Silent Order vs Technology

-Andrew writes to ask:

“Working my way through Rust Hand (10-15%), Shouldn’t the characters have something more science fictiony than phones.  Like Personal Data Units or some such?  Phones just don’t seem to fit. I guess there could be quantum cell towers or something.”

I dunno, I’m old enough that a handheld phone seems futuristic to me. 🙂

Of course, what we call “phones” nowadays really are Personal Data Units – handheld personal computers that happen to include telephony functions as a small subset of their overall capabilities. A smartphone has as much relation to Alexander Graham Bell’s original telephone as a Lamborghini Aventador has to an Egyptian nobleman’s horse-drawn chariot. Both the sports car and the chariot fill broadly the same niche – transportation for a wealthy person – but are wildly different from one another. A modern handheld smartphone is as distant from a 1940s party line as the sports car is from the Egyptian chariot, but we still use the same word “phone” to refer to both the iPhone and the 1940s party line.

Granted, the problem of “zeerust” is one that all science fiction writers face. Zeerust is a term coined by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd to describe something that used to seem futuristic, but now only seems anachronistic and dated. (Apparently they took the name from a town called Zeerust in South Africa.) One of the more famous examples is the book NEUROMANCER by William Gibson, which was written in 1984 by set (according to the author) sometime in the 2030s. Telephone booths aren’t really around any more, but they’re still a vital plot point in NEUROMANCER. A more famous example is from STAR WARS in 1977. The Imperials spend a lot of time talking about the “stolen data tapes” holding the Death Star plans.

Data tapes? Given how big CAD data files are, if the Death Star plans were stored on magnetic tape the collection of tapes may have been the size of the actual Death Star.*

So zeerust is a fine science fiction tradition that I have joined. 🙂

Then again, having “phones” in SILENT ORDER might not be zeerust.

One of the other occasional complaints I get about the series is that the characters still use chemically-propelled kinetic firearms (ie, modern guns) in a setting that includes lasers, plasma cannons and other futuristic weaponry. Why use a handgun if you can get a laser pistol?

Of course, nowadays we have technology that can produce thousands of perfectly printed pages in an hour, and yet still something like 1.5 billion pencils were sold in 2021. For the specific niche that it fills, the pencil is more efficient than a laser printer. On a more serious note, we have much better weapons than knives, but soldiers still carry heavy-duty knives, as they have for thousands of years. The knife is essentially the absolute pinnacle of technology for its specific niche. When you really, really need a knife, a handgun, a mortar shell, or a tank just won’t fit the need. Even more advanced cutting technology like a plasma torch is more difficult, more complicated, and more easily damaged than a knife.

Chemically propelled firearms, I suspect, fill something of a similar niche. Gunpowder weapons were first used in China sometime in the 1100s, and first showed up in Europe in the 1300s, which means they’ve been in continual use for centuries. (According to some accounts, gunpowder was discovered by Chinese alchemists seeking for the elixir of immortality, which may have been one of the biggest examples of unintended consequences in human history.) Even in a setting with plasma guns and laser cannons, I don’t think chemically-propelled firearms will go away because they’re just too useful and they don’t have some of the drawbacks of more advanced weaponry. They don’t require electricity, they can’t be hacked, they can’t be disabled by an EMP weapon or a power surge, and they would be more rugged than a more advanced weapon. You could famously drag an AK-47 through a river and still have it fire, though it might not be super-accurate. For that matter, they’re comparatively easy to make, too. For all the talking heads on TV panicking about “ghost guns” produced by 3D printers, this is hardly a new phenomenon – if you know what you’re doing, it’s possible to build a lethal firearm using some tools and parts from the home improvement store. Remember that mass production as a concept didn’t really come around until the first half of the 19th century, which means that all the guns used in all the wars before that were made by hand by craftsmen.

So for all those reasons, I don’t think traditional guns will be obsolete in a setting like SILENT ORDER.

The concept of a “phone”, likewise, I don’t think will be obsolete. I know the Galaxy Brain Energy people nowadays like to talk about Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, but I suspect that those won’t be as popular as their proponents think. Look at how Google Glass failed, after all. The fact that you have to strap something to your face really cuts down on the usability of VR stuff. Modern filmmakers might spend millions on flashy effects, but people still watch a lot of movies on tiny phone screens. So I suspect the concept of “phone” as “handheld communication/computer” is going to stick around for a while.

Maybe it’s zeerust, but for all those reasons, Jack March carries a phone. Even if it would be vastly more advanced than a 2022-era phone. 🙂

-JM

*Granted, IBM and Oracle still sell heavy-duty tape backup stuff, but if you’re an IBM or Oracle customer, your computing needs are probably somewhat more esoteric and more strenuous than commonly found in the mainstream.