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"I've got this beautiful panoramic three-dimensional painting of Mars based on Martian photos. It's 30 feet wide. You can pick out every pebble on the Martian landscape. And who'd have dreamed you could do that?"
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Korsakov's | ||
| A type of mind control imposed on prisoners to make them more manageable during their prison time. |
Mind control has long been a popular science fiction device; in this idea, Gibson goes right to the heart of the problems that infest prisons. Korsakov's effectively eliminates escape plans and long-term grudges by removing the mental capacity for this kind of activity.
| He'd done something -- it hadn't been anything much, but he'd been caught doing it, twice -- and been judged for it, and sentenced, and then the sentence was carried out and he hadn't been able to remember, not anything, not for more than five minutes at a stretch. Stealing cars. Stealing rich people's cars. They made sure you remembered what you did. Korsakov's, they called that, something they did all to your neurons so that short-term memories wouldn't stick. So that the time you did was time you lost, but he'd heard they didn't do it anymore, or any way not for grand theft auto. People who hadn't been there thought it sounded easy, like jail but then it's all erased, but it wasn't like that. When he'd gotten out, when it was over -- three years strung out and a long vague flickering chain of fear and confusion measured off in five minute intervals, and it wasn't the intervals you could remember so much as the transitions... |
| Technovelgy from Mona Lisa Overdrive,
by William Gibson. Published by Bantam in 1988 Additional resources -
|
The name for this technovelgy item is derived from Korsakov's Syndrome, also known as Amnesic Syndrome. The symptoms are
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'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
