.KEYWORD cebookmonth1099
.FLYINGHEAD WINDOWS CE POWER MAGAZINE BOOK CLUB
.TITLE There’s none so blind as those who won’t see
.OTHER
.SUMMARY Judith Tabron, the self-described "puppet dictator of academic technology at Brandeis University" has uncovered a wonderful science fiction short story that you can read on your Windows CE device. When you turn on your handy little electronic brain and read this story over your lunch or on the train, you’ll have too much fun to worry about the future.
.AUTHOR Judith Tabron
There were years of my life when I didn’t read a lot of science fiction. Presumably, I was busy doing something else. But honestly, my early twenties are all a blur to me now.
Then, a few years ago, I had a chance to go to the World Science Fiction convention of 1995 in Glasgow. It reminded me of a lot of things I had forgotten (like the fact that Samuel Delany’s writing is fantastic), but it also taught me a lot I didn’t know. I learned about Gardner Dozois’ fabulous Year’s Best science fiction anthologies because people told me it would be a good place to look for a reprint of Joe Haldeman’s "None So Blind." There was a lot of buzz about "None So Blind" that year.
"None So Blind" won the short story Hugo (Science Fiction Achievement Award) that year, and I was taken aback by the furiously enthusiastic applause that greeted Joe Haldeman when he went up to the microphone to accept his award. I became curious about this story. Obviously, it had a lot of public sentiment behind it. I read it and liked it. I then forgot about it until I saw it listed in the Fiction category (under "Sci Fi") at Memoware. Go ahead, download it, it’s only 15K.
Someone at The Mining Co. (before it became About.com) arranged to have this story digitized, so you can distribute this version for free as long as you include all the information about the work and the author that comes at the end. That’s pretty cool, and caused me to surf on over to About.com. Someone over there really likes Joe Haldeman; he was a featured spotlight author the third week of September 1999. Visit About.com yourself if you’d like a pretty exhaustive guide to Joe Haldeman on the Web. And you will, after you read "None So Blind."
Several immediate reasons for this story’s appeal come to mind at first reading. It starts out like a classic Heinlein tale (perhaps like a story about the legendary Grandpa Stonebender) by referring to the protagonist as a kid who makes the money he spends on computers "from education…teaching his classmates not to draw to inside straights."
It’s a story about the classic outsider, the kid who’s way too smart for his own good, and yet, also a slave to his hormones. Cletus is short, he’s young, he’s homely, he’s black, and he’s a genius. All of those are strikes against him in the "love sweepstakes" of the Virginia town in where he is attending high school at the tender age of 13.
He finally settles his affections on Amy, who (no coincidence) is blind and can’t reject him on sight. Amy is also a nerd, a music nerd, and even though she’s twice his size, white, and rich, their minds meet and they become quite a fascinating "item".
Science fiction fans tend to love outsider stories like this, as many of us identify with the position of the outsider, even when we are white middle-class citizens solidly inhabiting all the demographic medians of American society. And all of us relate to stories about that period of our lives when we were painfully insecure and made momentous decisions that changed our lives forever.
Also, the story has a delightful frisson of horror running through it like a steel thread. The narrator, who is obviously ambivalent about the characters and the story he is describing to us, slowly begins to foreshadow a rather nasty ending to his tale. From the first paragraph, we know we are hearing the history of something momentous ("It all started when Cletus Jefferson asked himself ‘Why aren’t all blind people geniuses?’") But as the story goes on — about halfway through, in fact — we start to get a chilling idea that this momentous change under discussion isn’t for the better.
Cletus Jefferson, the lovelorn boy genius of this story, spends all his time on science in college and very little on those required humanities courses that most schools force on all their students, even the science nerds who find the humanities tiresome. It’s a shame, the narrator tells us, because "If he had paid more attention in trivial classes like history, like philosophy, things might have turned out differently. If he had paid attention to literature he might have read the story of Pandora."
.CALLOUT This is the point at which you should stop reading this review if you like surprises.
This is, by the way, the point at which you should stop reading this review if spoilers annoy you. There will be several good bits further on but, if you like surprises, you’re just going to have to be strong and stop now.
And of course, the story has a classic science fiction "twist" ending where you find out what has happened to both Cletus and his true love, Amy. You also find out what happened to the nameless narrator, whose glum tone reflects the dregs of a life he is living out in a world that Cletus and Amy have changed entirely. Because Cletus, in his thirst for knowledge, has invented the next step in human evolution and boosted Amy up the step (incidentally, without her permission). The narrator is one of those people who got left behind.
Which is to say that the story has all the elements of a science fiction classic that most of us respond to without even thinking about it. It feels like a real science fiction story and a good one. It feels neat.
The really great thing about the story is that it practically begs you to keep thinking about it. And the more you think about it, the more you realize there is more to the story. The title, for instance, "None So Blind", is only the first part of the familiar proverb, "There’s none so blind as those who won’t see." It’s not a good thing to be the person who refuses to see (at least the way my grandmother used to say it).. The willful refusal of knowledge is a sign of excessive conservatism and stubbornness, especially in American culture where to know is all.
But on the other hand, knowing is often unpleasant and there are real ethical questions that we do need to address regarding what we should or should not know. After Dolly the sheep was cloned, Congress held an inquiry into the ethics of cloning; several of the scientists who testified told Congress that human cloning was years away. But they were being slippery and they knew it. The question isn’t when the change is coming. The question is whether we should allow the change to happen or steer our fates in a different direction.
And the relationship between "see" and "know" in English is central to our understanding of these kinds of ethical questions. If you see the change coming, you can’t pretend you don’t know about it. I see that the sky is blue; I therefore know it to be so. Seeing, and therefore knowing, is the root of our understanding of experimental science. Experimental science in science fiction is often treated as a universally good thing. Not always, and certainly not during the post-WWII era or the seventies. But often.
The question is, Who’s the one who won’t see? The "firstsighted" narrator who wants to keep his eyes and thereby sacrifice all that he might "see" if he takes the evolutionary plunge? Or Cletus, whose thirst for an answer to a problem led to a highly unethical experiment in the first place?
The story is about a battle between those elements of humanity that we lose as we evolve and the evolution itself. But it isn’t played that way. The narrator doesn’t cling to his eyes because he has a particular attachment to seeing, or if he does, it isn’t spelled out for us. We have to assume it from our own visceral horror at the idea of giving up our eyes.
At the same time, the prospect of becoming a supergenius isn’t all that attractive either. Undoubtedly, whole new levels of existence would come along with the results of Cletus’ operation that rewires the brain and allows us to use it so much more efficiently. But to be such a supergenius is so different from the life we lead now. As the narrator says, "firstsighted music probably bores the secondsighted." What other simple pleasures would we lose interest in? Pizza? Walks in the park? Harrison Ford movies?
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Of course, one answer is that both the firstsighted and the secondsighted "won’t see". There’s none so blind as those who give up the magic of sight for intellectual progress — and there’s none so blind as those afraid to take that plunge into a whole new world. I think, in balance, the story comes out on the side of evolution — it’s clear that the narrator is a vestigial, bitter remnant of an older humanity that is on its way out. But he is us. So, of course, we have sympathy for him, too.
The Mining Co. (now About.com) and Joe Haldeman did a great thing by making this short story widely available, and it’s a great, quick read for your Windows CE device. When you turn on your handy little electronic brain and read this story over your lunch or on the train, perhaps you, like me, will wonder if you too are leaping along the way to an evolved new relationship with computers and wonder whether it too is a Pandora’s box. Of course, only time will tell — and in the meantime we’re all having too much fun to worry about the future.
.H1 How do I get Doc files into my Windows CE device?
Plain text (ASCII) files may be imported into Windows CE devices in a number of ways that are documented in your device’s instruction manual. Doc format files can be read on Windows CE devices using the DOCview application, available at Mike’s Palm-Sized PCs Web site (at http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/3533/palm_sw.html), which also includes directions on using that piece of software.
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.H1 Product availability and resources
To download “None So Blind” to your Windows CE device, see http://www.MemoWare.com/cgi/mwsearch.cgi?field=Category&string=Scifi. This will take you to the list of SF works at MemoWare and “None So Blind” is in the list.
Visit http://fantasy.about.com/library/weekly/blhaldeman.htm?pid=2734&cob=home,which takes you to the Joe Haldeman Page at About.com.
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.BIO Judith Tabron thinks the ultimate goal of human evolution should be that enlightened state where we all get dozens of cable channels and Bill Gates gets what’s coming to him. She is the puppet dictator of academic technology at Brandeis University.
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