Vibiant

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My neighbor has a patio set. Nothing especially spectacular or unusual about this, a table, some benches, and an umbrella to top it off. What do they call these things “market umbrellas?” I’ve been to my share of markets and have yet to see one there, unless they’re talking about those small town flea markets held in the parking lots of the local shopping plazas, where the wiry men in tobacco T shirts and wide women in muumuus sit under loud-printed patio umbrellas stuck into sockets bolted to the side of their 1978 Dodge Tradesman 300 out the back of which they sell a variety of faded baseball cards, abstract rusted shapes that used to be tools in the time of Teddy Roosevelt and Chinese pocketknives by the 12 pack.

I see it from time to time, while I’m washing the dishes or walking to my car, in the sense that I generally don’t see it there at all, it’s part of the local landscape, and I take it for granted that it’s there.

Christmas Eve was windy. Very windy, 45 mph gusts making the whole house creak and me glad that I was inside. I thought about tree branches breaking, but didn’t hear anything besides the wind.

The next day, Christmas Day, I was on the phone with my mother, looking idly out the front window since I had wandered there while in my on-the-phone-orbit, I see that the people across the street have put a brown market umbrella on their tree lawn for trash day. Except that trash day is Monday and this is Thursday. And the umbrella is completely open and apparently missing its shaft. The color and the style of the umbrella also look a little too familiar, so I walk to the kitchen and look out the windows again at the neighbor’s backyard. Lo and behold, his 7umbrella was missing, the shaft was still there, but the rest of it was gone. My neighbor is out of town for the holiday so there was no one but his cat to notice the umbrella’s absence.

Later, I put on a coat and crossed the street to fetch it for him. As I walked over, I looked around for any obvious signs of a path of destruction the umbrella had made along its journey, about 250 feet from its origin, who knows how far it had traveled through the sky first. I didn’t see anything. I went to pick it up and discovered it had been stuck to the ground with its remaining bit of shaft like a giant push pin. I don’t know if the wind had done this, or someone had caught it and pushed it into the ground to keep it from traveling any farther. I did eventually pull it free and walked it, open, back to where it was supposed to go, the broken end of the shaft had prevented me from being able to close it. It had snapped, actually, in the cast metal hinge that allowed you to tilt the thing to block the sun. It had the classic, crystalline look of metal fatigue [well, duh].

I tried sticking into the ground myself, but the ground was frozen, and far too hard to attempt it. I began to wonder just how it got stuck in the ground in the first place. There was little wind, but as insurance I wedged it under a couple of the benches to make sure that it wont run away again.

My neighbor isn’t back in town yet, and I’ll be leaving town myself in a couple of hours, so I wonder when It will be when I next bump into him to explain the curious tableau I left in his backyard.

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How does ideology govern technology? I’m thinking about Russia and the nixie tube right now. How did they seem to get so locked into certain technologies, in case glass and vacuum? Not that there wasn’t innovation, they invented nightvision over there, but that also relied on vacuum tube technology, as did their technological lead in lasers for so many years, laser tubes being yet another application. [or microphones, for that matter, the technology of vapor deposition is common in the tube world, and transfers well into making transducers for microphones.] But it appears that the integrated circuit never took hold over there, in some kind of fundamental way. Lasers are all solid state now, otherwise checkout scanners at the supermarket would be three times the size and full of growling pumps and gurgling coolant. Nightvision is solid state as well, five or eight [depending on who you ask] generations on the Russian originals. And only steampunks use nixie tubes anymore.

The Russians didn’t invent the vacuum tube [though I wonder what the old Soviet histories say] they copied the technology of the West, just as the 1950 Lada was actually a 1930’s Chevrolet. But for reasons known only to themselves, they decided to innovate with what they had, rather than copy newer technology from the West. China today is at that stage of copying that the USSR was in the 1940’s and 50’s, though I wonder if they really have the kind of informational isolation and maniacal self belief necessary to tread the same kind of path. North Korea, on the other hand, might actually have developed something interesting from the 50’s war materiel they captured from in 1952, though so few westerners go over there it might not be immediately obvious just what it may be. Though if their chief exports currently are pot and counterfeit hundreds, they may actually be too pathetic to innovate, no matter what technology they have copied.

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Ahh, William Gibson really truly and deeply wanted the internet to become a seamless extension of reality. A seamless extension of self, just seen through a different lens, like the contrails of heat left by a walking person as seen through an infrared camera. I’ve had a strange love/hate relationship with Gibson, he has easily been my worst girlfriend, ever. [yes Danilee, feel free to add that to your quotes “William Gibson has been my worst girlfriend ever”.] It’s not helped by the fact that as much as I like reading science fiction, or like the idea of reading science fiction, I find so much of it being bad fiction propped up by the genre. You read it because it’s sci-fi, not because it is a good book anyway. I find that problem with a lot of genre fiction, though sci-fi has the added problem of telling stories that the reader has no frame of reference for. If you’re not careful, it just turns into word salad. I held off reading Neuromancer forever, [well it seemed like forever when I was that age, 10 years] because I was having a hard time with sci fi in general. I actually had to read the book for a class, but then inhaled it in two gulps, folded into a chair in my college library. It was a really good book, regardless of genre. I was fascinated by it, even though I never really “got” cyberspace the way he did; I still tend to think of it as a telephone with a really comprehensive phone book.

Then I read his other books. Count Zero kept getting lost in technical gobbledygook. Mona Lisa Overdrive just kept hitting the nail driven in by Neuromancer, the book wasn’t terrible, but it didn’t seem to move the overall arc of the storyline among the books forward. Then came his next trilogy. By this time I had started buying his books new, just about the only books I ever buy new, one of my few masochistic traits. I really wanted to like his books, but I just didn’t. The story arc for Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties were originally based on a very short work, “Skinner’s Room”, written for an art exhibit imagining the future of urban San Francisco. When you expand such a small work into something so large, the holes just get bigger. It was like watching a very bad magician fumbling through his illusions. You could see what was happening, but clearly, there was no magic. This was also about the time of his rewriting Johnny Mnemonic for the movie, the very nadir of his career if ever there was one [I like Burning Chrome, it contained his good writing, even the Twilight Zone-y The Belonging Kind]. It was like getting punched in the face. Godzilla 1985 had a better plot. Teenwolf had more empathetic characters.

But I held in there, I knew there was a good writer in there somewhere, even though I was contemplating driving to Vancouver to send him a note with my opinions wrapped around the brick that just went sailing through his living room window.

But then I heard an interview with him on NPR about his then latest book, Pattern Recognition. “9/11 killed science fiction,” he said, “our vision of the future has been radically changed by terrorism.” Maybe, but loved the book. I’m almost finished with Spook Country, and like that just as much. Not science fiction, but maybe speculative fiction? Just fiction? Or is it the science fiction of the present? This is the Tomorrowland that we got, not the one we necessarily wanted. This is the Great Cosmic Joke of the march of technology; technology is only half of the puzzle, the uses for it are the other half. And so often, like the internet, the actual uses are so unlike the imagined uses that the bear little resemblance to each other, in the end.