As the Beloved and I perused the Falling Rock Café, I ran across a 1960s vintage print of Space Prison by Tom Godwin. Interestingly, I also ran across a much newer print of it as The Survivors on the other side of the store. The name rang a bell, though it was a week later while discussing "The Cold Equation" with friends that I remembered why I knew that name.
I recently heard a person point out that a person born in late 1890s America saw transportation technology advance from horse and buggy to supersonic transatlantic flights and lunar landings. Yet at the same time, their telecommunications device remained the same rotary-dial telephone service (Thanks, FCC and Ma Bell! Way to crony!). Meanwhile a person born in the 1990s saw the end of those transatlantic flights, while telecommunications have advanced to the point that Dick Tracy's wrist communicator is an actual thing.
I think Space Prison is a product of that phenomenon. But first, the plot. Spoilers ahead. As in, the entire book.
Earth has gotten into an interstellar war with the Gerns, a race of aliens that are remarkably like humans, presumably due to convergent evolution. A colony ship is a month and a half away from a new planet to settle and rebuild when they are overhauled by a Gern ship. Lacking the weaponry to fight back, the ship's remaining officer surrenders. The Gerns pick who they can use as slave labor and strand the rest on Ragnarok, promising to come back and pick them up to be reunited with their families. The planet is thoroughly inhospitable with carnivorous critters, a virulent fever, and 1.5G.
The rest of the book is how the survivors cope and plot their revenge. It's pretty depressing. Of the 6,000 or so initial people dropped off, over 1,000 die the first night. When it becomes clear that the Gerns aren't coming back, the leaders decide that they have the technical skills to build their own ship, as long as they can find sufficient metal ore.
Unfortunately, there's no metal ore within travelable distance. They decide that their best bet is to write down all their technological lore--including all they know of Gern weapons and ships--and concentrate on building a society that will be sworn to vengeance, no matter how long it takes.
Several generations ensue. The population falls to as low as 250 before the surviving people are resilient to the conditions they are under. They find iron ore, but it's insufficient for a ship. It is sufficient to make a basic radio transmitter, but not a hypertransmitter, so they start transmitting their coordinates by basic Morse code, hoping to lure a Gern ship back to ambush and take themselves.
Along the way, they discover and tame a species of telepathic groundhogs to serve as communications equipment. They also manage to come to an arrangement with the carnivorous cat-wolves and more or less domesticate them.
Eventually, they get impatient and melt down the radio transmitter and the rest of their metals, primarily the old guns, to build a hypertransmitter. They lure a Gern ship to the village. The Gerns, expecting a primitive civilization, open their doors and send a small squad out. The Ragnarokians shoot out the search lights with their crossbows, kill most of the landing party, take their guns, and storm the ship. Then, they fly to the planet the original ship was bound for. They take along one surviving Gern officer, who taunts them that they are so outnumbered, they will be easily killed before they can accomplish anything.
What the Gern officer doesn't realize is that having evolved to live and work in a 1.5G environment, the Ragnarokians can disable the maneuvering safeties of their ship and pull tighter turns than the Gerns can. The Ragnarokians quickly take another ship, and the book ends with the Gern officer realizing that his species signed its own death warrant by placing humans in a harsh environment that would make them harder.
Now, the 1.5G thing is brilliant. I really like how he did that and how it makes an ironic finish to the Gerns' hubris.
Buuuuut...
Something like six generations have passed, and the aliens haven't had a single significant software update? I mean, in my first 25 years, Apple went from the IIc to the iPad. This story spans ten times that long, and the aliens' OS is still recognizable from manuals written with charcoal? Not to mention that while modern firearms are still using the same "put boom powder behind ball" that they were 250 years ago, what really are the odds that a time traveling Revolutionary could pick up a M4 carbine and actually use it effectively while actively under fire?
When you consider the historical context of the book, though, it makes absolute sense that a man seeing explosive (ba-dum-bum) growth in rocketry would assume that field would continue to advance at a consistent rate until interstellar travel was achieved while looking at the near-stagnant field of computers and assuming they would continue to advance merely incrementally.
And this is why I enjoy old books, especially futuristic science fiction. It allows you to look back at the fears and hopes people had for their technology. Movies do this, too. The pre-Code Frankensteins had a zombie reanimated by electricity. In Night of the Living Dead, it's suggested that a returning probe with cosmic radiation is the culprit. Fast forward to Resident Evil, and it's biotech. People look at technology that's being developed and assume it's heading in a particular direction.
And it injects a big old shot of humility into your life, as you realize that the trends people of previous generations thought were clear and inevitable turned out to be completely wrong.
Or at least, it should.
In 1894, the Times predicted “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of [horse] manure.” But along came Henry Ford.
On the flip side, in 1954, Lewis Strauss of the AEC said, "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age." And while some of that came true (especially the lack of famines, thanks to my hero, Norman Borlaug), the plentiful electricity that nuclear energy promised ran afoul of NIMBY.
Even in my own life, I've seen a technology stall. When I was a wee little X-Phile, I read a book based around Mulder and Scully taking on mutated nanobots. It was scary because it was plausible. But today, nanotech just means engineering macro-level materials on a molecular scale. The chase for white-blood-cell-sized self-replicating robots to augment (or cripple) the immune system is all but over. And I think the current freak-out over AI is going to be similar (a cynical man might suggest that it behooves researchers to fan the flames of fear to get grants and entrepreneurs to make wild claims to pump their stock prices).
This is why real, hard science interpolates, not extrapolates. When I have a patient result that is outside assay range, I do not simply say, "Well, it's going to be X mg/dL if I draw the curve out that far." No, I have to dilute the specimen until the value falls inside the curve, then multiply it to get a reliable result, taking into account the significant figures so that I report it to an appropriate level of certainty. And this is for good reason.
I once had a CRP that flagged above assay range with a result of 18, which was fairly close to the upper assay limit of 15. It should be fairly close, right? But when I diluted it to within the assay range, the result was 12*2=24. Quite a bit off.
I'm not allowed to draw a 3cm line with a 2cm ruler, and anyone who does has left the bounds of hard science and has entered the domain of conjecture. And that's fine for entertainment. It's even fine for individuals to try to predict the future through their investments. If a person is wrong, well, he may go broke, and maybe his business, but the damage is limited. But agitation--or worse yet, coercion--for society at large to do things en masse--can and often does create problems far beyond what the original trend would have.
Because the same ignorance occurs in societal predictions. At the time of the American Revolution, the Founders were concerned that the citizenry had not the moral fiber required to build a Republic, and well they might: in 1774, a visitor to New York noted at least 500 publicly practicing prostitutes. Almost 3% of adults had parented at least one illegitimate child.
And then came the Second Great Awakening.
On the flip side, in 1940, Robert Heinlein wrote If This Goes On--, a work centered around the US's inexorable slide into theocracy. And with the Depression bringing on a religious fervor that would see religious participation in the US peak two decades later, he had every reason to think that.
And then came the '60s.
The human brain is the greatest predictive machine ever made, and computer scientists still struggle to remotely compete with it. But even it cannot truly see the future, even in large groups (as the 2016 election betting odds saga proved).
So if you're reading the news, or even a science journal, and find yourself fearful of the trends and implications, well, it just might be useful to read a good old scifi book.
