Silicon chips make choices with stolen voices

[sovay]

My poem "The Gambler" is now online at Strange Horizons. It was written in November; its dedicatees are its inspirations and it is close to my favorite of the poems I wrote last fall. Certainly it's dark and icy enough outside still to feel germane.

I watched WarGames (1983) tonight for the first time since middle school; I don't care that it counts DEFCON in the wrong direction or if the real-life command center for NORAD does not so much resemble the bridge of the starship Enterprise, I never cease to be amazed at the fondness for a movie that childhood can hardwire in. It must have been one of my earliest exposures to science onscreen and furnished me with another offbeat archetype, John Wood's Stephen Falken. (Who I thought I was looking at, the first time I met George Dyson. The Pacific Northwest setting didn't help.) What strikes me now as strangest is the possibility that I may belong to the last generation that easily recognizes the technology on which the film runs—the alien hardware of acoustically-coupled modems and rotary payphones, never mind the rooms full of whirring supercomputers. When my father worked at Mass. General Hospital, one of the treats I was rarely allowed was to play in the computer room that belonged to the radiology department, which was chill and slightly dusty, loud with fans, and had panels in the floor, so that I could climb down underneath the banks of machines. He built the computer I learned to type on: black screen, green lettering; a dot-matrix printer with fan-folded paper, perforated and striped in pale green. This is early memory, but accessible to me. I know for a fact my brother remembers nothing before the toaster Mac. Once upon a time, there lived a magnificent race of animals that dominated the world through age after age. They ran, they swam, they fought, and they flew, until suddenly—quite recently—they disappeared. I am not sure this theme of obsolescence and extinction was meant to turn quite so personal.

Which is where my final link comes in. Courtesy of nineweaving: twenty history comics. You may never be able to forget Sylvanus Morley or Benedict Arnold again.

"It looks like someone has thrown a pair of bloomers into the machine."

Comments

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

It is scary how much computer technology has changed in so short a span of time. I remember how impressed folk who started college my senior year were at the fact that I'd got through high school still using an Apple IIGS. And I carry in my pocket every day a thirteen-dollar flash drive that will hold more than three times as much data as the entire hard drive on the laptop I had then.

Glad that poem's gone up there--it's a good one. I hope it's not too dark and icy in your vicinity. (We've still got power, here, but there's a tree down near our lines, as per my most recent post. Hopefully it'll get cleared before it becomes an issue.)

And thanks for the twenty history comics. You're the second who's linked me to them, proving that my friends list has taste. Odd taste, maybe, but taste. ;-)

[gwynnega]

Terrific poem!

I certainly don't miss dot-matrix printers. And ah, I remember composing entire novels on a typewriter...

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

... actually I have always been like that about Nicola Tesla, but unfortunately he would have started screaming and foaming at the mouth. Not terribly stable, that man.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I loved that movie for the extremely, for me, touching ending, where the kids teach the computer the futility of wargames, and it says "Strange game; the only way to win is not to play." As a child of the Cold War, that recognition still brings tears to my eyes.

I'm amazed that you remember those bits of technology you do! You remember dot matrix printers and green-and-white perforated printer paper? You have a great memory :-)

In the late 1970s, we used to visit my grandmother in Lexington, Massachusetts, and we were friends with some kids whose dad worked at MIT. I remember seeing my first modem then--yeah, a rotary-dial phone, and you set the headset in a little cradle. Our friends showed us how they could talk with students at MIT on their dad's computer that way. It must have been like, oh 1978 or 1979. Amazing.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

I couldn't remember the poem by name, but when I got to the page, I caught my breath.
"It's the one with the book of mica!" I didn't quite say it out loud, but then, no one would have heard me but the cats and the pigs.
One of my favorite places to go, these days, where I work, is the server room, big banks of black machines, sleek boxes stacked to above my head, showing red and blue lights. It's best in the dark, where the air conditioners, on full blast, even in the winter, keep it chill. There are white tiles on the floor, set a little above, the anti-static kind that I imagine must be the same as the Mass General floor.
I remember, now, the time we had a primitive IM conversation (the messages were more 2 minute delay than instant, then) with some kids from another school in the G/T program ... I think it would have been 1988. Wow. 20 years ago. I was in 8th grade... it feels both longer and shorter.

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

Sonya, I have so much to catch up on with you. I'm hoping this weekend to be able to actually read some of these poems you have up online. I'll have to scan through all your posts for the past two weeks. But congratulations on the recent publications.

And I've retained my fondness for War Games too (and when I first saw it I developed a crush on Matthew Broderick--he still makes me smile). Hope to get back to reading good poetry soon! For now, it's back to high school textbooks...

[time-shark.livejournal.com]

Enjoyed your poem today!