Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (102 page)

Best not to leave Doctrine any prisoners to torture.

Jedao was falling over sideways. Someone caught his arm. Commander Menowen. “You ought to let us take care of the mopping up, sir,” she said. “You’re not well.”

She could relieve him of duty. Reverse his orders. Given that the world was one vast blur, he couldn’t argue that he was in any fit shape to assess the situation. He tried to speak again, but the pain hit again, and he couldn’t remember how to form words.

“I don’t like to press at a time like this,” Korais was saying to Menowen, “but the Lanterner general—”

“General Jedao has spoken,” Menowen said crisply. “Find another way, Captain.” She called for a junior officer to escort Jedao out of the command center.

Words were said around him, a lot of them. They didn’t take him to his quarters. They took him to the medical center. All the while he thought about lights and shrapnel and petals falling endlessly in the dark.

Commander Menowen came to talk to him after he was returned to his quarters. The mopping up was still going on. Menowen was carrying a small wooden box. He hoped it didn’t contain more medications.

“Sir,” Menowen said, “I used to think heretics were just heretics, and death was just death. Why does it matter to you how they die?”

Menowen had backed him against Doctrine, and she hadn’t had to. That meant a lot.

She hadn’t said that she didn’t have her own reasons. She had asked for his. Fair enough.

Jedao had served with Kel who would have understood why he had balked. A few of them would have shot him if he had turned over an enemy officer, even a heretic, for torture. But as he advanced in rank, he found fewer and fewer such Kel. One of the consequences of living in a police state.

“Because war is about people,” Jedao said. “Even when you’re killing them.”

“I don’t imagine that makes you popular with Doctrine,” Menowen said.

“The Rahal can’t get rid of me because the Kel like me. I just have to make sure it stays that way.”

She looked at him steadily. “Then you have one more Kel ally, sir. We have the final tally. We engaged ninety-one hellmoths and destroyed forty-nine of them. Captain-magistrate Korais is obliged to report your actions, but given the numbers, you are going to get a lot of leniency.”

There would have been around 400 crew on each of the hellmoths. He had already seen the casualty figures for his own fangmoths and the three Rahal vessels that had gotten involved, fourteen dead and fifty-one injured.

“Leniency wasn’t what I was looking for,” Jedao said.

Menowen nodded slowly.

“Is there anything exciting about our journey to Twin Axes, or can I go back to being an invalid?”

“One thing,” she said. “Doctrine has provisionally declared a remembrance of your victory to replace the Day of Broken Feet. He says it is likely to be approved by the high magistrates. Since we didn’t provide a heretic focus for torture, we’re burning effigy candles.” She hesitated. “He said he thought you might prefer this alternative remembrance. You don’t want to be caught shirking this.” She put the box down on the nearest table.

“I will observe the remembrance,” Jedao said, “although it’s ridiculous to remember something that just happened.”

Menowen’s mouth quirked. “One less day for publicly torturing criminals,” she said, and he couldn’t argue. “That’s all, sir.”

After she had gone, Jedao opened the box. It contained red candles in the shape of hellmoths, except the wax was additionally carved with writhing bullet-ridden figures.

Jedao set the candles out and lit them with the provided lighter, then stared at the melting figures.
I don’t think you understand what I’m taking away from these remembrance days,
he thought. The next time he won some remarkable victory, it wasn’t going to be against some unfortunate heretics. It was going to be against the high calendar itself. Every observance would be a reminder of what he had to do next—and while everyone lost a battle eventually, he had one more Kel officer in his corner, and he didn’t plan on losing now.

About the Author

Yoon Ha Lee
is an award-nominated Korean-American sf/f writer (mostly short stories) who majored in math and finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for sf/f story ideas. Her fiction has appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Tor.com
and
Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
Her collection
Conservation of Shadows
will be published in 2013.

The Future, One Thing at a Time

Matthew Johnson

It’s conventional wisdom in science fiction that the future doesn’t come one thing at a time. This idea, which is sometimes called Campbell’s Rule (or Campbell’s Exception), is explained in these terms in the book
On Writing Science Fiction
by George Scithers et. al: “You can never do merely one thing. Our world a century hence could be almost as alien as another planet; each change triggers countless others.” As fondly as the book is remembered, history shows that this rule simply isn’t accurate. Different fields of science and technology do not march in lock-step; the world may change more rapidly or slowly for different places and people, and sometimes it really does change one thing at a time.

As literary advice, the rule was probably meant to prevent the sort of shallow stories that focus on a single change or technology in isolation. These are particularly common among beginners and among non-genre writers dipping their toes into the genre, which may be why SF writers and editors hold to this rule so fiercely. The problem is that it embodies an attitude towards technology that forms a big part of why so much older SF feels dated today. It may also lead to a lot of today’s most cutting-edge SF seeming out-of-step in just a few years: just as we laugh at giant computers of old SF novels and the voice-call-only communicators in the original
Star Trek,
many novels published just a decade ago are already beginning to look left behind. (Nearly all books that depict online social spaces, for instance, portray environments that are nearer to Second Life than to Facebook, while hackers are shown as outlaw programmers rather than basement-dwelling script kiddies.)

Why do we believe that the future can’t happen one thing at a time? In my opinion, it’s based on three fundamental fallacies about technological progress.

First, the fallacy that
technological progress is inevitable.
This is the idea that the future must be different from the past, but in many ways our lives are fundamentally the same as they were 20, 50, or 100 years ago. Consider a typical morning: we are likely awakened by an alarm clock (first adjustable, mechanical alarm clock patented 1847), eat a breakfast of eggs, toast or, if we are feeling particularly futuristic, corn flakes (patented 1896); shower in water heated by electricity (first electric water heater patented 1889) or gas (1868); put on clothing made of cotton (made affordable by the cotton gin in 1793) mixed with, perhaps, some synthetics such as nylon (1935), Lycra (1959) or Gore-Tex (1976).

Many technologies basically stop developing, in some cases surprisingly quickly: the development of canned and frozen foods led SF writers to imagine endless variations on technologies for synthesizing and preserving foods, but the food in your pantry and freezer was made in ways that have scarcely changed since the days of Louis Pasteur or Clarence Birdseye. Technologies can even disappear: Although digital watches were once a powerful symbol of futurism, if you’re under 30 you’re unlikely to put one on before leaving the house, preferring to get the time from your phone instead. (Some of these abandoned technologies eventually make a comeback: If you stop for a bathroom break you’re using a toilet that was pioneered in Minoan Crete and then forgotten for more than two millennia.)

When technologies do continue to develop, most of the changes that occurred after the initial flurry of innovation are basically
incremental,
things that improve the experience of using a technology without altering its basic function. The alarm clock, for instance, has undergone numerous changes—electrification, digital readout, the ability to play music and radio broadcasts—but what it does, and the role it plays in our lives, is unchanged. There are some genuinely disruptive technologies which change the world on a large scale: The classic example is the automobile which, as Scithers notes, shaped the 20th century in dozens of ways, from hollowing out cities to causing wars. But even these technologies soon settle into a state of slow, incremental change. When we drive to work we are using a machine that, while safer, more fuel-efficient, and easier to drive, is fundamentally little different from the Model T.

Moreover, the effects of things like the automobile create their own inertia; they often act as a brake on the changes other technologies might cause. Look at personal computers and the Internet. Not so long ago we imagined that, because of these advances, we would all be working from home, with employers hiring from a global pool of remote employees. Instead we still drive to work in offices (where we may use computers less powerful than the ones we have at home), and our children sit in rows in classrooms, paper and pens in hand, all because cities have been planned for cars and our educational system has been built to meet the needs of 19th-century industrial technology.

Truly disruptive technologies are the exception, not the rule. Few have anywhere near the impact of the automobile or even the Internet. A more typical example would be the microwave, a device that is uncannily similar to the “instant cookers” found in so many imagined futures but which has nevertheless utterly failed to replace the oven. When technology does change society, it’s much more common that only some sectors are affected—and it’s rarely possible to predict which ones and in which ways. Despite being funded by the military, the Internet has had little effect on the life of the average soldier. Nor has it much changed academia, despite the fact that academics were the first to use it. What it changed instead was the music industry. The unexpected collision of the Internet with cheap memory and digital compact discs (which the industry itself introduced, goosing profits in the short term but inadvertently digging its own grave) made it possible for consumers to rip and share songs, leading an entire generation to think of music as something they only have to pay for if they feel like it. Even within that industry, change has been uneven: Classical and jazz have been much less affected, since listeners tend to be older and sound quality is more highly valued, while the sheet-music business is near to dead because files are smaller and no quality is lost in copying.

The second fallacy about technological progress is that
all technology progresses at the same rate.
This likely has its origin in the roots of SF in the 19th century, in which a small number of basic technologies—primarily efficient motors, mass production, and electric power—led to fairly uniform technological development across much of society. The last 80-odd years, however, have seen a much more varied rate of progress, as industrial technology has largely stalled and other fields, in particular computer and communications technology, have developed in ways that were almost unimaginable based on their starting points. This is why they appear in little or no older SF, or appear in forms that are nothing like how they actually evolved. For all the giant computers that were hell-bent on controlling the world (or were already in control of it), it’s hard to find an example as late as the 1970s of a personal computer on a par with an Apple II, much less an iPad.

Technological progress is also often dependent on factors other than technology itself. One way in which our world
would
be almost unrecognizable to anyone visiting from more than 25 years in the past is that it is nearly cashless. While bills and coins are still in circulation, it’s rare that we
have
to pay cash for anything. In that case, though, the technology had been around for years before it had much of an effect. Credit cards were first introduced in 1959, while the magnetic stripe that made them less of a hassle to use appeared in 1970. It was only after a 1970’s Supreme Court ruling allowed banks to operate under the usury laws of their home state—effectively allowing them to set their own interest rates—that credit cards became profitable, rather than the loss-leader service they had previously been. Today it’s hard to imagine our world without credit cards. To name just one example, without them the Internet would be much more like the “world mind” imagined by SF writers than the shopping mall/arcade/peepshow (with a small library attached) that it is today.

This isn’t to say that technology doesn’t change our lives, but the
ways
in which it does so are subtle, unpredictable, and different for various places and people. This leads to the third fallacy of technological progress in SF:
Everyone uses technology in the same way.
Most early SF was written by (or from the point of view of) scientists and engineers, and the genre still bears the stamp of that viewpoint today; also, SF writers tend to be enthusiastic early adopters of new technologies, which colors their view. But widespread adoption of a technology (and therefore its continued development) can often depend on the unexpected uses found for it by unexpected audiences. These audiences may also choose not to adopt technologies until they reach a point where they are useful to them.

A good example is the landline telephone, something which we consider to be a fundamental feature of modern life but which never caught on in much of Africa due to a number of factors that prevented the investment in infrastructure needed. That didn’t mean that there was no desire for the technology: When cell phones, which have a much smaller infrastructure footprint, became affordable, they spread across Africa, leapfrogging generations of communications technology and leading to a level of adoption that for some years was higher than in most industrialized nations.