jameswharris

Communicating Across Time

I just finished reading Timescape by Gregory Benford and Walden by Henry David Thoreau and the two books strike me as a perfect set for a meditation on time travel. I doubt Henry David Thoreau ever thought about time travel, but any writer that produces a classic book is communicating across time, sending messages centuries into the future. Imagine if Thoreau had some kind of magical book and we could send messages back to him sitting in his little shack by Walden Pond. What would you tell him about life in the future and reading his book? Timescape by Gregory Benford is about sending messages backwards in time, allowing the future to talk to the past. Unfortunately, Benford tries to stick closely to a theoretical idea in physics which has limited application. His story is timid by science fictional standards, but wonderfully ambitious by defying the traditions of the genre.

I often want to communicate with the past. I’m currently reading The Scarlet Letter and figure it would be great fun to show the Puritans an hour of MTV. On the surface that sounds cruel, but I keep thinking if we could talk across the ages we’d realize new philosophical dimensions. Of course we know about the tyrannical nature of religious societies just by watching the nightly news, but it helps to remember that Americans once wore funny religious clothes and treated women like Islamic fundamentalists. The real test would be to have a time traveler show up today and let us know about the future and how our beliefs and actions are embarrassing to them. Are the liberated women on MTV a step forward in women’s expression as individuals or are they freed women to act out men’s fantasies?

The eight hundred pound gorilla in this essay is global warming. Will the people of the future all lie in the beds at night wishing they could talk to us? Benford’s story written in the 1970s and published in 1980 isn’t about global warming but another ecological catastrophe caused by the people of the 1950s and 1960s but which kills the people of 1998. Yes, his future is now our past but that doesn’t make the book dated. Timescape is #41 on The Classics of Science Fiction list – but it deserves to be higher. The idea of sending messages to the past is just as original as any of H. G. Wells’ great primal science fictional ideas.

If you read the reader reviews on Amazon you will find most readers giving Timescape five stars but many giving it one star. It’s a polarizing science fiction novel because it’s not a gee-whiz action story, but a quiet story about science and scientists. Critics loved it but many fans didn’t. I assume most adolescent readers would prefer a story about time travelers going back to hunt dinosaurs rather than read about a clever plot based on a theoretical sub-atomic particle called the tachyon. I can also infer that most page turning readers don’t want to be burden by bad tidings from the future.

In Timescape a few 1998 people desperately try to get a message to a few scientists in 1963 hoping to save their world. If the people of 1963 had listened to Thoreau message from 1854 the people in 1998 might not have ever needed to send a message backwards in time. Walden is a timeless essay about paying attention to details and questioning the status quo. Thoreau might be considered America’s original hippie, but he was a brilliant thinker, as was his friend Nathan Hawthorne who peered with nineteenth century eyes into the seventeenth century with A Scarlett Letter. There are still puritanical threads woven into our twenty-first century philosophy. The lessons of history have always been one way – think how dynamically philosophic history would be if we could tune in the future with tachyon radios.

I’m not shunning the Puritans when I mention them, they may have valid messages to send us too, points that we’re missing, and yes we’re still receiving their messages, for example, the current fad of Purity Balls. The key is to study Thoreau and learn to discern the ecology of our thoughts like he studied the ecology of Walden Pond. Are the Puritans four centuries away, or merely a few thousand miles? Scattered across this earth are people living in situations that mirror all the times of history. Every society might represent a different expression of innate programming to comprehend right and wrong – it may even be hardwired in our genes as Moral Minds suggests. Classic books may be classic because they show characters at the cutting edge of ethical dramas.

Global warming will be the ethical issue of our times. To overcome this obstacle we will all have to live life with the spiritual observational skills of Henry David Thoreau. Science fictional books like Timescape illustrates that every casual decision we make today affects the people of tomorrow. The emotional dynamics of how we judge our fellow passengers on spaceship Earth is portrayed in The Scarlet Letter. For years I have contemplated why some books become classics and others don’t. I’m never sure how to define a classic, but I know if you are reading books that don’t make you think, that you can’t interconnect with the communications across time, then more than likely you are only reading for escapism and that book isn’t a classic.

Rediscovering the Page

The World Wide Web has revolutionized reading and research but it has many deficiencies, one of which is the destruction of the page. People use the word “web page” but that really means a single web document referenced by a unique URL. A web page may consist of one or more screens depending on the size of the document and the size of the reader’s screen. Printed out, a “web page” may be one or more printed pages. Because screen size can vary so greatly in both pixels and technology there is no way to layout a static page like we see in books and magazines. This causes a problem in readability.

I’m not sure if the generation that grew up after the web will understand this problem because they consider the status quo the norm. Not only that but layout artists have moved web design ideas into the realm of print and corrupted magazine layouts destroying the page there too. Readability is the science of designing text so it is comfortable to read. This is not a simple task because vision varies greatly in the population.

Web sites are supposed to be accessible to the handicapped, but I think they often fail for people who can see, as well as those who can’t. Web pages have become a jumble of tiny print and NASCAR ad layouts, and very often the tiny print travels across long unscanable lines. One of the major discoveries of the science of readability is the width of the scanline determines how readable the print will be. That’s why newspapers use columns. Imagine if newspapers were laid out like websites – tiny fonts that could ramble across the width of a whole tabloid page.

One of the great hopes for computers was the idea of creating a paperless society. The web is actually bringing this about but it is transforming the concept of documents from a collection of paper pages to a digital files. A book can be a single text file, a .pdf file, multiple .html files, multiple .tiff files, and even audio .mp3 files. But in terms of readability and the web, it’s the .html presentation that counts. More of people’s reading time is moving to the web.

The New York Times is responding to this problem with a program called The Times Reader. Essentially, it’s a custom web application that has brought back the page. It has removed scrolling from online reading, reintroduced the concept of newspaper style columns, and added the paper’s printed typeface. This makes for an incrediable jump in readabiltiy. I find the Times Reader to be better than both the web version of the NY Times but also better than the print version in terms of reading pleasure. The programmers of this software have succeeded in melding the best of web layout with the best of print layout to create a new paradigm of screen reading. Unfortunately they have caused a rent in the reality of WWW because the Times Reader exists off the web in a universe of its own.

Whether you know it or not, the evolution of programming is moving towards making all programs exist on the web and fit within the universal window of a browser. The Times Reader is a rebellion against this development and could cause a civil war on the Internet. Most people think of the World Wide Web as the Internet, but it is not. The Internet is IP traffic. Before the web, people used a collection of programs to communicate, each working seperately. You used a FTP program to transfer files, telnet to talk to other machines, SMTP to send email and so on. All those protocols continue to work but most web surfers no longer notice the mechanics working under their browser. Each function has its own port number, but the browser on port 80 has dominated the evolution of the Internet for many years now.

What the NY Times programmers have done is to continue to use port 80 but reinvented the browser so the only pages their readers can surf are The New York Times pages. The technology they use is Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which uses .NET Framework 3.0. This means The Times Reader is currently limited to users of Windows XP and Vista. Mac, Linux and UNIX users are out of the loop. I think you can see why I’m suggesting this could be the beginning of a civil war. Microsoft promises to roll out WPF/E in the future that will allow Macs, Linux and UNIX machines to join the rebels if they want. But think about this: What if the Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, Time, Newsweek, and all the other top publishers follow suit? How many custom readers will you have on your computer?

The old idea is one browser for all, although many users have both two. Is there a way around this problem? Yes – bring the page back to the generic browser, although that may not be possible. Until you try the Times Reader you will not understand the advantages it has over the standard browser. The Times Reader standardizes readability over a variety of screen technologies. It is flexible like the standard browser, but it resizes and reforms its content to still layout a screen page. Thus an article may be one page on a large 20” widecreen LCD and five pages on a 12” laptop screen. The paradigm breakthrough is returning to paging and not scrolling.

Interestingly enough I have discovered another publisher finding a lower tech solution that works with the web. Tux Magazine formats its magazine to full screen Acrobat pages. Readers have to download the .pdf file but when they open the document it springs out to cover the entire screen and the content is laid out in pages. I’ve shown this magazine to people who create digital newsletters and they were impressed too. It provides for impact and readability.

This is an easier solution to roll out since most web surfers have Acrobat Reader installed. Installing .NET Framework 3.0 is a big deal. Both The Times Reader and Tux Magazine make for a much better reading experience because they both use columns to controll scan lines, pages to control layout and larger typefaces. Browsers could improve readability by controlling the scanline and giving their readers larger typefaces to read. However, that would require web publishers to change their habits of maximizing ad space over minimalizing readability and that might not happen. Current web design seems to believe in cramming as much content on the screen as possible with little regards for the visitor who must read the page.

In my daily browsing of the web I often find pages I’m anxious to read but the typeface is so tiny and the scanlines are so long that I just give up. It really annoys me that some designers even design their pages so the browser’s built-in feature to enlarge the fonts won’t work. Sometimes on pages I’m most anxious to read I will even copy the content to a Word document and reformat it for readabiltiy. That’s why I admire the Tux Magazine people – they have used Acrobat to maximize my reading pleasure. And their solution was so simple. Create a document in landscape mode. Format with columns, whitespace and large graphics and print to Acrobat with the setting “open in fullscreen” checked.

The Times Reader improves on these concepts by adding a menu bar across the top of the page that leads to sections of the newspaper, a photo slideshow feature, font scaling, and flexible adaptation to screen sizing. Both methods are weak for reading back issues. However, by downloading Tux Magazine I get to add them to my digital library, which is nicer than the piles of physical magazines I have to deal with. The web version of the NY Times is far better for looking up older articles.

My guess is the Times Reader is a tool to prepare the public for subscribing to an online newspaper. What I’m getting out of their experiment is the desire for web designers to lay out pages so they are comfortable to read on screen. I’ve also rediscovered the value of the page.

p.s. 3/20/7

I got an email from the New York Times telling me the Times Reader beta is over at the end of March and I’ll need to subscribe if I want future issues. I was shocked at how high the subscription rates are: $14.95 a month or $165 a year. As much as I like reading the NYTimes this way, I don’t like it $165 much. This is a bargain compared to buying the paper edition. I did pay the $49 to try the Times Select for a year, but I don’t plan to renew. Paying $49 to read a couple columnists isn’t worth it. I thought I’d take more advantage of researching their files, but I didn’t. It’s hard to price a product that is essentially being given away in another location on the web. If I got the whole deal, The Times Reader edition and the Archives for $49 a year, I’d consider it a bargain. I might go as high as $99.95 a year if the software added aditional features that made it functionally a lot more than just a newspaper reader.

Twenty Years Ago the Classics Were Different

Twenty years ago I wrote an article about the classics of science fiction for the fanzine Lan’s Lantern – and later made the essay into a web site at The Classics of Science Fiction. My friend Mike inspired the project when he asked me about my favorite science fiction books. I started reading science fiction as a kid in 1961, and then gave up SF in 1974 after dropping out of college to find reality. I returned to reading science fiction in 1984 after I had gotten married, finished college and settled down. By the time I wrote the essay in 1987 I had probably read well over a thousand science fiction books.

Now looking back with twenty years of hindsight I’m not sure how many science fiction books I would consider classic. The final Classics of Science Fiction list wasn’t selected by me, but was assembled from the most frequently recommended books from 28 best-of lists and other sources dating back to the 1950s. Of the 193 books on the list, I’m not sure how many I would personally recommend today. I’ve read most of the books on the list, and still reread many of them. I’m currently seeking out and listening to audio editions of books from the list. This week I’m listening to Timescape by Gregory Benford, #41 on the list, and a book on 16 of the 28 recommended references. I think it is a classic of sorts, but it’s doubtful you’ll find it at your favorite bookstore. I was surprised that Recorded Books had an unabridged audio edition. [By the way, RB is the very best place to find audio editions of the SF Classics.]

A few months ago I listened to Foundation by Isaac Asimov and I was appalled by how bad it was. I had forgotten most of the story. I had read the original Foundation trilogy back in the 1960s and accepted it then as a classic because everyone said it was so. Listening to it now it was obvious that it was a fix-up novel from a handful of Astounding pulp fiction stories. Even though I considered it bad writing it had ideas that made me wonder if it had been inspiration to George Lucas for Star Wars. As far as I was concerned it was too simplistic and had nothing to offer the modern reader. The Foundation Trilogy is #4 on the Science Fiction Classics List and was recommended by 24 of the 28 lists. It is well loved, but not by me anymore.

I wonder if the other fans, critics, writers and editors who created the original 28 recommendation lists still love all the books they once recommended Has the last twenty years changed them too? Here are the books I’ve listened to in the last five years:

#4 – Foundation by Isaac Asimov

#8 – The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

#19 – The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

#22 – Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

#29 – Fahrenheit 451 – by Ray Bradbury

#32 – The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

#37 – The Humanoids by Jack Williamson

#41 – Timescape by Gregory Benford

#48 – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (abridged) by Philip K. Dick

#58 – Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

#61 – Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

#67 – Startide Rising by David Brin

#87 – Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein

#93 – Blood Music (novella version) by Greg Bear

#94 – Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card

I have more SF Classics lined up to listen to, like Dune by Frank Herbert, Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman and a few others. They are on my Recorded Books Unlimited queue. Most of the books I have listened to were very entertaining, but I don’t know if I would call them classics. Library of America, a company known for publishing classic books, will publish a volume called Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick in June of 2007. The four novels are The Man in the High Castle (1962), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Ubik (1969) – all but Stigmata were on the Classics of Science Fiction list.

Are these the real classics of science fiction? I don’t know. PKD’s books hold up well in their audio editions and many of his stories have been made into movies, but his books were never mainstream science fiction. PKD was one strange dude, maybe a Poe or Meville of the sci-fi pulp writers, and although he wrote some books set in outer space, he was never considered an inspiration to the space opera crowd. I am a huge fan of PKD and I’m overjoyed that LOA has selected his books, but I don’t think PKD represents science fiction nor do I think his books represent American literature. Personally, I think Robert A. Heinlein fits that role better, but I’m not sure I’d pick any of his books as classics of American literature either. Many of Heinlein’s novels are my all time favorite books that I read and reread, but I don’t know if they represent America or its times. I think Have Space Suit-Will Travel represents the 1950s in the U.S. in a very special way but will future readers see that. Would nineteenth century New England want to be represented by Moby Dick?

The trouble is I don’t see any science fiction book becoming the Pride and Prejudice or Great Expectations to the readers of the twenty-second century as those two books have become classics to us. Whether Jane Austin or Charles Dickens wrote accurate portraits of their times, their books do represent the times in which they were set for all future readers. Huckleberry Finn and Little Women will represent nineteen century America, like The Great Gatsby will represent the twenthieth century. Strange in a Strange Land is a 1960s book, but it will never be a book about the 1960s. Science fiction books will have to be classics like Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan are classics but I’m not sure how many science fiction books will appeal to the young readers of the future.

H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and The World of the Wars have become classic books read by children for a century. Are there any books from the Classics of Science Fiction list that will follow in Mr. Wells’ steps? Ender’s Game might. Not on the list, but a book that might have a chance is Heinlein’s Have Space Suit-Will Travel. It was recently made into a full-cast audio book and it holds up very well and doesn’t feel dated. But I think it only has an extremely rare chance. Dune might succeed since it has already had two film incarnations, which is a good indication. Fahrenheit 451 might have a chance since it is a timeless allegory about reading, but I don’t hold out much hope for The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury’s other classic that is so loved outside of the SF world. Flowers for Algernon has potential. Overall though, I don’t have much hope for any book on the Classic of Science Fiction list lasting another century and remaining popular. I think Wells and Verne will fall out of favor – if they already haven’t.

As many observers have noted, modern children prefer movies, video games and movies over books, so there’s always a chance that books won’t be popular in the future. However, I think hard-core science fiction readers will continue to seek and find the books on The Classics of Science Fiction list. The average science fiction reader will be content with the latest fad in science fiction and fantasy books. I think the desire to read science fiction is mostly based on the urge to find new and novel excitements – so the classic books that come from the 1940s and 1950s pulp magazines will feel old and quaint to them. Eventually, even the New Wave times of the 1960s and 1970s will seem old wave. Books from the 1920s and 1930s seemed quaint to me in the 1960s. I have a feeling that the most sophisticated science fiction written today will feel like a dime novel does to us when read by our grandchildren.

I guess my conclusion is science fiction goes out of date too fast to become classic. I wish I could live to be two hundred and find out the answer though. I think there are other reasons why these books won’t become classics but those ideas will have to be explored in a future blog entry. The main reason I think this is I’ve read many many great books in the last twenty years that I consider better than the books on the Classics of Science Fiction List.

All Dressed Up and No Place to Go

Among science fiction readers and space explorers the consesus is manisfest destiny is no longer in the direction west around the globe, but up and out into space. Scientists, engineers and rocket jockeys are all ready to build and blast, but congressmen and bean counters keep asking why? While most of the world have their heads in ancient religions and think that death is the only ticket off Earth, a small percentage of the population feel that traveling into space is the meaning missing from our meaningless lives. The trouble is space travel won’t be like traveling in NCC-1701 Enterprise or the plush rides of Star Wars, no it will be like traveling in a WWI German U-boat. Living on the Moon or Mars will be a cross between McMurdo Station and 1849 gold miners.

The prime real estate off Earth will provide at best underground condo living with the outside weather offering extreme temperatures, unbreathable atmospheres or vacuum, lots of radiation and stark scenery that only a rock hound could love. The dirt on the Moon is so dirty that it will probably wreck machinery and space suits in a matter of days. Colonists will probably find living underground in highly engineered environments their most comfortable habitats off Earth. This means conquering space is really just occupying other worlds and making a rabbit warren of tunnels as cozy as possible. Given centuries and luck we might migrate to another steller system and find another Earth-like world, but that might not happen for a very long time.

For us humans, Earth may be our only fishbowl. It’s too bad we don’t take better care of it. Realistic science fiction should probably envision futures where we’re stuck on Earth for all eternity, or at least till the end of our times. Copernicus told the world that the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe – but the religious still believe humans are the center of God’s attention. Is that really so? It appears that existence has preceded humans by an infinite long time and will continue on without us for just as long. I wonder why in Genesis that God didn’t mention making so many other worlds.

Creationists freak out over scientists claiming the Earth is much older than the few thousand years. What I’ve got to wonder about is why don’t the creationists get in a hissy fit over the number of worlds and size of the universe too? If the fourth dimension pains them so much, why aren’t they bothered by the first three? When God said, go forth, be fruitful and multiple, why couldn’t he have meant, spread out across the stars and fill up the galaxy? The religious have always been preoccupied by heaven, but why aren’t they moved by the vastness of the heavens above us?

The dreams of science fiction fans have always appealed to the few, with the majority of Earth’s inhabitants never desiring to go much further than down the street or maybe as far as Disneyworld. Science fiction sold a false bill of goods when it promised easy trips to the stars, and exploring exotic inhabited worlds. And I’ve got to wonder if I would even travel to some ET Riviera when I won’t even bother to fly to France. And how many people would hang out with space aliens when they want to ban illegel aliens?

I think we’re all dress up with no place to go because Earth is more appealing than anything science fiction has ever dreamed up. The religious like to claim there are no atheists in foxholes, but if heaven is just beyond this life, why don’t more believers embrace dangerous living, if not suicide? We may all pray in the foxhole, but we’re praying to stay here on Earth. This makes me wonder if the old saying really shouldn’t be: There are no theists in foxholes. I wonder if the only source of death was suicide, how long would the average stay on Earth be?

Where does that leave us? I think we could have built space ships a long time ago if we wanted. People could have been living on the Moon and Mars back in the 1970s. We could have built nuclear rocket drives to take us to the next notch in specific impulse by the 1980s. And we’d been working on all kinds of new rocket drives by now if we hadn’t stopped the space program back in 1972. The obvious conclusion is the vast majority of humanity has no interest in traveling to the stars.

We are reaching an age that transcends the superstitions of ancient religions, but we lack the philosophical motivations beyond the programming of our genes. We have the built in guidance to eat and survive, reproduce and organize into small groups, but beyond having a good time we don’t know what to do with our extra time. Our focus has shifted from Let There Be Light, to Let There Be TV. If you don’t get me go read about television coming to India and China. If Marx was writing today he’d pick a new opiate when refering to the masses.

When I think about how big the universe is, and when I think of how long the human race might be around, I’ve got to wonder if there isn’t more to life than just looking forward to next Monday and the new episode of Heros. Now that the human race has television and video games, is that all we’re going to do while the centuries roll past?

The Lights in the Sky are Stars

“Because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” – Bob Dylan

I think people forget we live in a fantastically large universe. We’re bacteria living in a drop of water and imagine the few molecules we swim in are the crown of creation, the darling of God’s eye. Light polution has stolen the Milky Way from our lives and shrunk our universe. Most people never look up any more and speculate beyond the event horizon of their lives. Sense of wonder and philosophy has been replaced by gossip about Anna Nicole Smith. Is it no wonder that the uneducated of the world crave their old time gods? DVDs and iPods can’t give the young transcendence. We live in the most exciting time of all history but the only philosophers we have are ones that tell us how to cope with stress, lose weight, invest money, or quibble over left and right politics. Where are our transcendental explorers? Our population seems divided between people who want to ignore reality by partying till they die or those who ignore reality by feverishly studying ancient religious texts and praying for a rebirth in another reality – one that is simple and easy to understand.

If you wake up to The Today Show, come home from work to the ABC World News Tonight, and go to sleep with Eyewitness News and Jay Leno, then your view of our monsterously large multiverse is rather tacky and small. Watch the Discovery Channel in High Definition – it is the Henry David Thoreau of our times. A telescope will help you learn how small you are and a microscope will teach you how big you are. Ask yourself this question: What should I be doing in this immense creation that has no guidebook or instruction manual. For most of history our philosophers have asked: “Why are we here?” Up till now people have answered that question by believing in the silly idea that we’re being judged on our behavior and assume the judgement determines our immortal life in the reality after this one. Imagine if ants thought one human judged their every action.

Get over it. There is no reason why. We’re not being judged and there is no reality after this one. This reality is our final destination – our only vacation from oblivion. We’ve all gone to Hawaii and all we do is sit in our hotel room and watch reruns of That 70’s Show. How lame is that. We need to remember every moment of our lives that the lights in the sky are stars.