The Struggle over Information Curation in Fran Wilde’s The Fire Opal Mechanism

Brett, Jeremy. “'We’ll Free These Words From What Binds Them': The Struggle over Information Curation in Fran Wilde’s The Fire Opal Mechanism." SFRA Review 50.2-3 (Spring-Summer 2020).[1][2]]

Wilde, Fran. The Fire Opal Mechanism. New York City: Tor.com, 2019. Novelette/Chapbook (and e-book).[3][4]

This is an important essay on, in Brett's phrase (and with his emphasis), the "dichotomy between the library as gateway vs. librarian as gatekeeper identities," in Fran Wilde's work and in our world, historically and our contemporary world, very emphatically in the United States: a contemporary world in which the Librarian of Congress in 1998 could "fear that all this miscellaneous unverified, constantly changing information on the Internet may inundate knowledge – may move us back down the evolutionary chain from knowledge to information, to miscellaneous raw data."

Brett sees The Fire Opal Mechanism (along with the preceding The Jewel and Her Lapidiary [2016][5])

singular in the fantasy genre in its centering of the control of information as a theme [....,] in the very modern sense with which librarians and archivists are currently grappling and which [...] has enormous implications for the future of society.

The overwhelming menace in Wilde’s story comes from the Pressmen, a group of militant information populists with tactical and rhetorical elements reminiscent of both the eighteenth-century French Revolution and the twentieth-century Chinese Cultural Revolution. As was common during these real-life revolutions, Pressmen launch demonstrations and attacks —particularly stinging are those from former students who turn against their universities — on the traditionally curated information environment, and threaten or suborn educational administrators, in the name of destroying elitism.

The Pressmen derive their name from their magical machine, a reverse printing press into which eager hands toss books and which removes the ink (and therefore the content) from the pages. What results from this destruction is a so-called Universal Compendium of Knowledge, a constantly-updating information source lacking boundaries, context, or structure. For the Pressmen, this is the ultimate freedom, but it comes at the price of violence and the destruction of tradition, as sorrowfully witnessed by one of the story’s protagonists, Ania Dem, a librarian at the beleaguered Far Reaches University [....]

The whole set-up is significant for SF themes involving the internet and information technology (IT) more generally, but note carefully the "reverse printing press" and its resonance with the "memory hole" in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the burning of books in Fahrenheit 451 as novel and 1966 film, and, more directly, the chopping up of books for data upload and retrieval in Vernor Vinge's 2006 Rainbows End (sic on no apostrophe).

RDE, finishing, 23Oct21