IMAGINING THE

INTERNET:
Science Fiction
and Global Data
Networks
 The state of the Art
Early long-distance communications
networks:
 Express riders: the Roman Empire, the

Great Yeshivas of the early Middle Ages

 Postal system: Thurn und Taxis postal

monopoly during the late Renaissance

 Heliography in the 19th Century

The first global network:

 Telegraphy

All faced limitations in type and amount

of information, speed and reach.
 The Brick Moon
 Edward Everett Hale, 1869.
 First story proposing an artificial
satellite.
 The brick moon is meant as a
navigational aid, not a
communications satellite, but gives
a first glimpse of communicating
between Earth and space, with the
implication of global
communication.
 The Brick Moon
 “I caught the idea in a moment. They
were telegraphing to our world, in the
hope of an observer. Long leaps and
short leaps,--the long and short of
Morse's Telegraph Alphabet,--were
communicating ideas.”
 “The snow lay white upon the Flat. …he
rapidly unrolled a piece of black
cambric twenty yards long, and pinned
it to the crust upon the snow; …[he]
showed the symbols for "I understand,…"
 From the ‘London Times’ of 1904
 Mark Twain, 1898
 The ‘telectroscope’ – not the first
videophone, but the first webcam in fiction.
 “The connection was made with the
international telephone-station, and day by
day, and night by night, he called up one
corner of the globe after another, and
looked upon its life, and studied its
strange sights, and spoke with its people”
 “[H]e wandered about the remote underworld,
where the sun was shining in the sky, and
the people were at their daily work”
 The Machine Stops
 E. M. Forster, 1909
 “The Machine is much but it is not everything. I
see something like you in this plate, but I do not
see you.”
 “There were buttons and switches everywhere –
buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing.
There was the hot bath button… There was the
button that produced literature. And [the] buttons
by which she communicated with her friends. The
room, though it contained nothing, was in touch
with all that she cared for in the world.”
 “Let your ideas be secondhand, and if possible
tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from
that disturbing element – direct observation.”
 The Machine Stops
 “By her side… was a survival from the ages of litter –
one book. This was the book of the Machine. In it were
instructions against every possible contingency….In
accordance with a growing habit, it was richly bound.”
 “People never touched one another. The custom had
become obsolete, owing to the Machine.”
 “’The Machine,’ they exclaimed, ‘feeds us and clothes
us and houses us; through it we speak to one another,
through it we see one another, in it we have our
being… blessed is the Machine.’ And before long this
allocution was printed on the first page of the Book…”
 “No one confessed the Machine was out of hand.… there
was not one who understood the monster as a whole.
Those master brains had perished.”
 A Logic named Joe
 “Murray Leinster” (Pseudonym of
Will F. Jenkins), 1946
 First story to predict server-
client model – “logics” and “tanks”
and something like the personal
computer in its modern form.
 Envisioned data mining.
 Raised the issue of restricting
dangerous information and of
potential privacy violations.
 A Logic Named Joe
 “You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision
receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you
punch the keys for what you wanna get. It's hooked in to the
tank, which [is] fixed up with relays. Say you punch "Station
SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an'
whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin' comes on your
logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an' the
screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the
logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-
phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the
weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who
was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's
administration or what is PDQ and R sellin' for today, that
comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The
tank is a big buildin' full of all the facts in creation an'
all the recorded telecasts that ever was made—an' it's hooked
in with all the other tanks all over the country—an'
everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it
an' you get it.”
 Multivac
 Various stories by Isaac Asimov, 1950s.
 Name comes from early computers such as ENIAC and
UNIVAC.
 A giant machine, miles long, that processes all the
world’s data, providing much of the world’s governance
and many other functions besides.
 Not as pervasive as Forster’s Machine, but also so
complex that no one can debug it and it cannot fully
comprehend or troubleshoot itself.
 In “The Last Question”, Multivac evolves over time to
try to solve the puzzle of reversing entropy and finally
comes up with a solution as the Universe dies.
 Sam Hall
 Poul Anderson, 1953.
 With the US a police state, a
disaffected systems administrator
creates an imaginary rebel.
 One of the first stories to portray
the idea of “going viral”.
 Sam Hall
 “By God, he thought, I’ll give them
Sam Hall!” His fingers began to
race… You couldn’t duplicate
numbers and every citizen had a lot
of them. You had to account for
each day of his life.”
 “… the leader of the raid…said…: ‘…
My name is Sam Hall.’”
 If there Were No Benny Cemoli
 Phillip K. Dick, 1963
 The “homeopape”, a flimsy hardcopy of an up-
to-the-minute newspaper printed out from
street kiosks, appears in many of his stories.
 Another “going viral” story – with
broadcasting shut down, the government of an
occupied Earth stays in power by giving the
occupiers the nonexistent Cemoli to hunt,
whose activities are ‘reliably’ reported by the
New York Times homeopape.
 If there Were No Benny Cemoli
 “…we are safe, at least for a
while… if our tunnel to the
cephalon of the homeopape… isn’t
discovered.”
 Stand on Zanzibar
 John Brunner, 1968.
 Shalmaneser, one of a number of central
supercomputers that are all things to all people.
 Shalmaneser is a repository and processor of data
that provides its users many of the functions we
are used to from the WWW and the Internet.
 New occupation: information analysts who look
through the news in one area of science to find
information that may be useful in other sciences,
technology and business.
 Brunner would further develop his ideas in the
1975 novel Shockwave Rider, including the terms
“worm” and “virus” as they are used in
cybernetics today.
 Stand on Zanzibar
 “’It has been more than a decade since the
contents of the New York Public Library were
actually in New York. Their exact location
is now classified, but this has not reduced
– rather, it has enhanced – user-access.’”
 “Donald Hogan sat among 1235 other people
any or all or whom might be consulting the
same book or magazine as he was at any given
instant.”
 There were people…with the title
‘synthesist’…who spent their entire working
lives…making cross-references from one
enclosed corner of research to another.”