High-tech, low-tech

Browsing through the book reviews for recently-published SF novels, the thing that strikes me is how many involve characters who are human-cyborg mixes.  It seems we still haven't lost the dream of tech enhancing our world, making us puny humans bigger and better than we are.

SF has always been the predictor of future tech, and usually its authors are in love with their inventions.   We're shown how powerful the tech is, but very often in hard SF novels what's missing is any recognition of how the tech alters human culture,

I've always had a problem with scenarios where all-powerful rulers lord it over vast regions of space.  We know from our own experiences of empires on Earth that the bigger the empire gets, the harder it is to control.  Things start to unravel at the edges.  Conquered powers don't stay conquered.  They want their land and their freedom back, and sooner or later they challenge the supremacy of the empire.

The thing I really can't take is the all-powerful ruler who, through their faultless tech and systems, knows everything that's happening in their empire at all times.  No human being's brain can hold that amount of information all at once.  But the other thing that irks me is that their tech never breaks down.  We never hear about the attacks on the remote outposts of the empire that take out its tech and launch cyber attacks on its key systems,

I suspect the future in reality will be a good deal less shiny.  I think there will always be people like my Ren Hunter in the Panthera books who shun the virtiual world for the real one, people who fight for the physical world to retain its wildness and beauty.

There's even the possibility that we could see the rise of a New Pastoral movement.  Some out-of-the-way planets might revert to a near-agrarian existence.  Anne McCaffrey's Pern settlers were fleeing the high-tech world of Earth, taking with them only the tech they needed.  Their airm was to establish a simpler way of life on Pern. McCaffrey hints that bad things had happened on Earth, but doesn't detail them.  But her original settlers were fleeing the high-tech world of Earth for a simpler existence.

The future may become a divide between high-tech and low-tech civilizations not as a matter of lack of access to tech, but as a conscious choice not to use some of it.

My favourite authors - Anne Mccaffrey

One of my favourite authors is Anne McCaffrey.  I haven't read every book she wrote, but a fair number of then from different series.  Her books have been a constant presence in my life for many years.

I own a lot of the Pern books.  The debate has raged for years whether these are SF or fantasy.  I think it depends which books in the series you read.  If you read the books dealing with the colonists landing on Pern, you find technology a-plenty.  The dragons are bio-engineered from the fire lizards, and the colonists carry Aivas with them, a high-level AI.  All the Weyrs of Pern rediscovers Aivas 2500 years later, and successfully blends the fantasy elements of the series with hard science.

One of my favourite series is the Doona books.  Here, colonists settle on Doona and gradually come to realise they're not alone.  I love the way McCaffrey paints the Hrrubans as fully-rounded aliens, and I also love the way the two species have the wisdom to learn to live together.  There are xenophobes in both species, but friendship prevails.

I love the way she's created a sentient planet in the Petaybee books.  They give us a vision of powerful companies with their own militaries who own planets and are far too powerful for the good of the people.  She also has telepathic clouded leopards who help the humans. I wish.

Then there's the Freedom books, the Catteni stories.  I like the way humans are shown to be inventive and quickly rebuild a civilization when dumped on an empty planet with just a cup, a knife, and a blanket for technology.  

Another of my favourite books is from the 'brainship' series of books.  The Ship Who Searched has a brainship and her archaeologist brawn searching for alien ancient remains. The book partly inspired my book Eyemind. 

I met Anne McCaffrey at Octocon in Ireland a few years before she died, and I'm glad I managed to meet and talk with my heroine.  She's been lighting up my life for many years with her ideas and her simple storytelling.