We Had to Destroy the Library in Order To Save It

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We Had to Destroy the Library in Order To Save It

2/8/2007

By Terry Calhoun

Let's take a look into the near future and see who wins the race to digitize "the record of humanity up through 2000. The whole premodern world." The current frontrunner is Google, of course, with its Google Library Project. Since I live and work next to the campus of the University of Michigan, I am aware that one answer U-M has to the early Internet issue of people not coming to the library is taking the library to people. All 8 million of the U-M's books are part of Google's project.

But the winner, in the race to put "the record of humanity up to 2000" into digital form, able to be stored on a single 128 Petabyte storage card for $19.99 will be the Informagical Coalition backed by Chinese dollars.

What? Well, yeah, that's according to one of my favorite science fiction authors, Vernor Vinge.

Vinge is a not-so-prolific writer, one whose new works I seek out as soon as I am aware of them. One of his more interesting ideas is one that becomes more solid as a possible future, in my mind at least, with every new technological advance. He first posited a coming Technological Singularity in his 1993 essay, "The Coming Technological Singularity" (hereafter "Singularity"). His argument, which underlies the stories in many of his books, is that technology growth is so exponential that we will eventually reach a singularity point beyond which we cannot even currently reasonable speculate about the future of humanity. It's an analogy to the event horizon of black holes, among other things.

This new novel is set in a near enough future that the singularity has not yet occurred, but the edginess of the lives of the individual humans in the story--almost like a society of adolescents in light of the technology being applied by them--creates an underlying feeling throughout the novel that really questions, "Who's in charge of all this stuff?" (Warning: I'm about to give away pieces of a couple of subplots, but there are so many subplots that you'll likely get more out of the book and not mind.)

Much of the action takes place in and around the campus, specifically the library and research park, of the University of California, San Diego, of 2025. The main protagonist is a former famous poet who is a cynical bastard, basically, but who has recently been given both his youth and his memories back by modern medical technology after he barely survived years of end-stage Altzheimer's disease.

He interacts with colleagues (not friends, as he really was a bastard to people pre-Altzheimers) and descendants in ways that emphasize his own attempt to learn to handle current information technology. The contrasts of the various ways in which others his age but who have evolved through the past couple of decades interacting with the technology are using it and how the youngsters who have grown up with it use it are analogous to the current situation with Boomers and ‘Net Generation folks, but extended to a technology situation advanced a couple of decades from now.