One difficulty the writer of science fiction faces is that it seems quite likely that the world will be largely incomprehensible to us 100 years from now. There may well be self-aware computers a good deal smarter than any of us carbon-based life forms, and even mere human folks may be able to plug their brains directly into networks, giving them complete access to the sum total of human knowledge. If, when plugged in, you can recall anything from the gist of Joyce's Ulysses to historical trends in peanut production from 1941 to 1957 as easily as you remember your mother's maiden name, will you ever want to unplug and feel drastic intellectual diminishment? And what does society look like if everyone has this kind of access to information all of the time? We may well be approaching a cusp in history that changes things as drastically as the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
In Harvest of Stars, Poul Anderson takes a look at the human future and doesn't like what he sees. He likes individual freedom, open skies, wilderness, and challenge to the human spirit; and he doesn't think the future offers much opportunity for any of them.
To support the teeming billions, the environment will be carefully regulated, every square inch of arable land exploited, and the few remnants of wilderness kept alive through active human intervention. Just as machines have largely supplanted physical labor, computers will largely supplant intellectual work; jobs will be fewer and generally meaningless. Life from cradle to grave will be regulated and planned. Even resources from space will only stave off the day when initiative becomes meaningless, when machine intelligences function in a realm beyond our understanding and only those humans willing to become half-machine themselves have any real role to play in civilization.
Note that Anderson isn't a doomster: Hey, humanity has a future, ecocatastrophe won't do us in, and we'll learn to manage the planet sustainably. And Anderson thinks his likes are a minority taste; probably most people would be happy to live in a stable, controlled society that doesn't demand that people work.
If this were all there were to Harvest of Stars, we wouldn't have much of a story, merely a gloomy portrait of the future. It's just the backdrop, though. Anderson's real story is about the few obsessive folks who cross the gulf of stars to found a new society on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. First, they have to survive upheaval in North America, currently dominated by totalitarians—Anderson evidently doesn't think the death of communism has brought an end to the age of ideology just yet—and then persuade the rest of humanity to spend resources on a quest that can't ever benefit them directly. You're never going to ship goods or people across light years cost-effectively, after all; the solar system will never see tangible benefit from the settlement of other stars.
It's that struggle—on the one side, Fireball Enterprises and its chief, Anson Guthrie, a dead man whose mind has been downloaded into a computer, and on the other, the North American Union and the World Federation—that makes the story a taut, political thriller in a regimented and entirely believable future world. And we get some very nice bits along the way: a rather fey Lunarian culture, how espionage works in the computer era, lyrical passages on the glories of nature. We also get some bits that don't work so well: Anderson's patented archaic diction makes a lot more sense in his high-fantasy stories than it does here in the world of the technofuture. And those of us who aren't Randians may get impatient, early in the book, with the quantity of political speechifying. No, it's not as bad as that endless speech in Atlas Shrugged, but there are pages at a time that can easily be skipped.
There's a lot of Rand and a lot of Heinlein in this book—no surprise, since both wrote about small groups of capable people pitted against oppressive societies, and that's what Anderson is after. Writing like either Rand or Heinlein, and doing it well, is no mean trick—after all, the originals didn't always manage it. Anderson succeeds gloriously, and that is not to say he is being imitative. He is drawing on techniques those authors used, but in his language, his sense of transcendence, and his Scandinavian dourness, Anderson is ever his own man.
Most writers of Anderson's age are past the peak of their authorial powers, content to rehash old themes or rest on their laurels. With Harvest of Stars, Anderson shows that not only has he still got the spark that made masterpieces of No Truce with Kings, Brain Wave, and Orion Shall Rise—he's getting better. Anyone looking for the best of contemporary science fiction—or of the literature of liberty, for that matter—need search no further.
Greg Costikyan is a science-fiction writer and game designer.
The post Escape from Earth appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Changing attitudes about, say, race and sexual relations often make fiction appear dated, but science fiction dates for another reason: History passes it by. Thus, landmark novels like Robert A. Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon, in which an entrepreneur finances the first lunar landing, or Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust, in which the craters of the moon are filled with enormous (and dangerous) seas of dust, do not reach an audience their intrinsic merits might otherwise provide. It is rare, however, for a book to be out of date before it is published.
That is the situation with Russian Spring. This is unfortunate, because it is a work of considerable power and enormous scope and ambition. It would be a shame if its audience were diminished by its depiction of a Soviet Union that will evidently never come to be.
Norman Spinrad has been laboring in the vineyards of science fiction for almost 30 years now and has produced a staggering variety of works, from jokingly radical political novels like Bug Jack Barron to fine, literarily sophisticated tragedies like The Void Captain's Tale. He is without question one of the most talented active writers of science fiction, and Russian Spring displays his writing at the pinnacle of his craft.
Two themes pop up over and over in Spinrad's work: the Summer of Love and American freedom. Spinrad came of age in the '60s, and his work is filled with the symbolism of Haight-Ashbury: free love, young men and women protesting against injustice, the exhilarating moment of rebellion when all seems possible, even the detail of colorful and exuberant clothing. That the '60s was a depressing time of intolerant explosion on both sides of the political divide is not, in Spinrad's view, relevant; he is yearning for some Platonic ideal of the Summer of Love, not for the reality.
For Spinrad, America is the home of freedom. In some sense, he views America quite as much as the embodiment of the ideals of the Summer of Love as of the ideals of Jefferson, and much of his work is concerned with the survival and extension of freedom, not only physically in this country, but throughout the human future. Russian Spring is very specifically about Spinrad's fear of what he sees developing in this country and his hope for the triumph of American ideals even as America abandons them.
The novel follows the family of Jerry Reed, an American aerospace engineer, and Sonya Gagarin, a Soviet businesswoman working for one of the Soviet Union's main organs of socialist entrepreneurship, Red Star S.A. Reed's enduring passion is manned space flight; his greatest dream is to participate in the space age his parents promised would begin in his lifetime. Alas, America has abandoned that dream, its civilian space program gutted to fuel Battlestar America, the ultimate descendant of the Star Wars program, a massive system of orbital defenses that will ensure U.S. supremacy over any conceivable opponent. He defects to Common Europe, where he joins the European Space Agency, which has ambitious plans for space stations and lunar bases. In fury, the United States bars him from ever returning.
Reed and Gagarin have two children—Robert and Franja. Robert becomes enamored of America and its history and, despite the opposition of his mother and the increasing anti-Americanism of his European classmates, he determines to go to college in the United States. Franja is proud of her Russian ancestry and of the optimistic, renascent Soviet Union; she shares her father's dreams of space and longs to join the cosmonaut corps and participate in the Russian exploration of Mars.
Both get their wishes, allowing Spinrad to show us his American and Soviet futures: the one militaristic, protectionist, and aggressive, fighting brush war after brush war in Latin America; the other peaceful, prosperous, and free. In the course of the novel, the Soviet Union applies for admission to and joins the European Community; the United States invades and annexes Baja California. The turnabout is virtually complete.
Is the picture plausible? It is. Spinrad's specific Soviet future will not occur; the union's dissolution is already too advanced. But something like it is inevitable. Soviet citizens are among the best-educated, most literate in the world. Intellectual capital is far more important to a modern economy than resources; given reasonably just laws and reasonably free economies, the formerly communist nations will inevitably transform themselves into economic powerhouses in a matter of decades.
Spinrad's Europe seems inevitable too. Though "1992" is unlikely to happen before, say, 1996, and though talks over political and monetary union are bogged down, Europe will, barring some catastrophe, become increasingly unified and increasingly prosperous.
The most questionable portrait is that of America. Spinrad's America is the perfect 1960s nightmare: an economy addicted to massive arms expenditure, jingoistic conservatives swilling cocktails while cheering the conquest of Latin America on TV, the inner cities squalid ghettos, blacks and browns fleeing in terror from high-tech bombardment, an impenetrable satellite defense shielding America from the justified wrath of foreign opinion. It takes, in fact, a genuine miracle, a novelistic device just this side of deus ex machina, to save his America from itself, to allow it to join the world community in a final transcendence of destructive nationalism.
Here lies Spinrad's true purpose. His America rings less true than his Europe or his Russia precisely because he wishes to portray the road he hopes America will not take, and fears it may. For almost two generations, we have poured the greatest part of our technical resources and untold quantities of our national treasure into the development of the weapons of war. We now make the world's best bombs, while the Japanese make the world's best cars. We had an excuse: madmen in Moscow with nukes. The best years of the American Century were spent keeping the Free World free.
But there aren't madmen in Moscow any longer, and our excuse has worn thin. We are at a crossroads. If we decide to exploit our military prowess in an effort to impose our vision of a New World Order on a recalcitrant world, Spinrad's nightmare is wholly plausible. Or perhaps we will bring the boys home, shut down the military-industrial complex, and devote ourselves to economic self-improvement in a free and prosperous international trade regime.
If we take the first road, might we not end up as Spinrad portrays us, a travesty of the very values on which the nation was founded?
Any novel of this scope runs the risk of didacticism, of becoming so caught up in international affairs and historic extrapolation that it turns into a sort of travelogue of the future, hardly a novel at all. And in fact, there is a long tradition of that sort of thing in science fiction, starting with Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men.
Spinrad is too fine a writer to fall into that trap, however. Russian Spring is foremost the story of Jerry Reed's family and of his determination to one day walk the moon. Just as the international situation is precarious, so is Reed's family life. His career is stifled by his American citizenship in a hostile Europe; his Soviet wife's is jeopardized by her marriage to an imperialist; his children are torn by their heritage. Just as the survival of human civilization is in question, so is the survival and reconciliation of Reed's family.
The struggles Gagarin and the children face are wholly believable; so are the frustrations that face starry-eyed Reed—the agonies of his son as America turns more and more fascist, his daughter's exhilaration at space flight. Somewhat surprisingly, the family feels like a family in truth—surprisingly, because Spinrad's protagonists are generally young people, and because science fiction generally deals more with the adventures of the unattached than the introspection of family life. By the end of Russian Spring, each of the four is a wholly believable, sympathetic person—no mean accomplishment in its own right, and quite an amazing one given the novel's ambition on the larger scale. Science fiction is often accused, and justifiably so, of ignoring the personal for the grand idea. Russian Spring is unusual in succeeding not only as a powerful novel of ideas, but also as a novel in the more literary sense.
No finer novel of science fiction has been written in recent years; no more hard-headed, transcendent view of the human future has yet been written. And though science fiction may be generally viewed as the Artistically Challenged of the literary universe, perhaps even the non-genre reader might consider taking note.
Contributing Editor Greg Costikyan is a writer of fiction and nonfiction who has designed 23 commercially published games.
The post Prediction or Warning? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>William Gibson and Bruce Sterling are the founders and foremost practitioners of "cyberpunk," a recent and much-debated movement in science fiction. Cyberpunk as a word has now passed into general usage, in two rather contradictory ways. In entertainment media, it refers to a style of downbeat, hard-bitten, and violent science fiction; in the computer field, it's used by hackers operating on the sometimes-illegal leading edge of technology.
But in the transition from self-conscious literary movement to mass acceptance, the word has lost its original intellectual baggage—for make no mistake about it, Gibson and Sterling have a definite intellectual, even political, agenda. Central to their work, and indeed to literary cyberpunk as a whole, are two essential ideas: First, that we are in the throes of the information revolution, a sea change quite as important and powerful as the industrial revolution, and that very little thought has been given to what that means for society. Second, that humanity as a whole is in the grip of forces we do not understand, forces that revolutionize both technology and culture every generation, and that unless we begin to grasp that fact, we may be heading for a grim and rather unhappy smash-up.
The Difference Engine has been touted as a drastic change in approach for these two writers, and in a sense it is. Their previous work has been Chandleresque; this book reads more like Trollope or Dickens (albeit with a level of sex that the Victorians would never have accepted, at least other than anonymously). Gibson and Sterling's previous work has dealt with the future; this deals with the past. But the central theme remains unchanged: Computers can make it far easier for society to control individuals—and, simultaneously, can vastly increase individual freedom.
This much is historical fact: Charles Babbage (1792–1871), a fellow of the Royal Society, devoted most of his life to the conception and construction of computing machinery, first his Analytical Engine, and later his Difference Engine. The Difference Engine was nothing less than what we now call a von Neumann machine. That is, it was a computer, complete with memory, instruction set, and output devices. Naturally, even electricity was then a novelty, and electronics inconceivable: Babbage's machines depended on mechanical devices—gears, rods, and cams taking the place of vacuum tubes or microchips.
Alas, historically, the machine tools of the day were unable to produce parts to Babbage's demanding tolerances, and the device was never realized. To contemporaries, the Babbage machine must have seemed an imaginative failure; with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Babbage, like da Vinci, was a genius out of his time. Equally brilliant was Lady Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, who worked with Babbage and developed algorithms to be used with the never-completed Engine. She invented many of the basic principles used in modern software—the subroutine and the iterative loop, for example—and must be considered the world's first programmer, although none of her work ever ran since the hardware for which it was designed was never completed.
The story is a compelling one for a science-fiction writer: What would have happened if Babbage had been able to complete his machine? One readily imagines enormous steam-powered computing engines, rods and gears clacking away.
This astounding technology is one of The Difference Engine's strengths. The image of the Central Statistics Bureau's great brass engines, serviced by punk card-bearing technicians in "clean-room" lab coats whizzing about on roller skates within an enormous rococo Victorian pyramid is one that sticks in the mind.
The story itself is a fairly plebeian one: a Hitchcockian thriller, revolving around a mysterious box of punch cards. It exposes us to a mixed bag of well-drawn characters, from a prostitute and Luddite agitator to a paleontologist nearing the pinnacle of society in this alternate Britain. More interesting than the story is the society it explores.
In this world's 1830s, industrial agitation has given rise to the creation of the Industrial Radical Party, led by Lord Byron. Here, Gibson and Sterling are clearly anticipating the later creation of Labour, perhaps under the assumption that Difference Engine technology accelerates both industrial and political trends. In the ensuing convulsions, both Tories and Whigs are swept away, leading to a virtual Rad dictatorship under Byron. He creates the institution of "merit lordship," whereby titles are reserved for the most successful scholars and entrepreneurs of the realm. Meanwhile, America is balkanized, with California and Texas independent republics, the Civil War even more vicious than historically, and Mexico a French protectorate under the Emperor Maximilian.
In some aspects, it is an appealing world: Merit lordship, for instance, means that Britain offers upward mobility and great rewards for the scientists and businessmen who contribute most to society. (Contrast modern America, which reserves its adulation for actors, athletes, and rock stars.) But the Difference Engine has been far from a panacea. The Central Statistics Bureau maintains credit and criminal records on everyone, and God help the poor soul who runs afoul of the government. This is the era of debtors' prison, after all.
As with their previous work, Gibson and Sterling's intention is to show that the information revolution creates both opportunities for tyranny and the possibility of expanding human freedom. In their previous work, they have done so by extrapolating the changes computer technology is causing in our present society into the future; in The Difference Engine, they do so by showing how Victorian society might have been altered if computer technology had existed then.
Unfortunately, Babbage machines do not really suit their polemical purpose. Only governments and big businesses can afford Difference Engines, since they are so vast and expensive. (The early vacuum-tube computers took up rooms the size of gymnasia; think what a mechanical computer would be like.) Necessarily, therefore, Babbage machines are primarily instruments of social control. By contrast, modern computers are cheap enough that most people can own one: They are primarily instruments of individual liberation. Babbage machine technology, therefore, emphasizes the evil aspects of the information revolution, while diminishing the positive side. If Gibson and Sterling's intention is to show both the good and the bad, they have not chosen the best vehicle.
Moreover, it is strikingly odd that an ostensibly political work chooses to ignore the political developments of the time. The Difference Engine contains nothing about Cobden and Bentham, the evolution of the Whigs into a truly Liberal Party motivated by the ideals of Mill and Adam Smith, or the Anti-Corn Law League. And Byron himself seems quite unlike the young man who admired the French Revolution, who penned, "Who would be free themselves must strike the blow," and who died struggling for the liberty of Greece. Time and power change men, yet it is hard to see an elder Byron as a tyrant.
Admittedly, any book must choose its themes, and Gibson and Sterling are excellent on the texture of life and the scientific controversies of the day; yet by ignoring Victorian liberalism, they have again missed a way to drive their point home. One has the nagging feeling that ignorance of political developments, rather than conscious choice, is to blame.
On the whole, The Difference Engine is an ambitious undertaking and an imaginative and compelling work—but doesn't quite hit its mark. Gibson and Sterling have written better books in the past and, one may hope, will do so again.
Contributing Editor Greg Costikyan is a writer of fiction and nonfiction who has designed 23 commercially published games.
The post Computers in Steam and Brass appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Before the advent of computers, questions like "What is intelligence?" and "What is consciousness?" were exclusively the domain of philosophy. Artificial intelligence (or A.I.) research, pioneered at MIT in the 1950s, was created precisely to investigate and, ultimately, answer these questions. The Age of Intelligent Machines is an excellent discussion of the roots of A.I., its current capabilities, and its likely future development.
Raymond Kurzweil is well placed to discuss this fascinating field. Himself an A.I. pioneer, Kurzweil developed the first machine that reads printed text to blind people; the first electronic keyboard to accurately recreate the sounds of orchestral instruments; and the first large vocabulary voicewriter. He is also unusual among the technically accomplished in being a clear, readable, and often humorous writer.
Kurzweil's book offers a grand overview of the history and future of A.I. research. More than that, it offers a vision of a weird and wacky world where every appliance has a brain, intelligent houses foresee your every need, and your computer argues with you when you try to buy stock in a company it doesn't like. Weird and wacky it may be; Kurzweil makes a good case for its likelihood.
The holy grail of A.I. research is the development of the intelligent computer: a machine as intelligent, in precisely the same fashion, as a human being. Naturally, that goal has not been reached—and is unlikely to be attained for some decades yet. But by studying intelligent behavior and attempting to reproduce it in computer systems, A.I. research has given us great insights into the nature of human cognition.
One of the strangest realizations has been that many things we think of as difficult are actually very easy; and, conversely, that many things we think are trivial are actually very hard. As early as 1956, the Logical Theorist was able to derive original mathematical proofs, displaying a degree of mathematical sophistication that, in humans, we expect only of the highly educated. Yet a robot that can perform household chores is still considered vastly beyond the capability of modern technology.
A housewife, in some sense, is far more intelligent than a professor of mathematics. The things we think of as conscious reasoning—logical progression from one step to the next—are, in fact, the easiest things to program. Simple pattern recognition—the ability to recognize faces, for instance, or to realize that the cat is not part of the rug and shouldn't be vacuumed—is one of the most difficult.
As Kurzweil shows, artificial intelligence is more than an academic party game in search of an unreachable goal. In the last decade, it has begun to throw off billion-dollar industries as it advances. One of the most interesting is "expert systems"—in essence, massive databases coupled with "rules of thumb" drawn from the knowledge and experience of human experts.
Expert systems are used to diagnose disease, search for minerals, and offer tax-planning advice. American Express uses an expert system to judge the credit worthiness of its charge-card applicants— and the company claims a 75-percent reduction in expensive bad judgments since it adopted the new system. Before the end of the decade, expert systems will probably be at the heart of medical practice, financial planning, and military strategy—to mention only a few fields.
A.I. applications are in their infancy. Within a few decades, we are likely to see books replaced by flat-screen readers and the publishing industry altered beyond recognition: the standard means of interacting with a computer is likely to be English-language conversation: and your telephone will probably be able to translate your English into Urdu for the person on the other end of the line, and his Urdu into English. By comparison, Kurzweil's prediction that, within 15 years, the world chess champion will be a computer is small potatoes.
Kurzweil is concerned with more than technology: his chapter on the philosophical roots of A.I. is particularly interesting. He includes articles by a variety of other writers, including A.I. pioneer Marvin Minsky; Kazuhiro Fuchi, the head of Japan's Fifth Generation computer project; and journalist George Gilder. If Kurzweil has a message, it's that the prospect of machine intelligence, rather than posing a threat to humanity, has the potential to vastly expand our freedom and well-being. The A.I. revolution has begun, and within the decade, Kurzweil believes, it will dramatically affect all our lives.
The Age of Intelligent Machines is not for everyone, not at more than 500 pages of tiny sans-serif type. (The designer could have chosen a less wearing font—though Kurzweil points out that sans-serif is more easily read by machines.) And while Kurzweil eschews jargon, math, and program code, those who think that bit is the past tense of bite and floppy is an adjective that applies to hats would probably be better off finding a primer on computers before tackling the book. Those who are interested in the impact of technological advance on society will find it fascinating.
Greg Costikyan is a writer of fiction and nonfiction who has designed 23 commercially published games.
The post Programs for the Future appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Back in early February, newspapers across the country reported that computer hackers were interfering with emergency calls over the 911 communications network. The reports said the hackers had penetrated the system using information from a secret computer document.
The scare grew out of an indictment by a grand jury in Lockport, Illinois. On February 7, Craig Neidorf and Robert Riggs were indicted on seven counts of wire fraud, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, and interstate transportation of stolen goods.
Prosecutors alleged that Neidorf and Riggs had conspired to steal, using fraudulent methods, a confidential and proprietary document from the Bell South telephone company. This document, it was claimed, could allow computer hackers to disrupt the 911 emergency network.
The arrest of Neidorf and Riggs was only the beginning. The Secret Service, which has authority over crimes involving government computers, had embarked on a vast, nationwide investigation of hacker activity: Operation Sun Devil.
Imagine the night face of North America, shining not with cities but with lines of light showing the transmission of data. Brightest are New York City, the financial capital, and California, the technological capital, with Washington, D.C., a close third. The lines that crisscross the country are telephone wires and cables, microwave transmissions, and packet-switching networks designed for computer communication. Here and there, beams dart into space to reflect off satellites and back to earth.
The computer networks in this country are huge. The largest are entities like UseNet and InterNet, which link every academic computing center of any size and are accessible to every scientist, university student, and faculty member in the nation. The networks also include government-operated systems, such as MilNet, which links military computers that do not carry confidential information. And there are the commercial services, such as Dow Jones News/Retrieval, SportsNet, CompuServe, GEnie, and Prodigy. CompuServe is the largest of these, with half a million subscribers.
In addition to these massive entities are thousands of tiny bulletin board services, or BBSes. Anyone with a computer and a modem can start a BBS; others can then call it up and use it. BBSes offer, in miniature, essentially the same services that the commercial nets offer: the ability to chat with others by posting messages to an electronic bulletin board and the ability to upload and download software and text files. There are more than 5,000 BBSes in the United States, most of them operated for fun. Few charge their users. In my local calling area alone, I know of BBSes for writers, gamers, Macintosh enthusiasts, gays, and the disabled—and I'm sure there are others.
The vast majority of BBSes deal with unexceptionable topics. But some boards deal with questions of computer security. These attract hackers.
Naturally, hackers discuss their hobby: breaking into computers. Usually, however, bulletin board discussions are general in nature. Hackers are not stupid, and they know that posting credit card numbers or the like is evidence of criminal activity. By and large, BBS discussions rarely, if ever, contain information that would be illegal if published in print form. It's not illegal, after all, to tell your readers how to commit illegal acts. If it were, books like The Anarchist's Cookbook and Scarne on Cards (and half the murder mysteries in print) would be banned.
The laws dealing with electronic transmissions, however, are far from clear. And the methods used to enforce these vague laws set a dangerous precedent for abridging freedom of speech.
In the future, the Net—the combination of all the computer networks—will be the primary means of information transmission, with print publication merely its adjunct. The Net will replace the press, and users of the Net must enjoy precisely the freedoms enjoyed by the press. If users of the Net have to worry about police surveillance, if censorship is rife, if the state forbids mere discussion of certain topics—then the liberty for which the Founders fought will have been destroyed, not by war or tyranny, but by mere technological change.
From the government's point of view, the arrest of Neidorf and Riggs did not end the threat to the 911 network. The document they had stolen was not a single piece of paper that could be returned to its rightful owner. It was an electronic document that Riggs had downloaded from a Bell South computer.
Riggs belonged to a hacker group called the Legion of Doom, whose members shared information. It was likely that others in the group had copies of the 911 document. Worse, Riggs had uploaded the 911 document to a bulletin board service in Lockport, Illinois. Neidorf had downloaded the file from the Lockport BBS. Anyone else who used the same BBS could have downloaded it, too, meaning that dozens of people might have this dangerous information. Worse yet, Neidorf had published an edited version of the Bell South document in an issue of his underground computer magazine, Phrack.
Unlike conventional magazines, Phrack never saw a printing press; it was distributed electronically. After preparing an issue, Neidorf would dispatch it, via various computer networks, to his address list of 1,300 names. Any recipient could then upload the magazine to a bulletin board or to one of the academic or commercial nets. That meant thousands, perhaps millions, of people had access to the information in the Bell South document.
We may imagine that the Secret Service was gravely concerned about the potential threat to emergency services. If not, their subsequent actions are hard to fathom.
On March 1, 1990, employees of Steve Jackson Games, a small game company in Austin, Texas, arrived at their place of business to find that they were barred from the premises. The Secret Service had a warrant, and the agents conducting the search wouldn't let anyone in until they were done.
The agents ransacked the company's offices, broke a few locks, and damaged some filing cabinets. They searched the warehouse so thoroughly, says company founder Steve Jackson, that afterward it "looked like a snowstorm," with papers strewn randomly. The agents confiscated three computers, a laser printer, several pieces of electronic equipment (including some broken equipment from a storeroom), several hard drives, and many floppy disks. They told Jackson they were seizing the equipment "as evidence" in connection with a national investigation.
Among the equipment seized was the computer through which S.J. Games ran a BBS to communicate with customers and freelancers. It had never been a congregating point for hackers and was about as much a threat to the public order as a Nintendo game.
The loss of the equipment was bad enough. Worse, the Secret Service seized all existing copies—on hard drives, floppy disks, and paper—of S.J. Games' next product, a game supplement called GURPS Cyberpunk. The loss of that data shot Jackson's publication schedule to hell. Like many small publishers, S.J. Games runs on tight cash flow. No new products, no income. No income, no way to pay the bills.
Over the next several weeks, Jackson was forced to lay off about half of his 17 employees. By dint of hard work, he and his staff managed to reproduce the data they'd lost, mostly from memory. S.J. Games finally published GURPS Cyberpunk as "The Book Seized by the Secret Service." It has sold well by the (low) standards of the field.
Jackson estimates the raid has cost him more than $125,000, a sum a small company like his can ill afford. (The company's annual revenue is less than $2 million.) He was nearly put out of business by the Secret Service.
What justified the raid and the seizures? Apparently, this: The managing editor of Steve Jackson Games is Loyd Blankenship. Blankenship ran The Phoenix Project, a BBS of his own in the Austin area. Blankenship consorted with hackers. He was fascinated by the computer underground and planned to write a book about it. He may or may not have once been a hacker himself. He certainly knew and corresponded electronically with admitted members of the Legion of Doom.
But perhaps Blankenship's worst luck was this: An issue of Neidorf's Phrack magazine included an article titled "The Phoenix Project." As it happens, that article had nothing to do with Blankenship's BBS of the same name. But the Secret Service was well aware of the contents of Phrack. Indeed, the revised indictment of Neidorf and Riggs, issued in July, cited the article by title. The same morning that the Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games, agents awakened Blankenship and held him at gunpoint as they searched his house. They seized his computer and laser printer as "evidence."
Consider the chain of logic here. Robert Riggs is accused of a crime. Riggs belongs to a group. Loyd Blankenship is friends with other members of the group, though not with Riggs himself. Steve Jackson Games employs Blankenship. Therefore, the Secret Service does grievous financial injury to Steve Jackson Games. This is guilt by association taken to an extreme.
Neither Blankenship, nor Steve Jackson Games, nor any company employee, has ever been charged with so much as spitting in a public place. The Secret Service refuses to comment, saying only that S.J. Games was not a target of the investigation.
The company is now receiving legal help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization devoted to promoting civil liberties in electronic media. The Secret Service has returned most—but not all—of the company's seized equipment. Some of it is broken and irreparable. The government has made no offer of restitution or replacement.
On May 8, 1990, the Secret Service executed 28 or more search warrants in at least 14 cities across the country. The raids involved more than 150 agents, plus state and local law enforcement personnel.
According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney's office in Phoenix, the operation targeted "computer hackers who were alleged to have trafficked in and abused stolen credit card numbers [and] unauthorized long-distance dialing codes, and who conduct unauthorized access and damage to computers." The agency claimed the losses might amount to millions of dollars. In later releases and news reports, that figure was inflated to tens of millions of dollars.
Nationwide, the government seized at least 40 computers and 23,000 disks of computer information. In most cases, the subjects of these searches have remained anonymous. Presumably, they have either been advised by counsel to remain silent or have been so intimidated that they wish to attract no further attention.
John Perry Barlow reports in Whole Earth Review that the Secret Service held families at gunpoint while agents charged into the bedrooms of teenage hacker suspects. He adds that some equipment seizures deprived self-employed mothers of their means of support. These reports remain unconfirmed. It's clear, however, that the Secret Service closed down a number of BBSes by the simple expedient of seizing "as evidence" the computers on which those BBSes operated.
Bulletin board services are venues for speech. They are used mainly to exchange information and ideas. Nothing in the nature of the technology prevents the exchange of illegal ideas. But in a free society, the presumption must be that, in absence of proof to the contrary, the use of a medium is legitimate. The Secret Service has not indicted, let alone convicted, the operators of any of the BBSes closed down on May 8.
If law enforcement officials suspect that a magazine, newspaper, or book publisher may be transmitting illegal information, they get a warrant to search its files and perhaps a restraining order to prevent publication. They don't, however, seize its printing presses to prevent it from operating. A clearer violation of freedom of the press could hardly be imagined. Yet that is precisely what the Secret Service has done to these BBSes.
One of the BBSes closed down was the JolNet BBS in Lockport, Illinois, which Neidorf and Riggs had used to exchange the 911 document. Ironically, JolNet's owner, Richard Andrews, had triggered the investigation by noticing the document, deciding it was suspicious, and notifying the authorities. He had cooperated fully with the investigators, and they rewarded him by seizing his equipment.
The Ripco BBS in Chicago was among those raided by the Secret Service. Operated by Bruce Esquibel under the handle of "Dr. Ripco," it was a freewheeling, wideranging board, one of the best known BBSes in the Chicago area. Speech was extraordinarily free on the Ripco board.
"I felt that any specific information that could lead to direct fraud was not welcome and would be removed, and persons who repeated violating this themselves would be removed from the system also," Esquibel writes. But just about anything else was open for discussion. Hackers did indeed discuss ways of breaking into computers. And the Ripco board contained extensive text files, available for downloading, on a variety of subjects to which some might take exception. For instance, there was a series of articles on bomb construction-material publicly available from books such as The Anarchist's Cookbook.
Along with the computer on which Ripco operated, the Secret Service seized two other computers, a laser printer, and a 940-megabyte WORM drive, an expensive piece of equipment. The additional seizures mystify Esquibel. "My guess is that after examining the rat's nest of wires around the three computers, they figured anything plugged into the power strip must have been tied in with [the rest] in some way," he says.
The Secret Service has yet to return any of Esquibel's equipment. He has yet to be charged with any crime, other than failure to register a firearm. (He had three unlicensed guns at his office; he informed the Secret Service agents of this before they began their search.) Says Esquibel, "The government came in, took my personal property to determine if there was any wrongdoing somewhere. It seems like a case of being guilty until proven innocent.…It's just not right.…I am not a hacker; [I don't] have anything to do with credit cards or manufactured explosives. Until the weapons charge I never had been arrested, and even my driving record has been clean since 1978."
It appears that the Secret Service has already achieved its goal. The Ripco board was a place where "dangerous" speech took place, and the agency closed it down. Why bother charging Esquibel with a crime? Especially since he might be acquitted.
Secret Service agents searched the home of Len Rose, a computer consultant from Baltimore, on May 8. The agents not only seized his computers but confiscated every piece of electronic equipment in the house, including his fax machine, along with some family pictures, several boxes of technical books, and a box containing his U.S. Army medals.
On May 15, Rose was indicted on four counts of wire fraud, aiding and abetting wire fraud, and interstate transportation of stolen goods. Among other things, the indictment alleged that Rose is a member of the Legion of Doom, a claim both he and admitted Doomsters vociferously deny.
The interstate-transportation charge is based on the fact that Rose was in possession of source code for Unix, an operating system used by a wide variety of minicomputers and computer workstations. (Source code is the original text of a program.) In theory, Unix is the property of AT&T, which developed the system. AT&T maintains that Unix is protected as a confidential, unpublished work. In fact, AT&T has sold thousands of copies across the country, and every systems programmer who works with Unix is likely to have some of the source code lying around.
The wire-fraud counts are based on the fact that Rose sent a copy of a "Trojan horse" program by electronic mail. Trojan horse programs are sometimes used by hackers to break into computers; they are also sometimes used by system managers to monitor hackers who try to break in. In other words, a Trojan horse program is like a crowbar: You can use it to break into someone's house, or you can use it to help renovate your own house. It has both legitimate and illegitimate uses.
Rose is a computer consultant and has dealt with security issues from time to time. He maintains that his Trojan horse program was used solely for legitimate purposes—and, in any case, would no longer work, because of changes AT&T has made to Unix since Rose wrote the program. Rose is not charged with actually attempting to break into computers, merely with possessing a tool that someone could use to break in. In essence, the Secret Service found Len Rose in possession of a crowbar and is accusing him of burglary.
By seizing Rose's equipment, the Secret Service has effectively denied him his livelihood. Without his equipment, he cannot work. Rose says he has lost his home, his credit rating and credit cards, his business, and some of his friends. He can no longer afford to retain his original attorney and is now represented by a public defender.
Rose's difficulties are compounded by a theft conviction arising from a dispute with a former client regarding the ownership of computer equipment. Nevertheless, it seems brutal for the Secret Service to deny him the means to support his family and to pay for an effective defense. Investigators must long ago have gleaned whatever evidence his equipment may have contained.
Ultimately, the case against Neidorf and Riggs fell apart. In June, the grand jury issued a revised indictment. It dropped the charges of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and added seven new counts of wire fraud, some involving electronic mail between Neidorf and Riggs. Neidorf was charged with two counts of wire fraud for uploading issues of Phrack to JolNet. In other words, mere distribution of his publication was deemed to be "fraud" because Phrack contained material the Secret Service claimed had been obtained by fraudulent means. The new indictment also reduced the "value" of the document Riggs allegedly stole from more than $70,000 to $20,000.
On July 9, Riggs pleaded guilty in a separate indictment to one count of conspiracy in breaking into Bell South's computer. Sentencing was set for September 14—after Neidorf's trial was to begin. Riggs agreed to be a witness for the prosecution of Neidorf.
On July 28, Neidorf's trial began in Chicago. Within four days, it was over. The prosecution's case had collapsed.
Under cross-examination, a Bell South employee admitted that the stolen document was far from confidential. Indeed, any member of the public could purchase a copy by calling an 800 number, requesting the document, and paying $13—far less than the $20,000 claimed value or the $5,000 minimum required to support a charge of transporting stolen goods across state lines.
Testimony also revealed that the contents of the document could not possibly allow someone to enter and disrupt the 911 network. The document merely defined a set of terms used in telecommunications and described the procedures used by Bell personnel in setting up a 911 system.
Riggs, testifying for the prosecution, admitted that he had no direct knowledge that Neidorf ever gained illegal access to anything; that Neidorf was not himself a member of the Legion of Doom; and that Neidorf had not been involved in the initial downloading of the document in any way.
In short, Neidorf and Riggs had not conspired; therefore, Neidorf should not have been charged with the fraud counts. The only value of which Bell South was "deprived" by Riggs's downloading was $13; therefore, he was, at worst, guilty of petty theft. The interstate-transportation counts were moot, since the "stolen goods" in question were worth less than the $5,000 minimum.
Not only was there no case against Neidorf—there also was no case against Riggs. The government dropped the case against Neidorf. Riggs, however, had already pleaded guilty.
The computer nets do need policing. Computer crooks can steal and have stolen millions of dollars. But a balance must be struck between civil liberties and the legitimate needs of law enforcement. The laws as currently constituted are inadequate from both perspectives, and the Secret Service seems determined to interpret them with a callous disregard for civil liberties.
To attack computer crime, prosecutors primarily use the statutes dealing with wire fraud and interstate transportation of stolen goods, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, and the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986. The wire fraud statute prohibits the use of the telephone, wire services, radio, and television in the commission of fraud. The courts have, logically, interpreted it to apply to electronic communications as well.
The interstate transportation statute prohibits transportation of stolen goods valued at $5,000 or more across state lines. Neidorf's lawyer moved to dismiss those counts, claiming that nothing tangible is transported when a document is uploaded or downloaded. The judge ruled that tangibility was not a requirement and that electronic transmission could constitute transportation. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act prohibits knowingly, and with intent to defraud, trafficking in information that can be used to gain unauthorized access to a computer.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act makes it a crime to examine private communications transmitted electronically. Among other things, it requires law enforcement agencies to obtain search warrants before opening electronic mail. It is unclear whether electronic mail files on a BBS's hard drive are covered by a warrant that permits seizure of the hard drive, or whether separate warrants are needed for each recipient's mail.
The reliance on fraud statutes to fight computer crime presents problems. Fraud is the use of chicanery, tricks, or other forms of deception in a scheme to deprive the victim of property. Most attempts by hackers to gain illegal access to a computer do involve chicanery or tricks, in some sense—the use of other people's passwords, the use of known bugs in systems software, and so on. Much of the time, however, a hacker does not deprive anyone of property.
If the hacker merely signs on and looks around, he deprives the computer operators of a few dollars of computer time at worst. If he downloads a file, the owner still has access to the original file. If the file's confidentiality has value in itself—as with a trade secret—downloading it does deprive the owner of something of value, but this is rarely the case.
We need a "computer trespass" statute, with a sliding scale of punishments corresponding to the severity of the violation. Just as burglary is punished more severely than trespass, so a hacker who steals and uses credit card numbers ought to be punished more severely than one who does nothing more than break into a computer and examine a few public files. In the absence of such a scheme, law enforcement personnel naturally try to cram all computer violations into the category of fraud, since the fraud statutes are the only laws that currently permit prosecution of computer crimes. As a result, petty crimes are charged as felonies—as with Neidorf and Riggs.
Legitimate users and operators of computer networks need to be protected from arbitrary seizures and guilt by electronic association. The criminal code permits law enforcement personnel to seize equipment used in a crime or that might provide criminal evidence, even when the owner has no knowledge of the crime. But the purpose of such seizures is to allow the authorities access to evidence of criminal activity, not to shut down businesses. Searchers need not remove computer equipment to inspect the files it contains. They can sit down and make copies of whatever files they want on the spot. Even if they expect some piece of incriminating material to be hidden particularly well—for example, in a specially protected file or in a ROM chip—it is unreasonable to hold onto the seized equipment indefinitely.
And it's clearly wrong to seize equipment that cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, contain incriminating data. In both the Steve Jackson and Ripco cases, the Secret Service seized laser printers along with other equipment. Laser printers have no permanent memory (other than the factory-supplied ROM chips that tell them how to operate). They print words on paper, that's all. They cannot contain incriminating information.
Even computers themselves cannot possibly constitute evidence. When you turn off a computer, its memory dies. Permanent data exist only on storage media—hard drives, floppy disks, tape drives, and the like.Even if law enforcement personnel have some compelling reason to take storage media away to complete a search, they have no reason to take the computers that use those media.
Just as a computer is not evidence because it once carried incriminating information, a network is not a criminal enterprise because it once carried data used in or derived from fraudulent activity. Yet under current law, it seems that the operator of a bulletin board is liable if someone posts an illegal message on it. Say I run a BBS called Mojo. You dial Mojo up and leave Mario Cuomo's MasterCard number on the board, inviting anyone to use it. Six people sign on, read the message, and fly to Rio courtesy of the governor before I notice the message and purge it. Apparently, I'm liable—even though I had nothing to do with obtaining Cuomo's credit card number, never used it, and strenuously object to this misuse of my board.
Such an interpretation threatens the very existence of the academic and commercial nets. A user of UseNet, for instance, can send a message to any other user of UseNet. The network routes messages in a complex fashion—from Computer A to Computer B to Computer C, and so on, depending on what computers are currently live, the volume of data transmitted among them, and the topography of the net itself. The message could pass through dozens of computers before reaching its destination. If someone uses the message to commit fraud, the system operators of every computer along its path may be criminally liable, even though they would have no way of knowing the contents of the message.
Computer networks and BBSes need the same kind of "common carrier" protection that applies to the mails, telephone companies, and wire services. Posting an illegal message ought to be illegal for the person who posts it—but not for the operator of the board on which the message appears.
The main function of the Net is to promote communication. People use it to buy goods, research topics, download software, and a myriad of other things as well, but most of their computing time is spent communicating: by posting messages to bulletin boards, by "chatting" in real time, by sending electronic mail, by uploading and downloading files. It makes no sense to say that discussion of a topic in print is OK, but discussion of the same topic via an electronic network is a crime.
Yet as currently interpreted, the law says that mere transmission of information that someone could use to gain access to computers for fraudulent purposes is itself fraud—even if no fraudulent access takes place. The Secret Service, for instance, was willing to indict Neidorf for publishing information it thought could be used to disrupt the 911 network—even though neither Neidorf nor anyone else actually disrupted it. We must clearly establish that electronic communications are speech, and enjoy the same protections as other forms of speech.
The prospects for such legal reform are not bright. Three times in this century, technological developments have created new venues for speech: with radio, with television, and with cable. On the grounds of scarcity, government restricts freedom of speech on radio and television; on the grounds of natural monopoly, government regulates speech on cable. Recent events, such as the conviction of former Cornell graduate student Robert T. Morris for introducing a virus into the nationwide ARPANet, have aroused worry about hacker crimes. But concern for the rights of legitimate users of computer nets has not received the same level of publicity. If anything, recent trends lean toward the adoption of more draconian laws—like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which may make it illegal even for computer security professionals to transmit information about breaches of security.
The Net is vast—and growing fast. It has already changed the lives of thousands, from scientists who learn of new breakthroughs far more quickly than if they had to wait for journal publication, to stay-at-home writers who find in computer networks the personal contact they miss without office jobs. But the technology is still in its infancy. The Net has the capacity to improve all our lives.
A user of the Net can already find a wide variety of information, from encyclopedia entries to restaurant reviews. Someday the Net will be the first place citizens turn to when they need information. The morning paper will be a printout, tailored to our interests and specifications, of articles posted worldwide; job hunters will look first to the Net; millions will use it to telecommute to work; and serious discussion will be given to the abolition of representative government and the adoption of direct democracy via network voting.
Today, we are farmers standing by our country lanes and marveling as the first primitive automobiles backfire down the road. The shape of the future is murky. We cannot know what the Net will bring, just as a farmer seeing a car for the first time couldn't possibly have predicted six-lane highways, urban sprawl, the sexual revolution, and photochemical smog. Nonetheless, we can see that something remarkable is happening, something that will change the world, something that has the potential to transform our lives. To ensure that our lives are enriched and not diminished, we must ensure that the Net is free.
Greg Costikyan is a writer of fiction and nonfiction who has designed 23 commercially published games.
The post Closing the Net appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Poul Anderson is one of the most interesting talents in science fiction—and in some ways one of the hardest to pin down. His fiction can be read on one level as pure Campbellian action adventure, yet it is also concerned with serious philosophical issues. This is clearly how Anderson wants it; he will not allow his work to turn into a set of talking heads debating ideas. Instead, he wants well-drawn characters, interesting language, motion, and plot. The challenge, to which Anderson rises, is to show philosophical issues in action, not to yak about them—no 100-page political diatribes here.
And there is a third dimension to Anderson's work: an astounding breadth of scholarship. Anderson takes history and science quite as seriously as he takes his philosophy and his story-telling skills. When he says that a man in synchronous orbit around Jupiter must turn his head a little if he wants to look from one edge of the planet to another, you know that Anderson has done the calculation. When he says that a 13th-century Japanese nobleman would consider an ox-drawn carriage the only suitable means of transportation, you know that Anderson has researched the subject.
In consequence, the careful reader can draw many pleasures from Anderson's work: of a story well told, of ideas explored, of a fine attention to detail. There may be writers who write better, philosophers who speculate more deeply, historians and scientists with more comprehensive knowledge, but Anderson is a polymath; he brings it all together.
The Boat of a Million Years, like Anderson's other work, can be enjoyed as much for its idea content as for its story. Though many of Anderson's works are concerned with the philosophy of freedom, here his speculations deal instead with the long-term history of humanity. The book's ostensible theme is immortality. It traces through human history a group of immortals—men and women who simply do not die. There is no real explanation for this longevity; Anderson merely assumes that some small number of human beings are born without the built-in tendency to age and die.
The first three-quarters of the novel is straightforward "what-if": What if immortals had existed in history? How would they have survived? It is a reasonable question; in certain periods, someone who lived too long without growing old would be likely to find himself burned as a sorceror. Anderson's immortals adopt a number of survival strategies: One becomes a seaman, able to pull up stakes and sail away at a moment's notice; another becomes a prostitute, with an easy source of income and plenty of excuses for disappearing; a third becomes a middle-level bureaucrat, able to fake credentials for his new identities and always able to find work. Each of these immortals is born to a different civilization in a different era, allowing Anderson to display the variety of human culture.
But as technology advances, it becomes clear that Anderson is not simply exploring the problems of immortals. He is, instead, showing how technology makes fundamental changes not only in human culture but in human beings themselves. Before the rise of technology, human life is truly nasty, brutish, and short. As technology advances, people no longer worry about mere survival, but about… what?
In Anderson's final chapter, which takes up the last quarter of the novel, he shows a human society in which every want, every need is satisfied, one in which immortality is no longer the secret of a few, but available to all. When people need no longer strive to feed themselves, when the prospect of death no longer weighs on the human soul, what does humanity become?
This is Anderson's true concern. We now, after all, have the knowledge and ability to make it possible for every human on the planet to live free of hunger and privation; only cultural and governmental barriers stand in the way. The real problem we face is no longer mere survival; it is, rather, the danger our own technology poses. But the danger technology poses to the environment can only be solved by technology itself. Anderson's question is not far-fetched. Barring the collapse of civilization, the day will come when technology's triumph is complete, when there is no longer a need to strive.
To this prospect, Anderson adds a question: Where are the aliens?
It is a question that scientists ask very seriously. We have every reason to believe that life, including intelligent life, must have arisen within our galaxy many, many times. It is logical to think that at least one intelligent species would have developed interstellar travel. In the history of the universe, there has been plenty of time for interstellar civilization to expand throughout the galaxy. And yet our radio dishes receive no intelligent signals, we have found no trace of alien visitation on our world, and our explorations of the solar system have uncovered no evidence of previous exploration.
Anderson asks, Is there a connection between the problems of immortality and the apparent absence of extraterrestrial civilizations? Mature planetary civilizations have no wants, no needs, no fears of death. And only such civilizations have the technology to explore the galaxy. Available evidence says the galaxy has not been explored. What, then, does this tell us about mature planetary civilizations—and humanity's own future?
This is heady stuff. And, in retrospect, it becomes clear why Anderson spends so much of the novel introducing his immortals: They become proxies for ourselves. Anderson wants to portray a future civilization very different from any we have known. To make it comprehensible, he gives us characters we can comprehend, characters who grew up in eras when strife was still the norm. Through them he shows that humanity may well become something we might not consider truly human.
If this sounds like heavy slogging, recall the character of Anderson's fiction. His first concern, as always, is with story; this is no deadly philosophical tome, but a well-written novel by a master of the field. Indeed, I suspect that most of the novel's readers will see only the story, never recognizing the philosophical speculation that underpins it, just as they will never realize the depth of historical and scientific scholarship behind the work. And that, perhaps, is the book's best virtue: that anyone can enjoy it; that some can learn from it; and that a few may be fascinated by it.
Serious, speculative science fiction is increasingly rare in a field overrun with elfy-welfies and literary pretension. But as long as work of this caliber is still being written, hard science fiction must be considered a vibrant form.
Greg Costikyan is a writer of fiction and nonfiction who has designed 23 commercially published games.
The post Immortal Questions appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Way I see it, the government of the United States has stolen about a half a million dollars from me in the first place! I don't do business with people who have picked my pockets until they acknowledge the fact and pay me back with interest. Nonnegotiable, Ellis. I want my money. I don't think that's asking too much."
Some Bolshevik this guy is, Ellis thought.
—"La Vie Continue," Norman Spinrad
Norman Spinrad is one of the perennial Bad Boys of science fiction. From the first, he's pushed the edge of the envelope that describes the kind of fiction publishable in America. The Iron Dream, among his best-known novels but far from his best, remains banned in Germany, close to two decades since it was first published. That's because it's ostensibly by Adolf Hitler, an obscure American science fiction writer of the '30s and '40s, who fled to these shores after a brief and undistinguished career as a German lieutenant during the Great War.
"Journals of the Plague Years," an outline and treatment for a novel of the same name, was recently published in Full Spectrum, an original anthology from Bantam books. It deals with an America ravaged and horribly changed by the spread and mutation of the AIDS virus. Though the outline was published as a novella, the novel itself has been repeatedly rejected—because, Spinrad claims, publishers say that book chains and distributors would refuse to handle such controversial material.
Other Americas is a collection of four novellas, all dealing with a future America and each, in its own way, admonitory.
"Street Meat" is set in the same world as Spinrad's 1987 novel, Little Heroes; it portrays New York City as a complete dystopia, with the rich holed up in East Side preserves, protected by Uzi-armed desperadoes, while the poor scuffle in filth for a juicy mouthful of roast dog. It may be considered extreme of its kind; but, as anyone who must contend with filth-stained subway panhandlers on a daily basis can attest, it is not beyond the realm of imagination.
"World War Last" is broad farce, perhaps excessively broad at times. It deals with a dope-crazed Islamic dictator with nuclear weapons, a sex-crazed American president and former used-car salesman, a dead Soviet Premier animated by computer software and kept "alive" to preserve the delicate balance of power within the Politburo, and the possibility of global thermonuclear war. It is not for the easily shocked, but it is certainly uproariously funny.
"La Vie Continue" is somewhat self-indulgent; Spinrad casts himself as its hero, although it takes place some decades in the future. Despite the conceit, it is an amusing and ultimately sad vision of an all-too-possible America in which the First Amendment has been eroded to a meaningless sham.
To say that "The Lost Continent" is the weakest of the four is, by comparison, hardly criticism. It is no surprise to discover that the story was written in 1970; Spinrad has grown enormously since his early work. It describes a world in which Africa is the heart of global civilization and America is a sad, tattered remnant of the glory that once was.
Other Americas is explicitly about other Americas—possible futures or alternative paths for our own country. But all of Spinrad's work is motivated, in some sense or another, by America; whether set in the far future or alien worlds, his central preoccupation is with the survival and extension of freedom.
It would be ludicrous, however, to brand Spinrad a libertarian. Indeed, he would certainly reject the label with some heat. Spinrad's passionate attachment to freedom, individual and economic, derives not from some abstract 17th-century notion of natural rights, nor a pragmatic observation of the economic benefits of freedom. It comes instead from the Summer of Love.
In an era when "My Generation" is sung by 40 year olds and pressed into service to sell products on TV, the "Spirit of the '60s" is claimed by every conceivable pitchman with a product to sell, whether that product be Kentucky Fried Chicken or fear of nuclear power. Exactly what "the '60s" meant was far from clear at the time and its import, in retrospect, is no more pellucid.
To Norman Spinrad, the '60s was an era of possibility. It was the era when nonwhites were offered the possibility of full participation in American life; when America awoke to the dangers of being the world's policeman; when it seemed, for a brief and shining moment, that the promise inherent in America's radical and (ahem) libertarian beginnings might actually be realized. If it was, in truth, a confused, violent, and fundamentally unhappy time, this is irrelevant. To Spinrad, what is important is not what it was, but what it promised.
This vision inspires not the sort of sugar-coated '60s nostalgia that is becoming nauseatingly prevalent, but a gritty, hard-nosed prose. Taken together, the four novellas in Other Americas are an excellent introduction to Spinrad's work. Such an introduction is to be desired. Norman Spinrad is, simply put, among the finest living American writers. That he chooses to write science fiction should not limit his appeal; indeed, the sort of fiction that he writes could hardly be squeezed into any other form. Readers who, like Spinrad, love freedom and America will find his work a startling and invigorating brew.
Greg Costikyan writes both fiction and nonfiction and has also designed 23 commercially published games.
The post An Invigorating Brew appeared first on Reason.com.
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