COL49 - Chap 2: San Narciso as a circuit board

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Laura:
 
> In ATD, no matter how frightful the technology, humans are separate from it; they use it but aren't ONE 
> with it. Humanity has won. Can anyone come think of an example from ATD, where humans are physically subsumed 
> by technology (not just killed or blown up by it)?

I can't think of anything BUT: Joseph rightly pointed out the subdesertine craft; How about the hydrogen skyship
The Inconvenience itself? The boys are surely one with their ship and its technology, just as Rocco and Pino are
one with their manned torpedo, and just as Merle and Roswell are surely one with all the wonderful technology in 
their lab ("the lab of every boy's dreams" - AtD, 1035). And Lew benefits from their Integroscope as well in that 
beautiful passage on p. 1060-61, where he revisits the life of Troth, in a "compassionate time-machine story" (1060). 
 
The railway may be an instrument of colonization, but just like GR, AtD contains plenty of moving descriptions of
the railroad as well: For the State it may be an instrument for coopting virgin territory, but for the individual
the branching railroad also means freedom and possibilities.
 
A-and how about the poignant description of the graveyard for failed time machines on p. 409:
 
"Up and down the steeply-pitched sides of a ravine lay the picked-over hulks of failed time machines - Chronoclipses,
Asimov Transeculars, Tempomorph Q-98s - broken, defective, scorched by catastrophic flares of misrouted energy,
corroded often beyond recognition by unintended immersion in the terrible Flow over which they had been designed and
built, so hopefully, to prevail... A strewn field of conjecture, superstition, blind faith, and bad engineering,
expressed in sheet-aluminum, vulcanite, Heusler's alloy, bonzoline, electrum, lignum vitae, platinoid, magnalinum,
and packfong silver, much of it stripped away by scavengers over the years. Where was the safe harbor in Time their
pilots might have found, so allowing their craft to avoid such ignominious fates?"
 
It doesn't get much better than this, IMHO, and the passage reminds me of the description of Mucho's car lot.
Technology may be used to kill, maim or colonize, but for every V2 Rocket there is also a Rocket to take us to
the stars, or at least a dream of such a Rocket. And for every dreadful bomber plane (1068-71) there is a time
machine, or at least a dream of a time machine that will set us above the terrible flow of time. Sometimes
our stupid superstitions and poor mortal hopes are woven into technology, and AtD shows this as well as any
novel by Pynchon.
 
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