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Self Portrait
In the credo of this inspiringly selfless cyberneticist, nothing was too good for his colleagues in science. Much too good for them!
33 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 1, 1951
9 people want to read
About the author
Bernard Wolfe
32 books12 followersBernard Wolfe studied at Yale, taught at Bryn Mawr, served in the Merchant Marine, edited Paramount Newsreel, wrote Really the Blues with "Mezz" Mezzrow, and did a publicity stint on Broadway.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 6, 2017
Published in the November 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction and available free at Project Gutenberg, this story takes place in 1959. I was puzzled from the start; the blurb didn't make any sense to me. The GR blurb for this edition copies it:
In the credo of this inspiringly selfless cyberneticist, nothing was too good for his colleagues in science. Much too good for them!
The narrator, writing a diary for a year or so, relates how he arrived at Princeton to work in IFACS, hopefully on MS, which was the hot (but secret) theme for scientists at the time. IFACS turned out to be Institute for Advanced Cybernetics Studies, but no one ever made clear what MS was. I finally worked out that it apparently stood for Military Strategy.
Our man is not assigned to MS but to the 'Pro lab', where he is to spend time trying to create advanced prosthetics, something better than a mere wooden leg or an arm with hooks. He's disappointed of course, but gets to work anyway.
Then I got more puzzled. Ollie, our narrator, doesn't seem to fit into the group. He thought the twice weekly team-building group firewood chopping expeditions were silly. (He has a point there. Valuable scientists out working with cross-cut saws and axes?!) He gets upset when he learns that a friend from college is in the MS department, and he gloats about the fact that this friend seems to be having emotional troubles. He was paranoid about his chief assistant, and could never understand the man's jokes about playing God by trying to perfect artificial limbs that would work with the power of the human brain.
He knew enough or guessed enough about the MS issue to know what it could all lead to, but he didn't seem to care. He only wanted publicity for himself and the work he was able to do, as well as that work he felt he could do....in the MS department.
So maybe the point of the story was to show how this man was immune to the human issues of the work they were doing? Would that immunity have made him the perfect MS scientist? Or the worst? Can a scientist in such a field be concerned about the ethics of his work? And yet, how could any such scientist not feel the horror of What Could Happen? This was an issue in 1951, what with the newly hatched atomic age and all, so why not in the future of the author's imagination? A future which was only 8 years away: all of the diary entries were for the year 1959.
I'll want to read this again Someday, and I hope to find other titles by Bernard Wolfe as well.
In the credo of this inspiringly selfless cyberneticist, nothing was too good for his colleagues in science. Much too good for them!
The narrator, writing a diary for a year or so, relates how he arrived at Princeton to work in IFACS, hopefully on MS, which was the hot (but secret) theme for scientists at the time. IFACS turned out to be Institute for Advanced Cybernetics Studies, but no one ever made clear what MS was. I finally worked out that it apparently stood for Military Strategy.
Our man is not assigned to MS but to the 'Pro lab', where he is to spend time trying to create advanced prosthetics, something better than a mere wooden leg or an arm with hooks. He's disappointed of course, but gets to work anyway.
Then I got more puzzled. Ollie, our narrator, doesn't seem to fit into the group. He thought the twice weekly team-building group firewood chopping expeditions were silly. (He has a point there. Valuable scientists out working with cross-cut saws and axes?!) He gets upset when he learns that a friend from college is in the MS department, and he gloats about the fact that this friend seems to be having emotional troubles. He was paranoid about his chief assistant, and could never understand the man's jokes about playing God by trying to perfect artificial limbs that would work with the power of the human brain.
He knew enough or guessed enough about the MS issue to know what it could all lead to, but he didn't seem to care. He only wanted publicity for himself and the work he was able to do, as well as that work he felt he could do....in the MS department.
So maybe the point of the story was to show how this man was immune to the human issues of the work they were doing? Would that immunity have made him the perfect MS scientist? Or the worst? Can a scientist in such a field be concerned about the ethics of his work? And yet, how could any such scientist not feel the horror of What Could Happen? This was an issue in 1951, what with the newly hatched atomic age and all, so why not in the future of the author's imagination? A future which was only 8 years away: all of the diary entries were for the year 1959.
I'll want to read this again Someday, and I hope to find other titles by Bernard Wolfe as well.
September 24, 2023
The narrator, who references himself as Ollie Parks, keeps a diary of his time at a prosthetics lab where he is supposed to create artificial life, or rather "bridging the gap between the neuronic and electronics".
Ollie has so far only created artificial bedbugs after his long tenure as a researcher, and his specific assignment is creating artificial legs for a Korean war veteran, in which he ultimately succeeds.
The key to the story is the backdrop of an arms race: the science fiction part is having government funded laboratories that need to be kept out of the public eye and can be used for the development of cybernetic weaponry. It is this backstory that compensates for the lack of plot, where more is implied than actually stated, and because of its brevity is ultimately dissatisfying.
Illustrated. Available on Project Gutenberg.
Ollie has so far only created artificial bedbugs after his long tenure as a researcher, and his specific assignment is creating artificial legs for a Korean war veteran, in which he ultimately succeeds.
The key to the story is the backdrop of an arms race: the science fiction part is having government funded laboratories that need to be kept out of the public eye and can be used for the development of cybernetic weaponry. It is this backstory that compensates for the lack of plot, where more is implied than actually stated, and because of its brevity is ultimately dissatisfying.
Illustrated. Available on Project Gutenberg.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews