Children of the Lens

During World War II, as the use of radar became widespread in battle, the U.S. Navy introduced the Combat Information Center, a shipboard tactical room with maps, consoles, and screens of the kind that we’ve all seen in television and the movies. At the time, though, it was like something out of science fiction, and in fact, back in 1939, E.E. “Doc” Smith had described a very similar display in the serial Gray Lensman:

Red lights are fleets already in motion…Greens are fleets still at their bases. Ambers are the planets the greens took off from…The white star is us, the Directrix. That violet cross way over there is Jalte’s planet, our first objective. The pink comets are our free planets, their tails showing their intrinsic velocities.

After the war, in a letter dated June 11, 1947, the editor John W. Campbell told Smith that the similarity was more than just a coincidence. Claiming to have been approached “unofficially, and in confidence” by a naval officer who played an important role in developing the C.I.C., Campbell said:

The entire setup was taken specifically, directly, and consciously from the Directrix. In your story, you reached the situation the Navy was in—more communications channels than integration techniques to handle it. You proposed such an integrating technique, and proved how advantageous it could be…Sitting in Michigan, some years before Pearl Harbor, you played a large share in the greatest and most decisive naval action of the recent war!

Unfortunately, this wasn’t true. The naval officer in question, Cal Laning, was indeed a science fiction fan—he was close friends with Robert A. Heinlein—but any resemblance to the Directrix was coincidental, or, at best, an instance of convergence as fiction and reality addressed the same set of problems. (An excellent analysis of the situation can be found in Ed Wysocki’s very useful book An Astounding War.)

If Campbell was tempted to overstate Smith’s influence, this isn’t surprising—the editor was disappointed that science fiction hadn’t played the role that he had envisioned for it in the war, and this wasn’t the first or last time that he would gently exaggerate it. Fifteen years later, however, Smith’s fiction had a profound impact on a very different field. In 1962, Steve Russell of M.I.T. developed Spacewar, the first video game to be played on more than one computer, with two spaceships dueling with torpedoes in the gravity well of a star. In an article for Rolling Stone written by my hero Stewart Brand, Russell recalled:

We had this brand new PDP-1…It was the first minicomputer, ridiculously inexpensive for its time. And it was just sitting there. It had a console typewriter that worked right, which was rare, and a paper tape reader and a cathode ray tube display…Somebody had built some little pattern-generating programs which made interesting patterns like a kaleidoscope. Not a very good demonstration. Here was this display that could do all sorts of good things! So we started talking about it, figuring what would be interesting displays. We decided that probably you could make a two-dimensional maneuvering sort of thing, and decided that naturally the obvious thing to do was spaceships…

I had just finished reading Doc Smith’s Lensman series. He was some sort of scientist but he wrote this really dashing brand of science fiction. The details were very good and it had an excellent pace. His heroes had a strong tendency to get pursued by the villain across the galaxy and have to invent their way out of their problem while they were being pursued. That sort of action was the thing that suggested Spacewar. He had some very glowing descriptions of spaceship encounters and space fleet maneuvers.

The “somebody” whom he mentions was Marvin Minsky, another science fiction fan, and Russell’s collaborator Martin Graetz elsewhere cited Smith’s earlier Skylark series as an influence on the game.

But the really strange thing is that Campbell, who had been eager to claim credit for Smith when it came to the C.I.C., never made this connection in print, at least not as far as I know, although he was hugely interested in Spacewar. In the July 1971 issue of Analog, he published an article on the game by Albert W. Kuhfeld, who had developed a variation of it at the University of Minnesota. Campbell wrote in his introductory note:

For nearly a dozen years I’ve been trying to get an article on the remarkable educational game invented at M.I.T. It’s a great game, involving genuine skill in solving velocity and angular relation problems—but I’m afraid it will never be widely popular. The playing “board” costs about a quarter of a megabuck!

Taken literally, the statement “nearly a dozen years” implies that the editor heard about Spacewar before it existed, but the evidence legitimately implies that he learned of it almost at once. Kuhfeld writes: “Although it uses a computer to handle orbital mechanics, physicists and mathematicians have no great playing advantage—John Campbell’s seventeen-year-old daughter beat her M.I.T. student-instructor on her third try—and thereafter.” Campbell’s daughter was born in 1945, which squares nicely with a visit around the time of the game’s first appearance. It isn’t implausible that Campbell would have seen and heard about it immediately—he had been close to the computer labs at Harvard and M.I.T. since the early fifties, and he made a point of dropping by once a year. If the Lensman series, the last three installments of which he published, had really been an influence on Spacewar, it seems inconceivable that nobody would have told him. For some reason, however, Campbell, who cheerfully promoted the genre’s impact on everything from the atomic bomb to the moon landing, didn’t seize the opportunity to do the same for video games, in an article that he badly wanted to publish. (In a letter to the manufacturers of the PDP-1, whom he had approached unsuccessfully for a writeup, he wrote: “I’ve tried for years to get a story on Spacewar, and I’ve repeatedly had people promise one…and not deliver.”)

So why didn’t he talk about it? The obvious answer is that he didn’t realize that Spacewar, which he thought would “never be widely popular,” was anything more than a curiosity, and if he had lived for another decade—he died just a few months after the article came out—he would have pushed the genre’s connection to video games as insistently as he did anything else. But there might have been another factor at play. For clues, we can turn to the article in Rolling Stone, in which Brand visited the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Annie Leibovitz, which is something that I wish I could have seen. Brand opens with the statement that computers are coming to the people, and he adds: “That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.” It’s a revealing comparison, and it indicates the extent to which the computing movement was moving away from everything that Campbell represented. A description of the group’s offices at Stanford includes a detail that, if Campbell had read it, would only have added insult to injury:

Posters and announcements against the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon, computer printout photos of girlfriends…and signs on every door in Tolkien’s elvish Fëanorian script—the director’s office is Imladris, the coffee room The Prancing Pony, the computer room Mordor. There’s a lot of hair on those technicians, and nobody seems to be telling them where to scurry.

In the decade since the editor first encountered Spacewar, a lot had changed, and Campbell might have been reluctant to take much credit for it. The Analog article, which Brand mentions, saw the game as a way to teach people about orbital mechanics; Rolling Stone recognized it as a leading indicator of a development that was about to change the world. And even if he had lived, there might not have been room for Campbell. As Brand concludes:

Spacewar as a parable is almost too pat. It was the illegitimate child of the marrying of computers and graphic displays. It was part of no one’s grand scheme. It served no grand theory. It was the enthusiasm of irresponsible youngsters. It was disreputably competitive…It was an administrative headache. It was merely delightful.

Thinking in tones

I started to realize that the cover of the magazine was this blank space, this canvas, that had problems of its own, and I really started to enjoy shooting this cover…when Rolling Stone went to color. I had to change to color, too, and it was very scary. I was glad I came from a school of black and white because I learned to look at things in tones, highlights…

Remember, too, that Rolling Stone was printed on newsprint, rag print, and ink sinks into the magazine. So the only thing that would make it on the cover were pictures that had two or three colors, primary colors, a very posterlike effect. In a strange way, you almost had to make the color look like black and white. So I developed a very graphic use of form and color just to survive the printing process.

—Annie Leibovitz, in an interview with David Felton

“Karvonen looked out at the view…”

Note: This post is the fourth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 3. You can read the earlier installments here.)

A thriller is only as good as its villain, and if City of Exiles works at all, it’s because Lasse Karvonen is easily the most compelling villain I’ve created for any of my novels. He definitely struck a chord with a lot of readers: my agent, for instance, was particularly taken by him, and just the other day he half-jokingly suggested that I should write a prequel from Karvonen’s point of view. What makes him stand out to me, as the writer, is the fact that he gave me surprisingly little trouble. His original conception made it onto the page with almost no alterations, and I was rarely in doubt of how he’d behave or what he’d be thinking. Part of this is due to the fact that Karvonen is a clinical psychopath, down to the classic childhood behaviors of setting fires and cruelty to animals, and until the second half of the novel, in which his feelings grow slightly more complicated, I was able to keep his motivations stark and simple. If character is best defined by action, it’s no wonder that Karvonen works so well: he has a clear, murderous mission, he sticks to it relentlessly, and his decisions are all logical in the moment. (If all my characters lent themselves to being so cleanly drawn, these novels would be much easier to write.)

Yet I was always careful to keep Karvonen from becoming just a stock bad guy, and in particular, I tried to build elements into his character that I would find engaging. His Finnish background, which will be explored in greater detail later in the novel, was a major element in this: I’m half Finnish and Estonian, I’ve spent time in Helsinki, and I was drawn to the idea of making my villain a big, scary Finn—because you really don’t want to mess with these guys. I also liked the idea of making him a photographer. As I mentioned earlier, this was partially because illegal agents often find jobs in artistic communities, where it’s easier to develop a plausible cover story, but I also wanted to make him an artist for its own sake. Karvonen, like many of the characters in these books, is defined largely by his competence, and I had the feeling that he’d take his work as a photographer just as seriously as his true calling as an assassin. He’s good at what he does, no matter what it is, and that goes a long way toward making him someone we find interesting, even if his actions are evil ones.

The art world element in City of Exiles isn’t as fully developed as it was in The Icon Thief, but I’m never averse to including an interesting detail or piece of gossip if I think it will help me develop my characters and their world, and I do this several times in Chapter 3. Renata’s financial problems are obviously intended to recall those of Annie Leibovitz, although a quick look at their respective personal lives quickly reveals that the two women otherwise don’t have much in common. The story that Renata tells in this chapter, about a financial magazine that stopped publishing annual photos of the year’s top dealmakers because subjects complained when they were dropped from the list, is lifted from an anecdote in Leibovitz’s At Work. And the scheme that Karvonen and Renata invent—to contract with another magazine to do a gallery of portraits of the city’s top business leaders, then throw a party and sell the prints to the subjects at an exorbitant price—is all too real: it was inspired by a similar idea concocted by Peter Max and the editors of the defunct industry magazine Trader Monthly, as memorably chronicled here by Randall Lane.

Reading over this chapter again, though, my greatest impression is that of an author finding his way into the material in whatever way he can. I put Karvonen in the Shoreditch Triangle neighborhood of London because of its historical connection to the art scene, and on impulse, I gave him a cat, although I wasn’t sure how it would pay off. (We’ll see this cat at least one more time before this novel is over, and to all animal lovers who are reading this, I apologize in advance.) I also spent a lot of time researching material on photo retouching and printing, which is a subject I’ve always found fascinating—I wrote an entire screenplay on the subject a few years ago—and which seemed to offer an indirect way of evoking some of the central themes of this novel: interpretation, illusion, deception. The result only occupies a paragraph or two in the resulting chapter, as Karovnen edits and prints out a few images from the recent photo shoot, but I tried to make the details here as accurate as I could. These are all tiny things, but when you put them all together, you get a picture of Karvonen and his world. Although he has some deeper secrets as well…