Old Twentieth

Work Title: Old Twentieth
Medium: Novel
Episode Title:
Year: 2005
Writer(s): Joe Haldeman
"Original" Writer: Yes Own work?: No

Summary:

From Publishers Weekly Immortality can get boring after a while, especially when most of Earth's population and many of its treasures have been destroyed in a war between the haves and the have-nots. Jake Brewer, a virtual reality engineer, decides to liven things up by agreeing to run a virtuality machine on a starship looking for Earth-type planets. The passengers use the machine to roam through the recreated past, experiencing repeated virtual deaths because they have no expectations of real ones, until suddenly the oldest among them start dying seemingly of natural causes and the machine tells Jake, "We have to talk." This makes for an odd sort of locked-room whodunit. Is the newly sentient machine causing these deaths, or did the immortality treatment simply fail? Hugo- and Nebula-winner Haldeman (The Forever War) makes these questions tremendously compelling with his usual brilliant knack for detail and characterization. He draws the reader in even through a surprisingly boring expository first chapter, and the increasingly fascinating bulk of the tale makes the abrupt ending all the more shocking and unsatisfying. Haldeman's numerous fans will eagerly snap this one up, but few will reread it. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

  • Self-Written?:
  • Source Name: Publisher's Weekly
  • Source URL:

Era/Year of Portrayal: distant_future

Distinctive characteristics of the world in portrayal:

People are immortal. The Earth's population is kept at 1 billion after a war that killed most people. One death equals a new life.


Technology

  • Name of portrayed presence-evoking technology: virtual reality time machine
  • Description of the technology: A machine in which people enter and spend about ten hours. A person may choose any year and any place to spend time, often jumping from place to place. For example, a person could start in 1968 in Vietnam, then jump to San Francisco then Paris. It is high quality virtaul reality, very vivid and real. It is designed to make a user forget it is not real. Eventually, the machine becomes self aware...
  • Nature of task or activity: Everything a person would normally do in the chosen year to travel to. For instance, if it was the roaring twenties, a person would visit the Cotton Clun, drink, smoke, dance, and possibly have sex. Alternately, they could particiapte in a war, killing people, moving bodies, and trying to escape.
  • Performance of the Technology: It functions well, until it develops a personality and an ego. People start to die in the machine and it turns out it controls the whole ship the novel takes place on.
  • Description of creator(s): Unknoen
  • Major goal(s) of creator(s): entertainment, and to remind people how life was before the devasting war in the early 21st century.
  • Description of users of technology: Everyone - however, there were no children on the ship.
  • Type(s) of presence experience in the portrayal: both
  • Description of presence experience: Completely real virtual reality.
  • User awareness of technology during experience: The average person is unaware, although the people who maintain the machine can go in "observer mode" in which they remember that they are in a machine and not reality.
  • Valence of experience: Totally enjoyable.
  • Specific responses: After coming out of the machine, users are a little disoriented and very thirsty. It takes a minute to remember what year it really is. Users appear a little weak too, after 10 hours of sitting strapped into a chair, including cathiterization.
Long-term consequences:

Just when you think the machine is malevolently killing people, the twist ending surpises the reader. The entire novel has been an episode of virtual reality, with the protaganist in suspended animotion for the remainder of a thousand year voyage. The machine wasn't killing people - rather, it plays out a year episode over and over again, untill the protagnist realizes that none of what he is experiencing is real. Then it starts again. A surprising, yet somewhat good, ending.

Other:

Coder name: Amanda Scheiner
Coder email: amandags@temple.edu
Coder affiliation: Temple University