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"We are all repositories for genetically-encoded information that we're all spreading back and forth amongst each other, all the time. We're just lousy with information."
- Neal Stephenson
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| City Fathers | ||
| A set of computer systems which run every mechanical system in a city. |
Cities in Flight deals with long-term space travel. The cities are actual Earth cities (like New York and Scranton, Pa.) that were able to literally pick up and leave the planet thanks to the development of the spindizzy. Some of the city inhabitants were able to live effectively forever, thanks to drugs that were available; but only if they had the skills needed by the city. The City Fathers tutored the children of the city, decided who would be a citizen with skills that were needed (and live forever with geriatric drugs) and who would be a passenger with a normal life span.
| It's easy to think that because the City Fathers are dead, they're also stupid… Otherwise they would never be given the power they wield - and in some departments their power is absolute. Suppose they had a breakdown? If there were only a few of them, that would be a real danger; but there are more than a hundred, and they monitor and repair each other, so in fact it will never happen. Sanity and logic is their stock in trade. |
| From Cities in Flight,
by James Blish. Published by Avon in 1957 Additional resources -
|
This is an interesting early look at the idea of intelligent computer systems. One of the most important aspects of the City Fathers is that the plural is used because the system consists of a group of computers. The different units monitor each other, and constantly gauge each other's behavior and make repairs. The system has both redundancy and internal error-checking.
One of the essential functions of the City Fathers was to act as the memory for the people under their care. In the novel, the city administrators (as opposed to passengers) were practically immortal.
Compare this system to another which seems to consist of a single entity; check out the Big Computer, from Millennium, by John Varley.
Nobody bothered to remember many facts. That was what the City Fathers were and like machines were for; they stored data. Living men memorized nothing but processes, throwing out obsolete ones for new ones as invention made it necessary. When they needed facts, they asked the machines.
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