Someday

Asimov wrote at least 3 stories on a similar theme. In far future, people have lost the art of writing and reading physical books. Children rediscover these and there is an enormous sense of mystery, joy of discovery and the thought of new possibilities.

• In “The Feeling of Power”, children uncover the secret of doing mathematics “by hand”.

• In the “They Fun They Had”, they find out about “books”.

• In “Someday”, kids rediscover the art of writing, the alphabet, the “secret squiggles” which seem to have untold possibilities for those initiated.

Indeed, in “Someday”, they end up speaking of cryptography (without that terminology), as in this excerpt:

“Niccolo was riddled with disappointment. “Is that your idea? Holy Smokes, Paul, who wants to do that? Make stupid squiggles!” “Don’t you get it? Don’t you get it? You dope. It’ll be secret message stuff!** “What?” “Sure. What good is talking when everyone can understand you. With squiggles you can send secret messages. You can make them on paper and nobody in the world would know what you were saying unless they knew the squiggles, too. And they wouldn’t, you bet, unless we taught them. We can have a real club, with initiations and rules and a clubhouse. Boy—”

The boys discuss some mathematical aspects of writing, reminiscent of “The Feeling of Power”:

“He had a hunk of wood he called a slide-rule with a little piece of it that went in and out. And some wires with balls on them. He even had a hunk of paper with a kind of thing he called a multiplication table.” Niccolo, who found himself only moderately interested, said, “A paper table?” “It wasn’t really a table like you eat on. It was different. It was to help people compute. Mr. Daugherty tried to explain but he didn’t have much time, and it was kind of complicated, anyway.”

and

“Well, the hand computers, the ones with the knobs, had little squiggles on each knob. And the slide-rule had squiggles on it. And the multiplication table was all squiggles. I asked what they were. Mr. Daugherty said they were numbers.” “What?” “Each different squiggle stood for a different number. For ‘one’ you made a kind of mark, for ‘two’ you make another kind of mark, for ‘three’ another one and so on.” “What for?” “So you could compute.” “What fort You just tell the computer—” “Jimmy,” cried Paul, his face twisting with anger, “can’t you get it through your head? These slide-rules and things didn’t talk.” “Then how-” “The answers showed up in squiggles and you had to know what the squiggles meant. Mr. Daugherty says that in olden days, everybody learned how to make squiggles when they were kids and how to decode them, too. Making squiggles was called ‘writing’ and decoding them was ‘reading.“”

and

“Niccolo frowned. He said, “You mean everybody had to figure out squiggles for every word and remember them? Is this all real or are you making it up?” “It’s all real. Honest. Look, this is the way you make a ‘one’, through the air in a rapid downstroke. “This way you make ‘two,’ and this way ‘three.’ I learned all the numbers up to ‘nine’” Niccolo watched the curving finger uncomprehendingly, “What’s the good of it?” “You can learn how to make words.”

I think the 3 stories together very powerfully capture the pedagogic thought that while an enormous amount of technology remains at our disposal, it is of much value to be able to do some things by the dint of your own efforts. Who does not remember the joys of doing a tricky integral “by hand” instead of Mathematica? :-)

Further Commentary: Alex Kasman had written to me that he did not feel this story, on a standalone basis, was sufficiently mathematical; indeed, he saw both “Someday” and “The Fun They Had” as being about written language, not about math, even though he acknowledged that the 3 stories seemed to form a trilogy. So in his database, a remark about “Someday” has been added to the post on “The Feeling of Power”.

IMO, the mathematical allusions and also the implicit implication of the power of written symbols in both math and language are reasonable grounds to think of this as mathfiction, if borderline. The mathematical allusions may be references to very elementary mathematical concepts (written numerals and multiplication) but it remains a story of ‘lost-art-rediscovery’, amplifying what Asimov already wrote in his very mathematical “The Feeling of Power”.