Hackers and "Clackers"

In the last year, I have read more SF than at any other time in my life. I often think about what a great privilege it is to be a graduate student and to have the time and freedom (and financial support, although not as much as I would like) to pursue such extensive study. My goal has been to read widely and to take advantage of the summer to familiarize myself with key works and key authors that I have neglected or overlooked. There are many, of course, and achieving a respectable mental database of the genre will probably take me many years.

Sometimes after I finish a novel, I need a break of about a day or so to process what I read. I take notes, highlight, and turn over the corners of pages in my books in order to keep track of things that seem striking or worth further contemplation at some later date. I don’t generally take notes (or “reading notes”) separately from marking up the book itself; I’ve never really been the type of person to take notes on anything except to keep track of things I need to do. If I were to identify a novel (or novels) for a specific project, I would read it and probably carefully indicate specific scenes, passages, sentences, images, themes, and so on relevant to an argument I wish to make. In other words, I’d take notes. However, the kind of reading I’m doing right now is more like a general survey of a large piece of terrain; I’m less concerned with the details as I am the big picture.

Without the requirements of a syllabus to structure my reading, I tend to spend a lot of time looking at the many unread SF novels on my shelf, trying to decide which one looks most interesting. I also have a short list of “canonical” works that I know I should read sooner rather than later, like The Dispossessed and The Man in the High Castle, both of which I’m happy to report I completed recently. Another source of titles for my reading list comes from SF criticism; I’ve made it a goal to read many of the works that critics such as Katherine Hayles or Donna Haraway write about in their work. My summer independent study focuses on SF criticism, so I’ve thumbed through several of the works I intend to read to identify commonly discussed titles from other critics, as well. This includes Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, which Phil Wegner, who is supervising my independent study, writes about in his book Between Two Deaths.

Sometimes I just veer out into a completely different direction and read something that feels like fun. I’ve had a copy of The Difference Engine, a “steampunk” SF novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, on my shelf for a while. Last week I finally got around to reading it. The Difference Engine is an alternative history novel in which Charles Babbage succeeds in developing his “difference engine,” a mechanical (as opposed to electrical) computing device. This is the ur-Computer you sometimes hear about: a massive, heavy, lumbering machine that occupies a city block and is barely more powerful than a pocket calculator. In Gibson and Sterline’s alternate history, however, the Victorians use steam-powered difference engines to transform their society. Nineteenth-century England begins to resemble our own world in many ways: the difference engines accelerate the industrial revolution and lead to a consumer society (advertising, mass produced products) decades ahead of schedule. Governments use the difference engines to assign individuals a “number” and record of their biometric information (the physical characteristics of criminals are stored in a database that can be searched using the engines).

A new form of “(pre)-digital” visual projection also emerges, called the “kinotrope.” The engines operate using punch cards – they are the “software” to the engine’s “hardware.” The information stored on the punch cards is fed through the engine (a series of brass gears and rollers and such performing mechanical operations). Transparent versions of these punch cards are used to create visual animations. Hackers become "clackers" (the engines making a clacking noise). Naturally, the punch cards produce “digital” images, in the sense that they’re pixilated, or composed of discrete “blocks” of information. Obviously, they aren’t digital in the sense of being electronic, but the kinotrope technology confuses the tidy story we like to tell about the transition between “analog” and “digital” technologies. The kinotrope is a sort of weird hybrid: it relies on an analog “film” technology (the transparent punch cards), but the image that emerges is quasi-digital. The kinotrope technology comes on the scene before analog film; it’s a provocative re-imagining of how media technology might have developed differently.

The Victorian-era world the authors provide is richly detailed, and there are many cool steampunk images: steam-powered proto-cars, dandy clothing with “digital” designs printed on engine machines. The novel also explores class struggle in relation to the emergence of the engines and the social transformation engendered by new technologies of production and consumption: the Luddites vs. the Radical Industrialists (Lord Byron leads the RIs and becomes Prime Minister, interestingly). However, I was less impressed by the plot as a whole: a mystery involving a series of engine cards that contain an early version of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (which limits the complexity and operation of the Engines, somehow).

There’s a Gibson-esque “data made flesh” motif throughout the novel: can Victorian society be reduced to a series of informational patterns calculable by the engines? At the end of the novel, it’s suggested that the early-advent of computing results in the emergence of a quasi-singularity that has recorded (imprinted, stored) the characters, settings, and events of the novel (and everything else) within a massive engine that covers Earth’s surface. There are certainly parts of the novel that are worth thinking more about, or thinking with, because the speculative elements are fascinating – I simply wish there were more of them.