Published on August 19, 2024 Published by John Scalzi
In today’s Big Idea for Glasshouses, Author Madeline Ashby asks a question and then another question and then gets you to wonder if one or both of those questions have the answer you think might be the right one.
MADELINE ASHBY:
When is violence the answer?
If we’re honest, it’s a question we all wrestle with at some point. Most of us wrestle with it literally from childhood. There are schoolyard bullies and cyber bullies, mean teachers and just plain creepy ones, and of course, America has school shooters. “Fight” may be the last word in the run/hide/fight protocol, but it’s there nonetheless. American life comes with the basic expectation of defending yourself, because who else would you expect it from – law enforcement? Please. Pull the other guy, there’s something to that.
In my first year at university, this guy groped my girlfriend so hard that she flinched and curled up in the shape of an apostrophe, with her knees pressed to her chest like the words Do And not slowly form the word not. They were friends. And they stayed friends after that moment. (Later, she dated a guy who was 6’4″ and had a Viking sunburn, and the guy I’m telling you about became very polite very quickly.) But in that moment, in front of the Viking, it was just me. And watching her. So I finished my drink, which happened to be in a glass bottle, and called the other guy by his first name. Not the nickname he demanded of all of us. By his first name.
He paused. I don’t think he even looked at me. “Yes?” he asked.
I looked at the bottle in my hands and grabbed it by the neck. “If you don’t stop that shit right now, I’ll smash the bottle over your head.” And stab yourself in the neck with it, I thought it, but didn’t say it.
It was October. He knew me, but he didn’t know knowledge me. What he knew about me was that I listened to music he didn’t approve of, that I swore a lot, and that I was a pro-choice girl in a Catholic institution. On the other hand, I’m very short. The only thing I had going for me in an argument was my absolute confidence in my own righteousness. Eventually, he distracted me from my studies. The Phaedrus wouldn’t read itself. Anyway, he paused. Just for a second.
My friend took this opportunity to free himself from his grip.
At the time, my work-study job was reading audiobooks for students with dyslexia and other academic needs. I spent most of the year on a pathophysiology book. (I still remember how to bandage a wound and deliver a baby.) This meant that when he turned to me, I remembered all the times he had strategically appeared shirtless in front of my girlfriend, and I knew exactly where a broken bottle went.
Something of that must have crossed my otherwise plain and non-threatening face, because he didn’t walk across the room. He didn’t. He didn’t after making fun of me by saying something like, “Ooh, I’m so scared,” to which I remember just saying, “Okay.” But he did. And she went out with the other guy. The guy who could break the first guy in half. The first guy never pulled that shit in front of me again.
(Four or five years later, I told this story to my future husband. “You were like a little baby, Harlan Ellison,” he said, and his eyes were warm and loving. Then, at a later time, I told him the story below, which I will tell you now, and I saw his warm eyes go blank and cold and dead, as if someone else’s story had the power to rewrite his own.)
You see, something similar had happened to me when I was fourteen. Only it kept going and I couldn’t leave because I was alone and he was much bigger than me. And when I told the disciplinarian at my middle school, she said it happened because I had “a cute little body.” She put him in the care of his father, a pastor, who was supposed to make him weed the lawn extra thoroughly that weekend or something. And that’s when I realized that help just wasn’t going to come. Ever. Justice is like something hidden in the back of the top closet; you have to climb up a rickety pile of creaky furniture and get it yourself because no one ever wants to share it.
Of course, things would have been different if I had been richer or prettier or if my talents had cost some kind of mastery or something. In fact, I was a ninth-grader working on her first novel. I had a special arrangement with my social studies teacher, a Fulbright scholar stranded outside Seattle. I wrote a chapter for each unit he taught and did not have to do any other homework in class. If I agreed to submit the manuscript for publication and learn how to bear with composure when I inevitably failed, he would give me an A for the entire year.
In other words, I had been extraordinarily lucky once before. Lightning wouldn’t strike twice, let alone stay in a bottle. So it stayed inside me, occasionally landing on the ground, but most of the time it squirmed and crackled under my skin, and people wondered why I was so sensitive, so emotional, why I took things so seriously.
But now to this book.
It’s become popular – especially recently – to ask if you would go back in time and kill Baby Hitler. (Marvel Studios even made a joke about it. Don Cheadle is a real sales hit.) But I wrote a thesis on the history of the Holocaust in my third year of university and I can tell you: killing Baby Hitler is not the answer.
The one you actually want is Herman Hollerith.
In 1884, Hollerith invented a “punched card tabulating machine” that became the basis of automatic data processing. In 1911, he founded the Computing Tabulating Recording Company. In 1923, CTR acquired a German computer company called Dehomag, which used Hollerith’s technology. In 1924, CTR became known as IBM. And in 1933, Dehomag began offering computer services to the Nazis. The punched card tabulating system allowed for the rapid identification and categorization of people for “selection.” By 1941, when the United States entered the war, IBM New York licensed a special subsidiary of Watson Business Machines to the German government to help it organize the new train service to and from Poland.
They had to process a lot of trains, and by 1941, many of them had been sent back empty.
So the answer is not to go back in time and kill a man. The answer is to go back in time, start working at Dehomag as a secretary or someone else who should be serving coffee and tea, and poison the entire boardroom.
My latest novel, Glasshouses, is about the core team of a recently acquired startup who go on an anniversary trip and whose plane is forced to make an emergency landing on a remote island where there is only one building: a big, black box. At first, it’s very difficult to get in. And then it’s even more difficult to get out. It’s available from Tor Books on August 13th and I sincerely hope you enjoy it.
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