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BRIDGE_OF_STARS

                                                  January  9, 2006
When I was a young teenager
it seemed to me that a function
that science fiction could serve --
and that it sometimes did serve  --
was to act as a bridge between            Poul Anderson claimed
science and the humanities...             that science fiction writers
                                          were "the bards of science".
   I wanted to use the
   technical in the service                  (Perhaps Feynman was looking
   of poetry, I wanted to                    in the wrong places...)
   show technology charged
   with human significance.                         FUSILE_LINK


       I worked on a story where        
       some tapped phone lines       
       were referred to as           That was the one where the     
       "Traitorous wires!".          underground resistance wore        
                                     T-shirts with resistor symbols.
                                     
                          BANG
The impulse: to write                            And despite being
passionately about the                           nominally "pro-tech", my
technological.                                   imagination ran towards
                                                 technical failures: my
   To paint technology as                        Manhattan had a Fuller
   a human thing.                                Dome that had collapsed
                                                 under unusually heavy
   To engage the world with                      snow loading, leaving
   a poet's sensitivity and                      fragments of geodesics
   a scientist's precision.                      stretched across the
                                                 roofs of the brownstones:
     To re-unite the fragmented                  just more trash left
     intellectual world.                         lying around unremoved.

                                                   An apostle of technology?
   Such noble goals,
   all run aground in                              A "bard of science"?
   purple anthropomorphizing.

            Traitorous words.




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