Month: March 2008

Ordinary Life and Science Fiction

I just finished reading Marsbound by Joe Haldeman as a serial in Analog SF.  The book won’t be published until August but all parts of the serial can be found at Fictionwise.com.  I got to study with Joe Haldeman and his wife Gay for a week in 2002 when I attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop, so I feel bad for making criticisms of his new novel in the narrative below.  I’m going to be critical but not in an ordinary review way – I’m going to use Marsbound as a jumping off point for talking about some general problems I have with science fiction.  Overall I found Marsbound to be a fun novel and if you read Jason Sanford’s review he reports its his favorite SF novel from recent years.

Jason also has the same reaction I had reading Marsbound because we both felt it was modeled after Robert A. Heinlein juveniles – which in my book is very ambitious.  Part of my criticism will be how this story doesn’t measure up, but that is unfair criticism too.  Joe has to write his own novels and they shouldn’t be compared to Heinlein – even though I do.  However, I think the qualities I want can’t be described as belonging to Heinlein, I just saw them first in his juvenile novels.

This essay isn’t a review.  I’ll try to avoid specific spoilers, but I will mention plot elements because they will be examples of what I want to talk about in general.  Normally I hate serials but the title Marsbound just grabbed me because I love books about colonizing Mars.  Part of my disappointed deals with the fact that the story turned out to not be about colonizing Mars.  Again, this is not the fault of Joe’s writing or the story.  Instead of being Red Planet its more like Have Space Suit-Will Travel my all time favorite SF novel.  That is both good and bad.

Let’s get down to business.  I call this essay “Ordinary Life and Science Fiction” because SF seldom deals with ordinary life and people.  Marsbound starts off being a story about a young woman of 19 who is traveling to Mars with her brother and parents.  In the future this could be about ordinary life and the beginning was very promising to my hopes.  Because Haldeman was pacing the story slow, dealing with the background of Mars exploration and explaining a space elevator I assumed Carmen Dula’s story would be a step by step narrative about what living on Mars might be like. 

This excited me because I don’t think enough science fiction deals with the reality of space travel.  Kids need to see what hard work it will be to conquer another world.  And the first installment of this story appeared to be exactly what I wanted.  Early on Carmen admits she’s a virgin and one interesting plot problem appears to be centered around romance in a limited colony.  I thought this complication was excellent.  Haldeman had done something interesting for a SF juvenile by having a female lead and dealing with sexuality and romance, topics Heinlein could not touch back in the 1950s.

Alas, Joe takes a sharp plot turn at the end of the first segment and Marsbound becomes a completely different story.  Like Have Space Suit-Will Travel, the plot is structured like a multi-staged rocket.  When the second stage kicks in Marsbound leaves the story I was hoping to read.  Again like Have Space Suit-Will Travel it takes on good and bad aliens, and eventually deals with the fate of the Earth.  All exciting stuff by traditional science fiction.

What I’d like to read is non-traditional science fiction novel.  We’re now leaving Joe Haldeman’s territory.  This is something I often do with films – fall in love with the beginning but I end up wanting to rewrite the ending myself.  I must emphasize again this can’t be consider criticism of Marsbound.

From now on I’m speculating about a new book that could be considered inspired by Marsbound.  Even one of my favorite Mars colony books, Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson moves away from the details of day to day colonization and ordinary life.  SF seems to hate the mundane life.  Too often SF seems bored with any plot smaller than save the world.

When I started reading Marsbound I hoped it would be two things.  First, a detail speculation about ordinary people colonizing Mars – much like stories about colonists in early America.  Second I wanted it to be a true science fiction romance from a female’s POV.  I wanted Jane Austen meets Robert A. Heinlein.  Heinlein never could have done Austen because he didn’t have a clue about women but he was great at telling stories to youngsters about how to survive and succeed.

If mankind is to ever explore space beyond low Earth orbit we’ve got to colonize the Moon and Mars.  Such adventures will involve millions of mundane details not normally found in SF.  People who colonize these worlds will be ordinary and romance will remain a big part of their lives.  Because SF is addicted to epic plots it has trouble dealing with the minute problems people face daily.

Strangely enough Philip K. Dick attempted this in 1964 with The Martian Time-Slip when he dealt with a union on Mars and mental illness.  I think part of PKD’s success is sticking close to the little people, the ordinary person rather than writing about heroes that save the world.

I believe classic science fiction inspired rocket engineers and early space exploration but I don’t think modern science fiction has that impact on young today.  I’ve talked to a number of kids who have asked me when will space travel be like Star Wars or Star Trek.  When I reply probably never they act like I just told them Santa Claus isn’t real.  They whine that the space shuttle and NASA is boring.

Living on Mars will be a whole lot about farming and recycling – not very hip topics.  Living on Mars and the Moon will be about living underground in confined spaces.  Few people will get to hot rod on the surface.  So what will it be like to be a teenager growing up in such a limited world?  How does romance unfold when there will probably be very little privacy.  Life will be hard and kids won’t be allowed to waste hours a day on television, computers and video games.  Survival will depend on everyone pitching in.  Success will not be measured by wealth but skills and hard work, not qualities often associated with modern teen.

This is all very different from the way kids grow up today.  It should make for a great story, so why don’t we see SF books like this?  Maybe writers feel it would be too dreary to sell.  Maybe I should get off my ass and write it myself.  What’s really required is using the conventions of normal literary story telling and meld them with the details of science and science fiction.  In other words I’m asking for someone to write the great American novel set on Mars.

This is why The Road by Cormac McCarthy beats the common after-the-collapse SF novel.  McCarthy deals with the little details.  At Clarion they taught us that good fiction is the accumulation of significant details.  That’s why the Heinlein juveniles were so good and why later Heinlein adult novels are so bad.  Opinions and far out ideas are fine for blog writing, but fiction writing requires a focus on finer observations about ordinary living.  It’s nothing for me to ask for such a novel, but it’s years of work for someone to write.

I’d love to read Great Expectations or Pride and Prejudice set on Mars but with all the Martian details known by a JPL engineer.  Like I said before, if that’s something I want then maybe I should go write it myself.  But that’s even more ambitious than modeling stories after Robert A. Heinlein.

Jim

Science Fiction Short Stories 2007

I love science fiction short stories so it’s a pleasure to discover BestScienceFictionStories.com.  And yesterday Rusty posts his list of “The 10 Best Web Sites for Free Online Science Fiction Stories.”  Even though the print magazines are losing subscribers short stories are finding new venues on the web.  This site is slowly recognizing and reviewing quality short stories and helping their readers find where to read them.  What an admirable undertaking.  Now I just need to campaign to get all online publishers to create a “Send to Kindle” button.

Over at the new F&SF blog John Joseph Adams has an entry “Free Fiction Friday:  Paolo Bacigalupi” that I hope becomes a regular feature of the blog.  So far JJA has three authors listed at his Free Fiction section.   This week he links to three free stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, one of F&SF’s contributors who is making a few online waves in the past few weeks with the release of his new collection.  I have already reviewed one of the free stories in my entry “Science Fiction and Global Warming.”

Over at Black Gate Dave Truesdale provides his rather extensive list of 214 stories that he categorizes in various ways for “2007 SF & Fantasy Recommended Reading List.”  Damn, I wished I had the time to do this kind of reading.  Maybe Rusty at Best Science Fiction Stories can find links for many of these.  John Joseph Adams extracts all the F&SF stories from the list which will help me find them in my back issues.

Over at Locus Magazine they have their Recommended Reading: 2007 list – scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see their short fiction favorites.

If you are concerned about the viability of the short fiction market you may want to read “The Rise of the Genre eZine:  Will it ever find a profitable model?” over at Bloggasm by I assume Simon Owens.  He focuses on online markets, but I wished he had interviewed the print publishers about their status and their plans for co-existing in the online world.

Jason Sanford does cover the health of the print mags in “2007 SF/F magazine circulation numbers.”  It doesn’t look good.  I was worried back in 1994 when I covered the numbers in “Classics of Science Fiction Short Stories,” when I thought those numbers spelled doom, but the magazines are still surviving even with a fraction of their 1994 subscribers.  Please subscribe to a magazine!  Support the world of SF short stories.

The best stories of 2007 will be published in print in several annual best of anthologies, but they will all have 2008 in their title.  John Joseph Adams at his blog has the lineup for Rich Horton’s SF and Fantasy anthologies in Best of the Year 2008.  Over at Asimov’s forum Gardner Dozois gives us a list of stories for his The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection for 2008.  Kathryn Cramer offers a list of what will be in Year’s Best SF 13 edited by Carmer and David Hartwell.

If I had more time and energy I’d cross-tab all those best of 2007 stories to see which ones were cited the most.  If anyone is doing that please let me know.  I don’t read as much SF as I used to.  To be honest I find non-fiction about science more exciting in the years since I turned fifty.  But I still love to keep up with the SF short story field.  Strangely enough, my Kindle is getting me to read more SF.  It’s rather ironic that a science fictional looking device is getting me to read more SF, as well as reading online from a world wide network.  If I could some how tell my 1965 self who discovered science fiction short stories in little pulp magazines about how his future self would be reading SF it would be very amusing.

Jim

Blogging and the Hive Mind

I’ve always meant to write a “Why I Blog” post and now that I’m listening to The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen this seems like a great time to do it.  I googled Keen and many of the reviewers I read just dismissed him out of hand.  Keen is essentially calling all us bloggers monkeys with typewriters.  He’s not kind to amateur writing and talks as if the Internet is one giant slush pile that is assaulting the true quality writing that comes from traditional publishing.

Keen does make some good points.  One point he champions over and over is culture is better served by the expression of the elite few rather than hearing from the democratic roar of everyone.  Keen also suggests the idea that television would produce better shows if there were fewer channels and he also believes the emergence of YouTube dilutes what the average viewer watches down to crapola.

Now I don’t disagree with him.  If all the video we watched came from twelve networks then I’d say the average quality of TV would be pretty damn great.  In fact, for TV viewing I’d prefer having only twelve networks.  I actually miss the days when there were only CBS, NBC and ABC.  During those years I felt I had a stronger bond with my friends and family because we all watched the same shows.  Three is too few but five hundred is too many.  The same math does not apply to the Internet.

Keen believes the time people waste on reading blogs could be better spent on reading professional edited magazines and books.  He also believes that the web undermines the economy of traditional publishing.  I think in both cases this is true.  However, he misses the point on the real value of blogging.

Blogs and blogging actually have many purposes.  Few bloggers see themselves competing with Time, Harper’s or Scientific American.  Most blogging is social and their posts would be competition with casual conversation rather than paid writers.  Some bloggers are just writing public diaries and many others are just following the herd hoping to meet other like-minded creatures. 

I do believe there is a small percentage of bloggers who would like to be real writers and use blogging as a form of practice.  However, I can’t imagine them wanting to kill off commercial writing because they all secretly hoped to get published and paid too.  Many bloggers dream they can make money blogging but Andrew Keen shoots down this idea by interviewing owners of high traffic sites.  I also talked about these get-rich-quick bloggers in my post “Has Google Become King of the Spammers?”  I don’t equate blogging with these people.

All of this doesn’t discredit Keen’s attack that the web is hurting professional publishing by distracting readers from buying books and magazines.  The world of money centers around attracting eyeballs and minds.  There is always competition for people’s attention.  Even before the Internet parents and educators wanted to recapture the attention of their children and complained the choice kids faced was between quality and drivel.  Back then the pundits worried that television was empty calories and books were primo brain food for kiddies.  Now Keen is protecting TV from the Internet.

Is Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur just a descendent of Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham?  Both men could be right in their campaign to defend culture but they could also be wrong in that they missed the qualities of a new art form.  What does blogging bring to our world that didn’t exist before?

Instead of being passive individuals that consume predigested information produced by the elite, people on the net embrace being active through self-expression.  The Internet represents a do-it-yourself revolution. Sure, by the yardstick Keen measures blogging does not measure up – yet.  The value is not in what’s being expressed but in the effort people make to express themselves.  Blogging represent amateur essayists.  I remember back in school when the teacher assigned writing a 500 word essay it would bring about groans.  Now millions want to write such essays every day.  Is that a bad thing?

Personal computing has always represented a strange kind of revolution and transformation.   I helped hundreds of people learn to use a PC back in the 1980s and I always felt sorry for them.  Suddenly jobs for secretaries and professors required that they learn all kinds of new skills that was never part of their jobs before.  The average worker now has to learn skills once left to specialists like typesetters, graphic layout artists and computer operators.  Now the net is expecting little Jacob and Emily to write and edit, and for some to be sound engineers and video production technicians.  Is that so bad?  Most of the people producing the content for the web are rank amateurs and Keen doesn’t like that.  To Keen everyone is practicing the piano and it’s painful to hear.

Personally I think Keen is worrying too much over nothing.  He screams the sky is falling by predicting there will be five hundred million blogs by 2010.  It’s my theory that blogging will fall out of favor before 1/12 of the human race takes to the blogosphere.  There’s a good chance that socializing on the net might be a fad.  I say this because I see an awful lot of dead and neglected sites.  It takes a lot of work to maintain and grow a site.  Blogging isn’t for the lazy.  Nor does it have wide appeal.

I do not have any friends my own age that blog.  In fact, I have a very hard time getting my friends to even read my posts.  Even when I tell my wife that I’m writing about my girlfriends she can’t find motivation to read my writing because the world of blogs isn’t real to her.  Now blogging might be an age related activity, or it might be a person-type activity.  Most people I know define socializing as meeting other people face-to-face.  Blogging is a kind of hive mind socializing that allows certain kinds of people to enjoy communicating in a non-face-to-face mode, and I think that greatly limits the audience.

Which brings me back to why I blog.  I always wanted to be a writer because I loved to read.  I’ve taken a number of fiction writing courses, including many hours in a MFA program.  I also attended the Clarion West writer’s workshop in 2002.  It’s a semi-serious hobby that I’ve tried to work at more since I turned 50.  Blogging is writing and publishing without an editor.  I consider it practice writing.  Forcing myself to write 3-4 essays a week is a kind of discipline.  And it’s very educational.

Blogging has taught me that I have to entertain readers and that’s very hard to do.  When you’re young and want to be a writer you assume you’ll hammer out a novel and people will want to read it.  Well, they don’t.  I use blogging stats as a tool to measure successful stories, and so far I have not been very successful at all.  My best day was hitting 149 readers.  And even that number is deceptive because most people come to this site by accident.  WordPress shows me the search terms used and it’s obvious in most cases what people want isn’t what I’m offering them.

My two most successful essays “DRM and iTunes and Rhapsody Music” and “Did AAPR Rip Off My Old Mother?” were flukes dealing with topics outside my normal range of interests.  That’s actually a great lesson of journalism – write about what people want to know and not what I want to naval gaze.  Of course then I’d always be writing about Brittany Spears or how to create web sites that brings hordes to Adsense links.  I have a lot of room to learn and practice.  There are zillions of great essays to study and my hope is to find many models to work from.  Eventually I’ll write posts that succeed in the way I want.

I also blog to make friends.  My wife had to take a job out of town and I spend a lot of time in my house alone.  This has forced me to socialize more with face-to-face friends, but I also find blogging to generate good company.  I love the passion that my fellow bloggers show for their subject matter.  I admire many for their skills and I study them hoping to improve myself.  I see blogging as a self-improvement hobby.

I have also discovered a by-product of blogging that is very beneficial to me.  In recent years my memory has gotten more sieve like.  Since I’ve started blogging I’ve slowly changed and I’m now retrieving words better.  I worried I was on the road to Alzheimer-land.  Blogging is good for my mind and helps me learn discipline.  Keen is right – I don’t write as well as a professional writer.  However, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to improve.  Blogging challenges me to improve every day.  I read other blogs and admire what they have done and that pushes me to do better.  I read professional magazines and study their quality and that makes me want to write better too.  Keen missed this whole angle that deals with self-improvement.

Finally, blogging makes the world smaller.  There is a hive mind quality about the Internet.  I think of the Internet as a sixth sense and it disturbs me that my friends only live in the world of five senses.  This is both metaphorical and real.  I think Andrew Keen devalues this new kind of neural network of bits and bytes in which we’re all a synapse.  Keen really hates Wikipedia and fails to credit the hive mind for creating something both useful and wonderful.

I think Keen has some valid criticisms in The Cult of the Amateur and I’m going to return to them time and again.  I think blogging, YouTube, Wikipedia and all the other products of the net can be improved.  Many magnitudes of evolution will happen on the net in the next ten years.  Reading Andrew Keen won’t save the old ways of things, but his criticisms will help us to grow stronger.  Keen fails to see the competition of the fittest angle is this brouhaha.  I think traditional publishing will survive and thrive and the net will only get more powerful too.

Jim

What is Your Personal Science Fiction Fantasy?

What is your personal science fiction fantasy?  Let’s say you die and wake up in front of a superior being and he/she/it tells you to pick your next life, what would it be?  You can pick anything from reality, your own imagination or from any fictional world you’ve encountered.  It’s a big multiverse out there – where would you’d like to go?

Would you want to time travel to the epic past to be another Solomon with a harem of hundreds?  How about just taking a chance by asking to be born a thousand years in the future.  Military SF is popular so would you volunteer to join up and serve in an interstellar military brigade?   Does being a pioneering colonist on Mars inspire your dream time?  I know, ask to be a rock star in England in 1965.

Now think hard.  Use your imagination.  You don’t want to be Dudley Moore in Bedazzled.

All of us spend a lot of time reading science fiction escaping our mundane life in exciting stories of the future and other worlds, but I’m reminded of a title of a Philip K. Dick book:  What if Our World is Their Heaven?  How do you know that the life you are living right now isn’t the one you picked the last time you died?

If you think about this for awhile you’ll see you will want to be reborn into a life of opportunity and not restrictions.  The reason we all aren’t still living some Old Testament fantasy is because its so limiting.  If you look at the history of mankind on Earth you will see the evolution of diversity of being.  Imagine if reincarnation is true – but instead of us all trying to get off the wheel of life and death we all anxiously die desiring to come back for more and more and more.  The Hindu believe we return to this life because of the sin of desire.  Obviously we’ve embraced desire over returning to Oneness.

The philosophical purpose of reincarnation is to provide a mechanism by which we improve our souls.  So should our science fiction fantasies follow this concept?  Do I love Have Space Suit – Will Travel because it’s a blueprint for improving my being?  Or do we merely choose our stories seeking to diversify our desires?

Growing up my number one science fiction fantasy was to live on Mars.  If I died and met that superior being now that wouldn’t be my wish.  No, my current wish is very different.  I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating my naval while listening to pounding hard rock music that stirs my emotions and vibrates my neurons into a higher state of consciousness and I know what I would tell that very superior being.

I’d tell ole SB to put me back in my own life starting in 1963 so I could live my life over and try again.  I’d want it to be the ultimate “if I knew then what I know now” experience.  I don’t know if the laws of reincarnation allow for reincarnating into oneself but that’s what I would want. 

Now this isn’t because I thought my life was so great and I’m unnaturally attached to it.  First off, I hope I would do everything different.  Sure being a colonist on Mars would be damn exciting but to be honest, I don’t have the Right Stuff.  I think those Hindus were right, the idea is to improve and not just party hardy.  I think a do-over would teach me a lot.  Maybe it would take several repeats of this life before I do have the Right Stuff to go on.

Now this isn’t avoiding making a choice in front of that superior being.  This is a very active science fiction fantasy.  Log some iPod time and fantasize this out for yourself.  Imagine your own do-over and think about all those decisions you made where you could have followed the other path.

With every novel we read we step out of our own life into another world.  With every movie we watch we reject this reality for fictional moments in another.  What does this tell us beyond showing us we have a desire to escape?  Has reality has just gotten too slow and boring for us and we need imagination to make it more exciting?  This reality is pretty far out.  As far as we know Earth is the most happening place in all the dimensions we know about. 

Reality has always been vastly more complex than any fiction.  Remember that when you’re making your wish in front of that superior being.  No one has ever imagined a Heaven better than Earth.  Think about that.  Think about those poor Muslim bastards who kill themselves for seventy-two virgins.  Does fresh quim really define paradise or is it just an unimaginative wish?  Why do so many on this planet want to believe this world is shit and the next one Heaven?

I don’t believe in superior beings or lives after this one.  Every day I am reborn into the same exact reality as yesterday.  Every moment is a then where I know what I know now.  I am facing the same decisions I made in 1963.  Mars is always there if I take the time to invent a way to go. 

Are our science fiction fantasies escapism or planning time?  What is your science fiction fantasy?  What does it tell you?

Jim

The energy for this essay was fueled by:

  • “The Weight of the World” by Neil Young
  • “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult
  • “Thank You Friends” by Big Star

Inventions Wanted 006 – The Data Bank

I’ve worked with computers for decades and backing up has always been a hassle – both at work and at home.  I used to have a tape system for home but it became impractical years ago when hard drive space far outpaced the expense of tape drive technology.  In recent times I’ve been using external USB drives, but they’re not backup paradise either.

Unless your backups are frequently taken off site there is always the problem of your house burning down, blown away by tornados, submerged in a flood, or invaded by thieves.  In the early days of personal computers valuable home data was limited to word processing files, spreadsheets and financial records.  Most of that stuff could be saved to floppies.  Now I need 63 gigabytes of space to preserve my digital valuables.

Since our parents died, my wife and I have became the librarians of family photos.  We have boxes and boxes of photos that we’re scanning to digital files.  I’ve also converted dozens of old cassette and CD audio books to MP3 files.  And I converted LPs and CDs to MP3s.  Now I have an every growing expanse of valuable binary data.

The weight of all these digital files is becoming a burden.  Last year I bought Second Copy and two USB 250gb drives.  I made a copy of my files to one drive and took it to work.  I then connected the other drive and let Second Copy replicate my hard drive activity to it in real time.  My plan was to switch drives every week so I’d always have a fresh backup off site.  I never developed the discipline to follow this plan more than a few switch outs.

So this week I subscribed to Mozy.com, an online backup service for $55 a year.  My plan was to create a Mozy backup and then restore it to a drive at work to test it out.  When I purchased Mozy I knew it was going to be slow but I had no idea how slow.  The first backup I set up with 63gb of data was predicted to take 5 weeks.  I have the third fastest DSL from AT&T.  High speed internet access is built around downloading speeds not uploading speeds which are a fraction of downloading speeds.

I called AT&T and asked about getting their fastest DSL service but they told me it wasn’t available in my neighborhood.  I even considered switching to Comcast high speed cable internet but I’m living with slow uploads for the time being.

The next thing I did was stop the current backup and cut it down to 7 gigabytes of essentials.  I was able to upload this data set in a couple of days.  At work today I ran the restore to test things out.  Mozy.com offers different ways to restore your data.  The fast way for large backups is to have them burn DVDs and express mail them to you, but this costs extra.  I used the free web restore method.  You log into Mozy, request a restore and wait for them to email you when the files are ready for downloading.  It took about an hour to be notified.

Mozy makes one or more compressed .exe files for you to download.  I assume they divide your backup into the same DVD size chunks as they do for when they actually burn DVDs.  I got two 3gb files that I downloaded in less than an hour.  Download speeds were 1.1 – 2.2 megabits per second at work. 

I discovered that my backup had no .mp3 files in it.  I then read Mozy’s manual and discovered you can configure your backups with all kinds of filters.  The basic data set of My Documents files were set up to filter out .mp3 files because I had unchecked the Music backup set.  But I was expecting to get my audio books, which are also in .mp3 format.

In other words you will have to play around with the settings to get exactly what you want.  If you don’t have much to backup I’d just backup everything at once.  Mozy is light on documentation so I’m guessing at some of their methods.  I emailed Mozy several times and got answers, but for other things I just speculated about how to do things.  It’s easy to use, but you have to second guess them at times.

One problem with online backups is how and when to copy files.  My Second Copy program patiently waits and every ten minutes copies any newly created files to the USB drive.  That’s great as long as I don’t mind an ever growing backup because it never deletes files on the backup drive.  That’s great if you want to fetch a file you’ve accidentally deleted last week, but bad because your backup contains all those files you thought were deleted.   

Mozy works by creating backup sets.  Each set is a snapshot of the moment.  If you make a backup with Mozy one week, clean up your hard drive and reorganize your files and make another backup the next week and that backup will reflect your new system.  That doesn’t work with my USB system.  Working with the Second Copy method I’d have to wipe the folder on my USB drive and start Second Copy running fresh.

What I would like is an online backup that copies files as I make them but waits one week after I’ve deleted a file on my hard drive and then delete it off the online backup.  In other words I want backing up to be totally automatic and without backup sets.  Mozy doesn’t work that way, but the way it works is best for the technology we now have.

All this begs me to put on my wishing cap and imagine a perfect service.  What I would like is a Data Bank that protects my digital wealth the same way a normal Bank protects my money.  I want to feel totally confident that my data is always protected, maybe even with government regulations.  I’ve read horror stories about online backup companies going out of business.  Online backups is a fantastic concept.  It would be nice to know that Mozy or companies like it replicate their stores to multiple cities and I’m 99.999999999 percent sure I’ll be able to restore my files in case of a catastrophe. 

I’d also like my Data Bank to work with a standardize filing structure so I can easily find my files.  Mozy copies Windows My Documents’ structure and appears to use Vista’s new structure with my Vista machine.  Mozy is starting to support Macs and I hope they follow on with Linux.  It’s a shame that all the OSes don’t use a similar filing structure so people could learn data organizing principles.  I think it’s great that Microsoft started segregating music and photo files.  I wish the OS could tell the difference between music and audio books.

Because we can’t trust online backup companies yet, its important that you restore you files to a computer not in your house.  I did mine at work, but if that’s not possible you might want to find some backup buddies to trust.  It would be wonderful, that in the future, Data Banks do become a reality and they are guaranteed 100% trustworthy.

What I also want from the dream invention is perfect access from any computer I’m working on.  Just as I can log into my money bank from my work machine I want to be able to log into my Data Bank and have easy access to my home files.  For instance, as I rip my CD collection I’d like to copy it to my work computer to play songs there.  Or if I start a project at home on the weekend I’d like to get it out of the Data Bank on Monday.  Mozy isn’t set up like that.

I’d love to log into my Data Bank and see two folders at the root level:

/data

/library

Data would be where I go for any files I created and Library would be media files like music, photos, audio books, video, ebooks, Acrobat files, etc.  It would be very cool if the Data Bank worked like a network drive and I could just play my media files from that location.  However, I don’t know if that’s practical.  If a Data Bank had six hundred thousand customers could they handle such a load?  Maybe in the far future where everyone has fiber optics and gigabit bandwidth.  But for the near future I think causal access for backing up and retrieving should be practical now. 

Even that is beyond Mozy at the moment.  Mozy is designed to backup your files and then in an emergency restore them.  I think I’m pushing their system when I plan to backup my home system and then restore it on my work computer a couple times a year.  Since Mozy could go out of business I don’t trust them yet to hold my files without having them on a second computer.  I’m mainly using Mozy to eliminate messing with the USB drives.  That’s another source of saving electricity for those wanting greener computing, but I’m also getting tired of hearing my USB drive grind away.  Mozy should make my life simpler, and that’s good.  It will take a year or so of living with Mozy to really decide how they do.

Jim