Posted by Terry Doyle on February 25, 1997 at 05:56:19:
In Reply to: Internet prefigured in Vance? posted by Parsifal Pankarow on February 23, 1997 at 22:11:58:
: Am I making too much out of this, or has anyone noticed what I have in a remarkable early scene in "The Killing Machine" ?
: Gersen is in the IPCC office discussing his search for Kokkor Hekkus. Using something that sounds awfully similar to the people-search functions of the Internet today, he is able to locate one of the demon prince's henchmen, Rob Castilligan.
: Mr. Vance published the book in 1964. I have no recollection of whether, in the early 1960s, any sort of computer network existed on which these kinds of searches could have been made. Am I just not remembering, or was this a case of Mr. Vance's prescient ability?
: Read the section and tell me what you think, please. (pgs 32 and 33 of the Berkley edition)
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No, I don't think you're making too much of the comparison between Vance's vision and the internet (the interstellar model). I don't know that it prefigures a network of computer so much as the highly desirable capability of retrieving virtually any information anywhere, anytime.
Vance is deliberately indefinite about how things are accomplished and Per's remarks notwithstanding one simply cannot tell whether this is network or googol-bytes of data periodically updated, who-knows-how existing in a stand alone box.
This lack of exactly how things are done is coupled with a very clear vision of *what* should be done. On the other hand, many SF authors write with one hand on the keyboard and the other in the Sunday Science and Technology supplement of their major metropolitan newspaper. This makes for initial trendiness and medium term inaccuracy and long term laughability.
Jack Vance, out of respect for the reader eschews any sort of trediness, whether in science or politics. Who knows how the mutated human warriors, Trackers, Weaponeers and Heavy Troops in The Dragon Masters were created perhaps by cloning or if Night Lamp's Seishanee and Grichkin by in vitro feritilization or matter transmission a la Star Trek holodeck? Who knows? Does anyone care?
The important thing is what the recreation of human genetics means to society and the impact on the individual. These are things we all are bound up in. Generally Mr. Vance takes a chary view of mucking about with the human gene pool.
Further, that respect for the reader allows us to fill in the technological blanks when the intersplit is engaged or a macroscope's view of a planet below swims below us. It is our own vision of Vance's own grand view of the Gaen Reach on Beyond that matters most.