After I found the Robert Silverberg story, "What we did when the past went away", I reread stories in the same collection, "To the dark star". The first story is called "To See the Invisible Man"; as Silverberg writes: This story, written in June of 1962, marks the beginning of my real career as a science-fiction writer, I think.... The veteran writer and editor Frederik Pohl, with whom I had struck up a friendship in my earliest days as a writer, had taken over the editorship of Galaxy and its companion magazine If from the ailing Horace Gold in June of 1961, and he lured me back into the field which was still, after all, more important to me than any other. Fred had long been vexed with me for my willingness to churn out all that lucrative junk, and he believed (rightly, as time would prove) that a top-rank science-fiction writer was hidden behind the pyramid of literary garbage that I had cheerfully been producing over the past few years. So he made me an offer shrewdly calculated to appeal to my risk-abhorring nature. He agreed to buy any story I cared to send him—a guaranteed sale—provided I undertook to write it with all my heart, no quick-buck hackwork.
The story is about a man who has been found guilty of the crime of coldness. "Refusal to unburden myself for my fellow man. I was a four-time offender. The penalty for that was a year’s invisibility". What does that mean? A brand was attached to his forehead, and from that moment on, no one can "see" him for a year. At first he tests his abilities: he tries to get into a museum and initially queues for a token but he is not served. Eventually he realises that all he need to do is to take a token from the cashier's booth and walk in for free. He tries to get served in a restaurant but no one will see him, so even if he takes a seat at a table, no one will serve him. At one stage he feels ill, so he calls a doctor via the videophone; the doctor starts to diagnose him, but when the doctor sees the invisibility brand on the man's forehead, the doctor disconnects the call. Invisible means invisible.
I won't discuss the rest of the story, but I was contemplating what it might mean to be 'invisible' in 2025. As the COVID-19 pandemic showed, many people were able to continue functioning as normal - order meals via the internet and have them delivered to one's door, etc - although the medical side of the things could be quite problematic. And of course, there's no real way having the vaccination, but those appeared only after a year of the epidemic starting, so maybe the invisible man might have served his sentence by then.
Needless to say, the government could order the disconnection of internet access, both for phone and for computer, so that would definitely leave the invisible man without recourse to any form of interraction that has been added in the past sixty years.
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 189 | Speed IV | Programming | |
| 500 | Still coughing | Health | |
| 1061 | Theanine again | Theanine | |
| 1795 | Linda Lewis | Personal |
