Orbital decay
It’s nice to have an ABC right around the corner! Because that means you can restack your supply of sci-fi with a short walk. Added to my list: I finally got a copy of Alastair Reynold’s latest: house of suns. Also picked up a copy of his short-story collection ‘galactic north’, which to my surprise i did not have in my library yet. While browsing the shelves, I also noted more Charles Stross. He writes em faster than i can read em. The last one of his novels I read was Accelerando: something i want to recommend to every geek/nerd out there! With Glasshouse (an oldie from ’06) and and Halting State, he continues to explore the genre which i would (probably incorrectly) dub ‘post-cyberpunk’. In his novels, consciousness and the virtual are so intertwined that the disctinction vanishes.
Anyway, what I wanted to write about is an older novel from (I believe ’89) by Alan Steele. I’ve enjoyed his coyote-series, and Orbital Decay is his first non-coyote work i’ve read. Although, really, the style is not that different. Steele describes the folk who are pioneering the expensian of the human race into space. Apart from the crazy commander and maybe the doctor, these are common folks: construction workers, bikers and fishermen.
An interesting twist to the story, around which Steele unfolds his expose on those common men, is the prediction that in 2010 (at or about, which is when the story is situated; remember it was written in ’89) the US government will roll out a network of satelittes allowing them to tap into any phonecall made. Not only long-distance and international, but local too. And what’s more, the system is able to transcribe those phone-calls and alert the NSA whenever something fishy is being said. In the examples, the fishy things include a conversation between a mom who complains about how the current administration sent off her boy to war, afraid he’ll get killed.
I don’t know whether Steele realized at the time of his writing that his prediction was spot on. In the ‘war on terror’ the US has breached its constituents privacy in ways very similar to what Steele predicted. Perhaps even more so. I won’t go into detail on that here, if you’re curious about it browse eff’s site or aclu’s for a bit. Maybe it isn’t that much of a surprise though, as it turns out he was inspired by earlier such tendencies. One of the characters mentions the McCarthy witchhunt, and something termed the ‘Accuracy in Academia’ movement. The character furthermore points out the arrests of many people in the US during world-war I for saying anything that even slightly smelled of agreeing with the Germans.
And this is why all this surveillance crap is so dangerous: it is (in this case) the NSA that decides when you’re suspicious. You might have an innocent chat with your neighbour about the middle-east or Osama bin Laden or whatever. A slightly careless phrasing of your thoughts and voila: you’re on the suspect list! Scary stuff!
All in all, a good read. The surveillance stuff is actually not a central part of the novel, but more of a motive around which the stories of the people that work and live on the earth-orbitting space station unfold. A thought-experiment about living with tens of people within the cramped confines of a space station. The irony of being in space, stretching out endlessly beyond the small confines in which human life can be sustained.
