Tickling Wolves - Some Thoughts Inspired by Fritz Leiber
I just finished reading a story about an invention called the Tickler. It starts out as a joke about a mechanical reminder so you wouldn't need a secretary (it was written in the early '60s) and ends up being a telepathic hive minded robot that controls the thoughts of the entire population.
Once I finished it, I opened up my laptop and this thing flashed at me at the bottom of the screen - "I'm Cortana. I can help you. Ask me anything." There's that circle next to it, white and ominous like some unblinking eye. It was eerie.
It's like the time I'd recently finished reading Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 where the main character's wife detaches herself from reality within a TV show that has become her family. The screens are three walls of the living room, she really wants the fourth wall put in, closing the reality, putting her on the stage with the actors and letting her exit the real world. Then I turned on the TV and saw an ad for Big Brother. That was eerie too.
I won't tell you how I reacted when I read about the original Big Brother. Let's just say I nodded a lot as I did.
It all sounds conspiratorial. Too far-fetched. We'd never let those terrible things happen, would we? Authors write what they know. We may stretch and play with ideas, but the ideas come from somewhere. Our world is changing, faster every day, it's difficult to keep up, sometimes we don't want to know everything that's going on, we find ways to tune out. We plug in to switch off - it's a strange dichotomy.
I'm not saying we're living in a dystopia. I'm not saying we're not either. It's hard to know. Are we heading for one? If so, how do we stop it? If we go one way can we be sure that isn't the way to dystopia? In the end what is dystopia? The underlying factor, in the stories of ticklers, book-burning firemen, omnipresent big brothers and others, is thinking. The masses, usually everyone, stops thinking. They may know a lot, they may be very switched on with the news, but they don't think. Nor do they dream. So let's never forget how to think - rationally - and to dream - irrationally and with abandon.
For the record, the story was the first of four in Fritz Leiber's The Night of the Wolf, a sort of anthology/paste-up novel. In the book it's called 'The Lone Wolf' but it was originally published as 'The Creature from Cleveland Depths' in Galaxy 1962.
Keep dreaming!
Once I finished it, I opened up my laptop and this thing flashed at me at the bottom of the screen - "I'm Cortana. I can help you. Ask me anything." There's that circle next to it, white and ominous like some unblinking eye. It was eerie.
It's like the time I'd recently finished reading Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 where the main character's wife detaches herself from reality within a TV show that has become her family. The screens are three walls of the living room, she really wants the fourth wall put in, closing the reality, putting her on the stage with the actors and letting her exit the real world. Then I turned on the TV and saw an ad for Big Brother. That was eerie too.
I won't tell you how I reacted when I read about the original Big Brother. Let's just say I nodded a lot as I did.
It all sounds conspiratorial. Too far-fetched. We'd never let those terrible things happen, would we? Authors write what they know. We may stretch and play with ideas, but the ideas come from somewhere. Our world is changing, faster every day, it's difficult to keep up, sometimes we don't want to know everything that's going on, we find ways to tune out. We plug in to switch off - it's a strange dichotomy.
I'm not saying we're living in a dystopia. I'm not saying we're not either. It's hard to know. Are we heading for one? If so, how do we stop it? If we go one way can we be sure that isn't the way to dystopia? In the end what is dystopia? The underlying factor, in the stories of ticklers, book-burning firemen, omnipresent big brothers and others, is thinking. The masses, usually everyone, stops thinking. They may know a lot, they may be very switched on with the news, but they don't think. Nor do they dream. So let's never forget how to think - rationally - and to dream - irrationally and with abandon.
For the record, the story was the first of four in Fritz Leiber's The Night of the Wolf, a sort of anthology/paste-up novel. In the book it's called 'The Lone Wolf' but it was originally published as 'The Creature from Cleveland Depths' in Galaxy 1962.
Keep dreaming!
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