{"id":1728,"date":"2021-10-29T13:02:51","date_gmt":"2021-10-29T13:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1728"},"modified":"2022-01-03T16:46:23","modified_gmt":"2022-01-03T16:46:23","slug":"gunbelt-highway-by-dan-abnett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1728","title":{"rendered":"Gunbelt Highway by Dan Abnett"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Gunbelt Highway<\/em><\/strong> by Dan Abnett (Parsec<\/em> #1, Autumn 2021) begins with several wiki-like disambiguations, and the first \u201cGunbelt Highway\u201d passage is a about a specific DRAV (Deep Range Assault Vehicle) and the conflicts that particular vehicle was involved in (Gulf 6<\/em> (2052), Orbit 2<\/em> (2053), etc.). This is followed by other Gunbelt Highway wikis, which in turn describe a stretch of road, two different songs, a space traffic route, a piece of malware, a TV movie, an account of the Biafran War, and a western adventure novella. As you read through these wikis, there are inconsistencies in the history they describe, something that is developed when the next wiki discusses a sentient meme:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bentley (and others) also stress that the Gunbelt Highway Effect is far more insidious than the other described phenomena, in several key ways. One, its effect is often scattershot and piecemeal, rather than revolving around a single articulable fact. Two, it not only acts to change or invert verifiable historical details, it often seems to function retroactively, altering, mutating and even cross-pollinating the \u2018prior strata\u2019 of axiomatic information upon which any verification of said details depends. As such, the effect seems to possess an acausal property, which Bentley variously calls \u2018quantum memetics\u2019 or \u2018memetic relativity\u2019, behaving contrary to chronological or linear progression, with meaning and significance shifting depending on the objective position of the observer. Three, it not only affects a modification of collective psychology, but also of hard (usually digital) data.  p. 15-16.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Later on in the story this meme is traced back to science fiction in a droll passage:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cThe Primate Pool\u201d (2098), Bell controversially traces the ideas of skeuomophic resonance and quantum memetics back to the pulp fiction mass produced during the 20th century. He suggests that the \u201cheavy lifting\u201d of human cultural development has occurred, not in the deliberate field of philosophy, with its \u201cscrupulous laboratory condition\u201d, but \u201cin the wild\u201d, without oversight or adequate containment, in works of science fiction and speculative fiction. While a significant portion of science fiction has been \u201cpurposefully prescient\u201d and has often accurately predicted many aspects of what was deemed \u2018the future\u2019, Bell argues that the vast majority of works in the genre have been produced \u201clike wildfire, almost at random, without peer review, and usually with a throw-away or wilfully disposable intent. Words were a base currency, squandered with spendthrift glee, with no thought for the exchange rate, or the infinite variations of idea they could generate\u201d. Bell describes the authors of the genre, often producing frantically on demand to meet publishing deadlines and pay-by-the-word counts, as \u201ctoiling like the aphoristic infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, generating incalculable quantities of ideas purely for the purpose of escapist entertainment, without regard for the pernicious durability or half-life of those ideas\u201d.
Bell draws a clear distinction between the small coterie of \u201cresponsible speculative authors\u201d who conscientiously pursued the development of prescient scientific and sociopolitical concepts, and the \u201cnow largely anonymous legion of hacks and jobbing writers\u201d who wrote \u201cwith flagrant abandon\u201d to mass-manufacture prodigious quantities of consumable entertainment, the equivalent of \u201cfast food giants churning out food substitutes that favoured short-term gratification over nourishment, or pre-regulation plastics manufacturers overstuffing cultural and mental landfills\u201d.  p. 16<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This idea of a changing or tampered-with history is examined once more using the biography of the previously mentioned Biafran War writer but, by the time I finished the story, I wasn\u2019t entirely sure what was going on. The central conceit, and the changing events, are also buried under far too many words\u2014the story would benefit from being shorter and more focussed (especially at the beginning, where it takes far too long to get going).
** (Average). 7,600 words. ParSec <\/em>website<\/a>.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gunbelt Highway by Dan Abnett (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) begins with several wiki-like disambiguations, and the first \u201cGunbelt Highway\u201d passage is a about a specific DRAV (Deep Range Assault Vehicle) and the conflicts that particular vehicle was involved in (Gulf 6 (2052), Orbit 2 (2053), etc.). This is followed by other Gunbelt Highway wikis, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[422],"tags":[17,50,423,424,7,394],"class_list":["post-1728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dan-abnett","tag-17","tag-50","tag-dan-abnett","tag-memes","tag-novelette","tag-parsec"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1728"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2267,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1728\/revisions\/2267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}