Identifying the genesis of a story isn’t always possible, but I know where this one came from. The underlying scientific premise is the brainchild of Robert A. Fleming, friend, maniac, and a true patron of the arts.
Bob works at the cutting edge of technology. There are only a handful of people on the planet capable of persuading chips, boards, optical circuits, and non-sinusoidal wave generators to do what he and his wife Cherie Kushner make them do. I wish I could properly convey what it is like looking over their shoulders as they make improbabilities into reality. Perhaps the process is best typified by one of Bob’s stock explanations: It’s called pulling a miracle out of your ass.
This is a way of saying that Bob doesn’t have time to write his own science fiction stories, which causes him some frustration. Hardly a day goes by when he doesn’t come across something that makes him think, “What a story that would make.” Perhaps someday he’ll indulge the muse; meanwhile, he’s not the sort of man to let his harried schedule thwart him. He tries to get other people to write the stories.
Sometimes he is very convincing.
His persuasiveness snagged Vernor Vinge, which is why you’ll find considerable mention in A Deepness in the Sky and “Fast Times at Fairmont High” of “localizers” — technology that Bob and Cherie invented. Later in this collection you’ll find “The Cookie Jar,” my own exploration of a future shaped by the existence and use of those devices. But the first of Bob’s arm-twisting happened in 1986, and led to this story.
Bob presented me with a list of real-science ideas he thought might work as stories. Mostly, he was wrong. The thing is, real scientific developments are a bitch to use in place of raw material that rises from sheer imagination. Imagination can be tamed and manipulated. Real science fascinates me as non-fiction, and it’s fun to consider how it will affect our lives, but a given slice of technology or research all by itself does not supply characters, plot, conflict, and other elements necessary for a work of fiction. Bob himself had tried to think of scenarios to cope with this challenge, but none of them generated a spark in my brainstorming apparatus until he thrust forward one he called “Bookworm.”
The real science goes like this: We have a common bacterium in our gut called E. coli. It’s most often mentioned when it escapes the digestive system and wreaks havoc in parts of the body it doesn’t belong in, but when it behaves itself it is benign. It happens that this little critter almost allows us to digest cellulose, as termites do. If there were ever a time when food was in short supply, people might find it advantageous to be able to convert cellulose into edible sugars. (Some might argue that it’s already damn useful as the major component of fiber in our diet.)
In the milieu of “Bookworm,” the future is also a place in which books made of paper have long since fallen out of fashion (an almost unthinkable possibility back in 1986, prior to the development of the World Wide Web, smartphones, and ebooks). Precious archival volumes are kept in a place where oxygen, dust, and light will not decompose them: in a space station. One day a chunk of errant space debris appears at high velocity and wipes out the galley of the space station. The poor librarian is left foodless. Due to a tense political situation, a rescue party may not arrive for weeks.
All is not lost. After all, the books are full of cellulose. The librarian need not go hungry after all. He has shelf after shelf of sustenance. Never mind that each volume is one-of-a-kind, the last repository of classic literature in its original publication medium.
Imagine the choices. Shall he sacrifice Keats, or Shelley? Should he bother with Harold Robbins? No, probably not very fulfilling. Ah, but Thoreau, now there’s a rich meal. Dostoyevsky might present a little trouble going down, but surely the Betty Crocker Tenth Edition would provide a remedy.
A new form of literary criticism is born. And it used to be no more than metaphor to say that bad writing produces indigestion.
I never wrote “Bookworm.” I’m sure I would have enjoyed it, and I rather liked the idea of sticking close enough to it that I could justifiably list Bob as collaborator, because he has done me many a favor over the years and helping him get his byline on a piece of science fiction would please him. But my speculation had gone off on a tangent: Just why the hell would humans go to such extremes as to alter the digestive arrangement of the entire species? Why would the librarian have had that capacity? The answer that came to mind led me completely away from space stations, literary satire, and into a serious piece, which was what I was in the mood for anyway. I had a solid hard-sf premise to work with; I didn’t want to get too silly with it.
“Termites” was my first sale to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, appearing in the May, 1987 issue. We’re already past the date of the main action, which takes place in 2011. That’s one of the frustrating aspects of writing near-future science fiction — all too soon it becomes alternate-reality fiction. Which is one reason I made the characters, and not the premise, the core of the tale. They keep “Termites” fresh — but if you are jarred by some of the assumptions herein, remember what a different Africa we were all looking at in 1986. A time before, for example, the AIDS epidemic had taken hold and not only burst the bubble of population explosion in the sub-Saharan region, but in some places sent birthrates plummeting below replacement level.
One more thing, and it’s spooky. About the time the story saw print, I read an account of a biologist who actually created the very type of E. coli I mention in the narrative. He invented it in 1981, let it sit in his lab for a year, and when he realized what could happen if his sample were ever inadvertently released, he destroyed it.
Had he not been so prudent, by this time McDonald’s might have already treated us to its new McChaff sandwich.