THE SPEECH NOT GIVEN

In October 2006, I was invited to give a talk at the kickoff meeting--in Honolulu!--for DARPA’s HI-MEMS research program. The Program Director, Amit Lal, said he had read my novel Sparrowhawk (Ace, 1990), in which I posited implanting computer chips in genetically engineered insects and other animals.

Of course I was flattered by the invitation, but when it came to looking at the logistics, I just couldn't do it. There are no direct flights from the East Coast to Hawaii, and I could not see spending 40 hours in cramped airline seats to give a one-hour talk. At least not without a lot more time to spend getting acquainted with the beach!

So I said no, but not before developing the Powerpoint for the talk I would have given, if only. Click here if you want to see the version of it I prepared for more general consumption.

IF YOU CAN'T BLIND THEM WITH BRILLIANCE...

I've just gone through the December 2006 issue of the Communications of the ACM, and the most commentable article is "RFID and the End of Cash?" by Ian Angell and Jan Kietzmann, which offers enough to feed the spasms of the maddest of conspiracy fans.

The basic point is that RFID (radio frequency identification) chips will soon be in everything we buy. Worse than that, they will even be in our money (reports that this was coming were called "premature" in 2003). At that point we will no longer be able to buy anything anonymously. There will be no under-the-counter cash-only jobs. The government will be able to calculate exactly how much you owe in taxes, it will be able to tax you--if you don't want to pony up on April 15--by remotely inactivating your money, and it will be able to stimulate the economy by putting expiration dates on your bills (Use it or lose it, folks). And if you find a way to inactivate the chip (perhaps by microwaving the bill), well, a bill without a working chip won't be any good.

Since any goon with a remote reader will be able to tell whether you're worth mugging, there's gonna be a big market for foil-lined wallets. But that won't do much to fight the government's Big Eye. Fortunately there's a possible answer to both problems, as well as to the worry about people being able to read what's in your car or house. Get a good supply of random assorted (for stuff you don't have) RFID chips--at a nickel apiece, $20 will buy 400--and scatter them around the house. Dump a dozen in every drawer. Throw a dozen under each car seat. Sew money chips to your shirt or tie. Build them into your belt or wallet or purse. Add a $50 chip to every $5, $10, or $20 bill in your wallet.

Let 'em scan.

If you can't blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.

And if you can't see a golden business opportunity here, you're too dumb to be using a computer.

When you start selling chip-bags, chip-shirts, chip-ties, chip-belts, chip-wallets, chip-purses, etc., you can send my cut to my Paypal account at profeaston@adelphia.net.

NEW BOOK--OFF THE MAIN SEQUENCE

I've been the book columnist for Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine for almost 30 years. Over that time, I have deliberately paid more attention to the small press and other "related" publishing activities than most other book columnists for the SF&F magazines, and when I go to cons I find that the attention is appreciated.

So now I have drawn most of that coverage together in Off the Main Sequence, a Borgo Press book. Here you will find almost three decades of SF small press activity as well as coverage of small press, poetry, writing, literary criticism and biography, popular science, and the development of electronic publishing over the period. This last may be the most important part of the book, for it is a history that is, I think, covered hardly anywhere else, and it is an important part of the history of the Computer Age.

Remember IRIS, DART, Serendipity, High Mesa, "disk-top" publishing, Soft Press, SoftServ? They're all there, as well as a good deal more.

Here's the introduction to this section of the book:

I came a bit late to computers. I had spent a summer after college as a junior assistant programmer on the Lunar Excursion Module simulator and studied FORTRAN in grad school, but I didn’t get a PC until the mid-1980s.

That PC was a TRS-80 Model 4P from Radio Shack. It came with 64K of RAM, which I upgraded to 128K even before I took it home. It had no hard drive. And for the time it was actually a pretty nice machine, though it seems quite unutterably quaint today. Computers have come a long way in a very short time.

So has digital publishing, once known as “electronic” and “disk-top” publishing. About as soon as people could take a computer home for their desktop, some saw charm in being able to read books, magazines, and newspapers on a screen. They would be prepared in electronic form and marketed on reusable disks or cartridges. The main obstacle was the clunkiness of the reading device, but it seemed inevitable that PCs would shrink in size. And they did, of course. We now have laptops no bigger than hardbound books and palmtops no bigger than paperbacks, though their screens are typically dim and headache-inducing. They devour batteries, too, and most folks show a very persistent fond-ness for paper reading materials. The cyberbook just hasn’t caught on. Most of those who tried to turn digital publishing into money-making enterprises gave up and vanished from the scene.

But computer users are now reading more in electronic form than ever before. The Internet, with its profusion of Web pages, came along and made it possible for anyone to publish their rant, opinion, poem, story, or novel very easily. The result has been an astonishing explosion of reading matter. A great deal is conspiracy theories and other psycho-ceramic tripe, but there is also an immense amount of high-quality information and fiction. Much of it is even free.

Why did I call this book Off the Main Sequence? My previous collection of reviews was Periodic Stars (Borgo, 1997), covering writers who had appeared repeatedly in my column up to that time. Periodic stars, like most stars, fall into a band on the classic Hertzsprung-Russell plot of star color versus brightness; this band is known as the “main sequence.” “Off the main sequence” refers to all those stars not in that band. Here I suppose that the science fiction put out in paperback and hardbound by the various major trade (mass-market) publishers corresponds to the astronomical main sequence. “Off the main sequence” simply means all the science fiction and related material that does not show up on the usual bookstore shelf.