A Technologo-Scientific and Popular Cultural Appendix to Postblogging Technology, September 1953, II: Soylent Green is Etc!

 

I'm sure everyone has seen 1973's "Soylent Green is People" clip, and the opening credits are actually pretty fun. And a good reminder that Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, came out in the same era as John Brunner's Dos Passos-inspired pseudo-found novels beginning with 1968's overpopulation-centred Stand on Zanzibar. I'm not sure how the movie money came to be left on the table for Harrison. but he did have the good sense to write a police procedural instead of a quadrology of sprawling, experimental novels. Harrison was, if anything, too succinct for his own good, hence Deathworld not being Dune. 

Blue green algae might also be too succinct for its own good. It's small, and short-lived; There have been a million generations since blue-green algae started out being the next big thing in fighting overpopulation and the "limits to growth," and as far as I can tell, we're still waiting. But, then, that's the point of the movie, isn't it? "Soylent" is the food of the future; Blue-green algae would should have been the food of the future,  but it turns out that there's a problem. 

I know, I know, that's a link to a weird and poorly reviewed science fiction novel from the early Seventies. The Ballentine second hands are everywhere, so I suspect it sold well but was received coldly, and I can see why, because it is a strange, if epic, story. And it happens to be the place where the  idea of the empty oceans was introduced to me --along with a lot of other very weird stuff.  T. J. Bass probably deserves some kind of attention, and the idea of a dead ocean was definitely resonating in the early 1970s, replacing earlier optimism about the bounteous harvest to come of "Fish and plankton, sea greens and protein from the sea." Protein. It's always protein. And cannibalism. Yum!

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, September 1953, II: Missing Plugs, Missing Rebuttals

 

Is that a bandwagon going by? Let me hop right on that thing! 

I am going to go with the assumption that no-one wants to hear my potted history of Boeing's ongoing struggle to not embarrass itself with the millions of 737s-only-slightly-different it is currently selling to the airlines that only want 737s. (Even if they are slightly different.) I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with an  industry being locked into an airplane that looks and acts like an old-time 737 in spite of having a ridiculously large pair of engines dragging off their wing and a whole app on its computer set up so that it will fly like a 737 even though if you use the app wrong you crash and die. 

Because if I was going to make fun of this situation I'd say something like "Good thing grandparents don't fly planes," and then the dam would burst and I would point and laugh and laugh and laugh, and we're way more serious about that around here. And anyway it frankly doesn't even crack the top fifty of inexplicable institutional malfunctions we've got going on these days. (Just kidding about "inexplicable." It's obviously all the old people we've got these days.) 

On the other hand, I can go back to 1953 and the approximate moment we got locked into this path and try to understand how we started down it.

Postblogging Technology, September 1953, II: Sweetness, Thorazine, and the Madness of Howard Hughes

R_.C_.,

Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

You will be pleased to hear that Reggie's paper went well, with none of the security-related theatrics that scuttled the conference's most anticipated paper, the Avro reply to George Schairer on pods. (I think pretty much everyone knows that the paper was considered far too embarrassing and dangerous because it discussed the extraordinary frequency with which B-47 engines explode, and J47s by extension, but the face-saving story is that it couldn't be given because the Vulcan is still on the Secret List, or something like that. 

Aside from attending conferences and sad associated"wine and cheeses," I have been enjoying London, although that must come to an end next week when I head out to the studio and find out what they've been doing with our money. Hopefully there will be a convincing explanation and some wonderful film is in the can, and I will spend the day enjoying out-takes and what passes for British food, which is even worse than Californian. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, September 1953, I: Scupper me Skull-and-Crossbones!

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada

Dear Father:

It was so good to see you in London, and you were so sweet with Nat. McGraw-Hill certainly didn't where it is by paying its correspondents too much! now I know why they were so slow to admit that the Russians had a hydrogen bomb. Actually, no-one has a hydrogen bomb! I suppose I shouldn't be any more clear than that, lest I reveal the big secret here in my secret letters.  

I'm still mad that you couldn't stay long enough to take in Farnham. I do understand. You're only back in the land of your disgrace on Her Majesty's Secret Service. I hope you will find Vancouver well and that you will listen to  your doctor, no matter how badly that is working out these days for someone taking the new wonder drugs, and have a good long rest. 

I would to, but I'm in London! 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie