True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (2 page)

Earlier in this new preface I mentioned that we live in a science fictional age. That cuts both ways. The non-fiction written for this book reflected reality that in some cases was based in the 1980s, more than a full decade before its first publication. Just as science fiction sometimes deals with reality of a previous era, so do the non-fiction articles contained herein. They offer a unique perspective on where we came from in the dawning age of the Internet. And perhaps they will inspire a new generation of visionaries to innovations we cannot yet conceive.

—James Frenkel, August, 2014

Preface

Work on the volume you hold in your hands was begun in 1995. As Vernor Vinge's editor at Tor Books (and elsewhere, beginning, appropriately, with the Dell Books publication of “True Names” in
Binary Star 5
in 1981), I had long been aware of the great interest in that novella.

However, since its first publication, “True Names” had been difficult to keep in print, for reasons Vernor explains in his Introduction, which follows this Preface. By 1995 it had become quite apparent that the Internet, which was the core of or at least the environment in which the majority of the story took place, had become an integral part of modern life.

Both within and outside the field of science fiction, people discuss the notion that there are times when reality “catches up” with science fiction. Often this is said by those who don't understand science fiction. Some think that somehow SF writers are going to run out of new ideas, simply because developments in the real world either have brought into being something that was once written about in some science fiction tale, or because something that had been speculated about in some science fiction tale has been shown to be quite unlikely in the face of some entirely unpredictable development that makes the science fictional notion seem suddenly quaint, or worse.

My favorite instance of the latter is the development of smaller, more powerful computers. In the 1940s and '50s Isaac Asimov wrote a few stories in which he posited that computers would get more powerful—and bigger—until they were as big as whole planets. I personally found this vision pretty cool, though also a little daunting, since the ultimate result of this trend was a computer that essentially became God.

Then the microchip was developed, and since then computers have gotten increasingly powerful … but
smaller.
Which brings us back to this book.

When my then-assistant, Jim Minz, and I set out to get articles or essays that related to or were inspired by “True Names,” we received many excellent pieces, a number of which are included here. Then the project was delayed by a number of factors that had nothing to do with the material itself. Therefore this book is being published nearly six years after its inception.

The articles and essays here were written at various times, the oldest being “True Names” itself and then Marvin Minsky's Afterword, and the most recent being Richard M. Stallman's addendum to his “The Right to Read.” During the editing it became clear that some of the articles contain material that seems somewhat dated in the face of more recent developments. In a way, it's like science fiction from a previous time which has been superseded by (contradictory) reality.

The other thing that became clear during the editorial process, however, was that the one constant in cyberspace is rapid change. Things that were new and unique just a few years ago are old hat today, and the rate of change doesn't seem likely to slow down any time soon. So it's quite likely that all the nonfiction in this book will seem like outdated science fiction within just another few years.

But this book isn't intended to provide a report on what's about to happen in cyberspace, or necessarily on what's happening at the moment we go to press. Our intention from the start has been to provide something of a historical perspective, and to give readers a window on developments and theories that have contributed to some of the more intriguing aspects of the Internet and the World Wide Web, set against a story that provided the first seriously imaginative depiction of what the Internet could become. When
True Names
was written, it was considered visionary. And it was read by some of those who have had a great deal to do with shaping the Internet to date. Therefore, we've chosen to do the only really sensible thing—let the authors' ideas speak for themselves, without attempting to second-guess them.

—J
AMES
F
RENKEL

August 2001

Introduction

Vernor Vinge

I'm writing this in August 1999. It's almost exactly twenty years since I wrote the first draft of
True Names.
This new appearance of the story as part of
True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier
is the first that has included multiple essays by other people. And these are very interesting people. All but one I've met, in one way or another, because of
True Names.
If there were no other reason for writing the story, these friendships would suffice. I'm very grateful to Jim Frenkel for bringing all these essays together.

Word for word,
True Names
was one of the easiest projects I've ever worked on. I think there were several reasons for this. I went to college back before there were computers. Well, not really—but my college days are so far back along the exponential run of technology, it almost seems that way. In the early 1960s there were computers but as far as I know there were no computer-science departments. It's so far back that many of the computer services we use every day were not even imagined—and that is a terrible thing for a science-fiction writer to confess.

From well before the 1960s, however, there was one computer application that was imagined, and that still waits in our future: machine intelligence, in particular, superhuman machine intelligence. That did catch my attention. From the early 1960s onward, computer technology joined space travel as my central speculative interest.

And yet, in college I never took any computer courses. Sometimes, I wonder if this ignorance was an advantage, saving me from getting lost in the irrelevancies of the moment. After all, I figured I knew where things were
ultimately
going! (John Ford's essay here is an interesting look back on this. What of the machine archaeologists in our future, digging around in their prehistory trying to make sense of things as bizarre as human cinema?)

By 1979, I did know a little about contemporary computing. I had been teaching computer-science courses at San Diego State University for several years; I did a lot of what is now called telecommuting. One night I was working at home, logged on to SDSU's principal computer (a PDP-11/45 running RSTS; it had about the computing power of the digital camera I have sitting on my desk today). As usual, I sneaked around in anonymous accounts—no need for the whole world to see I was on the machine. Every so often, I'd take a look at the other users, or surface in my official account. Suddenly I was accosted by another user via the TALK program (which for some reason I had left enabled). The TALKer claimed some implausible name, and I responded in kind. We chatted for a bit, each trying to figure out the other's true name. Finally I gave up, and told the other person I had to go—that I was actually a personality simulator, and if I kept talking my artificial nature would become obvious.

Afterward, I realized that I had just
lived
a science-fiction story, at least by the standards of my childhood. For several years (ever since reading Ursula K. Le Guin's
A Wizard of Earthsea
) I'd had the idea that the “true names” of fantasy were like object ID numbers in a large database. Now I saw how that could be turned into a story.

*   *   *

It was the summer of 1979.
True Names
was the first story I ever wrote with a word processor: a TECO editor running on a Heathkit LSI 11/03. For me, the writing environment was heaven on earth! (And somewhere in the following years, in upgrading from RT-11 8-inch floppies to IBM 5.25-inch floppies to my first hard disk … the machine-readable form of the original manuscript was lost. Sigh.) I sent the manuscript around—in hardcopy, of course. Jim Frenkel suggested that I make it longer, mainly to have additional action after the battle with the Mailman and provide a satisfying denouement. I think that rewrite was done in early 1980, producing the form of the story that you see here. Dell published
True Names
early in 1981 as half of a Binary Star “double novel” book (the other half being George R. R. Martin's “Nightflyers”), all illustrated by Jack Gaughan.

In the years after the Dell Books edition,
True Names
was in and out of print: Jim Frenkel's Bluejay Books had an edition illustrated by Bob Walters with an afterword by Marvin Minsky (which has been recaptured here). Jim Baen published the story in a collection of my other short fiction,
True Names and Other Dangers.
The only other U.S. publication is in Hartwell and Wolf's
Visions of Wonder
from Tor Books. This on-again, off-again publishing history has been frustrating to some readers—and it has certainly been frustrating to me! Part of the problem is that
True Names
is thirty thousand words long, too small to be a stand-alone novel but too large for most story collections.

As the years pass, I've been very interested in the reaction of readers to
True Names.
I have a knowledgeable friend who first read it in 1980. At that time she liked it, but thought the story was a bit “off the wall.” She reread it several years later and still liked it, but by then it seemed much less radical. By the middle 1980s, the ideas in the story had appeared (independently) in a number of other places. By the late 1980s, there were television shows with these ideas. In the early 1990s I noticed another kind of interest—not inspired by the Internet aspects of the story so much as by the autonomous sprites and guardians that inhabited the Other Plane. This was largely because such things were actually being made (and that is so much more impressive than any fiction!). Both Pattie Maes and Lenny Foner (Pattie's PhD student, now graduated) are in the middle of this research, and they both have essays here.

*   *   *

I've also looked for antecedents to
True Names.
There's Poul Anderson's “Kings Who Die” (1962) and John Brunner's
Shockwave Rider
(1975). In the late 1970s, I believe there was an interactive role-playing program being marketed for use on a computer network (and I'd be grateful for a solid reference on this). And, of course, there's Vannevar Bush's incredible essay “As We May Think” (1945) and Theodor Nelson's Xanadu system (1965–).

Many of the best things about
True Names
grew almost subconsciously as I worked on the story; others came out of the constraints that the plot put on me. (So some of the following is undocumented archeology on my recollections of the time!) The network aspect was inspired by my interactions on SDSU's dial-in computer. Scaling up from that and imagining consequences was easy, and pointed to many important things. I was aware of Moore's Law in some form when I wrote
True Names.
I think I had the raw hardware power fairly well targeted. The story took place just on the near side of a network-mediated Technological Singularity, but superhuman automation was still mostly offstage. (There were numerous things about the future that the story misses—or that have not yet happened. The version of
True Names
appearing in this book contains some small corrections, but as far as I know they are all spelling, punctuation, and typography. For this story, I felt that larger “fixes” would not be as interesting as seeing what went right and what went wrong.)

Some things in
True Names
were simply very happy accidents. For instance, the Vandals used “fifty thousand baud” connections from their home machines. The “baud” was just a misuse of jargon; I should have said “bits per second.” But “fifty thousand bits per second”
is
correct, even though many home users in 1999 already have better connections to the Net. Home connections in
True Names
were much much larger, but it seemed to me that covert, untraceable channels would be very small by comparison, because of all the overhead involved in hiding one's tracks. (Actually, latencies would probably be a lot worse on the covert connections, but I didn't get that.) It was this low bit rate that made me put the responsibility for picture generation at the user end (the “EEG Portal,” mediated by the user's imagination). It was fascinating, at Hackers several years later, to talk to Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer about what they had done with Habitat. Chip and Randy did the real thing, using a 300-bit-per-second link and a protocol that evoked image fragments stored on the user's local disk.

The user environment of the 1999-era Internet is not nearly as magical as the one in
True Names
(which was targeted to take place around 2014). But in writing the story, magic was everywhere I looked. The concept of “true names” is entrenched in fantasy and seemed an excellent fit to the real importance of true names in a network environment. And even in serious commerical programming, the magic metaphors are very common, partly as humor, partly because they provide useful terminology to hang reasoning on. (Interestingly, there is even a rational reemergence of superstition. Very few people nowadays believe that if you spill salt, then—to avoid bad luck—you should throw a pinch of it over your shoulder. But I'll bet almost every computer user notices and acts on correlations that are almost as unsubstantiated. For example, a user notes, “My VeryComplexApplication often crashes when I pop up a calendar window in this other application”—and therefore avoids looking at the calendar when running the VeryComplexApplication. Before computers, things moved slowly enough that such correlations could be tested and verified, and lead to logical insights. With computer programs, things are very complex and interrelated, and in many situations we don't have time to go beyond the superstition stage in analyzing coincidences.)