Bandwidth (Analog #1)

by Eliot Peper

Acting on a whim, he ducked into what turned out to be a bookstore. Every book faced cover-out from the dense forest of shelves, and Dag was immediately absorbed in scanning the thousands of titles on offer. Most of the books were in Mandarin or English, with some Spanish and Arabic thrown in for good measure. As he grazed, Dag occasionally picked up a book and flipped through it, only to replace it on the shelf. Books are sharks, he remembered reading somewhere once. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark. As antique media went, books were still far more popular even than vinyl, surprising analysts who predicted time and again that the feed would render them obsolete. Perhaps being outside the feed was in fact part of the appeal, offering readers something similar to what Analog patrons sought. Of course, that line about sharks must have been from a twentieth-century source, for the metaphor broke down now that the marine predators were all but extinct. With luck, today’s vote would shift civilization’s direction onto a path that might allow for such species to return in a distant, happier future.

The wonderful line about books being sharks is from the brilliant Terry Pratchett, whose richly imagined Discworld series of fantasy novels does a better job distilling the social, political, psychological, and technological forces shaping our culture and extrapolating their consequences than any explicit analysis I've ever read.