Computers and science fiction – an essay - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 347

punched cards to control which tubes the ants crawl through so that Hex could
calculate some mathematical functions. By the next novel, Interesting Times , Hex
had become a lot more complex. It is started by “initializing the GBL” - meaning
pulling the Great Big Lever - and releasing millions of ants. Long-term memory
storage is a massive beehive and there is also a mouse living in the machine. An
aquarium acts as a screen saver, giving the operator something to look at while
waiting ( Fig. 17.19 ). In another Discworld novel, The Fifth Elephant , a telegraph
system very like Claude Chappe's invention is described. The “clacks” system
works by sending signals using a network of semaphore towers. Just like the
Internet in our world, the clacks revolutionize communications and commerce
in Discworld with c-mail and c-commerce.

Nanotechnology in science fiction

Fig. 17.18. The cover of the first edition
of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by
Douglas Adams.

A few perceptive science fiction writers have taken up the challenge of
incorporating future nanotechnologies in a novel. Greg Bear's Queen of Angels is
set in Los Angeles at the turn of the “binary millennium” in 2048 ( Fig. 17.20 ).
The nanosurgeon character in the novel describes the techniques he uses to
explore what he calls the “Country of the Mind” - in this case the disturbed
mind of a famous poet turned multiple killer:

The advent of nano therapy - the use of tiny surgical prochines to alter
neuronal pathways and perform literal brain restructuring - gives us the
opportunity to fully explore the Country of the Mind. I could not find any
method of knowing the state of individual neurons in the hypothalamic
complex without invasive methods such as probes ending in a microelectrode,
or radioactively tagged binding agents - none of which would work for the
hours necessary to explore the Country. But tiny prochines capable of sitting
within an axon or neuron, or sitting nearby and measuring the neuron's
state, sending a tagged signal through microscopic “living” wires to sensitive
external receivers.… I had my solution. Designing and building them was
less of a problem than I expected; the first prochines were nano therapy
status-reporting units, tiny sensors which monitored the activity of surgical
prochines and which did virtually everything I required. 23

Fig. 17.19. Hex is the computer at the
Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork in
Discworld . It can be given input either
through a wooden keyboard, by writing
and using a complicated mechanical
eye, or vocally through an old hearing
trumpet.

B.17.13. Douglas Adams (1952-2001) was an English writer best known for his five-part “trilogy”
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . This started life as a BBC comedy radio series in 1978 and subse-
quently generated a computer game, a TV series, and a movie in 2005. Besides being a successful
writer, Adams was also a passionate advocate for conservation and the environment. He was also
a “radical atheist” and, on Adams's death from a heart attack in 2001, the atheist and biologist
Richard Dawkins wrote that “Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain
gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender.” B1