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PREFACE

When historians of the 22nd century are cudgeling their brains (and each other; God, I hope I can sit in!) to characterize the 20th century, their problem won't be lack of data. It will be the very diversity of that data. But what will they conclude from the structures of Gropius and Wright; the popularity of punk rock and Stravinsky; armies supplied with bayonets and ballistic missiles; citizens enjoying Volkswagens and Ferraris, fantasy fiction and epic nonfiction; cities drawing power from coal and nuclear plants?

I'm betting they will note the bewildering change of pace in each arena and will then ignore it, looking for something more arcane. But it's that change of pace, that variety of choice, that separates us most profoundly from earlier cultures! Look: people everywhere have always sought variety—not this or that, but this and that. There may be no better way to differentiate the free West from competing systems than to note the changes of pace available to the citizens of each.

Not that everybody likes to have the pace changed: I know some folks who like only the foxtrot, white bread, and Ford V-8s. Well, those things are all reliable, and tomorrow isn't. I understand and sympathize, but tomorrow is where we're headed, and all indications are that it's going to be more full of variety, changes of pace, than today.

That goes for fiction as well as fact. Even the most hardbitten of hard-science fiction scribblers can opt for a change of pace to fantasy. It's a different set of mental gymnastics, and it keeps our sense of wonder from getting flabby.

On the other hand, a consultant helped me flesh out the background for one of the most far-out tales in this collection, then asked me why I considered it science fiction. "It wouldn't surprise me if it really happened," she said; "some marine invertebrates aren't too shabby in the brains department." It was her view that, if it's likely to happen, it ain't sci-fi. So then we got into an argument about the difference between SF and fantasy, and I cried, and she hit me. . . . Oh all right, so I added a bit of fantasy to our exchange. The point is, sometimes we reach into a sea of fiction and grasp a tentacle of what feels like fact. It can be unsettling. So why does it elate me? Maybe I like to be unsettled a bit. I suspect my readers like it too. God knows, anybody who likes being unsettled can have loads of whoopee in times like these!

But some of it is very serious whoopee. Take the small arms piece, for instance, which reports on the findings of a recent thinktank session on future weapons. I'd be disingenuous if I denied we had fun, but the purpose of that seminar was ultimately to figure out what an infantryman will mean by "small arms" in the next century. The diversity among members of that seminar was marvelous to behold. Well, of course: the thinktank people wanted it that way, knowing that variety is the spice of life, the source of strife, and a great provocation toward new ideas. Our conclusions weren't intended as fiction, but you never know. Tune in twenty years from now.

For better or worse, the collection you're holding may be a metaphor of tomorrow: terror and hope, right guesses and wrong ones, high tech and thatched cottages. Nothing wrong with a thatched cottage if you want one; the nice thing about tomorrow is, we can bring the best parts of yesterday along with us. Bearing that in mind, we can get useful tips not only from hard engineering looks at our near future, but also from playful peeks into our distant past. Just don't start complaining when you find that each piece in this book is a change of pace from the piece ahead of it, yet you keep finding echoes of previous scenarios in the next ones. That's the way the book works.

That's the way the world works. May as well enjoy it . . .

MILLENNIAL
POSTSCRIPT

Anyone who risks a retrospective glance at his own science fiction has a problem. If he's serious about guessing at our future, that look backward looks embarrassingly like a report card. I give myself only a "B-" on these guesses, but in another twenty years they might look better. The primary reason for my misses—a reason, not an excuse—is that I keep giving humans credit for improvements we refuse to make until we absolutely must!

Take the "Y2K" problem, in which computers may treat January 2000 as January 1900. Why didn't I, one of the activist cadre in survival studies a generation ago, realize the problem then? Because I wasn't a programmer and didn't realize the deliberate oversimplification built into computers. But I worked with aerospace programmers who did, and not one of them ever mentioned it. At the time it was a clever touch to assume the "19" prefix. After all, the cost of data storage was on the order of a dollar per byte. In retrospect it all seems pretty short-sighted, but no more so than, say, keeping gasoline taxes too low to fund a national grid of fast mass transit. That is a logical source of its funding, as the Brits have known for decades.

Many of the things I got right are trivial in the grand scheme but being a bit trivial myself, I'll mention a few of them as millennial postscripts at the ends of the individual pieces that lie ahead. On the other hand, in several novels of the early 1980s I assumed that the Soviet Union would be dissolved by 1996. Hey, I can't be wrong all the time . . .

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Framed