Goodbye

Studies of the Future

shock of Houston, supposedly conservative city undergoing constant convulsions of change

everyone moving, leaving one family to make another

 past and present without value, only future: get rich, move away or buy yourself into private comfort

warning about dangers of growth, climate change

now how future should be but forms future takes

change in quarter century: student's lifetime and my career

course will die but served purpose

like the future, this last class was one that could never be imagined until it happened

like previous courses, a mix of dedicated sf enthusiasts and students who didn't know what they were getting into

you guys took over

retirement

For first time I didn't know what you were talking about enough of the time that I couldn't entirely control or direct what was happening

Didn't feel wrong, it's change, it's inevitable

+ always treated me respectfully, so exemplified our definition of evolution: continuity + change, the old and the new, past and future meeting in the present

flip side: if I don't know what you're talking about, increasing chance that what I'm talking about is becoming less relevant

future I no longer lead into, but got you this far, so make it happen

now your turn, thanks for helping with mine.

Allusion

Hinterlands 1.15, 2.1, 2.8, 3.2 (Kurtz), 4.6 Bambi, 7.7

Kuhn allusion; cf. Poplar Street Study

extended metaphor

Hinterlands flies 7.2, 7.8

1.16] Tsiolkovsky 1 is fixed at the liberation point between Earth's gravity and the moon's, but we need a lightsail to hold us here, twenty tons of aluminum spun into a hexagon, ten kilometers from side to side. That sail towed us out from Earth orbit, and now it's our anchor. We use it to tack against the photon stream, hanging here beside the thing the point, the singularity we call the Highway. [the singularity = popular science term for advanced evolutionary-technological transformation]

[1.17] The French call it le metro, the subway, and the Russians call it the river, but subway won't carry the distance, and river, for Americans, can't carry quite the same loneliness. Call it the Tovyevski Anomaly Coordinates if you don't mind bringing Olga into it.

[1.18] Olga Tovyevski, Our Lady of Singularities, Patron Saint of the Highway.

[3.6] But when he opened her right fist, something spun free and tumbled in slow motion a few centimeters from the synthetic quartz of his faceplate. It looked like a seashell.

[3.8] They had better luck with the seashell. Exobiology* suddenly found itself standing on unnervingly solid ground: one and seven-tenths grams of highly organized biological information, definitely extraterrestrial. Olga's seashell generated an entire subbranch of the science, devoted exclusively to the study of . . . Olga's seashell. [*Exobiology = astrobiology, study of life in universe beyond Earth]

[8.1] Late that night Charmian brought a special kind of darkness down to my cubicle, individual doses sealed in heavy foil. It was nothing like the darkness of Big Night, that sentient, hunting dark that waits to drag the hitchhikers down to Wards, that dark that incubates the Fear. It was a darkness like the shadows moving in the back seat of your parents' car, on a rainy night when you're five years old, warm and secure.

"Hinterlands" (BC 58-79)

58 dreaming of wet, dark streets in winter. Pain

58 bonephone implant, patched directly into the pain centers

58 we’ve got business

59 a confirmed meatshot: a returning ship with active medical telemetry, contents one (1) body, warm, psychological status as yet unconfirmed

59 clinical depression. One of the occupational hazards of being a surrogate

59 “Where are you getting all that dope?”

59 Toby Halpert’s Place in the Universe

Worker’s Paradise back at L-5

59-60 Tsiolkovsky 1 is fixed at the liberation point between Earth’s gravity and the moon’s, but need a lightsail to hold us here [cf. cyberfiddle story]

60 hanging here beside the thing—the point, the singularity—we call the Highway.

            The French call it le metro, the subway, and the Russians call it the river. . . Call the Tovyevski Anomaly Coordinates if you don’t mind bringing Olga into it. Olga Tovyevski, Our Lady of Singularities, Patron Saint of the Highway.

60 pictures of Saint Olga that Charmian had taped . . . Our Lady of the Highway

60 en route to Mars, solo; her role in the experiments could have been handled by a standard household timer.

61 easily the most photogenic cosmonaut of either gender

61 the Alyut was gone

61 a young physicist began to slam the side of his monitor, like an enraged pinball finalist protesting TILT.

61 elevator . . . up to Heaven looked like Hollywood’s best shot at a Bauhaus mummy case . . . .

62 Heaven . . . ripe Disney dream of homecoming

62 a constant stream of raw data

63 corporate logos

63 ritual of drugs in pockets

64 Olga, our first hitchhiker

64 She blipped back into our space time like some amateur’s atrocious special effect

64 She’d gone after the ship’s communications gear with her bare hands

65 right fist, something spun free . . . looked like a seashell

65 she came, in her martyrdom, to fill whole libraries with frozen aisles of precious relics . . . more than 2 million tissue slides

65 seashell. Exobiology . . . : one and 7/10 grams of highly organized biological information, definitely extraterrestrial

65 product of no known terrestrial biosphere . . . come from another star. Olga had either visited the place of its origin or come into contact, however distantly, with something that was, or had once been, capable of making the trip.

65 Major Grosz . .. ship vanished . . .234 days later he returned

66 committed suicide, Highway’s 2^nd victim; elaborate recording gear blank

66 Soviet Union might avail itself of the best minds in Western psychiatry

66 dummy Highway boat . . . a prop, a set piece

67 Heaven runs on Greenwich Standard . . . Birds have a very hard time in the absence of true gravity

68 “We’re getting fragments from Hofmannstahl . . . ‘Shone Maschine,’ something . . . ‘Beautiful machine’ . . . “

68 a breath of Heaven’s air . . . like cool white wine

69 Texas accent

69 Chilean Jorge . . . I knew he was a live one, one of the 10%. Our DOA count runs at 20%. Suicide. 70% of the meatshots are automatic candidates for Wards: the diaper cases, mumblers, totally gone. Charmian and I are surrogates for that final 10%.

70 Heaven was built after a dead Frenchman returned with a 10-centimeter ring of magnetically coded steel locked in his cold hand, black parody of the lucky kid who wins the free ride on the merry-go-round. . . . that ring was the Rosetta stone for cancer. So now it’s cargo cult time for the human race. We can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thousand years.

70 Charmian says that contact with ‘superior” civilizations is something you don’t wish on your worst enemy.

70 multinationals

71 “That’s your minute.” . . . more like 3 minutes

71 promise of pain . . . there each time

71 poem Hiro quotes, Teach us to care and not to care.

71 like intelligent houseflies wandering through an international airport

71 At the edge of the highway every human language unravels

71 but the highway governed by rules

72 Dozens of new schools of physics have sprung up in Saint Olga’s wake. . . . hear the paradigms shatter . . . lifework of some corporate think tank is reduced to the tersest historical footnote, and al in the time it takes your damaged traveler to mutter some fragment in the dark.

72 Smart flies stick with Black Box theory . . . what we put into the box and what we get back out of it . . . optimize this exchange

72 we aren’t the only flies who’ve found their way into an airport. We’ve collected artifacts from at least half a dozen wildly divergent cultures. “More hicks.”

73 when the gestalt clicks, Hiro and I meld into something else

73 he was right: something felt terribly wrong this time

74 imagined Charmian wading in the shallow water, bright drops beading on her thighs, long-legged girl in a fishpond in Heaven

74 the Fear found me, really found me, for the first time

74 vast, the very hollow of night, an emptiness cold and implacable. It was last words, deep space, every long goodbye in the history of our species.

75 long finger of Big Night . . . Olga knew it first, Saint Olga. She tried to hide us from it, clawing at her radio gear

75 He hit me with the pain switch . . . like a cattle prod . . . drove me through the Fear

75 almost homelike . . . .mold itself around an absence

76 a surgical manipulator is carefully programmed against suicides, but it can double as a robot dissector, preparing biologicals for storage.

            She’d found a way to fool it. You usually can, with machines, given time. She’d had eight years.

77 Charmian brought a special kind of darkness . . . sealed in heavy foil. . . It was a darkness like the shadows moving in the back seat of your parents’ car, on a rainy night when you’re five years old, warm and secure.

77 business as usual, really. A bad day in Heaven, but it’s never easy.

77-8 They talked about Leni’s diagrams and about her ballpoint sketches of molecular chains that shift on command. Molecules that can function as switches, logic elements, even a kind of wiring, built up in layers into a single very large molecule, a very small computer.

78 We aren’t the only hinterland tribe, the only ones looking for scraps.

78 Cling to this dark, warm and close . . . get high enough . . . hear the sea . . something we carry with us, no matter how far from home.

78 She holds the current record. She kept a man alive for two weeks

78 We both have the drive, though, that special need, that freak dynamic that lets us keep going back to Heaven. . . . Some people just aren’t taken, and nobody knows why. And you’ll never get a second chance.

78 feeling of profound rejection. But I’d wanted to go, wanted it so bad. Charmian, too.

79 Olga must have know, must have seen it all, somehow … . Even now, knowing what I know, I still want to go. I never will

79 her white smile, forever.

Most of our time units are based on astronomy

1 day = 1 rotation of the Earth (night and day, light and shadow)

1 month = approximately 1 complete revolution of the moon (month = moonth)

1 year = 1 revolution of earth around sun.

Exception (non-astronomical units of time)

The week as 7 days has no observable basis in nature

Instead, cultural or scriptural < Genesis account of God creating world in 6 days, resting on 7th

Futurists like H. G. Wells have proposed 10-day weeks (with 3 day weekends)

instructor's questions

How does the unknown become known? (look for metaphors)

Does apocalypse become evolutionary adaptation?

Chocco 213 our home here on this planet

“Newton’s Sleep”

back matter: 341-352

+ fiction: dialogue of voices, views, esp. gender

Ike as dominant voice

But

Susan

Esther

Anti-Semitic voice

People left behind

Women repressed in fundamentalist state: Reason

Cryogenics

Breakdown of nation-state?

Apocalypse

Ecological disaster > depopulation?

Earth as woman / mother

Survival of fittest

Race in future / science fiction

“New Urbanism”

Escape / engage

+ fiction: dialogue of voices, views esp. gendered

Ike as dominant voice

But

Susan

Esther

Anti-Semitic voice

People left behind

312 women and children sentimental, “homesick”

316 Susan: “I guess I’m a little afraid of oversimplifying.”

319 Susan: Her silence was almost hostile, and he resented it.

319 blames monitors

Susan: “He didn’t need to listen to the monitors.”

327 after your eye transplant . . . That would be stupid, Esther.

328 “What if I . . .don’t want to”

328 Susan. Her mother was silent.

328 “You’ll make the reasonable choice.”

334 Helena takes over leadership of Emergency Committee

334 hallucinations > ghosts

334 bison!

335 Susan: a vine growing by the front door

Women repressed in fundamentalist state: Reason

312 women and children sentimental, “homesick”

318 The discourse concerned power, and the teachers didn’t understand it; few women did.

321 telling ghost stories, quoting hysterical little girls

Cryogenics

313 organfreezes, fishsticks

Breakdown of nation-state?

Maybe just a fictional theme, not necessarily desirabl

World-wide human rights, then OK

If Texas doesn’t have Massachusetts, Texas still has slavery or at least segregation; if Massachusetts doesn’t have Texas, choked on taxes

311 Government of the Atlantic Union

311 Atlantic Union > USA > Republic of California

313 resource exhaustion, population explosion, the breakdown of government

317 Sonny was a drawling, smiling good ole boy from the CSA [Confederate?]

Apocalypse

311 millenarian cult group 

317 Down there: life, liberty, and the pursuit > Four Horsemen

Ecological disaster > depopulation?

311 depopulated chemical wastelands of the San Joaquin Valley

312 Amazon Basin. Dunes and bald red plains

312-13 “It’s all dead.  How come everybody isn’t up here?”

“Money.”

“weren’t willing to trust reason”

313 resource exhaustion, population explosion, the breakdown of government

313 immense dust storm, deserts of Amazonia

Earth as woman / mother

312 women and children sentimental, “homesick”

315 monitors: a lien, a tie, an umbilicus.  I wish we could cut it.

321 “did you hear about this burned woman . . . “

325 All right, so maybe this burned woman was a black woman

Survival of fittest

322 every single person must be fit

Race in future / science fiction + rich-poor gap

312 wore glasses, like some slum kid

318 geology, not ethnicity!

320 Susan: “Ike, Spes people are very conventional, conservative people, hadn’t you noticed?  Very elitist people.  How could we be anything but? . . . Power hierarchy, division of labor by gender, Cartesian values, totally mid-twentieth century!” . . . You pay for safety.”

322 lack of African-ancestry colonists: closed community

322 every single person must be fit

322 After the breakdown of public schooling during the Refederation, blacks just didn’t get the training

322 wonderful people, of course . . . through no fault of their own, disadvantaged from the start [irony of language]

324 those people that used to live where that was before the desert, right.  Africa?

324 they’d been born in the Colony.  They’d never lived outside.

Esther had.  She remembered . . . cockroaches, rain, pollution alerts, Saviora

324 Saviora: “I just be your eyes, OK? And you be my brain, OK, in arithmetic?”

325 All right, so maybe this burned woman was a black woman

325 when all the faces in your whole world were soft and white and fat

332 like some old tape in anthro or something

337 Esther released, little black girl came with wife’s note

“New Urbanism”

314 The Roses lived in Vermont, faced on Vermont Common [cf. New Urbanism]

314 horizon projection

Escape / engage (escape Earth / live here)

311 Earth was not a viable option

311 liberation point

316 turn us from clinging to the past, free us toward actuality and the future

316 What relevance is anything about Earth going to have to those people?  They’ll be true spacedwellers

316 Susan: “I guess I’m a little afraid of oversimplifying.”

336 Susan: “If I don’t think about it in those words. If I just look at it . . . it makes sense.  How did we, how could we have thought we could just leave?  Who do we think we are?”

336 “Is surgery the answer to all your problems?”

338 boulder

338 “Now we can go down.”

311 Government of the Atlantic Union

311 Leap Year Coup

311 Atlantic Union > USA > Republic of California

311 millenarian cult group

311 depopulated chemical wastelands of the San Joaquin Valley

311 dometown = prototype of Special Earth Satellite

311 new epidemic

311 Earth was not a viable option

311 liberation point 

311 Ramirez’s hordes had overrun Bakersfield [reversal of USA invasion of mid-19c]

312 wore glasses, like some slum kid

312 women and children sentimental, “homesick”

312 wanted his children to see what Earth was and why they had left it

312 Amazon Basin. Dunes and bald red plains

312-13 “It’s all dead.  How come everybody isn’t up here?”

“Money.”

“weren’t willing to trust reason”

313 resource exhaustion, population explosion, the breakdown of government

313 reason x luck, God, or easy fix

313 organfreezes, fishsticks

313 immense dust storm, deserts of Amazonia

313 “x-luck; x-chosen people; we chose.”

314 Susan: “And we sacrificed”

314 Ike’s mother: “Leave me to breathe smog, okay?”

314 Chicago Dome

314 rapidly mutating virus, 2 billion human deaths

Ø  slowrad syndrome and famine

314 The Roses lived in Vermont, faced on Vermont Common [cf. New Urbanism]

314 horizon projection

315 monitors: a lien, a tie, an umbilicus.  I wish we could cut it.

315 x-landscapes.  Let it find its own aesthetic.

316 turn us from clinging to the past, free us toward actuality and the future

316 What relevance is anything about Earth going to have to those people?  They’ll be true spacedwellers

316 Susan: “I guess I’m a little afraid of oversimplifying.”

316 Weather . . . that stupid, impossible unpredictability!

316-17 happy, absolutely happy . . . negative ions . . . rational happiness

317 Down there: life, liberty, and the pursuit > Four Horsemen

317 Sonny was a drawling, smiling good ole boy from the CSA [Confederate?]

318 The discourse concerned power, and the teachers didn’t understand it; few women did.

318 geology, not ethnicity!

319 Susan: Her silence was almost hostile, and he resented it.

319 blames monitors

Susan: “He didn’t need to listen to the monitors.”

320 Susan: “Ike, Spes people are very conventional, conservative people, hadn’t you noticed?  Very elitist people.  How could we be anything but? . . . Power hierarchy, division of labor by gender, Cartesian values, totally mid-twentieth century!” . . . You pay for safety.”

320 door of NE framehouse, but hissed open sideways

321 prochips

321 “did you hear about this burned woman . . . “

321 telling ghost stories, quoting hysterical little girls

321-22 projecting designs for second ship, rationally beautiful, form follows function

322 lack of African-ancestry colonists: closed community

322 every single person must be fit

322 After the breakdown of public schooling during the Refederation, blacks just didn’t get the training

322 wonderful people, of course . . . through no fault of their own, disadvantaged from the start [irony of language]

323 only one criterion: excellence

323 a working scientist, a breeding woman, a 200-IQ kid

323 a warm body sighed inside the darkness

324 those people that used to live where that was before the desert, right.  Africa?

324 they’d been born in the Colony.  They’d never lived outside.

Esther had.  She remembered . . . cockroaches, rain, pollution alerts, Saviora

324 Saviora: “I just be your eyes, OK? And you be my brain, OK, in arithmetic?”

325 All right, so maybe this burned woman was a black woman

325 when all the faces in your whole world were soft and white and fat

325 English, the only language she would ever know.  Roaches, rain, Spanish, all washed away

326 Her mother’s half-brother . . . my family!

Maybe the word did mean something

327 16 = age of reason

327 like he has to control everything or everything will be out of control

327 after your eye transplant . . . That would be stupid, Esther.

328 “What if I . . .don’t want to”

328 Susan. Her mother was silent.

328 “You’ll make the reasonable choice.”

328 the Hag? Sort of Asian, you know . . other people sitting at the table and they were black

329 mass hallucination and environmental deprivation

330 aching need to be alone . . . just to be alone, sitting at his Schoenfeldt screen, in the night, in peace.

331 Laxness: “our guilt.”

331 Larane: “nobody is hysterical.  These people are here.”

332 like some old tape in anthro or something

332 had on animal skins, but they were actually kind of beautiful

332 they might be seeing us

332 people are getting closer

333 “To deny what I and the people with me see, that would be just as insane.”

333 goldfish . . . came out of the tap

334 Helena takes over leadership of Emergency Committee

334 hallucinations > ghosts

334 bison!

335 Susan: a vine growing by the front door

335 no earth in Spes

335 Noah: “It’s going backwards, Dad: people > animals > plants”

336 Susan: “If I don’t think about it in those words. If I just look at it . . . it makes sense.  How did we, how could we have thought we could just leave?  Who do we think we are?”

336 “Is surgery the answer to all your problems?”

337 Esther released, little black girl came with wife’s note

338 boulder

338 “Now we can go down.”