Caitlín R. Kiernan

I think the technological anachronisms are something to be savored, seeing how far we’ve come since the time the book was written. I remember reading Second Stage Lensmen when I was young, and being bemused by a passage where Kimball Kinnison uses his new upgraded powers of the mind to cause a computer to perform some mathematical operation (just as a test), and describes the computer as puzzled by this. I puzzled over this for a little while, then flipped to the copyright page on the book and saw that it antedated any computer I’d ever heard of, and I realized that “computer” used to be a job! And I suddenly understood why people would talk about an “electronic computer” or “digital computer”, since I had previously thought the adjective redundant.