My relationship to my online readers is a relationship of sorts: a narrow and peculiarly restricted kind of relationship. It's very much like the relationship between an author at a bookstore signing and the line of people with his books. Ninety percent of the people who write me online ask for nothing more than a ritual acknowledgement of their existence. They say "thank you for writing this" and I reply "you're quite welcome" and they depart the electronic premises forever, quite satisfied. It's very much like the bookstore fan who wants his copy of ISLANDS IN THE NET inscribed "To Jim." Not because he expects me to remember that his name is Jim, or even that I ever met him; what he wants is a ritual validation of his personhood by someone he regards as a celebrity. Nothing wrong with this; it's part of the game, part of society, and e-mail serves this function very well. In fact, as an author I'd have to say that e- mail is the best method I've ever found for dealing with the public.
I have a hard time maintaining friendships via e-mail alone. Though I get a lot of e-mail from friends, I have no sustained relationship with any person whom I've met only by and through e-mail. I've heard of this being done, but I've never done it myself. I uncharitably speculate that it's because I already have a life.
I can already sense the nature of my next major online challenge. I will have to deal with the consequences of a spectacularly growing Internet and my slowly growing notoriety within it. Increasing traffic on the Information Highway is slowly but surely overwhelming me. Lately, I have begun logging onto my home system, the WELL, every day; not by choice but by necessity. I've become much better at online research, and my use of my online time is much more efficient. But there are limits, and the limits are visibly approaching.
I'll never forget the strange chill I felt when I once logged onto the WELL after a brief absence and found 115 pieces of mail awaiting me -- *every one of which was interesting.* There was simply *nothing left to skip.* I was captivated by all of it, and it was all there right at my fingertips, and I suddenly understood why certain unlucky souls rupture their wrist tendons at the keyboard.
An hour a day online is hard work, but I feel it's worth it; the stuff I get online is no longer soup, I'm getting real cubes of bouillon online, nuggets of information of intense interest that are unattainable anywhere else. But if this goes on I'll be beaten to a pulp; I'll be pelted into a coma with little croutons of incoming data. Somehow I'm going to have to find a way to make it stop. And it's not just dry data that is getting out of hand, but the socialization, the increasing demands online for my personal attention. As more and more people obtain my net-address, my replies must become briefer and briefer. The crush of the virtual crowd will eventually overwhelm me.
When that happens, I believe I'll have to take stern measures. I could simply ignore unsolicited mail. But that seems a stopgap measure. I'll probably have to drop my current online identity, and go back online incognito. It's a pretty problem in virtual etiquette: who will get my new address and who will have to be dropped? How will I convince people to maintain the secrecy of my new ID when the whole raison d'etre of the infobahn is instant access to anybody anywhere anytime?
I don't know yet. But if I keep at it I'm sure I'll learn something.
CATSCAN 14 "Memories of the Space Age"
Back in the heyday of the twentieth century, you couldn't keep a space hero out of network television or off the glossy pages of LIFE and LOOK. Nowadays LIFE and LOOK are as dead as Yuri Gagarin. Even the TV networks are assuming a rather sickly post-digital hue.
Space news out of the USSR -- a defunct entity itself looking very true to LIFE -- no longer kicks up nine-day Sputnik wonders, no longer appears in major monthlies. It's to be found instead in the workaday pages of IEEE SPECTRUM, a specialized magazine for electronics engineers.
In March 1995, longtime cosmonaut-watcher and NASA engineer James Oberg engaged in an extensive first-hand tour of the formerly Soviet launch sites and space complexes. Oberg is a recognized Soviet Space expert, somtime NOVA host on PBS, special consultant to the Sotheby's auction house for Soviet space memorabilia, and the author of the definitive tome RED STAR IN ORBIT (Random House 1981). His article appeared in the December 1995 issue of SPECTRUM.
For decades during the Cold War and Space Race, Oberg basically used the techniques of other career Kremlinologists -- rumors, defectors, body counts, overheard radio telemetry, May Day parade stands, and informed speculation.
But with the USSR defunct, Oberg simply breezed into the legendary Baikonur cosmodrome with camera, videocam and notebook in hand -- and what a story Oberg has to tell.
The Russian space centers haven't quite caught on to the unromantic fact that the century has left Khrushschev and Gagarin behind. The space facilities still boast a plethora of hammers and sickles, with the names and profiles of Lenin, Kalinin and other Old Bolsheviks. A certain nostalgia is only to be expected, as the space worker corps is littered with deadwood. Most of Russia's current top space experts are men in their 60s and 70s, a Brezhnev-style gerontocracy of rocket-science.
Many of these veteran space workers have simply outlived the Space Age. They first took up their sacred calling in the 50s and 60s, during the super-secret Sputnik and Vostok days, when technical knowledge was strictly compartmentalized and doled out on a need-to-know basis. Institutional senility is creeping in, as Oberg demonstrates with an anecdote. Last April the Mir space station cosmonauts began showing odd bits and pieces of lost hardware to ground control, asking what these gadgets were. Nobody on the ground had a clue; they couldn't recognize the gear or even guess its purpose. The machines were still in orbit, but the paper trail was gone.
The Mir space station itself is ten years old. It has had at least one fire on board. No one has any idea how to "de-orbit" the decaying station safely, but the Russians hope that American money and American technology will keep the station running through the turn of the century. The Soviet tracking ships, which once kept a global communication net running for the sake of space exploration, have been sold, scrapped, or have ended up rotting in the harbors of the breakaway Ukraine. The Mir station can only speak to Russian ground control in ten- to-fifteen minute bursts, broken by up to ten hours of enforced silence as it flies over areas of the globe where Russia no longer has radio presence.
The USSR had two major launch centers, Baikonur Cosmodrome (aka Tyuratam) and the ultra-secret Plesetsk site. Official fraud claimed that Baikonur existed some 250 kilometers away from the actual site of launches; the launches from Plesetsk were denied entirely and officially proclaimed to be UFOs.
Like a lot of Russian government military and paramilitary sites, Plesetsk hasn't been paying its power bills lately, and has sometimes had its power shut off. But Plesetsk is a thriving haven compared to Baikonur, because Plesetsk is at least within the physical territory of the Russian Federation. Baikonur/Tyuratam isn't so lucky. The launch site of Soviet manned space missions is now entirely within the independent state of Kazakhstan.