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SCANNERS

                                                 March  6, 2013

There's a Cordwainer Smith
short story from 1950 called     http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/1416521461/1416521461___5.htm
"Scanners Live in Vain".

It's a very early Cordwainer Smith
story, and though extremely popular,
it's really pretty heavy-handed...
but that makes it suitable as a
basis for philosophical maunderings.

    In this story, there's a class of
    people who have been modified for
    spaceflight: they can endure "the pain
    of space" at the expense of having
    their perceptions permanently numbed,
    their emotions flattened out.

        They can temporarily, albiet
        dangerously, revert the change,               I find myself using
        and return to something closer to             this jargon of late,
        what we'd call human.  They call              hence this page to
        this "cranching".                             explain the sense of
                                                      it....

    The basic plot of this story is that                 The Scanners have
    a development is taking place that                   a kind of single-
    could obviate the need for these                     vision, they have
    Scanners and make them obsolete.                     discipline, but
    The Scanners have called an                          none of the mental
    emergency meeting where they express                 flexibility of
    their outrage over this, and prepare                 normal humans.
    to launch a coup to prevent this.

         One of the scanners has arrived at
         this meeting in a cranched state,
         and he and only he is capable of
         perceiving that this is a
         completely insane thing to do.






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