\ s semi-professional crystals-ball gazers, we science-fiction types share a community of interest with budget-makers, city planners, airline traffic managers and all sorts of other people whose principal occupation is to make statements today about what is likely to happen tomorrow.
Everything considered, it's our opinion that the wide-ranging view of the average Galaxy writer is less likely to be appallingly wrong than even the best-based projection of the specialist, making predictions about his own field. We think there is a reason for this, and we think the reason is worth a little consideration.
Take one of the great new inventions at random say, the hologram.
There's no doubt that the hologram is a fascinating piece of technology. Three-dimensional virtual images, an eerie ability to look behind the objects in the forefront of what you find yourself thinking of as a photograph no question about it, it's interesting, it's unprecedented, and sooner or later it's going to prove mighty useful.
But useful at what, exactly?
There's really no way to tell. One thing we do know: Any present study about the future of the hologram, considering nothing but the hologram, is certain to be simplistic, incomplete and just plain wrong.
The reason we say tfiis is simple. The dialectic of society does not allow any development to occur in a vacuum. The things that transform the world are not single gadgets; tHey are gestalts. For instance, we talk about "the automobile revolution", and certainly the phenomenon we mean when we say that has radically altered all our lives. But what is "the automobile revolution"?
It isn't one invention; it's more like a dozen. At least. It is the product of Ford's assembly line, plus Goodyear's rubber, plus Otto's engine, plus Macadam's Hardtop roads plus such other inventions as the crucial one of installment buying.
Take away any one of these things, and you have no "automobile revolution". You have something quite different, and far less significant. Nobody invented the automobile. (Nobody invented the airplane or the ICBM or television or the computer, either.) What happened in the case of the automobile is that a lot of different people came up with a lot of different innovations, large and small, technological and social and the result in 1968 is highway deatfis, a mobile population, new kinds of status symbols and air pollution.
So to know what holograms will signify 50 years from now, you must be able to make some sort of guess at any number of simultaneously occurring changes.
For example care to predict the future of rocket transport?
Technologically, that job is easy. The materials exist right at hand. A Douglas scientist named Philip Bone already Has on the drawing boards what He calls a Hyperion, a rocket wHicH could carry a thousand people anywHere in tHe world in 45 minutes, independent of traffic patterns and even of landing fields.
But, althougH tfie technology is pretty straightforward, the question of wKetHer sucH transports will ever fly depends on some ratKer remote-seeming otKer contingencies, including the prospects of putting domes over our cities and tfie likeliEood of a general disarmament treaty.
WHy these two? Simple. A: The noise level of rocket transports is even more horrendous tfian that of tfie SST, which is already intolerable. It is almost certainly out of tfie question for tKem to take off or land anywHere near a city (and there's not mucH point in landing tfiem anywHere else), unless tfie people in tHe city can be insulated from tfie "sound pollution" and about tHe only immediately visible practicable way of doing that is through putting Buckminster Fuller's domes over the cities. And B: The big roadblock for rocket liners, as for that matter for SSTs, is finding a way to pay for the development costs. Basically these are now met out of defense- funds, one way or another; but given disarmament, the defense money dries up . . . and either we find a new way of funding R&D or we don't have rocket liners.
>Tphe other thing wrong with ■* straight-line predictions about the future of technological innovations is that all too often they miss the point of what the innovation is really going to be good for. Innovations aren't used in a vacuum, either.
Take computers. There is not a science-based shop in the country where you can't get an argument on The Future of the Computer, or Whether Machines Can Really Think.
Strikes us that this is a pitifully trivial argument. It's like looking at a newborn child, and wondering about the future of his left arm.
What is important about the future of a child is not what will happen to any of his members, but what will happen to the whole organism; and what is important about the future of computers is what will happen to servo-systems, man-machine symbioses and still-unguessed social constructs in which computers play a part
A man using a computer can function as though he has (which, functionally speaking, is the same as has) an I.Q. anywhere from 10 to 50 points higher than his unaided score. That is what is important about computers not what the machine can do, but what the man-machine symbiosis can do. The implications go far beyond the present horizons of expediting scientific research or selling airline tickets; they include the excellent possibility that all of us can pick up those functional extra I.Q. points and use them in our daily lives.
And there is a revolution that makes the automobile look pretty trivial. If nothing else, think of the retarded 10% of the human race; and think of them equipped with, say, wristwatch-sized remote-access computer consoles. Now they can navigate city streets by themselves; now they can hold jobs; now they can rejoin the human race.
Somebody once said that a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. We agree. And so should good science.
THE EDITOR
Illustrated by REESE
The trouble with cultural imperatives is that they must be served. Like the practice of cannibalism or revenge 1
I
A/Toru understood about guns.
At least the tall strangers Had demonstrated to tHeir guides what the things that each of them carried at his hip could do in a flash and a flameburst. But he did not realize that the small objects they often moved about in their hands, while talking in their own language, were audiovisual transmitters. Probably he thought they were fetishes.
Thus, when he killed Donli Sairn, he did so in full view of Donli's wife.
That was happenstance. Ex-(
cept for prearranged times at morning and evening of the planet's twenty-eight-hour day, the biologist, like his fellows, sent only to his computer. But because they had not been married long and were helplessly happy, Evalyth received his 'casts whenever she could get away from her own duties.
The coincidence that she was tuned in at that one moment was not great. There was little for her to do. As militech' of the expedition she being from a half barbaric part of Kraken where the sexes had equal opportunities to learn arts of combat suitable to primitive environments she had overseen the building of a compound; and she kept the routines of guarding it under a close eye. However, the inhabitants of Lokon were as cooperative with the visitors from heaven as mutual mys-teriousness allowed. Every instinct and experience assured Evalyth Sairn that their reticence masked nothing except awe, with perhaps a wistful hope of friendship. Captain Jonafer agreed. Her position Having thus become rather a sinecure, she was trying to learn enough about Donli's work to be a useful assistant after He returned from the lowlands.
Also, a medical test Had lately confirmed that she was pregnant. She wouldn't tell him, she decided, not yet, over all those hundreds of kilometers, but rather when they lay again together. Meanwhile, the knowledge that they had begun a new life made him a lodestar to Her.
8
On the afternoon of his deatH she entered the bio-lab whistling. Outside, sunlight struck fierce and brass-colored on dusty ground, on prefab shacks Hudi died about the boat wHicH Had brought everyone and everything down from the orbit where New Dawn circled, on tHe parked flitters and gravsleds that took men around the big island that was the only Habitable land on this globe, on the men and tHe women themselves. Beyond tHe stockade, plumy treetops, a glimpse of mud-brick buildings, a murmur of voices and mutter of footfalls, a drift of bitter woodsmoke, showed tHat a town of several thousand people sprawled between here and Lake Zelo.
'TpHe bio-lab occupied more than Half tHe structure where the Sairns lived. Comforts were few, when ships from a Handful of cultures struggling back to civilization ranged across the ruins of empire. For Eva-lytfi, thougH, it sufficed tKat this was tKeir Home. SHe was used to austerity anyway. One thing that Had first attracted her to Donli, meeting Kim on Kraken, was the cHeerfulness witH which He, a man from AtKeia, whicH was supposed to Have retained or regained almost as many amenities as Old EartH knew in its glory, had accepted life in Her gaunt grim country.
The gravity field Here was 0.77 standard, less than two-thirds of wHat sHe Had grown in. Her gait was easy tfirougH tHe clutter of apparatus and specimens. SHe was a big young woman, good-looking in the body, a shade too strong in the features for most men's taste outside Her own folk. She Had their blond-ness and, on legs and forearms, their intricate tattoos; the blaster at her waist Had come down through many generations. Otherwise she had abandoned Krak-ener costume for the plain cover -alfs of the expedition.
How cool and dim the shack was! She sighed with pleasure, sat down, and activated the receiver. As the image formed, three-dimensional in the air, and Donli's voice spoke, her Heart sprang a little.
" appears to be descended from a clover."
The image was of plants witH green trilobate leaves, scattered low among the reddish native pseudo-grasses. It swelled as Donli brought the transmitter near so that the computer might
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That's it, for this year. Some goodies to come for 1969 include a new E. R. Eddison, MEZENTIAN GATE, Peter Beagle's LAST UNICORN, Lee Hoffman's CAVES OF KARST, and Dave Van Arnam, Anne McCaffrey, Miriam Allen deFord, Roy Meyers, Bob Silver-berg, and on and on. More about your glorious future next month. AND A MERRY YULE TO YOU ALL. BB record details for later analysis, EvalytH frowned, trying to recall wHat... Oli, yes. Clover was another of those life forms thai man Had brought with him from Old Earth1, to more planets than anyone now remembered, before the Long Night fell. Often they; were virtually unrecognizable; over thousands of years, evolution had fitted them to aliett conditions, or mutation and ge* netic drift had acted on small initial populations in a nearly random fashion. No one on Krakeii Had known that pines and gullg and rhizobacteria were altered immigrants, until Donli's crew arrived and identified them. Not; that He, or anybody from this] part of the galaxy, Had yet made it back to the mother world. But the Atheian data banks were; packed with information, and so was Donli's dear curly Head
And there was his Hand, huge1 in the field of view, gathering specimens. She wanted to kis$. it. Patience, patience, the offices part of her reminded the bridel We're here to work. We've disf covered one more lost colonyi the most wretched one so far, sunken back to utter primitivisaa Our duty is to advise the Board whether a civilizing mission worthwhile, or whether the slen der resources that the Alliec Planets can spare had better hi used elsewhere, leaving thest people in their misery for another two or three hundred years. To make an Honest report, we must study them, their cultures, their world. Thafs why I'm in the barbarian highlands and he's down in the jungle among out-and-out savages.
Please finish soon, darling.
Qhe Heard Donli speak in the ^ lowland dialect. It was a debased form of Lokonese, which in turn was remotely descended from Anglic. The expedition's linguists had unraveled the language in a few intensive weeks. Then all personnel took a brain-feed in it. Nonetheless, she admired How quickly her man had become fluent in the woodsrun-ners' version, after mere days of conversation with them.
"Are we not coming to the place, Moru? You said the thing was close by our camp."
"We are nearly arrived, man-from-the-clouds."
A tiny alarm struck within Evalyth'. What was going on? Donli hadn't left his companions to strike off alone with a native, had He? Rogar of Lokon had warned them to beware of treachery in those parts. But, to be sure, only yesterday the guides Had rescued Haimie Fiell when He tumbled into a swift-running river ... at some risk to themselves. . . .
The view bobbed as the transmitter swung in Donli's grasp. It made EvalytH a bit dizzy. From time to time, sKe got glimpses of the broader setting. Forest crowded about a game trail, rust-colored leafage, brown trunks and branches, shadows beyond, the occasional Harsh' call of something unseen. She could practically feel the heat and dank weight of the atmosphere, smell the unpleasant pungencies. This world which no longer had a name, except World, because the dwellers upon it had forgotten what the stars really were was ill suited to colonization. The life it Had spawned was often poisonous, always nutritionally deficient. With the help of species they had brought along, men survived marginally. The original settlers doubtless meant to improve matters. But then the breakdown came evidence was that their single town had been missiled out of existence, a majority of the people with it and resources were lacking to rebuild; the miracle was that anything Human remained except bones.
"Now here, man-from-tHe-clouds."
The swaying scene grew steady. Silence hummed from jungle to cabin. "I do not see anything," Donli said at length.
"Follow me. I show."
Donli put his transmitter in tKe fork of a tree. It scanned him and Moru while they moved across a meadow. The guide looked childish beside the space traveler, barely up to his shoulder; an old child, though1, near-naked body seamed with scars and lame in the right foot from some injury of the past, face wizened in a great black bush of hair and beard. He, who could not hunt but could only fish and trap to support his family, was even more impoverished than his fellows. He must have been happy indeed when the flitter landed near their village and the strangers offered fabulous trade goods for a week or two of being shown around the countryside. Donli had projected the image of Morn's straw hut for EvalytH the pitiful few possessions, the woman already worn out with toil, the surviving sons who, at ages said to be about seven or eight, which would equal twelve or thirteen standard years, were shriveled gnomes.
T> ogar seemed to declare the Lokonese tongue was by no means perfectly understood yet that the lowlanders would be less poor if they weren't such a vicious lot, tribe forever at war with tribe. But really, Evalyth thought, what possible menace can they be?
