"Dean Ing - Firefight Y2K" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

wonder from getting flabby.

On the other hand, a consultant helped me flesh out the background for one of the most far-out tales in
this collection, then asked me why I considered it science fiction. "It wouldn't surprise me if it really
happened," she said; "some marine invertebrates aren't too shabby in the brains department." It was her
view that, if it's likely to happen, it ain't sci-fi. So then we got into an argument about the difference
between SF and fantasy, and I cried, and she hit me. . . . Oh all right, so I added a bit of fantasy to our
exchange. The point is, sometimes we reach into a sea of fiction and grasp a tentacle of what feels like
fact. It can be unsettling. So why does it elate me? Maybe Ilike to be unsettled a bit. I suspect my
readers like it too. God knows, anybody who likes being unsettled can have loads of whoopee in times
like these!

But some of it is very serious whoopee. Take the small arms piece, for instance, which reports on the
findings of a recent thinktank session on future weapons. I'd be disingenuous if I denied we had fun, but
the purpose of that seminar was ultimately to figure out what an infantryman will mean by "small arms" in
the next century. The diversity among members of that seminar was marvelous to behold. Well, of
course: the thinktank people wanted it that way, knowing that variety is the spice of life, the source of
strife, and a great provocation toward new ideas. Our conclusions weren't intended as fiction, but you
never know. Tune in twenty years from now.

For better or worse, the collection you're holding may be a metaphor of tomorrow: terror and hope,
right guesses and wrong ones, high tech and thatched cottages. Nothing wrong with a thatched cottage if
you want one; the nice thing about tomorrow is, we can bring the best parts of yesterday along with us.
Bearing that in mind, we can get useful tips not only from hard engineering looks at our near future, but
also from playful peeks into our distant past. Just don't start complaining when you find that each piece in
this book is a change of pace from the piece ahead of it, yet you keep finding echoes of previous
scenarios in the next ones. That's the way the book works.

That's the way theworld works. May as well enjoy it . . .




MILLENNIAL POSTSCRIPT
Anyone who risks a retrospective glance at his own science fiction has a problem. If he's serious about
guessing at our future, that look backward looks embarrassingly like a report card. I give myself only a
"B-"on these guesses, but in another twenty years they might look better. The primary reason for my
missesтАФa reason, not an excuseтАФis that I keep giving humans credit for improvements we refuse to
make until we absolutely must!

Take the "Y2K" problem, in which computers may treat January 2000 as January 1900. Why didn't I,
one of the activist cadre in survival studies a generation ago, realize the problem then? Because I wasn't a
programmer and didn't realize the deliberate oversimplification built into computers. But I worked with
aerospace programmers who did, and not one of them ever mentioned it. At the time it was a clever
touch to assume the "19" prefix. After all, the cost of data storage was on the order of a dollar per byte.
In retrospect it all seems pretty short-sighted, but no more so than, say, keeping gasoline taxes too low to
fund a national grid of fast mass transit. Thatis a logical source of its funding, as the Brits have known for
decades.

Many of the things I got right are trivial in the grand scheme but being a bit trivial myself, I'll mention a