Mindwebs: Over The Line and Portable Phonograph

[james_davis_nicoll]

Over The Line

So the first rule of generation starships is that pretty much all generation starships will have some mission-killing event early on, dooming them to drift through deepest until such time as the author can figure how to do their particular variation on Orphans of the Sky; it's like a classic song everyone eventually covers. To Barry N. Malzberg's credit, he avoids the Orphans of the Sky dismount. What you get instead is a Barry N. Malzberg story full of bleakness and despair and how someone deals with that.


Portable Phongraph

This first appeared in the Spring 1941 issue of the "The Yale Review" and was later selected for Ray Bradbury's Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow. With all due respect to Bradbury, I think this is tied to a fairly narrow period (1) and tool set, or at least I don't see how to make this story of post-apocalyptic art appreciation work with an iPod.


1: Although I understand there are lots of vinyl fanciers so maybe I am wrong.

Comments

[resonant.livejournal.com]

"ELEGY BEACH" by Steven R. Boyett does contain an iPod version. Three decades after civilization collapsed, a father finds a solar-powered iPod, leaves it in the sun to recharge, and his son hears Beethoven for the first time. Angst about what has been lost ensues.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

But with an iPod you could potentially have thousands of songs, a decent body of work, rather than a handful of delicate, decaying records.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

If you knew anything you'd know that the correct plural expression is "lots of vinyl fancier".

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Vinyl rocks!

[nojay.livejournal.com]

The local pound store (ObNA: dollar store, ObNihon: 100 yen store) sells plastic rocks in the gardening section but I think they're polyethylene. Vinyl is crap in that sort of application as it degrades in sunlight and doesn't weather well.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Well then, substitute fired clay for the vinyl. Now you've got a machine that plays cuneiform :-)

Although, come to think of it, maybe you can put a lot of music on a platter if the needle is a scanning tunneling microscope. In fact, the resolution is somewhat higher than you get with even blue-ray optics . . .

[martinl-00.livejournal.com]

"So the first rule of generation starships is that pretty much all generation starships will have some mission-killing event early on"

The second rule of generation starships is that "you don't talk about generation starships." An amazing number of books involve people living in a delicate artificial environment without knowing it.

The third rule of generation starships is probably something along the lines of "A civilization capable of hurling a multi-gigaton stable self-contained ecosystem at a significant fraction of lightspeed will not implement commensurate technology in other areas of starship design, and in fact will probably prefer a social and technological model based on some particularly brutal historical precedent."