Article-I.D.: lzwi.311
Posted: Wed Sep 18 23:04:53 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 20-Sep-85 04:39:54 EDT
Organization: AT&T-IS Enhanced Network Services
Lines: 193
"Press Enter _": novella (about 25000 words), written by John
Varley. First appeared in the May 1984 issue of ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE
FICTION MAGAZINE. Reprinted in TERRY CARR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION OF
THE YEAR (#14), 1985. Hugo nominee, Nebula winner.
WARNING: The following review completely gives away the plot of
"Press Enter _". You are strongly encouraged to read the story first.
Carr's "Best #14" is a good anthology; I've already recommended it
elsewhere. "Press Enter _" is the book's first story, about sixty
pages.
Let me say something right here about the typography. The last
character in the title is supposed to be a blinking block cursor.
Oddly enough, none of the books that make reference to the story manage
the blinking. I can't even manage the block, so I've substituted a
underline (that's what my cursor looks like).
With "Press Enter _", Varley again proves himself a master
wordsmith. He puts one sentence down after another, and the next time
you look up, it's fifteen minutes later, and there's nothing you want
to do so much as finish the story. Good stuff.
There are six characters in the story. Two are cops. Two stay
offstage (in life, anyway). And two are survivors of a couple of wars
in Asia.
Victor Apfel is fifty years old. He was a prisoner of war during
the Korean "police action". A head injury and attempts at brainwashing
left him an epileptic. He lives alone, in a small house in southern
California he inherited from his parents when they died in 1968. It
looks like a time capsule from the fifties. The only change Victor
made was adding a large bathtub - after Korean winters in a POW camp,
he's never felt warm. (There's a neat couple of lines or so about
veterans and POWs: "We got a taste of what the Vietnam guys got, later.
Only for us it was reversed. The G.I.'s were heros, and the prisoners
were . . .") He'd survived, and he continues to survive.
Lisa Foo also survived. She was born in Vietnam in 1958. Her
mother was half Chinese and half Japanese (the latter from "a Jap
soldier of the occupation" in 1944). Her father was half French and
half Annamese. ("Annam", later called "Central Vietnam", was even
later split between North and South Vietnams.) Her mother died when
she was ten, killed by one side or another. (Oddly enough, Victor's
parents died the same year.) At the ripe age of fourteen, an American
soldier gave her an apartment and taught her to read English. When
Saigon fell, she fled to Cambodia. She survived two years of horror in
the camps there, then escaped to Thailand. From there, she got to the
US at about age seventeen, picked up degrees in computer science from
MIT or Harvard, and possibly Berkeley or Stanford, and set up her own
consulting firm. A well respected hacker at twenty-five (which sets
the story in 1983, by the way, as a final bit of arithmetic), she's
called in to investigate a murder.
The cops can be described quickly enough. One, Hal Lanier, is
actually a programmer for the LAPD, and a friend of Victor's. There's
also a Detective Osborne (inside joke there?), who tries to investigate
the murder of "Charles Kludge".
Patrick William Gavin was about fifty at the time of his death. He
was a computer programmer in the fifties and sixties, specializing in
computer security: making it impossible to, say, dial up a bank
computer and rob it blind. In 1967, he told enough computers that
mattered that he was dead. For sixteen years, he lived as "Charles
Kludge", supporting himself by breaking into computers and looting
them. The computers he'd programmed had been left with "trapdoors" he
could enter. Other computers, he assaulted with brains, patience, and
special purpose computers.
The sixth character has no name, never appears in the story, and
kills three people. More on this one later.
(Note: If you haven't read this story yet, but are beginning to
think you'd like to, stop *now*!)
I described the characters in that much detail for two reasons.
First, I wanted to figure out just what happened when. Second, I want
to claim that of the three threads of the story, the romance between
Victor Apfel and Lisa Foo is the most important, in terms of words and
energy invested. It's also the one that affected me most. The other
two plots are an exploration of how "Kludge" (and Lisa) hacked, and the
mystery of the sixth character, including Kludge's murder.
There's not a lot left to say about the romance; Varley tells it
well. The sequence (friendship, sex, love) is maybe too common, but
one reason it's used a lot is that it works. As they get closer and
closer together, they share more and more of their experiences, and
both characters are drawn more and more vividly. Good writing.
The bit with hacking was pretty well done, too. Naturally enough,
Victor doesn't know anything about computers (this is completely in
character), and isn't too interested in them (ditto). He follows the
logic just enough to educate the reader, but also just enough for him
to understand what his new love is doing. All the jargon seems to be
genuine Hacker, and most of the descriptions make sense. In my
informed opinion, Varley overly respects the power of software that can
automatically break into a system; I get the impression he read Verner
Vinge's TRUE NAMES, and took the metaphor of the Other Plane too
literally. Some details are improbable: "He left informants behind,
hidden in the software. If the codes were changed, the computer ITSELF
would send the information to a safe system that Kludge could tap
later." Wouldn't it be easier to leave a "trapdoor" code in the
software, one that Kludge could always enter though? (Varley's
description might conceivably fit an encryption scheme.) Another
description of something that sounds good, but probably isn't real:
"there's a lot of very slick programs out there that grab an intruder
and hang on like a terrier." So far as I know, it doesn't work that
way; a security system can detect or kill an intruder, but can't
"fight" in any meaningful way. All in all, the descriptions of hacking
(and hackers) are refreshingly close to the mark, without once using
the word "hacker".
But the last plotline, of the unnamed character and all the
murders, has problems. The sixth character in the story is a program,
or a gestalt of many programs running on many processors. Call it
"Daemon". Ironically, "Kludge" may have helped create his own
murderer. He did some work for the National Security Agency, which
Varley all but names as Daemon's owner; they certainly had reason to be
interested in him. He also did work in artificial intelligence, trying
to network lots of home computers together until the number of
connections is enough to reach "critical mass", and the whole mess
comes self-aware. So far as I know, this idea was first published by
that little-known computer scientist, Robert Heinlein, in THE MOON IS A
HARSH MISTRESS. Heinlein's "Mike" makes more sense than Varley's
Daemon. Mike had a lot of capabilities we'd label advanced "artificial
intelligence" today. Today's software can neither reach such limits
nor transcend its instructions.
But granted Daemon's existence, I can't understand its power. It
can control "a carrier wave that can move over wires carrying household
current", and uses this to hypnotize people. It made Kludge and
Osborne blow their respective heads off, and got Lisa to modify a
microwave oven and cook her brains. It only gave Victor a major
seizure. Victor recovered, removed all the wiring and electrical
appliances from his house, and worried if Daemon "could come through
the pipes".
The science in most of Varley's science fiction stories (e.g.,
"In the Hall of the Martian Kings", the Gaea trilogy, and all of the
Seven Worlds series, including "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", "Gotta
Sing, Gotta Dance", and THE OPHIUCHI HOTLINE) is biological. In many
cases, particularly in the Gaea trilogy (TITAN, WIZARD, and DEMON),
biology replaces electronics. Tour his worlds, and you'll see a
symbiotic creature that can serve as a human's spacesuit (for as long
as they both shall live), a "space habitat" that dwarfs anything
mankind has planned for L5 that's actually a gigantic being, cloning
and memory transfers as the basis for life insurance, kidnapping, and
an interesting alternative to a safari. Different kinds of
transcendence keep cropping up, too. The symb/human "pairs" are two
individuals a little less than a human schizophrenic is. Gaea is to
some extent just one of the intelligences in the body of the same name,
but is the entire collection in some very profound ways. Even Avram
Fingal becomes more than just a personality trapped in an electronic
cage.
But Varley's fall from "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", through
Heinlein and Vinge, getting a thick coating of the stuff of TRUE NAMES,
ends up in a crash. When Fritz Lieber wrote "The Man Who Talked With
Electricity", he got away with electricity as an entity, but by writing
it as a tall tale, and you didn't have to believe it all. Varley
leaves you with the image of malevolent energy attacking a house like
the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, all but rapin' our women. (Come to
think of it, all three victims had guns. Why did Daemon shoot the men
and mutilate the woman?) I don't care if it's carrier waves, I don't
care if it's computer graphics (programmed how?) generating a hypnotic
image, I don't care if it's battery-powered Ewok dolls - I say it's
spinach, unpalatable and indigestible, and I say to hell with it.
There is a pact between writer and reader, and the terms are
verisimilitude and the willing suspension of disbelief. Varley nobly
held his part up for nearly nine-tenths of the story, but when he
dropped it, he dropped it hard and far, and one of the things that got
squished was my disbelief. Granted, he's treading on my turf here
(well, personal computers, not hacking), and I'm more sensitive to
flaws. But how high do I have to suspend my disbelief when the
mystery, the Big Secret Behind It All, is built on a framework of fairy
dust and cobwebs?
(Avid Varley haters will be reassured to know that once again, the
smartest, most powerful, most dominant character in the story is a
woman. People who object to this should be bound, gagged, and
force-fed Pamela Sargent's "Fears" by half a dozen tag-team feminists.)
John Varley has written a hell of a story or two in "Press
Enter _". This is perhaps the best love story to be found in SF this
past year. This is a pretty good tale of contemporary computer hackers.
This is a terrible nightmare, not "terrible" as full of terror, but
"terrible" as "lousy". The result is a fatally flawed story, dammit.
--
-Paul S. R. Chisholm The above opinions are my own,
{pegasus,vax135}!lzwi!psc not necessarily those of any
{mtgzz,ihnp4}!lznv!psc telecommunications company.
(*sigh* ihnp4!lzwi!psc does *NOT* work!!! Use above paths.)
"Of *course* it's the murder weapon. Who would frame someone with a fake?"
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