From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Apr 27 2002 - 19:28:25 MDT
At 02:31 PM 4/25/02 -0700, Hal wrote:
>So what is life like in Vinge's 2020?
>The biggest technological change involves ubiquitous computing,
>wearables, and augmented reality (although none of those terms are used).
>Everyone wears contacts or glasses which mediate their view of the world.
>This allows computer graphics to be superimposed on what they see.
[...]
>In Vinge's hands this is an astonishingly powerful technology.
>Remember the mediatrons from Diamond Age, where any surface could be
>turned into a display? You have the same thing here, except it's all in
>the eye of the beholder, so to speak.
This technology was implicit, but masked, in Samuel R. Delany's important
1984 novel STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND.
< `The door deliquesced' (p. 244) is a rather swaggering play on Heinlein's
paradigmatic `The door dilated', discussed above. `The blue crystal, behind
us now, began to foam; the foam rose, climbing at the jambs faster than in
the middle and darkening, and shutting out light as the door's
semi-crystals effloresced' (ibid.). This is absurd as technology; it might
be decorative special-effects, however, for one of the book's principal
cognitive shocks - whose slow fore-tremors build as we try to correlate
place and movement - is that an indeterminate amount of the `excess
scenography' displayed is fraudulent, generated by brain-tricking
`cassettes'.
This is finally brought to our attention on pp. 339-41, where George Thant
turns off Marq's gorgeous open-air sleeping platform and reveals a rundown
three-metre square metal box. It is an interesting tactic, for Delany
(mis)uses our familiarity with sf mega-text decoding conventions to trick
us into supposing that `limen-plates' teleport people to distant locations,
when in fact they are merely local entrances into detailed holographic fake
environments. With a moral jolt one asks: does this mean that Korga, the
only person in the world unable to access information sources by direct
neural connection, moves through a savagely denuded homescape, one more
overlooked item of psychic and social dispossession? > (READING BY STARLIGHT)
Damien Broderick
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