Science Fiction – Page 40 – Auxiliary Memory

Are Smartphones Nanocomputers?

Young people will probably not know this, but back in the 1970s personal computers were called microcomputers. The dinosaur of computers, mainframes, were huge, some as big as houses, and cost millions. Then in the 1960s newer, smaller computers started coming out that were dubbed minicomputers. These were still too expensive to be personal, but they were cheap enough that they spread like gossip. So when even smaller computers came out in the 1970s they were dubbed microcomputers. These eventually became cheap enough for almost everyone to own one.

Now most people think of their smartphone as a phone, but it’s really a computer, just a very small one, so why not consider the smartphone the next paradigm of computing and call them nanocomputers? I doubt if smartphones have any actual nanotechnology in them, but they might, but nano is obviously the next label in the series, so why not call them that? Of course, what will picocomputers be like? Nanocomputers are a planned concept, and smartphones might eventually use real nanotechnology, so it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the current vernacular, a “PC” is a Windows based computer. PC used to stand for personal computer, and in the old days all microcomputers were PCs, even ones from Apple. Somewhere along the way it became the PC versus Mac. The smartphone is even more personal than the original PC because people actually carry them on their person. We could call the smartphone a pocket computer, but that would be another PC acronym.

We could also call the smartphone the hand computer, following the labels of desktop and laptop computers. The term handheld was in use for awhile, but it doesn’t quite work.

So why do I object to the phrase “smartphone” when it’s already so popular? Because it’s rather limiting to think of the device as a phone. Steve Jobs and Apple have done a wonderful job with the iPhone by creating a new category of pocket computer with hundreds of thousands of applications. The phone part is just one of those applications, so why should it get top billing?

Already iOS phones and tablets have garnered over 1% of net user market share, competing with both Windows and Mac operating systems.

iPhones and Androids are quickly evolving into what I dreamed of having, an auxiliary brain. Cellphones are about as close as we’ll ever get to telepathy. Their GPS features give us homing pigeon like directional sense. Adding the still and video camera broaden their versatility to create new concrete forms of memory. The device is obviously more than a phone.

In the 1980s it was all the rage for schools to offer computer literacy courses to help the public understand the impact of the microcomputer on society. Nanocomputers are bought and used without any training and no one talks about computer literacy anymore. But do we understand the true impact of the nanocomputer?

Take this one example. Public opinion pollsters are worried that telephone polls are now skewed because only certain types of people still have a landline phone, which is the only kind they can poll. Now I don’t ever want pollsters to be able to call cell phone numbers, but what if nanocomputer users could elect to have a polling app, so whenever they felt like it, they could respond to variously kinds of polls.

What if nanocomputers became uniquely customized to its owner that they could be used to verify the identity of the user? Nanocomputers could then be used as voting booths, and that would lead to their use for referendums. By this thinking we should see these devices as extensions of our body. We can already network the ear with a Bluetooth headset. What if we connected nanocomputers to sensors inside our body? As we integrate nanocomputers to our body, when do they become part of us?

And more importantly, how do we become part of them? I now spend more time in front of a computer than I do sleeping. Computers dominate my life, and so too for most people. When do we start thinking of them as a prosthesis? Aren’t they becoming enhancements for our brains, aren’t they becoming prosthetic minds? We should think of nanocomputers as body enhancements that are leading us towards group minds.

The idea of wearable computers has been around for decades. Most people thought such a concept was dorky, but now most people carry around one or more computers with them all the time. Even a normal dumb cell phone is a computer, and so are MP3 players, game units, tablets, calculators, GPSes, digital cameras, ebooks, etc. How long before it becomes obvious that the most convenient way to carry a nanocomputer is by wearing it? Many people wear their Bluetooth headsets all the time now. When will glasses and hearing aids be networked with the nanocomputer?

We need to get away from thinking of nanocomputers as phones but cybernetic enhancements to our bodies and minds. So when did the Borg assimilate us? When you think about it, Bluetooth headsets look like the first sprouting of Borgware.

JWH – 10/28/10

My Favorite Science Fiction Fantasies

I’ve always been a big time daydreamer. By the way, do most of you spend a good portion of your day daydreaming? I hope I won’t be embarrassing myself by revealing my how much inner fiction I generate. Well, I won’t go into the sexual fantasies, I’m sure everyone has tons of boring mind movies about getting naked with other people. No, what I wonder about is your revealing science fiction fantasies. I tell you mine, if you tell me yours.

For instance, how many of you have ever dreamed of owning a flying car? I can remember back to when I was four years old, and riding in the back seat of our family car with my sister, and imagining the car flipping out switch-blade like wings. I’d always envisioned the car getting up speed and then soaring up into the sky at a seventy-five degree angle. At first, my father was the pilot, but soon I cast myself into the driver’s seat, and eventually morphed the family car into something sportier that changed into a jet fighter.

The flying car was a good solid feature attraction of my early daydreaming. They started in the 1950s, but as soon as Alan Shepard took his Mercury ride on a Redstone rocket into sub-orbital space I started expanding the features of my dream flying car so it could drive all the way into orbit, and then the Moon and Mars. I can’t remember now, but my flying car was featured as a flying submarine in some those daydreams, but I don’t remember if underwater action happened before or after outer space action.

Even as a grown up, sometimes when I’m driving across country on a long trip I like to imagine that my truck could fly.

Starting with elementary school my main science fiction fantasy was flying to Mars in a giant rocket ship, the kind that stood on four fins when it landed. Mars was always my favorite interplanetary destination, and before Mariner 4 flew by Mars in the summer of 1965 I pictured the Red planet full of exotic alien life. Because my parents were alcoholics, that often fought, I pictured Mars as a getaway from my family life. Mars had unlimited potential. It could be anything. After Mariner 4, when that spacecraft photos crushed my Mars dreams by revealing that world to be as dead as the Moon, full of craters and not much else, I started daydreaming interstellar fantasies.

Of course by my teen years 99.9 percent of my mental movie making dealt with sex, and so science fiction fantasies got shoved aside for many years. Growing up and trying to adultify had been very painful for me. Getting an after school job when I turned 16, where I worked 3:30 to 9:30 M-F, and all days Saturdays at a grocery store, killed off my reading, television and fantasy time. Oh, I’d have lots of mini fantasies about having sex with girls and ladies shopping the store, but reality killed off most of my sci-fi fantasies.

It was during that time that I had one of my most creative science fiction daydreams. I’d imagined having a robot that would stand in for us at school and work so we could do other things, like imagining having sex with cute neighborhood girls or learning to play the guitar so I could become another Bob Dylan. I always thought my idea of everyone owning a robot to earn their nine-to-five money was among my most brilliant inventions. Plus I figured our robots would be our best friends for life.

You’d have thought I would have combined my sex fantasies with my robot fantasies but I didn’t. I guess my puritanical programming kept me from thinking about robot love. I don’t know if it was a limitation of my imagination, but I always pictured robots having machine like bodies, rather than androids that could pass for humans. Well hell, when you can imagine any girl you want for your sex fantasies, why picture one built out of metal and electrical parts. But even before The Six Million Dollar Man, I did imagined having cybernetic enhancements for my own weakling bod, but they were more like the suits Heinlein imagined in Starship Troopers.

For some reason I was never the kind of guy who imagined clones of myself. I still don’t. I wonder what Freud would say about that. I did love to imagine building my own robot where I programmed all the books of Mark Twain so I could have a Samuel Clemens bot for a buddy. That was a favorite fantasy of mine for a long time, I guess while I was going to school studying computer programming.

It was very entertaining to think about programming a personality into a robot. Of course, I did have the narcissistic fantasy of developing a robot with my personality. I never pictured those robots looking like me, which is revealing, maybe I don’t like my body that much, but I loved the idea, the challenge of programming a robot that would love the same books, music, movies and television shows I liked. I don’t know why, but it was a fun way to while away some hours.

I don’t know why I never liked clones. I guess it’s just boring to think of a copy of me. I think I once wondered if I had a female clone of me would I want to fuck myself, but that never caught on as a fantasy. Who knows, maybe the strong anti-incest instinct we have keeps us from liking clones of ourselves. Or I could go deeper, maybe it was become of my own un-attraction to my physical self (which would also explain why I’ve met so few women where I was the star of their daydreaming).

As an adult, I don’t have as many science fiction fantasies as I did as a kid, but I do have some, even now. I really like the idea of having a robot companion, although I worry about the ethicality of having a robotic slave. I think I should fix my own food, wash my own dishes, clean the house myself, and do all the chores I can as long as I can, but as I get old it would be great to have a robotic caretaker. So instead of having to go into a nursing home, I could remain independent longer with a robot Jeeves. If I ever got Alzheimer’s and forgot to check myself out, I’d want a robotic caretaker. I’ve often imagined what it would be like to be an intelligent robot with such a job, and I’m even working on a science fiction story about it.

Another science fiction theme that’s been a big setting for my daydreaming has been after the collapse stories. Why are last man on Earth fantasies so much fun? Now really, what would Freud have made of that? And Mad Max like survivalist stories with lots of wild west gun fighting makes for terrific heroic fantasies. But also, Jeremiah Johnson living in the mountains alone, with few people left on Earth, also make satisfying daydreaming too. Those are a little weird though, when I think about it. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 16, but in those circumstances I’m more than willing to kill and eat animals. Hey, they are only fantasy animals.

For some reason I’ve had many fantasies about a life without other people, so Robinson Crusoe dreams have been common, even Robinson Crusoe on Mars, like the old movie. Being the sole human on an alien planet is a cool fantasy. Don’t worry, I’m not always that way. Another wonderfully challenging fantasy is building colonies on new worlds. The fun here is picking the kind of people you want to bring with you versus the kind of people you want to leave behind. My Mars colonies were free of religion and superstition, and everyone was liberal and scientific. I wonder if conservatives dream of Republican colonies on Mars? Or do Muslims ever think about a world without Christians and Jews? Those Left Behind books tells us what evangelicals daydream about.

Of course, one of the best science fictional themes to use for personal fantasies is time travel. I’ve had thousands of time travel daydreams. When I as little I wanted to go see the dinosaurs, or visit famous events in history like the crucifixion of Christ, the gunfight at the OK corral, or be at Kitty Hawk with the Wright Brothers. Now that I’m older, and daydream of time travel, I imagine hanging out with Jack Kerouac, visiting the Bloomsbury group, or attending the Monterey Pop Festival.

Reading science fiction is only brain loading pre-fabricated fantasies. And maybe science fiction books are just favorite fantasies writers have to share with others. When you think about it, the “What if?” mechanism in our minds are powerful generators of fantasies. I’ve often wondered if our fantasies create real worlds in other dimensions. One of my favorite book titles is from a collection of interviews with Philip K. Dick that’s called, What If Our World is Their Heaven? Let’s turn that around – what if our lives are the daydreams of other beings?

p.s.

This is embarrassing, but it seems not everyone spends a lot of time making up stories in their head. I’ve been talking to my friends and wife, and so far none of them have the Walter Mitty gene. This is a surprise to me. I guess I’m admitting to doing something very weird in this blog post. But I’ve got to ask, if y’all aren’t spending all your time making up vivid fantasies, then what’s happening in your heads?

JWH – 10/23/10

Science Fiction Short Stories

Over at SF Signal they held a Mind Meld asking sixteen of their favorite SF fans and writers to assemble their own anthologies of personally favorite science fiction short stories. This produced several hundred short stories with annotations and commentaries to think about reading. Strangely, there is damn little overlap. Just from eyeballing the list without using any kind of tallies, “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” by Roger Zelazny got the most recommendations, with three. I think the participants consciously tried to avoid the obvious classics.

Science fiction is at its purist in the shorter lengths of fiction where ideas dominate. Reading any good science fiction anthology should showcase the true potential of science fiction, and any recent anthology of the best SF will show the furthest edge of the speculative universe.

Robert Sabella did pick my all-time favorite SF novella, “The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany, and he picked several other of my favorite stories so I need to check out his unfamiliar selections. Tinkoo Valia, whose web site Variety SF is devoted to short SF produced a rather novel list that shows he reads far and wide. Jason Sanford made a nice selection of Then and Now stories, and since I remember fondly many of his Then stories, I figure I better go after his Now stories. Before seeing his list this morning, I read his number 19 choice last night, “Eros, Philia, Agape” by Rachel Swirsky, a rather tender story about a woman and child in love with a robot.

Since Nancy Jane Moore picked “Empire Star” another all-time favorite that I reread regularly, I’ll need to track down the stories on her list too. And I’d definitely have to check out Rick Klaw’s quirky anthology of ape stories – his list comes with a nice enticing historical introduction.

The trouble will be finding all of these great stories. Lucky for us many are reprinted on the Internet just waiting for readers, like “The Man Who Lost the Sea” by Theodore Sturgeon. Other stories like “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” by Samuel R. Delany require a visit to ISFDB to find which books have reprinted the story over the years. Of course you can jump over to Free Speculative Fiction Online and check there. Quite often its possible to put the title and author in Google and if you’re lucky, the actual story will be in the top search returns.

But what I really wish for is a totally different way to find these stories. What if science fiction writers could load their stories into a database at Amazon.com, and Amazon allow their customers to build their own Kindle anthologies at bargain rates – maybe 24 stories for $9.99 (the latest Dozois The Years’s Best Science Fiction has 32 stories for that price).

Readers could build their own anthologies to order, or the contributors of the Mind Meld could have assembled their lists with links to Amazon with their collections pre-assembled for purchase. Amazon could also keep tabs on the most popular stories to help Kindle users easily build new collections, and maybe even offer a voting system. And it would be fantastic if Amazon offered Kindle editions of all the classic past SF anthologies, like Adventures of Time and Space, or Before the Golden Age, or reprint all the Judith Merrill, Donald Wollheim, Terry Carr past annual best of anthologies.

This would be a good time to also recommend to Amazon that they redesign the Kindle with folders, so I could have a Science Fiction Short Story folder, and within it have something like playlists, or virtual folders so I could organize my short story collection by publication year, author and theme.

JWH – 10/19/10

Dear Me

Dear Jimmy Age 10

If you would study more and watch less television I could finish college.

Love Jim Age 22

———-

Dear Jim Age 16

If you could run away to California it sure would be nice remembering the Monterey Pop Festival.

Love Jim Age 52

———

Dear Jim Age 22

I’m watching the Flintstones – you guys leave me alone!

Love Jimmy Age 10

———

Dear Jim Age 35

You need to start putting away money for our retirement, I’m running out.

Love James Age 72

———

Dear James Age 72

What’s in it for me?

Love Jim Age 35

———-

Dear Jimmy Age 10

Turn off that goddamn TV.

Love Jim Age 25

———-

Dear Jim Age 25

Make me. You sound like Dad.

Love Jimmy Age 10

———-

Dear Jim Age 35

I know two women who told me I should have hit on them when we were younger. Show me some money and I’ll tell you who they were.

Love James Age 72

———-

Dear Jim Age 17

You should hitchhike to Bethel, New York this summer. Don’t worry about buying tickets, just remember the name Woodstock.

Love Jim Age 52

———-

Dear Jim Age 17

Tell me the secrets of getting laid

Love Jim Age 16

———

Dear Jim Age 100

Are you there?

Love James Age 77

———

Dear Jim Age 16

Ask one of the older Jims, and then let me know.

Love Jim Age 17

———

Dear Jim Age 15

The Beatles are coming near you, think you can steal $40 for tickets and bus money.

Love Jim Age 52

———-

Dear Jim Age 13

Quit reading so much science fiction, girls don’t like it.

Love Jim Age 21

———

Dear Jim Age 13

Stop reading that science fiction all the time – take up sports. Boy am I out of shape.

Love Jim Age 45

———-

Dear Jim Age 13

Do you think you could get some older guys to place bets for you at the track? I need money to buy science fiction books. I’ve read all the SF books at the library.

Love Jim Age 14

———-

Dear Jim Age 13

Get your head out of that goddamn book and do something real.

Love Jim Age 57

———-

Dear James Age 99

Are you there?

Love James Age 77

JWH – 9/17/10

The Fall of Robert A. Heinlein and the Fading Final Frontier

There are two concepts I want to express but I don’t know the words for them, if there are any, and I’m not creative enough to make up new words. If these two concepts do have definitions please let me know.

The first concept deals with being so close to a belief that you can’t tell how widespread it is in the population at large. The best I can come up with is the phrase “belief perspective.” For example, back in the 1960s, kids who got high thought the whole world was joining their stoned revolution.

The second concept is about experiences that belong to a particular generation that are ineffable to earlier or later generations, and as people age, that particular quality of a generation fades away as their population die off. The 1960s counter culture is a good example. Kids growing up in the last two generations have no concept of what the sixties was like, in the same way my generation, the baby boomers, have no idea what WWII and the Great Depression was like. I call this “fading generational identity.”

But these concepts don’t just apply to big beliefs or mass experiences. For example, to young people of a certain age there is a huge identification with Star Wars movies that I just don’t get. To this generation, Star Wars is huge in their belief perspective and it’s a touchstone to their language. It’s like Star Wars has infected their psyche.

Kids today might love The Beatles but they will never understand the impact of Beatles mania had on the music of 1964 and 1965, like I will never truly understand the success of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller on their generation even though I love their music. Or look at the Beat Generation, what a tiny subculture, but their population is dying off, and the only way they will be remembered is a few books. But no matter how many times I read On the Road I can never know how Jack Kerouac felt inside his subculture.

I grew up during the counter culture sixties but I also identified with a very small group of science fiction readers of the times. In my belief perspective I thought Robert A. Heinlein was the Buddha, Gandhi, Einstein of a particular belief system dealing with space exploration. Robert Heinlein defined my 1960s like Timothy Leary defined that era for acid heads. From my perspective Heinlein was a major thinker, but my belief perspective totally distorted my worldview, because obviously he wasn’t.

Now on the Internet I’m finding other people like me, people in their fifties and sixties who have a generational identity with the same 1950s and 1960s science fiction that I have. What we’re realizing is the beliefs we embraced weren’t widely embraced by the population at large and as new generations grow up, with their own beliefs, our ideas are fading. The phrase “science fiction” means something totally different to the current generation than it did to mine.

It is sad, sometimes in a depressive way, and sometimes in a wistful accepting way, to see the ideas of your generational subculture belief system pass away. You realize they really weren’t that big, or widespread, or even significant or meaningful, they were just beliefs you had, and they made life important to you in your time and place.

I grew up believing in the final frontier as proposed by 1950s and 1960s science fiction. Like Christians or Muslims who thoroughly believe Jesus and Mohammed define their reality, not seeing that their beliefs are just ideas to believe in and not reality itself. Colonizing the Moon and Mars was our Heaven to believe in, and Heinlein was our prophet.

I’m discovering two things now that I wish I could put into perspective. I wish I knew how many people were like me that made Heinlein spiritually important to our final frontier beliefs. Second I’d like to know how many people on Earth actually dream about colonizing space. Space enthusiasts are actually separate from Heinlein, but I always tie the two together.

I have this hypothesis I’d like to test, but I don’t know how. I think a small portion of the population believe in space as a kind of Manifest Destiny, but I don’t know how big that group is, and I’m also thinking it peaked in the 1960s because of the space race and because of 1950s science fiction. I worry that in a hundred years that belief-perspective will be considered a minor 20th century fad. Except for a handful of people I meet on the net I know very few people who share my religion.

We like to think the wonderful aspects of our generation are timeless, but they aren’t. They just fade when we age. Not only is my body wearing out and getting old, but so are all the ideas I loved. That’s just another thing about getting old that we have to deal with. And I’m not sure young people see this coming. I certainly didn’t.

With the publication of the new authorized biography of Heinlein I’m afraid I’m discovering that his ideas and influence are already on the wane. But I only have a few clues to go on.

Robert A. Heinlein is the Science Fiction Writers of America first Grand Master, selected for this honor in 1975. It’s very hard to gauge the impact of Heinlein on science fiction fans of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, but if you search the web you can find hundreds of testimonials about how Heinlein imprinted on these writers.

With the publication of the biography I thought there would be an outpouring of reviews that would evaluate and elevate Heinlein’s literary status, but there have been damn few reviews, and most of them have been about Heinlein nostalgia. Typical is the Washington Post review, which is the only national publication I found, all the rest were essentially blog reviews, like mine.

On the net I can rustle up plenty of folks to wax nostalgic about discovering Heinlein as kids, but among my normal friends, most haven’t read the man, and nearly all of them show a vacant expression when I mention his name.

To his fans from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Heinlein sold us on the future of colonizing the Moon and Mars and humanity heading out to the stars. To the children of Heinlein, we all assumed everyone thought space was mankind’s final frontier, but in the forty years since, that hasn’t turned out to be true. Most people never think about space exploration.

I’m reading Packing for Mars right now, by Mary Roach, and it’s about preparing astronauts for space flight. If I had read Packing for Mars right after I first read Have Space Suit-Will Travel in 1965 I probably wouldn’t have embraced the final frontier dream. People really aren’t designed for traveling in space, and you have to be immensely driven and a bit of a masochist to try.

I started really worrying about Heinlein’s popularity in the last few days when I did Google searches on the new biography. I typed “robert a. heinlein in dialogue with his century” on Google and found damn few major reviews. I noticed my blog review was second in the Google listing behind the publisher. Now that’s a bad sign. I mean, I like my blog, but if some tenth rate blogger gets the second slot on Google what does that say? Furthermore, I’m averaging 2 hits a day on my review, from both the great Google placement and from the link I put on Classics of Science Fiction, which usually brings me a steady stream of 40-80 hits a day to various blog essays and reviews of science fiction topics.

This leads me to believe my childhood hero Heinlein is far less popular than I ever imagined. For years now when I visit bookstores I’ve noticed that the number of Heinlein books in the SF section is shrinking. And it’s extremely rare to meet a young person that reads Heinlein.

Now I can accept that Heinlein’s fan base is shrinking, but I dread the thought that the true belief in the Manifest Destiny of Space is fading. But it might be. It’s terrible to have to become an atheist to your own belief system. And for me, I think 1950s science fiction was my religious substitute growing up in the 1960s.

So, what is the word for when you discover your belief system turns out to be minor and insignificant and is fading away as its older believers die off? Whatever that condition is called, I’ve got it. I’m not depressed. I’m just wistfully philosophical.

I used to think I’d die knowing how the future would unfold from reading science fiction, but now I realize I won’t pass away believing in those visions. But then I’ve known since I was a teen that the future is everything I never imagined it to be. I wanted to believe different but the Zen of reality taught me it didn’t give a shit about what we believe.

JWH – 9/9/10