Banned Books Month: Guest Post from Brenda Cooper: When Information Hid in Pages
I was a teenager in the 1970’s. I was 11 when THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK came out. Teenagers know far less than they think they do, but we did know that the government hated the book. That meant we needed to get our hands on one.
Ozark Press, Reprint Edition, June 2002.
I think I had mine by the time was thirteen. I kept it hidden in my bedroom the way young boys or old men hide pornographic magazines under the bed. THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK contained information about how to make Molotov cocktails and other bombs. The information was partly incorrect, but it was so in-your-face to the government (and so very banned in so many places) that just owning felt like an act of defiance.
No one knew I had it. I bought it with cash, maybe even through a third party. I don’t really remember the details any more. But there was no database that tracked the purchase, nothing the government could have known except that somewhere in Los Angeles another copy was sold. Perhaps they could not have even known that, not then.
I think I still have my copy – 40 years old now – in a box in the storage bin. I haven’t touched it in years. I wasn’t actually ever very interested in its contents. After all, I never wanted to make a bomb. But even now the thought of owning it is warm and sweet and a little nervous.
Today, of course, I could find accurate and up to date information about how to make almost anything dangerous I want on my home computer. But the NSA will know what I went to look at, will see if I get curious about pressure-cooker bombs like the ones the Tsaranev brother’s used on the Boston Marathon, will track the pages I visit if I look up how the Taliban constructs I.E.D.’s, will know how long I talk if I call a professor in Chechnya.
Pyr, October 2013.
I might do these things in preparation for committing terrorist acts of fiction or perhaps of poetry.
Some faceless big data program might then recognize what I did and send a stranger in DC (or perhaps in a foreign country) to find me online. If I’m lucky, they will find this post and decide I am only moderately dangerous.
Information (or misinformation) used to hide in the crisp white pages of books, but now it rides out in the open. Librarians have been fighting the government’s desire to know who checked what book out when for years. But we have no librarians to defend the patrons of the Internet, and information cannot be kept under the bed of teenagers easily any more. Instead we live in a world where banned books have morphed into watched keywords. I like this brave new world in so very many ways, but there is a secret dark heart to it that is scarier than owning The Anarchist’s Cookbook was in 1973, when 1984 was still ahead of us and we didn’t really think the events in that banned book might happen, either.
Brenda Cooper.
Brenda Cooper writes science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. Her next novel is THE DIAMOND DEEP, which will be out in October 2013 from Pyr. It’s book two of a two-book series that started with THE CREATIVE FIRE. She has seven novels out and numerous short stories. Brenda is also a technology professional and a futurist, and publishes non-fiction on the environment and the future.
See her website at www.brenda-cooper.com.
Brenda lives in the Pacific Northwest in a household with three people, three dogs, more than three computers, and only one TV in it.
