The Martians
The opportunity to write about Martians came about because of a rare Sunday afternoon when I was alone with the TV at the very time the Sci Fi Channel broadcast The Martian Chronicles. A Sci Fi fan since fourth grade (when I read Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint) who particularly enjoyed The Martian Chronicles in both print and celluloid, I dropped everything and got out a tape.

The movie set me to thinking about January’s PC Alamode when I made my own feeble attempt at speculative fiction. I was amazed that as soon as I dreamed up some technological miracle to put in my story, I read about it in Wall Street Journal.

If you know this business, however, you know what screaming technological needs must be met and you know where most trends are leading. Who doesn’t know that we’re migrating to palm-top computers and wireless communications? Who doesn’t know that workers are moving into “offices with no walls?” Who doesn’t know that “the rage” among private consumers is now home networks? But how do concepts in speculative fiction hold up over the long run?

The Martian Chronicles, written in 1946, was set in the years 1979 through 2007, most of the action taking place in the early third millennium. The movie was faithful to the novel’s quaint scientific concepts, (out of date even in 1981) such as using a Saturn rocket to touch down on the planet surface, using the Martian “canals” to transport colonists to outlying areas and a US manned Martian exploration program even more ambitious than the Apollo project.

Other concepts were more compelling. The Martian communities consisted of pre-fab buildings that looked a lot like packing crates with windows. The residents used lightweight stackable furniture. They ate and drank from the same bland-looking utensils.

A few concepts stood out like a sore thumb. The women did little but keep house for the men. They wore dresses and heels to do housework a la Donna Reed. The men wore leisure suits, even as uniforms. And there was that pesky telephone that rendered one passage laughable instead of gripping.

Visualize this: The third world war has started. The US abandons the colonization effort to divert funds to the war effort and tells all the colonists to evacuate. When everyone leaves Mars in a panic, someone invariably gets left behind. Frantically, one of the stragglers searches for others like him. He enters one neighborhood and hears a phone ringing. Desperate, he tries to locate the house. The phone continues to ring. Finding the house he reaches out to answer. The ringing dies. Although the phone has a view screen, he finds the phone book and dials (manually) every number starting with the A’s.

The phone was something that even the movie makers in 1981 couldn’t anticipate. Back then, we had no star-six-nine callback, no caller ID, no cell phones, pagers or e-mail. In the grand scheme of Big Technology in Science Fiction, the little miracles that get overlooked.

It reminded me of another film, probably a candidate for Worlds Worst Sci Fi movie, but somehow fun to watch: Godzilla vs. Megalon. The protagonists in this flick were tasked with creating an enormous robot capable of defeating Godzilla (who I assume needs no introduction) before he destroys the earth.

One scene took place in the ultra-modern office of Megalon’s creator. The camera panned the sleek desktops and other worldly art until it came to rest on … a typewriter.

A sci-fi novel of more recent vintage offered a small but interesting technological concept that warrants further investigation. Much has been written about the paperless office, so much in fact that we’ve destroyed a lot of trees in the process. The 1993 novel The Turing Option by Harry Harrison (prolific sci fi writer) and Marvin Minsky (the father of modern robotics). The book is a speculation on uses of Artificial Intelligence.

What interested me was an obscure passage regarding a laser printer. After reading a printout, the protagonist puts the stack of papers back into the printer’s paper tray. The printer erases the original printout and produces another printout on the same paper. I hope this concept does for printers what Star Trek’s communicators did for cell phones.

The MP3s
As a preface to Walter Mossberg’s instructions for converting LPs and Cassettes to MP3s, let me say that we did try this with my favorite album. It worked like a charm, and the audio quality was quite good. You’ll probably want to start a new MP3 for each track  rather than putting the entire album on a single MP3. To do this, on your recording software, click the stop button when a song ends, then click the start button when the next song starts.

“Mossberg’s Mailbox”
Wall Street Journal
January 2, 2001.