BOOK REVIEW: BUCKNER, WATERMIND

M. M. Buckner, Watermind, Tor, $24.95, 301 pp. (ISBN: 978-0-7653-2024-7). Publication date: November 2008.


One of the old science fiction and fantasy tropes is the Thing from the Swamp. The Thing can be a primordial monster with a craving to devour shrieking maidens, a space alien just as hungry, or a spontaneous emergence from swamp muck mutated by a radioactive or chemical spill (and of course this one's hungry too). In Watermind, M. M. Buckner adds one more genesis: In the throw-away society that is modern America, millions of tons of electronic gadgetry gets tossed. That's a lot of chips, some of which are pretty tiny (think of RFID chips). In the near future we can expect to see even tinier chips in the mix as nanotech gets rolling. That's a lot of might-be computing power, certainly enough to suppose that as the rivers roll the rubbish downstream into the Mississippi, eddies might collect a critical mass of circuitry into a single spot such as Devil's Swamp, where CJ Reilly, a brilliant young lady who has fled MIT under the whip of her late father's scorn, and her sort-of boyfriend, Max Pottevents, a zydeco musician, are contract laborers cleaning up a chemical spill.

After what I just said about Swamp Things, you just have to be expecting a great big GOTCHA at this point. But no. They stumble on a patch of water that is frozen solid despite the muggy local climate. It does weird things, and CJ--being brilliant--starts hypothesizing madly. Before long a corporate honcho is involved, some of those hypotheses are looking good, and efforts are under way to sample, capture, and destroy the Swamp Thing.

Except it's pretty good at wriggling out of traps. A couple of people die as it defends itself. It destroys wharfs and barges. And before long it's grown much larger, demonstrated an astonishing ability to adapt, and headed down the river toward New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The corporate honcho is growing desperate (he dreads the prospects of lawsuits galore and inevitable bankruptcy), while CJ, with Max's help, is trying to teach the Thing music and communicate with it.

Yup. It's alive and perhaps even sentient. It's not some evil, ravening monster, for it can transmute initial lessons in 4/4 time into a 3/4 waltz. It's a waltzing Swamp Thing! And there we are, trying to destroy it as it wriggles and flees. A few older exercises in the trope have accused humans of being the bad guys, but never quite so blatantly. Justice might require that our destructive efforts somehow backfire on us, but no. Buckner says we're pretty effective when we set out to destroy things. On the other hand, the Thing is very mutable. The ending, depending on whose side you take, is either terrifying or hopeful.

There are some basic technical problems with the book, however. The idea that a sentient neural net could emerge from waterborne electronic garbage is awfully far-fetched, but let that go. More of a problem is Buckner's sense of the biology in which the net is embedded and which it coopts. For one thing, bacteria do not have cell nuclei. In fact, the lack of nuclei is one of their major defining features. And it would have been so easy to edit out any mention of bacterial nuclei--well, I'm reviewing this from an Advance Reading Copy, and some changes will be made before hardbounds hit the stores. Maybe the nuclei will vanish, leaving behind a story which, if unlikely, is still a lot of fun.

BOOK REVIEW: CLARKE & POHL, THE LAST THEOREM

Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl, The Last Theorem, Del Rey, $27, 303 pp. (ISBN: 978-0-345-47021-8). Publication date: August 2008.


The late Arthur C. Clarke fell in love with Sri Lanka many years ago and for many years made his home there. Among the many novels that endeared him to readers everywhere--not just science fiction readers--was Fountains of Paradise (1979), which centered on the construction of a space elevator. It is thus perhaps no surprise that his last novel should revisit the latter in his beloved home setting.

Together Clarke and the almost equally famed Frederik Pohl have penned The Last Theorem. The central character is Ranjit Subramanian, son of a temple priest, who has gone off to university. He's a clueless 16-year-old, very smart, very self-centered, and already enchanted by the tale of India's number-theory genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan. He doesn't see the point to many courses, is enthralled by astronomy 101, and is obsessed by Fermat's Last Theorem, which insists that there is a compact proof that although two squares can sum to another square (the Pythagorean Theorem), no two cubes can sum to a third cube (indeed, for n > 2, a^n + b^n cannot equal c^n). He muddles along until one summer he stumbles into a mess: People he thought were okay turn out to be involved in piracy, he is trapped into a ship hijacking, and to save his life he cooperates with the pirates, only to be caught up as a suspected pirate when the military attack. A victim of harsh interrogation and extraordinary rendition, he winds up in an isolated cell where he has nothing to do but think about Fermat's famous theorem, and he solves it.

When, thanks to friends in high places, he is rescued and returned to friends and family, his solution makes him famous. But there is a poignancy to his situation. He has fame and true love, but the world is going to hell in its usual way, and the electromagnetic blasts sent into the universe by the first (and subsequent) atomic explosions have attracted the attention of the Grand Galactics, who do not approve of infant races who insist on playing with such toys. In fact, they approve so little that they have dispatched one of their client species, the One Point Fives, to sterilize the Earth. They won't be here for awhile, but they and doom are on the way. Meanwhile, another client species, the Nine-Limbed, is keeping an eye on us.

Also meanwhile, a secret operation on behalf of the UN, in which Ranjit's childhood best friend is deeply involved, is deploying measures that reduce combative nations such as--first--North Korea to powerlessness before rebuilding them on a more peaceful model. Known as Pax per Fidem, short for the Latin for Peace through Transparency, it is soon making the world a much better-behaved place. Perhaps, thinks the reader, the Grand Galactics will have second thoughts?

Also meanwhile, a space elevator is rising from Sri Lanka, the Moon is being outfitted for an Olympics in which Ranjit's daughter Natasha will star, after which she will attempt to compete in a solar sail race but vanish catastrophically only to reappear as a sort of puppet for alien voices. The Subramanian family, constantly on center stage, thanks to Ranjit's initial success with the theorem, must struggle to avoid falling victim to assorted political machinations (Pax per Fidem stops war, not politics).

In another echo of Clarke's career, the end hints of transcendence, but that is not why anyone should read the book. Rather, here is a warm and hopeful tale very much in the Clarke tradition. It's not action-adventure, not space-opera, but it's well worth the attention of everyone who enjoys thoughtful fiction and loving optimism.

NEW BOOK COMING--ENERGY ISSUES

I already do three textbook anthologies for McGraw-Hill:

Classic Editions Sources: Environmental Studies,
Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Environmental Issues, and
Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Issues in Science, Technology and Society

As of this afternoon, a fourth one is scheduled for December 2008, just in time for Spring 2009 courses:

Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Issues in Energy and Society

It will cover peak oil, fuel efficiency, clean coal, global warming, nuclear power, wastes, and reprocessing, alternative energy, and "free energy."

The reason for the book is simple: Energy issues are of huge importance to society, related problems such as global warming desperately need attention, and this year rapidly rising oil and gas prices are bringing home to more and more people. Energy & Society courses are out there, but they use a mixed bag of texts and other readings. This book will provide a compact, affordable package of important readings. If you teach such a course, watch for McGraw-Hill's offer of examination copies. (You can also request a copy of the table of contents from me.)

BOOK REVIEW, EDWARD LERNER, FOOLS' EXPERIMENTS Edward M. Lerner, Fools' Experiments, Tor, $25.95, 447 pp. (ISBN: 978-0-7653-1901-2). Publication date: November 2008.We used to think that living things were very different from nonliving things. They had something special--the breath of life, the touch of God, the élan vital--that made them able to move and feel and reproduce. "Artificial life" or a-life researchers, however, think of life in terms of what it does, not just what it is. In the Tierra software developed by Thomas S. Ray, Professor of Zoology and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, a-life entities are small programs that absorb and use environmental resources (they eat and metabolize), respond to environmental events, reproduce, and die. They have been used to study natural selection and the development of social systems (among other things). Some people object that there is no way they can be considered alive, but others, including Professor Ray, think that they fit the definition of life in that they eat, reproduce, react to their environment, and die. To call them "alive" requires only that we do not restrict the definition of life to squishy things made of chemicals. So far a-life "creatures" are pretty crude things. But they can evolve and develop new abilities, such as the ability to eat or parasitize other a-life creatures. Some researchers find the ability of software to evolve interesting not because of its connection to a-life but because it offers ways to come up with solutions to difficult problems. They work with "genetic algorithms," which begin with a rough attempt at a solution, generate many random variations of that solution, choose those that represent improvements, and then repeat the process. After a few rounds (or generations) of random variation and selection, the solution can be much improved. It has been used to design lenses, circuits, and antennae. New designs can be "evolved" in as little as a day.How far might a-life develop or evolve, given time? No one knows. But some a-life researchers speculate that in a big enough computer, with loads of memory "space" for these things to inhabit, they might achieve intelligence. If that ever happens, we will be faced with some powerful and fascinating questions: What do a-life beings think about? Do they share any concerns with us? Can we talk to them? (What if they don't want to talk to us?) Are they friends? Are they enemies? Since they live in our computers, are they a threat? What if they get loose?This is where Edward M. Lerner begins with Fools' Experiments. His near-future world is sore afflicted by computer viruses. In this world reside neural interface technology (NIT) researchers such as Doug Carey. Doug's motivation is straightforward: he must wear a prosthetic arm, and his research is aimed at making that prosthesis as nearly natural in function as possible. He's done very well so far.There is also AJ Rosenberg, who is working with a-life. He began with a very crude maze-solver, generated a thousand copies with random mutations, and gave them a maze. The ten most successful ones were multiplied to try again. The rest were erased. After a few generations he had an "entity" that could solve any maze given it in seconds. It had also figured out it was in a box, it and its cousins were being tormented and culled, it was pissed, and it wanted out. He was trying to develop a general problem solver, and he just about has it, though he doesn't know it. He doesn't think he has anything to worry about, since the computer that is the entity's box isn't connected to the network.Meanwhile, NIT researchers are dying in a variety of gruesome ways. The survivors seem to be fixated on the message carried by a particularly versatile computer virus. Doug and Cheryl--he still hasn't gotten over memories of his wife's death, and she's career-oriented, but you just know what's going to happen in due time--figure out that NIT helmets let the virus get to the brain.Meanwhile AJ has made the mistake of hiring a slacker student because of fond memories of his star brother. In due time, he has to can the boy, and that's when the stuff hits the fan. Slacker boy sneaks into the lab to play games on the computer and makes a network connection. And the entity is out. Recall that it's pissed. Soon it's found the controls for dam floodgates, power plants, and a great deal more. It's crashing the system, people are dying, and the government is trying desperately to keep it locked inside North America.Fortunately, Doug's a smart fellow. He has some ideas, and as soon as they let him he takes care of the problem by destroying the entity. Not that that's the end of the story. There's a mess to clean up, and one of AJ's just-graduated students is working on training a tame version of the entity. Her technique she likens to that of a lion tamer, and if you ever wondered what the lion thinks of those whips and guns and chairs… Another pissed-off a-life critter, and the world is very fortunate that it doesn't stay pissed-off as long as the first one. You'll love it. But I hope you don't find it inspiring. Playing with a-life doesn't take genius-level coding skills, and we really don't need a bunch of geeks trying to see if what Lerner describes would actually work.

Edward M. Lerner, Fools' Experiments, Tor, $25.95, 447 pp. (ISBN: 978-0-7653-1901-2). Publication date: November 2008.

We used to think that living things were very different from nonliving things. They had something special--the breath of life, the touch of God, the élan vital--that made them able to move and feel and reproduce. "Artificial life" or a-life researchers, however, think of life in terms of what it does, not just what it is. In the Tierra software developed by Thomas S. Ray, Professor of Zoology and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, a-life entities are small programs that absorb and use environmental resources (they eat and metabolize), respond to environmental events, reproduce, and die. They have been used to study natural selection and the development of social systems (among other things). Some people object that there is no way they can be considered alive, but others, including Professor Ray, think that they fit the definition of life in that they eat, reproduce, react to their environment, and die. To call them "alive" requires only that we do not restrict the definition of life to squishy things made of chemicals.

So far a-life "creatures" are pretty crude things. But they can evolve and develop new abilities, such as the ability to eat or parasitize other a-life creatures. Some researchers find the ability of software to evolve interesting not because of its connection to a-life but because it offers ways to come up with solutions to difficult problems. They work with "genetic algorithms," which begin with a rough attempt at a solution, generate many random variations of that solution, choose those that represent improvements, and then repeat the process. After a few rounds (or generations) of random variation and selection, the solution can be much improved. It has been used to design lenses, circuits, and antennae. New designs can be "evolved" in as little as a day.

How far might a-life develop or evolve, given time? No one knows. But some a-life researchers speculate that in a big enough computer, with loads of memory "space" for these things to inhabit, they might achieve intelligence. If that ever happens, we will be faced with some powerful and fascinating questions: What do a-life beings think about? Do they share any concerns with us? Can we talk to them? (What if they don't want to talk to us?) Are they friends? Are they enemies? Since they live in our computers, are they a threat? What if they get loose?

This is where Edward M. Lerner begins with Fools' Experiments. His near-future world is sore afflicted by computer viruses. In this world reside neural interface technology (NIT) researchers such as Doug Carey. Doug's motivation is straightforward: he must wear a prosthetic arm, and his research is aimed at making that prosthesis as nearly natural in function as possible. He's done very well so far.

There is also AJ Rosenberg, who is working with a-life. He began with a very crude maze-solver, generated a thousand copies with random mutations, and gave them a maze. The ten most successful ones were multiplied to try again. The rest were erased. After a few generations he had an "entity" that could solve any maze given it in seconds. It had also figured out it was in a box, it and its cousins were being tormented and culled, it was pissed, and it wanted out. He was trying to develop a general problem solver, and he just about has it, though he doesn't know it. He doesn't think he has anything to worry about, since the computer that is the entity's box isn't connected to the network.

Meanwhile, NIT researchers are dying in a variety of gruesome ways. The survivors seem to be fixated on the message carried by a particularly versatile computer virus. Doug and Cheryl--he still hasn't gotten over memories of his wife's death, and she's career-oriented, but you just know what's going to happen in due time--figure out that NIT helmets let the virus get to the brain.

Meanwhile AJ has made the mistake of hiring a slacker student because of fond memories of his star brother. In due time, he has to can the boy, and that's when the stuff hits the fan. Slacker boy sneaks into the lab to play games on the computer and makes a network connection.

And the entity is out. Recall that it's pissed. Soon it's found the controls for dam floodgates, power plants, and a great deal more. It's crashing the system, people are dying, and the government is trying desperately to keep it locked inside North America.

Fortunately, Doug's a smart fellow. He has some ideas, and as soon as they let him he takes care of the problem by destroying the entity. Not that that's the end of the story. There's a mess to clean up, and one of AJ's just-graduated students is working on training a tame version of the entity. Her technique she likens to that of a lion tamer, and if you ever wondered what the lion thinks of those whips and guns and chairs… Another pissed-off a-life critter, and the world is very fortunate that it doesn't stay pissed-off as long as the first one.

You'll love it. But I hope you don't find it inspiring. Playing with a-life doesn't take genius-level coding skills, and we really don't need a bunch of geeks trying to see if what Lerner describes would actually work.

BOOK REVIEW: NANCY KRESS, DOGS

Nancy Kress, Dogs, Tachyon Publications, $14.95 (TP), 288 pp. (ISBN: 978-1-892391-78-0).

Terrorism is the big fear of the 21st century. Next to that is the specter of biological weapons, diseases that strike through all defenses to kill without discrimination. Both have genuine roots, the one in 9/11 and the other in new diseases such as ebola.

Ebola is one of potentially many diseases which have not affected people in the past simply because they persisted in areas where people didn't go, so that people did not meet them. But as populations have grown around the world, the human presence--in pursuit of timber, firewood, bushmeat, and more--has pushed into new areas. People have been exposed to new diseases, but what is new is the exposure, not the disease.

If you want a new disease, consider the potentials of genetic engineering. No one has yet crafted a new and horrific bacterium or virus, but the basic technology is developing rapidly, and using may not take the kind of sophisticated equipment and thousands of personnel that an effort to build nuclear weapons takes. In fact, you can buy gene-sequencers on eBay! It may only be a matter of time.

Meanwhile, new diseases, whether run into in the backcountry of Africa or manufactured by an evil-hearted gene tweaker, are the stuff of science fiction. Nancy Kress, rightly renowned for her past work, give us Dogs, in which the sleepy little town of Tyler, Maryland, wakes up to terrifying ferocity. Beloved family pets are suddenly turning vicious and attacking adults and kids. It doesn't take long for the local animal control cop, Jess Langstrom, and the police and medics to call the CDC, nor for Washington to send in FEMA, as ham-handedly clumsy as the worst of its post-Katrina rep. Meanwhile Tessa Sanderson, an ex-FBI agent whose late husband was (horrors!) an Arab, is being told by her ex-bosses that her name and her husband's are coming up in traffic. She's also getting strange emails, and when she starts investigating, she runs into a weird character from her husband's past who seems to think she's his now. And he keeps mentioning dogs.

Meanwhile, back in Tyler, the town is quarantined. The dogs are going wild. The CDC finds a virus attacking rage centers in the brain. FEMA is collecting all the dogs, and people are getting their backs up, crying that "No one messes with my dog!" Some are cleaning their guns and checking the shed out back for old dynamite. Others are saying all the dogs should be killed, right away. A few infected dogs are showing up outside the quarantine cordon. And people who have been bitten are going into comas.

Kress ratchets the tension up and up in a grand display of writerly talent. If you like suspense, you're gonna love this one!

BOOK REVIEW: MICHAEL FLYNN, THE JANUARY DANCER

After thirty years and 341 columns, I have decided to hang it up as Analog magazine's book columnist and let someone else have a turn. But after that long as a book reviewer, I can't read a book without reviewing it, at least mentally. And I hate to waste even mental effort. So I'll keep reviewing, just without the nuisance of a monthly deadline, and I'll post the results here. To begin, here is:

Michael Flynn, The January Dancer, Tor, $24.95, 350 pp. (978-0-7653-1817-6).

Michael Flynn's latest novel, The January Dancer, represents his bid to displace Mike Resnick from his position as champion writer of thoughtful space operas.

Flynn's voice is reminiscent of Resnick's as he sets the stage in a bar on the world of Jehovah, a hub where converge several branches of the Electric Avenue, the fractal network of folds in space, that alone makes interstellar travel and civilization possible. The time is long after war cleansed Earth of its native humans, replacing them with interlopers. The descendants of Terran refugees, looked down upon by the humans who had left Earth an age before, cluster in ghettoes on a thousand worlds and dream and scheme of a Day of Return. First, they know, the cruel Confederation of Central Worlds must be defeated. Meanwhile, they manage to survive in the United League of the Periphery.

Into the bar walks a harper, and yes, there is a persistent effort to echo Olde Ireland here, though Flynn several times reminds the reader that the old ethnic and national distinctions have vanished in mongrelization and layered history. People pretend, they know they pretend, and the reader can enjoy the game.

So this harper walks into a bar and sits down across from a man of many scars who refers to himself as "we." An oddity, perhaps, but wait and see… She asks of the Dancer, and the scarred man begins the tale with a tramp freighter whose engines falter, bringing its crew, led by Captain Amos January, to a barren world. As they dig for metal to repair the ship, they discover a buried structure, in which lies a room of pedestals. Most are empty. One holds an egg that seems to contain the universe. Another holds an odd lump of sandstone that, every time one looks at it, proves to have changed its shape. A magical thing this Dancer, an oddity, perhaps a treasure that will bring a pretty price when they manage to return to a port.

The price proves to be repairs for the ship, with a promise of future cash, but soon enough pirate reivers have made off with the prize, only to be intercepted by an unknown fleet, and then… The harper keeps buying drinks, and the scarred man keeps supplying installments of the tale. We meet the Hounds of the Ardry, supremely competent secret agents. We meet Little Hugh O'Carroll, the Ghost of Ardow, who led the resistance against a coup and is now paired with the Fudir, a Terran scalawag who might also be a secret agent of the Confederation. We learn of the legends of the prehumans and their mysterious artifacts, with one legend in particular referring to a shape-changing scepter that commands obedience.

Hugh wants the Dancer because if it can command obedience, he can use to reclaim his world from usurpers. The Fudir is less obvious, but as a Terran, he has at least one obvious goal. The Hounds are on the trail of a mystery: Not all League ships who cross the Rift to trade with the Confederation return, and new intelligence suggests that the same is true for Confederation ships. Paths converge, and in the end…

The scarred man saves something for another story, but he tells enough for the reader to fear the people of sand and iron, to understand his "we," and to hope that Flynn continues with the universe he has created here. He's done such a grand job that Resnick must henceforth share his throne.

A CRISIS OF TRUST

Awhile ago, I said I was working on a book on 3D printing. I still am, an article will appear in the science fiction magazine Analog, and another article will appear in a book on "Values and Technology" edited by Gabriel Ricci of Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. That second article will deal with the impact of 3D printing on trust; the potential impact is huge, for as soon as it becomes possible to make convincingly "real" objects of various kinds, we will no longer be able to trust that something we can hold in our hands is really what it seems to be. Imagine creationists manufacturing fossils that prove humans and dinosaurs coexisted, or corrupt cops manufacturing evidence, and you get some idea of the ramifications.

As the lead-in to that discussion, I have been looking at what the computer revolution--short of 3D printers--has done to trust. This is part of chapter 5 in the book, and so far what I have is:

A Crisis of Trust

Before the PC, no one had ever heard of cyber-crime. Of course, programmers had figured out ways to use mainframes to steal money, but identity theft and the various forms of modern fraud were on few people’s radar.

That doesn’t mean they never happened. Even in the age of ubiquitous personal computers, the easiest way to get someone’s personal information is still what it always was: go through their garbage. A second technique, known as “social engineering,” amounts to little more than asking. If you get a call from a stranger who says he or she is from your bank, and they need your username and password to check security, just hang up; they’re not from the bank! “Phishing,” emails that link you to a site that looks like your bank’s login page, is a variation on the theme. “Domain-name poisoning,” a trick that sets network nodes between your computer and your bank so that even though you actually type in your bank’s URL when you wish to contact them, you are diverted to a fraudster’s site, is a more sophisticated and less detectable variation. Viruses that capture and send on your login data are a variation on the “shoulder-surfing” that can victimize people using credit cards on phones in public.

The “Nigerian scam” might seem more computer-specific. It begins with an email starting like so:

'This letter may come to you as a surprise but I really prayed to God to help me choose somebody that will be my true partner.

'My name is James Savimbi. I am the first son of Mr. Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the UNITA movement in Angola. Maybe you know that my father was killed recently in Angola by the Angolan Government soldiers and he has since been buried.

'Two weeks before he died (May be he knows he will die), he called me and showed me a box containing US$20 million and some Diamond value about US$15 million. He sent the box to a security company in Europe for safe keeping with a false name. …'

Mr. Savimbi of course needs your help, which will involve your bank account numbers and the occasional check to pay fees and bribe officials. In return you will get as much as half the loot. You, of course, are much too savvy to bite, but the scam is extraordinarily lucrative, victimizing even Harvard professors. It also has a long history, reaching back to the days before email.

If there is a lesson here, it is that we have to be cautious about trusting strangers. It’s not a new lesson, for caution has always been a good idea. What is new in connection with computers is that it is no longer just other people we have to be cautious about.

I have heard book collectors complain that they can no longer trust that a paper manuscript is an original and therefore worth collecting. That is, there is no longer such a thing as an “original manuscript.” Before computers, manuscripts were typed (even earlier, they were handwritten). Since copies could be made only at considerable labor and expense, collectors were happy to pay large sums for unique originals, ideally with hand-written corrections. Carbons and photocopies were easy to identify. Now that writers use word processors, a copy of a manuscript is only a button-push away. Worse yet from the collector’s standpoint, some writers never print a single copy of a manuscript. They just email the file to the publisher. And electronic files are so easy to copy that “original” becomes a meaningless term.
Related to this, when decent photocopiers became widely available, some people quickly discovered that a photocopy of a dollar bill could fool a vending machine. Vending machines were promptly improved, but then came color laser printers which, for awhile, could print copies of bills good enough to fool some cashiers. Today’s bills have a number of features that a printer just can’t copy, and future bills will contain computer chips (RFID chips) to make it even harder.

Computer files, however, cannot be so easily safe-guarded. As a result, one computer-related crime is theft of intellectual property. When a book, musical piece, or film is a computer file, it is extraordinarily easy to give copies to friends or post them on websites. If the number of copies were small, no one would mind much, just as no one ever made much fuss over music-lovers who copied records to tape. But computers make it much easier to make such copies, and the number of copies can easily be large enough to cut into sales of legitimate books and recordings. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has become notorious for its war on music piracy, which has included suing children for large sums. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been somewhat more restrained.

Illicit copying is not the only computer-related offense involving photos and sound and video recordings. In the pre-computer past, it was possible but difficult to alter photos, or to edit a sound tape by splicing out portions, or to dub a tape with fragments from others to make someone seem to say something they never did. But such manipulations were relatively easy to spot. Today, photos and sound files can be edited almost as easily as can text files, and the necessary software is widely available. With photos, we actually say that an edited picture has been “Photoshopped.” We don’t have an equivalent word for sound files, but very effective free software is available (look for Audacity). The signs of editing remain detectable, but they are less obvious, especially to the untrained eye or ear.
So far, video is harder to manipulate, but the software exists and people are beginning to realize that just as they cannot trust a photo or sound recording to represent faithfully objective reality, even video may be suspect. Since doctored images and recordings have shown up on national news programs, people have already begun to trust the news less than they used to.

And trust is important to the smooth working of society. In fact, it is so important that people actually speak of an “economy of trust” that facilitates political, financial, and other interactions. We cannot vote for a politician we cannot trust to look out for our interests. We cannot put our money in a bank or a mutual fund that we cannot trust to keep it safe and even growing for us. We cannot buy insurance from a company we cannot trust to honor its promises. Politicians, banks, and insurance companies (and some other businesses) therefore try very hard to convince us that they are trustworthy. They have an easier time of it because we are brought up to trust our parents, teachers, ministers and other adults, and despite political and business scandals, that training sticks. We are willing to trust, and even if we turn cynical toward politicians and businesses, we remain willing to trust our friends, relatives, and coworkers.

We are also, of course, willing to trust the evidence of our senses. There was a time when that meant trusting that what we saw or heard for ourselves was real and undoctored. Today much of what we see and hear is electronically mediated. We see pictures in magazines, on television, and on websites. We hear recordings of what people said. We see video clips. And those of us who are aware of how easy it is to manipulate electronic images and recordings are less willing to trust them.

Does this damage our social interactions? Not yet, perhaps, but trust is no longer something we can take for granted. It never was, of course, but it was not so long ago that our distrust took the form of “Did he mean what he said?” rather than “Did he really say (or do) that?” Today, evidence such as photos and sound or video recordings can be manufactured to “prove” anything we like. The technology to edit images and recordings is more and more available and people are more and more aware of what it can do. To some, skepticism is now the default mode, and one major use of the Internet is consulting websites and discussion groups to learn the truth behind the news or a corporation’s claims. And politicians, government agencies and businesses (even Fox News) are attempting to tilt perceptions of their trustworthiness by, for instance, rewriting Wikipedia entries and hiring bloggers to praise them.

What recourse do we have when our trust is betrayed? Thanks to the Internet, anyone can deploy the weapon of publicity. Unfortunately, that is often the only weapon available. In financial matters, we have lawyers and lawsuits, and perhaps America’s famous litigiousness owes something to the growing threat to trust posed by modern technology.

Your thoughts are as always welcome. Indeed, if you say you want to see more pieces of the book, you'll make me happy, and I'll probably post a few more as I go along. I do not, however, want to post the entire book here.