Friday short fiction #32: The Morrow Project
Mark Strozier Robots Only Eat Old People 2005
Last November, Intel Germany embarked on The Morrow Project, in which they invited four futurists and/or science fiction authors to envision near-future scenarios that would provide Intel with actual directions for research. The four stories can be found either as a free PDF or individual podcasts here. So yeah, some neat ideas, but it's clearly the message here that's shouting louder than the medium.
Ray Hammond, 'The Mercy Dash' (THE MORROW PROJECT, 11 NOVEMBER 2010)
A feel-good story designed to show off the streamlined possibilities of robotics, intelligent sensors and fully automated traffic, and as an added bonus Hammond throws in a personal assistant robot that's straight out of the ’50s. This is clearly within the lineage of those 'brave new world' pulps where the seamless technological future worked perfectly and everyone would be getting around airborne with their jetpacks, only in this future it's the descendants of Satnav that will get us from A to B. I confess to admiring some of the the functional technology here more than Ray Hammond's rather functional writing.
Markus Heitz, 'The Blink of an Eye' (THE MORROW PROJECT, 11 NOVEMBER 2010)
How do you cope when your intelligent house - designed to enable you to save hours every day in trivial tasks - becomes a little oversensitive? This points the finger at scary superfluous technology, but in a rather dryly amusing way.
Douglas Rushkoff, 'Last Day of Work' (THE MORROW PROJECT, 11 NOVEMBER 2010)
Will the last pre-Singularity human to leave the planet please switch off the lights? A story of humanity's sudden transition from an age of commerce to a future age of plenty in partnership with robotics, the infodumping feels a little clumsy and the narrator really doesn't come across as particularly post-human at all.
Scarlett Thomas, 'The Drop' (THE MORROW PROJECT, 11 NOVEMBER 2010)
This story is a postcard from the future: in a health-and-efficiency obsessed Britain somewhere on the English coastline, Agnes is part of a 'normal' family: their brains are Bluetoothed to the outside world, they're always at play somehow and even making money from it, and the virtual is often as real as the real. This story has several plus points going for it (best is the brief description of families competing for attention on Reality TV, something I find completely believable) and is probably the best story here to extrapolate from current trends. It's kind of uplifting in lots of minor ways but overall also a little depressing at the same time: have we already become such shallow attention junkies, so easily satisfied by the incremental and minor ways that tech enhances our lives?
Favourite short story of the week: Cordwainer Smith, 'Scanners Live in Vain' (GARRET FORD, ed., FANTASY BOOK Vol. 1 No. 6, 1950)
A re-read, probably my favourite Instrumentality story (with the possible exception of 'A Planet Named Shayol'), and another highlight from my current read The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. 1. In retrospect, Linebarger's first published story risks disengaging the reader's interest close the start, yet it's only that odd but brilliant neologism 'cranch' that hooks you completely and hauls you to the centre of this strange universe, which you then have to explore from the inside out - what do Scanners do? Are they merely roboticised men, or the lowly undead, or a stratified class in between? And what on Earth is cranching, and why must Scanners cranch? The reader has to put some effort into this story yet the style of narrative is simple enough, and while I wouldn't say it's particularly representative of the strangeness of the remaining Instrumentality tales it's certainly the one with the most angular concept, something almost guaranteed to stick in the reader's head in a most uncomfortable way.