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Digital Dreams edited by David V. Barrett, NEL, pp 347, £4.50
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If science fiction’s greatest triumph of prophecy was space travel,
then its biggest missed bet must be the rise of the digital computer. As
late as the 1970s, some American science fiction stories still featured
earnest young men fingering slide rules (‘slipstick jockies’), while British
authors tended to ignore the subject completely. Even when the realisation
came that here was a technology that was about to alter everyday life irrevocably,
and not always for the better, the computer was all too often merely a prop,
the equivalent of a ‘blaster’ or the much-loved ‘hyperspace drive’.

In the US, the rise of cyberpunk put computers centre stage. A frequently
misunderstood sub-genre of science fiction, cyberpunk authors such as William
Gibson and Bruce Sterling extrapolated the future of the microchip into
a world where the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, human and
nonhuman become provisional and illusionary.

British authors, sunk in post-imperial gloom, have always tended to
take a more dystopic view of a future driven by technology, as Digital Dreams
shows clearly. This is a collection of stories by 20 British authors based
on computers.

The general mood is one of mistrust, although some stories reveal a
fascination with the world of computer viruses and ‘worms’, perhaps because
this contains the idea of contamination, an increasingly common topic in
an AIDS-obsessed society. Among these something-nasty-in-the-plasticwork
stories lurks David Langford’s ‘What happened at Cambridge IV’, which invokes
the spectre of killer computer graphics, a recurring theme of recent stories.
(In the 1930s there was a similar vogue for tales of books that could drive
men mad.

More enjoyable is Neil Gaiman’s ‘Virus’, a tale of the ultimately addictive
computer game. A pleasant story by Ben Jeapes dares to suggest that computer
viral forms may eventually develop their own ecology and, indeed, that some
may have to become protected species.

Gary Kilworth’s piece of whimsy, on the other hand, has God’s grand
design for the cosmos corrupted by the introduction of a viral soul. David
Barrett concentrates on a malicious author of a virus, an ultimately pathetic
figure totally dependent on his machine. I share his curiosity about why
people spend so much time trying to sabotage other people’s microcomputers.

But the collection does reiterate cliches that were old before the first
transistor flipped its flop. Josephine Saxton and Michael Fearn knock out
vers ions of E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’, which originally warned
about excessive dependence on machines. That the machines are digital adds
nothing to the original thesis.

The characters in Keith Robert’s piece are tiresome stereotypes – the
passionate impulsive artist opposes the cold, unfeeling computer technician
who wishes to render all creativity down to zeros and ones. I am sure that
plot has been run and run for every type of technology there is.

I found much to be enjoyed in this collection, nonetheless. Besides
lightweight pieces of candyfloss like Ray Girvan and Steve Jones’s ‘Lord
of the Files’ and Andy Sawyer’s ‘Mechanical Art’, there is the excellent
Terry Pratchett story ‘# ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time’. This is the
first piece of science fiction I have read that tackles the issue of ‘virtual
reality’, in which a computer generated world substitutes for reality.

Pratchett takes the idea beyond the crude goggles-and-glove approach
to a world in which you can choose to wear a virtual reality suit to edit
out all the nastiest features of everyday life. This makes it the only really
up-to-the-minute piece in the anthology.

Although this collection has its sparkling moments, it is surprisingly
short on insights, literary or technical, into the impact of information
technology on everyday life, in particular the convergence of communications
and computing that will increasingly define the way we look at the world.
Instead, with the exception of the Pratchett and a few other stories, Digital
Dreams has an oddly dated feel to it. An advance on cyberpunk, it isn’t.

Fin Fahey is a programmer and writes for computer journals.