Unanticipated futures

[beccaelizabeth]

I'm reading a book copyright 1974-5, revised and expanded 1982.
Crystal Singer, by Anne McCaffrey.

I just found a bit that struck me as odd for a moment but took me a bit longer to figure out why:

All she ever wanted to know about black quartz communications, Killashandra thought as diagrams and computations rolled across the screens and pressed on to more interesting data. She slowed the display speed when she caught the caption 'Membership' and reversed to the start of the entry.

This is a short bit from the middle of a data dump.

But what struck me was how she is accessing the data. On a computer, yes, but after initially typing in the planet name, everything just scrolls past.

No Keyword search, at least not by typing, just by eye.
And no hyperlinks.

Just one big long page.

And, yes, this is a plausible way to access data when you don't really know what you're looking for. But it struck me that, to people used to reading books, keywords and hyperlinks aren't intuitively obvious ways that data will be stored in future. Pages in books don't have clicky links. The way we use this thing here we are reading right now wouldn't be obvious to someone reading twenty years ago. In fact some bits of it aren't obvious to people using it right now.

Fascinating.



Also, there's a bit where she finds a 'need to know' label on data, and can't get in because she can't think of a reason. Now it might be the character is just that law abiding, but methinks that if anyone knew, it would end up on future-wiki. I kind of don't believe in secrecy any more.

Also, she gets one and only one answer to her typed query. No google, just one authorised data source.

Weird, weird, weird, the minor differences.

Comments

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

Personally I'd retcon it to the point where a government got rid of the internet and free exchange of information at some point in the novel's past.

See my last LJ entry.