Review: Vernor Vinge's 'Fast Times'
Vernor Vinge's Hugo-award-winning short science fiction story "Fast Times at Fairmont High" takes place in a near future in which everyone lives in a ubiquitous, wireless, networked world using wearable computers and contacts or glasses on which computer graphics are projected to create an augmented reality.
Originallly published in Extropy
April 2002. Published on KurzweilAI.net Sept. 5, 2002
Vernor Vinge's short
story "Fast Times at Fairmont High" won the 2002 Hugo
award in the Novella category. It appears in his recently published
story collection called The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge.
It's a somewhat expensive collection so I know most people won't
have read the story yet, but I thought I'd make some comments about
it here.
"Fast Times" obviously takes its title from the popular
movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but it's a little misleading
because actually the story is about junior high kids. It's set in
the 2020s, I think -- a difficult era for authors to write about
because the world needs to be significantly different from our own,
but still recognizably grown from our world. (The year is not stated,
but one character's grandfather grew up in the 1980s, which would
suggest that the father grows up in the 2000s, and this kid is about
14 so it should be the late 2020s.)
I wasn't impressed by the plot. Too much time is spent with the
kids wandering around in the nighttime fog at Torrey Pines State
Beach, making a surprising and rather unlikely discovery (which
I won't give away here, because it would spoil the plot, such as
it is). However the technological milieu is fascinating and is the
true appeal of the story. Also the grounding of the story in actual
San Diego County locations (where Vinge lives) adds some local color
which I enjoyed. My wife lived in San Diego when we were first going
together, and I used to travel down there to visit her.
Vinge indicates that he hopes to expand the story into a novel,
and that sounds like a great idea. The story is really more of a
peek into the "fast times" of the 2020s, much as "The
Blabber" (also in the collection) gives a very abbreviated
picture of the Zones of Thought. A weak story led to a great novel,
and the same thing could happen with "Fast Times".
So what is life like in Vinge's 2020?
The biggest technological change involves ubiquitous computing,
wearables, and augmented reality (although none of those terms are
used). Everyone wears contacts or glasses which mediate their view
of the world. This allows computer graphics to be superimposed on
what they see. The computers themselves are actually built into
the clothing (apparently because that is the cheapest way to do
it) and everything communicates wirelessly. Scientific American
had an article about this.
In Vinge's hands this is an astonishingly powerful technology.
Remember the mediatrons from Diamond Age, where any surface could
be turned into a display? You have the same thing here, except it's
all in the eye of the beholder, so to speak. If you want a computer
display, it can appear in thin air, or be attached to a wall or
any other surface. If people want to watch TV together they can
agree on where the screen should appear and what show they watch.
When doing your work, you can have screens on all your walls, menus
attached here and there, however you want to organize things. But
none of it is "really" there.
It goes beyond this. Does your house need a new coat of paint?
Don't bother, just enter it into your public database and you have
a nice new mint green paint job that everyone will see. Want to
redecorate? Do it with computer graphics. You can have a birdbath
in the front yard inhabited by Disneyesque animals who frolic and
play. Even indoors, don't buy artwork, just download it from the
net and have it appear where you want. You can change your decor
theme instantly.
These kids are teenagers. Got a zit? No need to cover up with Clearsil,
just erase it from your public face and people will see the improved
version. You can dress up your clothes and hairstyle as well.
Of course, anyone can turn off their enhancements and see the plain
old reality, but most people don't bother most of the time because
things are ugly that way.
Augmented reality automatically produces sight-and-sound virtual
reality. Some of the kids attending Fairmont Junior High do so remotely.
They appear as "ghosts", indistinguishable from the other
kids except that you can walk through them. They go to classes and
raise their hands to ask questions just like everyone else. They
see the school and everyone at the school sees them. Instead of
visiting friends, the kids can all instantly appear at one another's
locations.
They even have tactile VR systems, but you have to buy special
clothes with "gaming stripes", whatever those are.
A related technology is the localizer network. These are small,
inexpensive network relay nodes that are scattered about, solar
and battery powered. Each one sets up connections to the local nodes
and provides for network access. They also have some sensors, sight,
and sound apparently, which can enhance the augmented reality system.
The computer synthesizing visual imagery is able to call on the
localizer network for views beyond what the person is seeing. In
this way you can have 360 degree vision, or even see through walls.
This is a transparent society with a vengeance!
The cumulative effect of all this technology was absolutely amazing
and completely believable. It's as far beyond our current communications
media as the net is beyond the telephone. It's very exciting to
imagine this technology coming into existence.
Vinge has other technological changes that I found less convincing.
The biggest was an effective increase in human intelligence due
to better computer support. He has these junior high kids doing
Putman level math problems with ease, and learning a programming
language in a couple of hours that the kid's father spent 3 years
learning. Society is turned topsy turvy, with competence running
inversely with age. The adults are helpless compared to these junior
high kids, who themselves fear the fifth graders.
I didn't buy it. All the net connectivity and visual systems don't
clearly add up to the kinds of improved competence Vinge is claiming.
One of the kids is using some biological boosters but this didn't
add credibility for me because first, it comes out of nowhere as
far as grounding in our current scientific knowledge, and second,
most of the kids didn't use these but they were all expected to
master these skills.
One thing that was believable is that it seemed that a lot of the
kids cheated, and it was almost impossible for the adults to catch
them. With universal network connectivity it would be hard to make
sure kids are doing their work on their own. I got the impression
the school sort of looked the other way, the idea being that as
long as the kids solved their problems, even if they got help via
the net, that was itself a useful skill that they would be relying
on all their lives.
Overall while I did not buy everything Vinge presented, it was
an astonishing glimpse at a near-future world which is continuing
to go through revolutionary changes. Expanding the story to novel
length should provide many more opportunities to develop techniques
that are only hinted at here.
(c) 2002 Extropy Institute, reproduced with permission.
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