Paul Linebarger, whose pseudonym was Cordwainer Smith, was a science fiction writer of the mid-twentieth century whose stories stand out for their incredible imagination as to what different scenarios for space travel would be like...and how we would adapt ourselves to be able to withstand it. Last May I reviewed another of his many short stories: The Game of Rat and Dragon, which you can read by simply clicking on the title. Scanners Live in Vain came out in 1948 and is one of Smith's most celebrated and widely read tales, appearing in the collection The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I (edited by Robert Silverberg, Avon Books, 1970)...
So what exactly is a scanner, anyway? At my workplace...and at many, many others in today's world...a scanner is a device that reads bar codes or optical characters in order to quickly process information pertinent to the business or organization. In that technical sense, the scanners in Scanners Live in Vain play a similar role to a small extent, but it goes well beyond collecting data. In Cordwainer Smith's very imaginative view of the future, travel in deep space is only possible with humans surgically disconnected from all but their visual sense...making them "Scanners" if they are volunteers and "habermans" if they are drafted from the criminally condemned. They thus escape the mind-destroying "Great Pain" caused by space travel, running the ships while the "normal" travelers sleep through the experience. To compensate for their loss in senses, the Scanners each carry a complex computer on them that their brain interfaces with...making them a bit like that character in Robocop, but with their original identities still very much intact. In fact, Martel, the protagonist, is a Scanner who at the start of the story gets "cranched", i.e. uses a special winding wire to temporarily restore his other senses to him and render him "human" again. You can see a little here the extent to which the author has created a crazy-sounding future for us...
Word has gotten around the Scanners that a man has invented a process by which future space travelers will be insulated and protected from the Great Pain, making Scanners and habermans obsolete. They meet and decide to assassinate the inventor...Martel, still cranched and thus more human, strongly opposes this and visits the inventor to warn him of the danger. You can read it yourself to see what happens: here's a link to the story on Internet Archive: [link]...
Obsolescence is a natural byproduct of technological advance. While outdated things and processes can be disposed of, people cannot...ultimately, those responsible for the change need to recognize this and consider the human consequences of their actions. In societies where rapid change is a fact of life, there must be an infrastructure that retrains and gives opportunities for displaced workers to adjust to their bygone employment and prepare for their new future...otherwise there will be a great deal of social and political upheaval, either at the ballot box or on the streets...nobody likes having the rug pulled out from under them...
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