FRANKENSTEIN, RAYGUNS, AND BICYCLES

I read for research. This past Christmas break, I read formal philosophy. From 2021 through 2024, I read a lot of astronomy, several of those books cover-to-cover. But I do try fiction. I do not always succeed. I read at bedtime and therefore the sprints are short. Perhaps more to the point, I prefer to read authors who write better than I do and I have no patience for anyone who cannot outdo me because I know that I am not that good at it which is why I do not write fiction. However, as Montag said in Fahrenheit 451, inside each book is a man. So, I give the author a fair chance. 

At ArmadilloCon 47 this past September 12-14, I was working in the Convention Suite and two of the fen (not “fans”) were chatting. “Of course, I read Frankenstein,” said the one. Replied the other, “The 1818 or the 1819 version?” I was loading ice so I missed the rest, but I did check out two editions from the UT Perry-Castañeda Library. The book is nothing like the movies. (I have not seen the newest release from Guillermo del Toro.) 

• Frankenstein : the 1818 edition with related texts / Mary Shelley ; edited, with introduction and notes, by David Wootton. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851, author.; Wootton, David, 1952- editor.
• The annotated Frankenstein / Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley ; edited by Susan Wolfson and Ronald Levao. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851.; Wolfson, Susan J., 1948-; Levao, Ronald. 2012.

The proper title is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In my opinion, Mary Shelly failed to complete the analogy. Moreover, that context was not explored in any of the editions or criticisms that I found at the UT library. 

Prometheus (Forethought) was tasked by Zeus with creating animals to inhabit the Earth. His brother, Epimetheus  (Afterthought), gave all of them the strength, speed, agility, powerful talons, fangs, hides, horns, etc., etc., leaving Man with not much else. Prometheus gave Man intelligence — and fire. For that, he was chained to a mountain in the Caucasus and his liver was torn out by a vulture, only to regenerate overnight and be torn out again. We experience the tremors of his suffering as earthquakes. Mary Shelley did not carry through the many possible parallels. 

What does project to the reader is the dual nature of the monster. He is completely innocent, teaching himself to understand language, speech first and then writing. He discovers music, first in birds then from the old man in the cottage. He is vegetarian, subsisting on roots, leaves, and berries, sometimes cooking them after he learns (by accident) fire. He wants to be liked and loved but his horrendous form—eight feet tall and made from inanimate matter brought to life—draws only terror, rebuke, revulsion, and violence from everyone around him. He pays the world back in kind, at first killing a child then turning his attention to Victor Frankenstein’s family. Frankenstein pursues the monster to the North Pole but dies and the monster drifts off on an ice flow, promising to immolate himself. By Aristotle’s theory, the fable must be a tragedy, a story about a being brought down by circumstances not of his own choice but of his own making. 

Rayguns over Texas was published in 2013 by FACT the Fandom Association of Central Texas. It contains 19 short stories and eight essays. I bought my copy at my first ArmadilloCon (39) in 2017. The book disappeared into storage boxes when we moved from Austin to Kyle. Looking for something else, I found it and I now know some of these authors. So, I started with those stories. 

“Texas Died for Somebody’s Sins But Not Mine” by Stina Leicht is another Frankenstein story. This retelling has been informed by decades of science fiction and political theory. This monster is a transgenetic clone labelled “Dallas” and called “Una” who works as a computer programmer and is the legal property of a corporation. She is harmless and truly a victim. She escapes the software factory for one night of selfish pleasure. When she slips back in, she learns that she had been discovered. It does not matter on two grounds: this project is closing, so she was going be erased and reprogrammed with different skills anyway; and against that she knows that she had her own life for a short time, even though she will not remember any of it. 

I believe that “Operators are Standing By” by Rhonda Eudaly is a personal story told through aliens. Set in a galactic sales call center, it is about belonging. If you saw Boiler Room or Wall Street, you get the picture. Moreover, Fahrenheit 451’s Montag would say that this is autobiographical and is on a narrative level forbidden in his society. 

Of these first three stories, I found "Jump the Black" by Marshall Ryan Maresca to be the most emotionally engaged. The viewpoint character is an illegal alien, a Terran seeking to get off the Deathplanet which we turned Earth into. Imagine a world of homeless people, living on whatever is left of the streets, paying smugglers to get them anyplace else. Many die along the way. That’s how it is. Keep moving. 

After I finished the three-part review of ArmadilloCon 47 last month, I left messages in the contact pages of the websites of the vendors, authors, and fans whom I mentioned. Panelist Lauren Teffeau replied with corrections to my blog post. Reading her website, I discovered the Solar Punk subgenre in which home-brew solutions remediate some of the environmental sins of our time. From the libraries at the University of Texas (Austin), the City of Austin, and the City of Kyle, the closest I could come was Bike Topia: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction in Extreme Futures, volume 4 of the Bikes in Space series from Microcosm Publishing. 

The narrative style of “Riding in Place” by Sarena Ulibarri is matter-of-fact, unadorned writing. So, I just followed the story and I did not foresee the (surprise) conclusion. It is another smuggled alien story told from an outside viewpoint as we follow our human corporate worker on an industrial space station orbiting Earth. I was reminded of Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net which opens with a middle class corporate office work gang ripping up old telecom lines and patching the landscape.They do the job they are given but they don’t have much enthusiasm for it: “it’s community work,” they say. In Sarena Ulibarri’s utopia of megacity biking trails and parkways, everybody gets assigned some tough jobs and working on the space station is one of them. Hence the bicycles to maintain bone strength. 

Maddy Spencer’s "Meet Cute" is a graphic flash story with neither narration nor dialog. The pictures tell the story. Montag would have read this before he discovered books. 

"Portlandtown" by editor Elly Blue weaves the threads of self-discovery within a tapestry of complex future sociology told as history. 

The stories in BikeTopia are fresh. The plots are the ones we know from The Bible and The Iliad and Shakespeare. The tellings are new and now. 

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No One Needs a Computer in Their Home

“No one needs a computer in their home.” -- Ken Olsen, 1977.

What is really funny about that is the way Snopes debunked it back in 2004.  

Quote: “What Olsen was addressing in 1977 was the concept of powerful central computers that controlled every aspect of home life: turning lights on and off, regulating temperature, choosing entertainments, monitoring food supplies and preparing meals, etc. The subject of his remark was not the personal use computer that is now so much a part of the American home, but the environment-regulating behemoth of science fiction. Digital historian Edgar H. Schein described it thusly:‘What Olsen [was focusing on was] that in the 1950s and 1960s there existed the notion that the computer not only could but would control all aspects of our lives. Images of the fully computerized home that automatically turned lights on and off and that prepared meals and controlled daily diets were popular. And the fear that computers might, as in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, even try to take charge altogether was widely experienced.’ ”  -- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ken-olsen/

 On the eve of the Hall Process, Napoleon III served his most important state guests on aluminum dinnerware while dignitaries of lesser status ate from gold or silver. Our best hobby telescopes today in the $10,000 range would have been the envy of an observatory. Our dobsonian "light buckets" ten to 16 inches costing between $500 and $1000 would have been unthinkable to amateurs whose 3-inch refractors would be considered toys ($50 to $100) today. 

Your kitchen has appliances that would have been found only in laboratories of 1950, among them the variable high speed blender, microwave, and coffee filters.

If no one needs a computer in their home, do they need one in their pocket, to stream video chats, play music and movies, bring the news, and (functions I actually use) be a map accurate to ten feet, a directional compass, and a carpenter's level? 

Pundits of science tell us that the universe is beyond our imagination. I find it more compelling that our own civilization challenges our easy assumptions about what is possible--and what is helpful, useful, and ultimately necessary in common daily life.

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John Kemeny Knew: We Shall Have Computed

In Man and the Computer John G. Kemeny analyzed some aspects of society and a few institutions with suggested alternatives for them to be improved with the application of computers.  Many of Kemeny’s predictions were largely correct.  Some were very wrong. To be fair, the future of computers moved so fast that even William Gibson gave up cyberpunk for mainstream fiction. 

American Museum
of Natural History
Special Edition

Generally, John Kemeny failed to expect the invention of the microcomputer and the resultant home and office desktops and laptops that today are ubiquitous.  Although he wrote briefly about the advantages to video telephones, nothing he presented applies to the iPod. And much of what the iPod actually does –playing recorded music, taking pictures, giving directions to drivers – was not suggested for the video telephone. 

Throughout the book two complementary ideas frame the thesis: a regional network of mainframes will allow personal terminals for millions; this technology also will empower “social analysts” to attempt solutions to our problems.  Chief among those problems is traffic control in metropolitan centers.  But that only reflects the full range of challenges from overcrowding, over population and over consumption.  In short, John Kemeny was a fascist.  But a nice fascist.  He would never put anyone into a concentration camp for their beliefs, but he did see government authorities and academic experts as the central forces that can and should define and drive social progress.

Writing about business applications for computers, he outlined the power of management information systems.  He did not suggest that entrepreneurs would find computers helpful.  He certainly did not see a role for entrepreneurs in creating new modes of computing.  He did call for private entities to provide time-sharing mainframes and databases, but only to counterbalance the potential threat of government monopoly over information and access to it.  If John Kemeny read any Friedrich Hayek, it could only have appeared as an indecipherable alien language, written in Roman letters.

That aside though, this book was a seminal work and deserves attention for its positive attributes. 

Early on (35-37) he grants validity to the importance of games on the computer.  Gaming builds familiarity with the system, demystifying the computer. 

That describes my experience meeting my wife in 1977 in front of an HP 9830 on which our physics instructor at Lansing Community College, Claude Watson, taught “BASIC for Arts and Science.”

“At Dartmouth we do not consider these recreational uses frivolous. First of all, they are an important resource for recreation in a residential college environment. But, more importantly, for many inexperienced users the opportunity for playing games against a computer is a major factor in removing psychological blocks that frighten the average human being away from free use of machines.  Indeed, we are proud of the fact that one of the places that Dartmouth students take their dates to “show off” is the computation center.  While they are likely to play several games there, they are also quite likely to show off with programs that they themselves have written.” (35)

As a teacher, Kemeny’s insights into the value of computer-aided instruction were accurate.  (Ch. 7; 72-84; but also throughout) First, he acknowledged the importance of drill-and-practice.  Beyond that, he recognized that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it and we do that when we write a program to carry out a task. The three best uses from an educator’s point of view are rapid calculation, information retrieval, and the creation of algorithms.  (80) 

Kemeny correctly identified the need for a society of autodidacts, people who can teach themselves what they want to know by accessing databanks, journal articles, and lectures. (81-82).  Books will remain important and pleasurable (83), but their content must be supplemented with interactive learning sessions. 

Imagining “The Library of the Future” (Ch. 8; 85-98), Kemeny paints a detailed portrait of the product while totally missing the delivery mechanism. Focused on fiche images stored in card files and indexed by100-word abstracts, he did not expect that I could put “John Leonard Riddell” into Google Scholar and be led directly to a PDF of a lost work, Riddell’s 1836 monograph Memoir on the Nature of Miasm and Contagion. While some PDFs are image-only, this one is word-searchable.  I can quote easily and exactly to show Riddell’s assertion that disease is caused by germs (“animiculae”). 

Thomas Kurtz (Mac)
 and John Kemeny (PC)

For all of the prognostication and soothsaying, Kemeny in 1972 vastly underestimated the length, breadth, depth, and flow of the information revolution he would live to see welling up before he passed away too early in 1992 from heart failure. He calculated limits expressed in transmissions of megabits per second, delivering pages of storage, for dollars of rental time.  Today we throw out computers with more capacity than the network he dreamed of in 1972 for 1980.

Of course, he could not see the limitations and contradictions that would evolve from within a successful informatic revolution.

Kemeny wrote about the need for “computer programmers.” We are all computer programmers, but like oncologists who have their moles removed by dermatologists, we are specialists, too often as limited in our skills with computers as our parents before us.  The other day at work, I saw two young managers scan receipts to JPEG files with their iPods to facilitate the filing of expense reports.  As their technical writer, I know that neither of them knows much about word processing software, or they would not have Arial in their Calibri and they would know what the red squiggly underline is trying to tell them.  I warrant that none of the 40 project managers on my current infrastructure integration project could write a program to translate Roman numerals into Arabic numbers, though many of them are certified for Microsoft Project. (Myself, in 2007, I completed an undergraduate requirement for “computer literacy” by taking a class in Java a kind of Basic done up in Rococo.)

This post comes with some irony.  As I read the book, I made notes in the front, a couple of words and a page number for each.  Then I copied the page numbers and tags into this Word document to start the article.  To get them into order, I highlighted and sorted. Seeing 111 ahead of 87, I went back and prepended zeroes to the two-digit integers. Then I resorted.  Like much else, technology stays the same the more it changes.

Finally, Kemeny outlines a problem in simulation (traffic control) at some depth (130-135). He is correct that the general purpose digital computer allows flexible creation and testing of models.  One promise not addressed was the testing of existing models.

Today’s controversies in anthropogenic global warming only bring this into the front.  A model is based on assumptions.  Data tests those premises.  Real validation or falsification can only come from new data not in the original model; or else from different models employing the original data.  Aside from some curve-fitting with least-squares, we seem not to do much of this, certainly not in the social sciences.  If the essence of John Kemeny’s apology for computing is to be accepted, then modeling – both making and testing – must become a requirement for informatic literacy.

Postscript -- Speaking of literacy, to check the grammatical future in English, I googled "english grammar future tense" and read a Wikipedia article, then paged forward and read more at www.lousywriter.com. John Kemeny knew. 

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Claude M. Watson
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