Analog SFF, March 2009 Read online

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  Analog SFF, March 2009

  by Dell Magazine Authors

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  Science Fiction

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  Dell Magazines

  www.analogsf.com

  Copyright ©2009 by Dell Magazines

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  Cover art by Jean-Pierre Normand

  Cover design by Victoria Green

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  CONTENTS

  Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE? by Stanley Schmidt

  Novelette: CAVERNAUTS by David Bartell

  Science Fact: FROM TOKEN TO SCRIPT: THE ORIGIN OF CUNEIFORM Henry Honken

  Short Story: MADMAN'S BARGAIN by Richard Foss

  Short Story: AFTER THE FIRST DEATH by Jerry Craven

  Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: HUMANS AND ESTIMATING PROBABILITY by John G. Cramer

  Probability Zero: WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS By H.G. Stratmann & Henry Stratmann III

  Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

  Short Story: LIFESPEED by Carl Frederick

  Serial: WAKE: CONCLUSION by Robert J. Sawyer

  Reader's Department: GUEST REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers

  Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS

  Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis

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  Vol. CXXIX, No. 3, March 2009

  Stanley Schmidt Editor

  Trevor Quachri Managing Editor

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  Peter Kanter: Publisher

  Christine Begley: Associate Publisher

  Susan Mangan: Executive Director, Art and Production

  Stanley Schmidt: Editor

  Trevor Quachri: Managing Editor

  Mary Grant: Editorial Assistant

  Victoria Green: Senior Art Director

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  Published since 1930

  First issue of Astounding January 1930 (c)

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  Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE?

  by Stanley Schmidt

  Change happens.

  That's one of the most general true statements you can make; it applies to just about everything. But changes don't all happen in the same way—and some ways are easier than others, in just about any situation.

  Biological evolution, for example, has resulted in the great diversity of life on Earth, but it has never produced a railroad. As a process, it has the fundamental limitation that it makes new things by changing single features of old things. Sometimes a new thing is so fundamentally different from the available old ones that you can't change one into the other by modifying the parts. It's fairly straightforward to get from something lizard-like to something bird-like by changing the shapes, sizes, and articulation of appendages. But there is no simple way to get from a leg and foot to a wheel and axle. And if you really want a railroad, you also need tracks: an external system, separate from the train but designed to work with it.

  So how do you get a railroad, if you can't evolve it? You design it. You figure out how it could work, and you fabricate the necessary parts and assemble them into a complete system. In principle, and sometimes in practice, devices unlike anything ever seen before can be created from scratch in this general way.

  Now, how about social systems? I have for some time (most recently in the Analog editorial “Ups and Downs” [May 2008] and the book The Coming Convergence [Prometheus Books, April 2008]) been promoting the idea that we need a fundamental change in ours, and that we've been persistently viewing an unprecedented opportunity as a frightening problem instead. The real problem, in short, is that our culture has been creating a great many labor-saving technologies, which reduce the amount of time we need to do the work we've had to do in the past—but instead of reaping the obvious reward of more leisure time, we keep inventing new work to do and winding up busier than ever.

  Why are we doing this to ourselves? Because we, and generations of our forebears, have long been so locked into a mindset of thinking that Everybody Must Be Fully Employed that we find it literally hard to imagine another way of doing things, much less a way to make the transition from our way to a better way. Our goals are at cross purposes: we love to create and buy new labor-saving gadgets, but most of us don't really want the amount of work to decrease—because we have been deeply, deeply conditioned to believe that we all Have to Have Jobs.

  And indeed, in our present system, we do. Given that our society works as it now does, I would be as reluctant to lose my job as you would. But I can imagine a different way that society could work, in which we could all work some, but less than we now do, and we could all have all the material things that we need, plus a lot that we just want. Sometimes, when I describe the general outlines of that vision, people even agree that it sounds inviting; but then they shrug it off, pointing out why this or that aspect of our present way of doing things would be incompatible with it. But that misses the point: this or that aspect of our present way of doing things would not be part of the new way, so the objection is irrelevant.

  But it may well point up an obstacle to making the transition from old to new. And some of those obstacles look formidable enough that people have trouble making the distinction between difficulty of the transition and impossibility of the end state. That, in turn, makes it hard for some even to grasp what I'm really describing as the goal.

  In simplest terms, it's this: Instead of inventing work to give people jobs, we could decide what work we really need or want done, and divide it up among all the people who are available and want to do it. Since we're currently inventing work for its own sake, the total amount we do could clearly be less than it is now; therefore the average time spent working could be less than it is now. Since, in the scheme I'm describing, all needed goods and services are being produced, people can buy them as long as pay is distributed commensurate with the work.

  If any defense is needed for the claim that we as a people are now doing more work than we need to, simply consider these obvious facts. We routinely invent work ("create jobs,” a phrase which has taken on an almost saintly aura) by paying people to do things that don't need to be done, such as holding doors open for people who are perfectly capable of doing it for themselves. We deliberately build things to fall apart much sooner than they need to, so people will have to buy new ones, so people can be paid to make the new ones. We pay advertisers to convince us that we need things that we don't, simply to have the “latest and greatest” or the currently fashionable. We continually do things in absurdly wasteful ways, like having self-righteous but trivial arguments over whether it's better to use thousands of plastic grocery bags or thousands of paper grocery bags to do the work of three or four sturdy cloth
bags.

  So it's clear that we as a society are doing a lot more work than we need to, and in the process wasting huge amounts of other resources as well. Those paper and plastic bags, for example, consume large quantities of wood and petroleum as raw materials, plus more petroleum as fuel to manufacture and transport them, and to transport the people making them to and from factories. We would in many ways be better off using a few durable bags for years, and skipping the unnecessary work and waste of making and shipping much larger quantities of disposables. And I should think most of the people doing that work would be happy to have to spend less of their time doing it, as long as they could still get the things they need.

  At this point I commonly hear a couple of objections that are clearly rooted in our fixation on our present way of doing things. For example, who decides which work is unnecessary? Why would people settle for the reduced pay from their reduced hours? Wouldn't we need a negative income tax to support people whose jobs were done away with? Do I really think people would accept a life with no luxuries?

  All of these miss the point: except for the last, which is easily disposed of, none of them has any relevance in the new kind of system I'm positing. The questions are meaningful only in the short term, as issues that need to be dealt with in the early stages of a transition. So I suggest dividing the problem into two stages: First consider the kind of system that we could have, as a potentially desirable end state, without regard for how we might bring it into being. Then consider, separately, the question of how, if at all, we could get from here to there.

  Looking only at the hypothetical end state, I must first point out that I have never suggested (as someone claimed I did on Analog's online forum) a world with “no luxuries.” For one thing, many of the things we have already come to regard as “necessities” are in fact luxuries of quite high order. Through the vast majority of history, no king could have had, for any price, the computer on which I'm writing this, or the car I drive to places too far to walk to in the available time, or the freezer that lets me have fresh-tasting summer-grown food in the middle of winter. But beyond that, I have never suggested that anyone should live a bare-bones existence. What I have suggested is that most of us could be a little more selective about which extras we really want, as distinct from simply kowtowing to advertising or peer pressure.

  The questions about reduced pay and negative income tax indicate a basic misunderstanding of the new model I'm proposing. I am not suggesting that some people's jobs should be abolished and they should be thrown out on the street, or that their purchasing power should be reduced so they have even more trouble than now making ends meet. I am suggesting that if we cut way back on “make-work,” the total amount of work left over will be smaller than it is now. The remaining work would be redistributed; those whose jobs remained would spend less time doing them, while those whose jobs disappeared would be reemployed in the fields remaining. In essence, a reduced amount of work would be redistributed so that everybody was doing an equitable (but smaller-than-now) share of it and receiving pay enabling them to buy what they need and a reasonable amount of what they want (which in many cases would mean less stuff than now, because much of what people now buy is waste).

  To give a simplified but concrete example: Suppose enough demand for unnecessary goods and services goes away to reduce the total workload by half. In practice this may mean that the work to be done in some jobs is reduced by some smaller fraction and other jobs dry up completely, but for simplicity let's just say half the jobs become unnecessary while others are unaffected. If the “standard” work week is concurrently reduced by half, the people still in the remaining jobs will only be doing half as much as they were. The other half can be taken over by people made available by the disappearance of other jobs. Everybody can keep being paid as they were, while working half as long and maintaining a good standard of living.

  To me, it seems like a highly desirable and quite possible end state—but I'll freely grant that it's so different from what we now have that getting there from here would be a big challenge. But I don't think that means it's a priori impossible. In the past, when I've mentioned this idea, I'll admit I've glossed over the difficulties of making the transition—because they're so big and complex that I don't have the answers. So today I'm throwing it out as an explicit challenge to you, the “world's biggest think tank": how could we get from where we are to where we could be, in a less wasteful, less frenetic, but no less satisfying world with material needs fulfilled and more discretionary time? Science fiction readers like challenges; here's a dilly, but one worth a lot of shared effort.

  I'll throw out just a few general ideas to get things started. The most basic question is: Could this change be achieved by “evolutionary” means, with a series of gradual or incremental changes in what we're already doing? Or is it more like building a railroad, where we'd have to essentially design a whole new system, then scrap the old one and put the new one in its place?

  I would hope that it could be done incrementally, because in general “designed societies” have a poor historical record. There are exceptions; the United States itself can be considered an example of one that worked pretty well, though the revolution that created it did involve considerable violence. Might there be ways to make comparably revolutionary changes without physical violence or extreme social upheaval, or the dismal failures and abuses of other “designed societies” such as the Soviet Union? I don't think we should rule anything out a priori; maybe somebody can figure out a way to do this kind of social engineering while avoiding the gaping pitfalls.

  But I'm frankly not optimistic about that, and I suspect that if we do get to something like what I'm envisioning, it will have to be done in smaller steps, and even those will seem disruptive and frightening while they're happening. But there are hints in history about how such things can be done—and how they can't. The United States, for example, has occasionally paid lip service to the idea of converting to the metric measurement system used by almost every other country in the world, but has failed to make any real progress in that direction because it has failed to take any decisive action. Australia, on the other hand, made the transition quite thoroughly between my two visits there, fourteen years apart; government decrees played a role, but so did changes in education and popular attitudes.

  Popular attitudes can play a crucial role: if large numbers of people just start saying no to wasteful non-necessities, fewer of them will be made. In the short term, this would of course cause difficulties, because our present system is geared to seeing unemployment only as a problem. But unemployment in some areas could be offset by new jobs becoming available in others, and that could be encouraged by a reduction in the definition of “full-time work week.” The government would no doubt play a role in doing that, but workers themselves could play one too. Unions have demanded, negotiated, and received shorter work weeks before, and it could easily happen again. Employers have increasingly come to accept nontraditional arrangements like telecommuting and job-sharing.

  Since any society is a complex system of many interlinked feedback loops involving many variables, computer simulations (along the general lines of games like SimCity or Spore) might be helpful in estimating what combinations of changes (such as work week, salaries, and expected service life of commodities) would have what effects. Admittedly those are at best approximations, and would find it especially hard to deal with such human variables as people's willingness to change their ideas of when they need to buy something new. But they could still be a useful first step toward figuring out a way off the real-world treadmill.

  Probably the most fundamental requirement for anything like this to happen is that masses of people have to want it and believe that it's achievable. We know such shifts can occur; look, for example, at how attitudes toward, and popular acceptance of, slavery and smoking have changed. The one I'm talking about is a big and difficult challenge—but isn't it worth some real effort?


  Copyright © 2008 Stanley Schmidt

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  Novelette: CAVERNAUTS

  by David Bartell

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  Illustration by Vincent Di Fate

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  Rationality is one of our most characteristic traits—but not the only one.

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  Why would anyone voluntarily grope around the dark, frozen bowels of a dead moon 400 million miles from Earth, spending two years away from home, only for standard wages? If you're not an extreme thrill seeker, I can't tell you.

  I'd hoped I'd never have to answer the question, but no bit shield or sociobypass can give complete privacy. People would just answer for me, in my absence from the net, and my foolishness would be confirmed democratically. That's what happened while I was bound for Callisto on the Ozark. The WyrdNet was buzzing to know why an expectant father like me would bolt to some distant rock, just as I got the news about the baby.

  I couldn't tell them that another woman needed me on Callisto, so I recited a stock joke: I was going just to escape WyrdNet. The general reaction to that is surprise; people don't know that you're offline when you're deep underground. A typical question: “How can you stand being unplugged so long, especially in a dangerous place?” If you weren't plugged in, you were in a vacuum, alone and ignorant.

  I also never tell people that the most beautiful sight in the Solar System is under Callisto base. The cave we call John's Glen, formed by crystallized urine refuse, is a sight to behold. Sometimes you just can't tell the truth.

  Bart and I returned to Callisto to help our partner Colleen, and as soon as we touched down, we had another reason to revisit those caves.

  “Guys, I've got bad news,” the base's Ops Director Trev told us. He was waiting for us outside the airlock. Not a good sign. Colleen was missing, he told us, somewhere down in the caverns.