The Way the Future Blogs

I don’t want to give you the impression that all my lecture subjects came from computer-geeks in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Far from it. My net was spread far wider than that, and my number-one crowd-pleaser in those early days had nothing to do with computers or any other manifestation of inorganic hard science. It was, in fact, a bunch of worms.

James V. McConnell

The planarian worms were the province of Dr. James V. McConnell of the psychology department of the University of Michigan. They weren’t much to look at — tiny, thin, the color of milk — but the important thing about planarians (about Dugesia dorotocephala, if you’d like a formal introduction) was that, although they were pretty dumb even as worms in general go, they were not totally ineducable.

Given an experimenter with a significant amount of patience they could be trained to acquire a Pavlovian conditioned reflex to certain kinds of stimuli, and Jim McConnell had that patience. Other factors that made planarians attractive research animals included the facts that they were easy to raise and not at all cuddly, so they didn’t have the legions of defenders of, say, gerbils or bunnies. They were also pretty cheap, all of which qualities added up to the fact that McConnell had large quantities of the creatures to experiment on.

And he did in fact experiment, in many ways, employing large numbers of planarians. One series of experiments — don’t ask me how he got on to this train of thought, because I don’t know — produced some quite curious results. It goes like this:

Planarians

Suppose you take a batch of planarians and divide it into three parts. The first group, for reasons we will come to in a moment, we will name LUNCH, the second WELL-FED and the third simply CONTROL. The LUNCH group goes to school. That is, you do the Pavlov conditioning thing with them, repeating a given stimulus that naturally causes the worms to twitch (perhaps a flash of light) along with a second (maybe a mild electric shock) that doesn’t until the worms now twitch at the shock alone. This is the definition of a conditioned reflex, but when they have attained it you don’t give the LUNCH group caps to throw in the air. Instead their graduation ceremony amounts only to being chopped up into small pieces and fed to the second, or WELL-FED, group.

You might imagine that even a planarian worm could have objections to cannibalism. They don’t, though. WELL-FEDs will gobble LUNCH planarians down as enthusiastically as any other part of their diet. Then, while the WELL-FEDs are chowing down you start a new series of Pavlovian flinch lessons for them and the CONTROLs, and this is where Dr. McConnell found a quite unanticipated result.

Both WELL-FEDs and CONTROLs learned to do their assigned reflexes as they were supposed to, but there was a difference. The WELL-FEDs learned faster. They acquired their new reflexes after significantly fewer repetitions than the CONTROLs. To Dr. McConnell that could mean only one thing. Some learning was being passed along through the digestive system. Part of what the WELL-FEDs “knew” came not from what they had been taught but from what they had had to eat.

As you can imagine, I had a lot of fun with that idea, particularly with college audiences and especially when senior members of the faculty were right there in the room — and in particular when they were old friends like Tom Clareson or Jack Williamson. I got a lot of mileage out of those dim-witted little creatures. (By which, of course, I mean to refer to the planarian worms.) Sadly it has begun to seem that the effects McConnell (and I) described may have been illusory, because when other experimenters tried to replicate his results they failed.

That’s not to say that no one took McConnell’s work seriously, though. There was at least one person who evidently did, and that was a troubled recluse by the name of Theodore Kaczynski, better known to American history as the “Unabomber.” Apparently Kaczynski didn’t care for what McConnell was doing with the planarians, because he sent one of his bombs McConnell’s way. It didn’t kill anyone, but the noise of the explosion left McConnell partially deaf for the rest of his life,

But by then I had moved on to other subjects anyway, because a generous Providence had dropped in my lap a whole new comedic (and serious) topic to talk about.

Blogging in our cabin aboard MS Ryndam.
Photo by Elizabeth Anne Hull.

So here I am, back home at last after visiting Kauai, Bora Bora, Tahiti and four or five others of the most beautiful tropical paradises God ever made — and now doggedly tunneling my way through mountains of letters, emails, contracts, phone messages and — what is most relevant here — comments from all you wonderful people who were kind enough to tune in on the beginnings of The Way the Future Blogs and drop us a line about it.

In regard to which there is something I must say. I care about you all — beloved grandkids, cherished old friends and just high-quality human beings in general — and wish it were possible for me to respond personally to each of you. Unfortunately, due to the useless condition of the witch’s claw that was once my sturdy right hand, it just isn’t. But please keep reading and letting us know what you think! (Did I mention that you did so in such unexpected volume that you burned up all our bandwidth and head blogmeister Dick had to run out and buy more?)

And what’s ahead? Oh, all kinds of stuff. In the universe of personal reminiscences of some of science-fiction’s giants, there are pieces on three of the field’s greatest married editor-publisher couples, Ian and Betty Ballantine first, because it is already on the computer, then Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey and Donald and Elsie Wollheim. Plus sketches on Jack Williamson, Isaac Asimov and Cyril Kornbluth and some added material on Sir Arthur C. Clarke … and, of course, whatever other fancies happen to occur to me as I sit before the keyboard. See you then!

Which, as you know, is the largest island in the Marquesas group, and the one in whose harbor we are now anchored so that our shipmates may storm ashore in search of tapa cloth and guaranteed authentic ironwood carved war clubs.

Betty Anne and I, shipboard, 2009.

The other thing about Nuku Hiva is that it is the last dry land we are going to see until, after seven more days at sea, we dock once more in San Diego. This has certain consequences, among them the fact that something we do with our computers is incompatible with something the local comsats do up there in orbit. I won’t bore you by providing a more technical explanation of the problem (as if I could!), but what it means is that the posts I have been writing for transmission to our blogmeisters, Dick and Leah, aren’t going to get transmitted anywhere until we are back in our own home. And then they may not get to you in the proper order, as planned for your maximum reading enjoyment.

Ah, well. Sorry about that. I’ll try to do better. Meanwhile. . . .

I said in the beginning that I intended to provide reminiscences of some people who might interest you, and you might like to get an idea of who these people are. They appear to come in five categories: writers I have collaborated with to one degree or another (Williamson , Kornbluth, Asimov, Hubbard, etc.), writers who were my clients when I was a literary agent (Asimov, Budrys, Wyndham, etc.), writers I published when I was an editor (Asimov, Niven, Doc Smith, Heinlein, etc.), writers I hung around with a lot (Asimov, Silverberg, Ellison, etc. — you will note that some people come under more than one of these headings) and, the smallest of these categories, the nonwriters. This includes editors and publishers (the Ballantines, John Campbell, Horace Gold, etc.) and a few assorted scientists, politicians and other special cases (Carl Sagan, a local Democratic Party boss, a U.S. senator and so on).

Quite a few of these I have already written about in one form or another and those bits just need touchups to pass on to you, and so I will start them soon and keep them going as long as my right index finger permits. Along with whatever other kinds of comments I think you might be willing to sit still for. And I hope you’ll enjoy.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke at home in Sri Lanka, 2005. Photo by Amy Marash.

I first met Arthur C. Clarke in the 1950s, on the occasion of his first cross-Atlantic visit to New York City By then Arthur had established himself as a first-rate science-fiction writer and he did what sf writers do in a strange city: He looked for other sf writers to talk to.

He found them in the rather amorphously shaped group that called itself the Hydra Club, where I was one of the nine heads that had been its founders. We became friends. We stayed that way for all of the half century that remained of Arthur’s life. We met when chance arranged it — at a film festival in Rio de Janeiro, at an occasional scientific meeting, at assorted “cons” — sf-speak for science-fiction gatherings — in many places at many times.

In the early days Arthur spent a lot of time visiting New York, usually staying at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23d Street, and when possible I would join him for dinner or a drink — that was all expense-account money and happily paid for by my publisher, because I was an editor in those days and eager to publish as much Clarke as I could get my hands on. But by the turn of the millennium our friendship had reduced itself to a desultory correspondence and the odd phone conversation. I had given up editing to concentrate on my own writing. What Arthur had given up was ever leaving his island home in Sri Lanka, where I had never been. (Although I visited a number of other countries, Sri Lanka wasn’t one of them.)

Then, in one of his letters in the early part of 2006, Arthur rather offhandedly mentioned that, a couple of years earlier, in a fit of exuberance, he had signed publishing contracts for several books that, he was now convinced, he would never be able to write himself. Most of them he had arranged for some other writer to finish, but there was one, called The Last Theorem, for which he needed a collaborator.

Continue reading ‘Sir Arthur and I’ »