The Sword and Laser discussion

One of the most memorable aspects of AFutD is the inclusion of the Usenet-style discussion groups. When Vinge wrote the book in the early '90s Usenet was at its height, and in fact many of the characters in the book are based upon real Usenet posters of the time (including Twirlip, yes), so the whole thing came off as a cool in-joke for those in the know, and completely alien to those who weren't online yet. By the early 2000s, though, views had changed -- by that point, Usenet was yesterday's technology, and the idea that aliens would be using something like it tens of thousands of years from now was absurd.

But I wonder how it stands up today for readers who have no clue what it is. Does it come off as just another Internet message system on a galactic scale, or does the primitive nature still shine through?

(For those who never experienced Usenet, or only know it as an odd file sharing network, it was an early type of Internet forum (it predated the World Wide Web by several years). On the user end, it worked pretty much like email, except for an address you'd use a group name like rec.arts.sf.written, or soc.history.what-if, or alt.sex.bestiality.hamsters.duct-tape (yes, that's real too -- Usenet was a weird place).

On the back end, though, it was a distributed system. Your message would go to your ISP's Usenet server, which would be peered with other servers. Every couple minutes, they'd ping each other to say, "Hey, you got any messages I haven't seen?" Your message would then slowly filter out to more and more Usenet servers around the world.

The great thing about Usenet was nobody controlled it -- once a message went out, it was virtually impossible to censor it, and since there was no central server anywhere, the only way to attack the system was to flood groups with spam. The bad thing about Usenet was nobody controlled it. If a racist troll set up shop in your favorite group, there was no way to get rid of him except to put him in your killfile.)

I know very well what Usenet is, but I'm just a tad too young to have actually used it and know it intimately, so the reference was lost on me. That said, I thought the style of messaging made perfect sense in the AFUtD universe. You want to be able to broadcast messages to the entire (non-Slow) galaxy, and you probably also want it to be distributed due to certain dangers that can befall regions/solar systems.

I haven't started AFutD yet. Is BIFF in it? Do they have awesome 3 page ASCII art sigs?

Usenet is still around and searchable via groups.google.com, if anyone wants to revisit embarrassing shit they posted in college before they dropped out because they spent all day drinking and mudding and not going to class. Not speaking from experience.

Sean wrote: "One of the most memorable aspects of AFutD is the inclusion of the Usenet-style discussion groups. When Vinge wrote the book in the early '90s Usenet was at its height, and in fact many of the char..."

Cool. I'm pretty sure he wrote this before I became a regular on Usenet, but I used to talk to him all the time.

I've been online since July 1985, so I've seen some wacky stuff.

I'm a bit too young to have been involved with Usenet, but I still kinda get the reference. That said, it doesn't quite work in audiobook format, at least not to me.

Sean wrote: "I'm a bit too young to have been involved with Usenet, but I still kinda get the reference. That said, it doesn't quite work in audiobook format, at least not to me."

Those sections do date the book. It would be like writing the book now and using Twitter and Facebook millenia in the future as the cutting edge of social media communication.

It is hard to project 50 years forward in internet usage, but I would not use a system we have now. In tens of thousands of years, I would imagine some type of pure thought communication.
Not original, but unlikely to be outdated by technology in my lifetime.

It's not so much that it feels dated (and I can get past that), it's that the reader A) reads every line of those messages (including the translation route and what group it's being broadcast to) and B) reads it in a somewhat emotionless semi-monotone, including stuff that should be very emotional (like, say (view spoiler)[the plea for help after the attack on Sjandra Kei (hide spoiler)]). It's just stuff that clearly works best as text.

Tassie Dave wrote: "Those sections do date the book. It would be like writing the book now and using Twitter and Facebook millenia in the future as the cutting edge of social media communication."

Reminds me of The Forever War – far in the future, sending a letter to Luna costs thousands of dollars because of taxes...

Sean wrote: "It's not so much that it feels dated (and I can get past that), it's that the reader A) reads every line of those messages (including the translation route and what group it's being broadcast to) a..."

I agree. I overall enjoyed the audiobook, but I didn't understand why they thought the narrator should read these passages without emotion.

Also, I didn't realize Usenet had been a real thing, and because of this, it didn't make the book feel dated to me.

Tassie Dave wrote: "It is hard to project 50 years forward in internet usage, but I would not use a system we have now. In tens of thousands of years, I would imagine some type of pure thought communication."

That tech exists, it just doesn't work where the story takes place:

Most of the High Ones didn't look very strange; civilizations at the Top were most often just colonies from below. But the headbands she saw here were not jewelry. Mind-computer links aren't efficient in the Middle Beyond, but most of the High Beyonders would not give them up.

You also have to consider the translation issues. The systems have a hard time handling plain text from sufficiently alien languages. Trying to render Skroderider mental patterns into something a human could understand would probably require Transcendent technology.

And on top of that, there's the bandwidth. I'm sure the planetary network on Relay or Sjandra Kei blows away whatever we have now, but when it comes to transgalactic FTL communications, there simply isn't enough to give everyone on a planet even a megabit connection.

I was going to say the same as Sean. It appears that Vinge has thought it out and decided that the Usenet-style substrata for communications is the one that every society could participate in.

This is the guy who foresaw things like Second Life and Facebook years before the founders of those services were even born, so it's not like he's being regressive due to lack of vision. His short story True Names anticipates the issues of web anonymity and combines it with NSA-style privacy concerns, the dark net, hacking, criminal scammers, bots, Homeland Security and VR... in freakin' 1980!

So it's not like he looked around and said, "Yeah, Usenet, Mario Cart and Windows 3.1, this is the pinnacle of technology."

I was on Usenet a bit in the late 90s and early 00s but by then it was mostly file sharing that drew me. I honestly didn't make the connection though. I mostly took it as some kind of galactic forum or bulletin board (severely lacking in door games).

Even knowing that know, it doesn't feel that dated to me. Usenet just evolved a bit differently than he predicted.

Being below the age of 30, I've never actually used Usenet, but it didn't really bother me - after all, there is an explanation in that they make a pretty big deal about the severely limited bandwidth in interstellar communications. Kilobits were mentioned. So something simple, like this kind of very bare-bones text communication, makes a lot of sense.

Though I'm sure that, if it hadn't been for the whole fall of human civilization thing, they probably would've introduced emojis.

Well, as someone who used usenet lots thought the mid 80's to the early 2000's I got the reference very quickly.

I don't think it dates it really, It's a very good fit around the considerable translation issues, communications delays, routing issues AND fits very well with the bandwidth limitations that apply.

I am really enjoying this book.

There's a lovely, funny reference to unix time in the next book in the series (A deepness in the Sky). Clearly the Human race survived the Y2038 problem without total collapse.

Brendan wrote: "There's a lovely, funny reference to unix time in the next book in the series (A deepness in the Sky). Clearly the Human race survived the Y2038 problem without total collapse."

So does that mean the girl from Jurassic Park would be able to use the Net?

Speaking of forward-thinking computer stuff...

(view spoiler)[On page 275 in the paperback there's this passage:

"There was no voice recognition attached to the display; Jefri almost panicked before he realized that the lower part of the screen worked as a keyboard. It was a laborious job typing in every letter of every word -- though Amdi had gotten pretty good at it, using two noses to peck at the keys."

That sure sounds like the haptic touchscreen of smartphones and iPads. Granted, Apple released Newton the same year AFUTD was published, which had a version of the virtual keyboard one could operate with a stylus. Even so, I'm not sure I would have been able to picture that. Yet here I am, typing on just such a screen. Wabash, my puppy who looks like a blonde Tine, even managed to erase my iPad's bookmarks with a single swipe of her nose. *I* don't even know how to do that. (hide spoiler)]

Putting in spoiler tags because it relates to Trike's spoiler.

(view spoiler)[My friend's kid has only been exposed to iPads so far. They gave the kid an older laptop and the kid immediately touched the screen and was confused as to why it didn't do anything. They didn't even THINK to try the keyboard. (hide spoiler)]

More on that:

(view spoiler)[

Have you seen the videos where babies are confused by non-iPad media?

Baby thinks magazines are iPads that don't work: http://youtu.be/aXV-yaFmQNk

Baby perplexed by her book.
http://youtu.be/aQBKC09Mi90

Edit: I just remembered an incident from a few years ago where my cousin, who is now 30, couldn't get into his car because the battery in his key fob died. He called his dad who asked him, "Did you try using the key in the door lock?" Heh.

(hide spoiler)]

Hah. The kid in my story was 2.5ish, crazy times.

It's not only babies. At my mine processing job we have a touch screen input near our sample analyser.
The same input is available on a desktop in the control room, using keyboard and mouse.

I'd love a $1 for every time I've pushed the buttons on the PC monitor with my finger instead of using the mouse ;-)
It's embarrassing when someone sees you do it.

And of course there's the classic Hatsune Miku song, "Even Though I Installed Windows 8, My Screen Didn't Become a Touch Pad."

Heh.

I loved the Usenet bits. It felt like all the Usenet/forum/reddit discussions I could think of. It also reminded me of my days on BBS's back in the late 80's.

I have often thought about writing a story using a similar format. Discussions in a network in our own solar system would likely resemble those older formats due to light speed delays.

Usenet is an excellent technology for low bandwidth and high latency situations. It's distributed, can be easily moderated, archived, and compresses like crazy.

It makes sense, given the high cost per byte of long range communications that a Usenet style protocol would come back into usage.

I thought it was an interesting contrast to the AIs and cyborgs that co-existed with this ancient technology.

Robert wrote: "Usenet is an excellent technology for low bandwidth and high latency situations. It's distributed, can be easily moderated, archived, and compresses like crazy.

It makes sense, given the high cost..."

Agreed. It's explained early in the book that galactic communication over long distances is cost prohibitive and often low bandwidth, so the Usenet model seems like a pretty good way to communicate across the galaxy.

It's also implied that the the source of some of the news feeds may not be someone typing, but the computers and relays translate it into the best transmission medium. There's at least one scene where the Ravna has a video feed to Kjet which degrades to audio, then text...

So, maybe someone in the High Beyond is mentally inputting their thoughts into a computer, but it gets translated to text for the Low Beyonders.

As and aside, I discovered Usenet back in 1989 or a little earlier, and had a passing knowledge of BBSs, so I was amused at the "Net of a Million Lies."