Back in 2015, I mentioned an old
Jack Vance story called "
Dodkin's Job", first published in the October 1959 issue of
Astounding Science Fiction. You can get the story in ebook format (along with "
Rumfuddle" and "
Moon Moth") at
this website. This month, I've been looking back at some old stories by Vance and
Isaac Asimov (
see), so in this blog post I'll discuss "Dodkin's Job" from the perspective of 60 years after Vance got the story published.
I have no idea what motivated Vance to write "Dodkin's Job". I wonder if it was related to his experience writing scripts for "
Captain Video". Apparently Vance could not conform to the requirements that Captain Video stories be properly sanitized for a children's show on television in the 1950s. Alternatively, I can also imagine that Vance may have been reacting to an idea previously published by Asimov.
 |
Searching for the source
of power in The Organization.
Interior art for "Dodkin's Job". |
Anyone who published as many stories as did Asimov and Vance almost certainly needed to have a good sense of humor. It is easy to picture both Vance and Asimov chortling over something that they wrote.
In "Dodkin's Job", Vance leads readers on a silly search for the source of a stupid bureaucratic policy. Vance's setting is some sort of dystopic world in which every worker must conform to the
Rules of Organization. In that world, Nonconformity (such as questioning the stupid orders that arrive from policy makers) is a great sin and likely to get you demoted.
Is it science fiction?
I have to wonder to what extent Jack Vance was influenced by Orwell's book
1984. Orwell's invented language,
Newspeak, was a fairly one-dimensional tool for spreading propaganda. In his 1957 story
The Languages of Pao, Vance imagined the creation of several new languages that would lead to dramatic alterations to the social structure of the world Pao. Maybe "Dodkin's Job" was written at about the same time as
The Languages of Pao, when Vance was in an Orwellian phase.
When I was in high school and I had to read
1984, I was told that it was a science fiction story. There is a category of "
social science fiction", however, at the time, I was reading what I thought to be "real"
science fiction with spaceships and aliens beings from distant planets.
In 2011,
NPR asked people to suggest good fantasy and science fiction novels. There must have been millions of other school kids who were also told that
1984 is science fiction because it ended up on that list (at position #6!).
Later,
SF Signal made a flow chart which attempted to divide those 100 novels into 1) fantasy, 2) science fiction and 3) other types of books. I agree with the way that SF Signal categorized
1984 and their opinion that
1984 is not really a science fiction story simply because it was set in Orwell's future.
 |
| 1984 at the lower right; not categorized as science fiction. (source) |
Computers
So, is "Dodkin's Job" science fiction? I suspect that Vance only cared about the genre status of "Dodkin's Job" because he wanted to get the story published. He got it published in
Astounding, which needs some kind of explanation. In the October 1959 issue of
Astounding, editor
John Campbell had an essay about semiconductors, transistors and computers. He also announced plans to have more actual science and technology content in the magazine and requested that people working in various technical fields submit articles, sharing the most exciting advances in their areas of expertise. I've previously
suggested that in the 1940s, you could try to get your story published in
Astounding by included an equation and a character with
telepathic powers. In 1959, at the dawn of the space age, what was Campbell looking for?
 |
| Network analyst (line-tender) in "Dodkin's Job". |
In "Dodkin's Job", at the bowls of
The Organization, there are cubicles with workers seated at "projection desks", analyzing streams of textual data. Before the dawn of the information age and the arrival of millions of office workers seated before their computer screens, Vance depicted
The Organization as depending on an army of such workers who each have ready access to the Information Bank, an archive of all the information of interest to
The Organization.
 |
| 21st century servers |
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| Input/Output for the Information Bank. |
Vance imagined that one of the positions in
The Organization was a "line tender". In "Dodkin's Job", it is almost as if Vance was imagining and describing the future Information Age with workers who would access and process business information using networked computers.
In 1950, Asimov published a story called "
The Evitable Conflict" in
Astounding. Asimov imagined a future world with a few gigantic centralized computers (he called them "the Machines") that came to control the entire economy of Earth. Asimov raised the question, "what would happen if false data were fed into the Machine"? For his story, Asimov argued that bad data would be quickly detected and rejected. However, in "Dodkin's Job", Vance imagined that a low-level employee of
The Organization could enter false data into the Information Bank and cause all sorts of mischief. Vance's character "Dodkin" may have been the first computer "hacker" ever depicted in a science fiction story.
In our world of actual computer systems, we know that Vance was closer to the truth than was Asimov. After having published "The Evitable Conflict" in 1950, Campbell later published "Dodkin's Job", perhaps realizing that Asimov's scenario of futuristic computing was a bit too rosy.
Related November Retroreading: 1949 "
The Sub-Standard Sardines" by Vance, 1949 "
Mother Earth" by Asimov, 1969 "
Feminine Intuition" by Asimov, 1969
Emphyrio by Vance
.
Next:
dinosaurs in science fiction
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