Blue Box by Kate Orman
3 March 2003
I can't remember a world without computers.
By the time I was born in 1994, the World Wide Web had already existed
for four years, and by the time that I was old enough to operate our old
HP machine (the first personal computer in our household, running
Windows 98 at the time), more than half of the world's two-way
telecommunications were happening online. The number today is well over
97%.
I got my start exploring Google Images (and later Wikipedia, once that
was a thing) and spent many of my formative years on web forums for my
various interests. I was a precocious lass who learned to read quite
early, so by the time that I had my first typing class in fifth grade
(around 2005), I had long since mastered the QWERTY keyboard and was
desperately bored because I had little use for the lessons.
My dear dad does remember the time before widespread home computing, of
course, and was just about the right age to jump on the bandwagon,
turning 14 around the time this book is set. So I sent him a text to ask
him what the transition was like, and get his own perspective on the
subject and events of
Blue Box.
His first computer was a Tandy TRS-80 Model III, a machine with only 4Ks
of RAM without buying additional expansions. This was more than enough
for regular use in the early 80s, and dad made frequent use of it
indeed, teaching himself BASIC and Hex to go "data mining" in the
various programs his family bought. (Presumably on cassette, as he was
only able to install a floppy drive a few years later after saving up
extra for it.)
Around 1985, the old TRS-80 was donated away when dad went off to
college, and was replaced with the formidable Commodore 64. This was the
machine he used to connect with the early Internet for the first time,
with the help of a dial-up service called Quantum Link (or Q-Link) which
he remembered being rather pricey. Supposedly grandpa once gave him a
talking-to for racking up the phone bill using this rig. For shame...
Interestingly enough (but not surprisingly perhaps, as I've previously related his
history with the fandom),
it seems that one of his formative online experiences in this period
involved posting in bulletin board groups about Doctor Who. He says he
contributed to an online episode guide for American fans, specifically
rounding out the last missing episodes on the list with some information
on the Sylvester McCoy Doctor. I couldn't find any trace of it today
(albeit with only a cursory look), but I'm reliably told it had some
godawful dot matrix art of a Dalek on the front page.
All things considered, his experiences were mostly only different from
mine in the particulars of the technology. I guess the more things
change, the more they really do stay the same. Having heard all about it
from someone who was there, I'm assured of the authenticity of the
computing landscape illustrated by
Blue Box, and I'm inclined to think that Kate Orman had first-hand experience with these machines and networks herself.
Blue Box vaguely resembles
Who Killed Kennedy
in its narration style, told as an in-universe book published by
Australian journalist Charles "Chick" Peters. This time, the narrator is
firmly embroiled in the Doctor's adventure, so this is far more
Doctor-centric than the aforementioned novel. The chapter titles, given
as numbers in various types of computer syntax, help to set the tone.
Cyber crime is a major subject in
Blue Box, which depicts a time
when ordinary people and law enforcement alike were still somewhat
innocent to the idea of cybersecurity risks. The first computer fraud
actually happened all the way back in 1970, but it was only the
emergence of the early Internet which allowed hacking and cyber fraud to
really blossom, a time period which is portrayed in this book.
The harbinger here of this all-digital future is chief antagonist Sarah
Swan, a ruthless, "fuck you, got mine", Reagan-era yuppie entrepreneur, who
enjoys controlling the lives of others by means of their digital
footprint. She finds her match in the Doctor, whose people probably see
human technology like a child's toy. He still gets really into the
hacker persona and seems to have a great deal of fun modifying his Apple
II and playing cat-and-mouse with Swan.
It is a little funny seeing the Sixth Doctor in a Kate Orman book; she's
most famous for writing for the Seventh and Eighth Doctors, who
couldn't be more different from Six. She still captures Six's
personality beautifully, while making him a little more likable than his
Season 22 counterpart. I enjoyed him quoting a poem extolling the
virtues of the domestic cat (
‘For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command,’ non-explained the Doctor), and reading a collection of B. Kliban's cat comics.
The reactions of other characters to him amused me. For example: Chick Peters remarking, "
I bet in school you were the kid who always ate the Playdough",
or suggesting the Doctor might be an art thief (truer than he knows).
He also gets a much-needed costume change, albeit in a medium where we
can't see him: a black Bond suit with a neon technicolor cat-print
necktie.
Peri also gets to wear jeans and a sweatshirt, bless her. There isn't
much botany to be done in this book, but she still gets plenty to do and
feels more well-rounded than she ever did on TV. She's in her native
America for once, and seems at ease with navigating the pizza parlor and
local hotels toward the start of the story, as well as galloping around
with the Doctor and company later on when on the run from Swan and the
law.
The book makes an able attempt at sketching out the relationship between
Six and Peri. Their banter is a bit more good-natured than it was on
TV, but we still learn that Peri is considering leaving the Doctor now
that she's in a setting resembling her own time and space. In the end,
she chooses not to. She explains their bond to Chick as one formed
through a common traumatic situation (presumably
The Caves of Androzani), which is interesting.
This whole thread is even more interesting in light of the book's
primary alien antagonist (more of a MacGuffin), the Eridani creation the
Doctor calls the "Idiot Savant". The Savant is biologically engineered
to learn computer languages in the same way a child acquires natural
languages, allowing it to rewrite and hack into any computer system, no
matter how complex. This ultimately includes the "biological computer"
of the human mind as well, which it seems to control via pheromones. It
passively rewrites the minds of those who spend the most time around it
in order to make them feel attached to it and interested in keeping it
safe, even at the cost of their own lives.
Although the Doctor obviously isn't doing that same sort of thing to
Peri, the book does still draw a bit of a parallel in suggesting their
relationship to be somewhat toxic and codependent in nature, something
which is definitely a lot more interesting than whatever we got on
screen.
The theme of privacy and personal information is even extended to gender
identity, as we learn, late in the book, about something that Chick has
been hiding from the reader and the others: that he's intersex and a
transgender man. This totally took me off-guard, even though it was
hinted at earlier in the book in retrospect, since I didn't expect much
in the way of gender diversity from a twenty year-old Doctor Who tie-in.
As a trans person myself, I was absolutely delighted; Chick is a pretty
cool character in general, is written sensitively, and is not
stereotyped.
Curiously, Chick isn't the only character that's brought up in the
context of gender identity; when the Doctor is exploring a MUD
environment (
that brought me way back), the narration remarks about his in-game avatar, "
The Doctor didn’t bother with details like appearance or even gender," and Peri says something rather interesting after Chick comes out to her:
‘Oh... I guess I see. You know, it’s funny. I’m sort of surrounded.
The Doctor also –’ she stopped short, colour jumping into her cheeks.
‘Uh, never mind.’
This seems to be drawing a comparison between transitioning one's gender
and Time Lord regeneration, something which I'll definitely talk about
more than once over the course of this marathon.
The emergence of the Internet, and the widespread prevalence of
computing technology in general, are historically very recent phenomena,
and it doesn't seem like they're going to stop evolving anytime soon.
My lived experience of becoming acquainted with the World Wide Web is
already a thing of the past. Now toddlers go about with iPads in hand,
and may never make more than incidental use of PCs in their lives.
The average formative online experience is probably now something more
like 6 hours a day of Frozen or Spider-Man asset flip videos, at least
until kids are old enough to make use of social media mobile apps. After
asking around, I learned that the schools in my area no longer offer
typing classes like they did when I was a kid; children now learn to
type even earlier than I did, albeit making use of non-tactile touch
screen keyboards instead of the physical type.
Already the web forums and blogs of my younger years are considered
somewhat obsolete (present company excluded, naturally), replaced by
more centralized services controlled by corporate monopolies. Many old
sites and online resources I made use of in my youth have already
disappeared forever into the digital aether, and the Web is full of
abandoned sites and accounts - ghosts in the machine.
2003 is just as distant now as 1982 was when this book was published.
Hacker Bob Salmon's dialogue about an all-digital future where "people [talk] in sentences that they’ve actually thought about first"
was funny in 2003, and is absolutely hilarious now. The capabilities of
the Web have expanded, but so have its dangers. The first real
cybersecurity laws came into force in the States in the later Eighties,
but I was alarmed to discover in the course of my research that, even
today, there are still some glaring holes in cyber crime legislation.
As technology has become more and more centralized and corporatized, the
general population now seem to be actively discouraged from repairing
their own devices or learning how the various applications we rely upon
actually work. Companies like Apple have created our very own generation
of "idiot savants" who can use all their apps and products with ease,
but are generally forbidden from trying to pick them apart like my dad
used to do.
This decline in computer literacy is especially concerning when you
consider how cyber crime has grown more sophisticated in the last twenty
years. I find myself worrying over the idea of the situation somehow
getting even worse as more of the population gets online, while less and
less of them know how to keep themselves safe while doing so.
Maybe I just despair over this because I'm growing older. Or because I
work in the tech support field. Time will tell if I'm wrong; it always
does.
We aren't departing from the virtual world just yet. Join me next time for an exciting adventure with Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror.
(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 16 May 2024.)
