman officially no longer roams the Earth. Sony has announced that production has shut down. Another era has passed.  Alas, Bradbury’s vision of a witless America hasn’t.