David Alex Lamb

If you’ve used computers long enough to leave a project for a long while and come back to it, you may have had the “fun” of resuming, only to find that, despite your having changed nothing, it no longer works. We computer geeks call that “software rot” – as if the bytes on the storage drive had decomposed over time.

What happened is that you didn’t change anything, but someone else did. The operating system got an update. Or, on a shared system, somebody updated software that you had previously used – or, indirectly, something you didn’t know about that, behind your back, was being used by the software you did know you used.

This started happening to me last week, and I am delighted that today, after about seven hours of work over that time, I got things working again.

What Happened To Me

For the Linux software geeks (if any) among you readers, this is what happened.

Back in 1972, in grad school, I had an idea for a book about the fundamental ideas in Computer Science. Finally in 2020, after many hard times including 15 years of disability leave, I got a serious stab at writing it. I was on a 6-month stay-at-home sabbatical. For Reasons, I was using LaTeX on Solaris, with the 2016 version of TeXLive. I added to the book bit by bit over the next few years, but completely stopped in the latter half of 2023, at the end of which I had to retire (again, for Reasons). I finally tried to pick it up earlier this year, but software rot had set in. The Solaris system had been updated, and LaTeX (or at least some of the LaTeX packages I needed) no longer worked. Almost nobody was still using that software, so the technical staff suggested I move it to a Linux release (Ubuntu under WSL) on my office Windows computer.

So last week I started that: set up WSL, create a user account under Linux, transfer files from the Solaris machine, discover seven things I needed to update or install on Linux (three of which didn’t completely finish, but seemed to work anyway), and finally try to run LaTeX to recreate my document from scratch.

Compilation failed with status code 2.

TeXLive was updated in June, and Things Are Different Now.

I spend about four and a half hours this week tracking down the bugs, partly by experimenting, partly by sifting through (mostly) out-of-date Reddit and StackOverflow suggestions (finally finding a GitHub fork of a critical package that fixed some issues in what I had been using), partly by just rewriting the bits that failed. Finally, today, the old document compiled and looked great.

Then I spent a glorious half hour adding new prose. It was the best session of “scholar / writer / computer geek” (all parts together) in four years.

What Happens to Others

Something like this might have happened to you the last time your operating system forced an update on you.

Operating systems used to allow you to delay (or outright refuse) to update, but historically that led to Russian bot networks hacking your machine because of security flaws that had been patched months or years ago that you never installed. So now, Windows (at least, and likely others) makes it really, really hard to avoid updating.

And that’s a problem for any big company with a public-facing service. It is completely impossible for even a very careful operating system company to test a new release under every circumstance that users might create. So there is a nontrivial chance that something will go wrong the instant your company’s public-facing servers update.

You can’t afford to let that happen.

I have a writer acquaintance who is also in the computer industry, and his company faces exactly this situation. Every time Windows updates, they have to stop the public-facing servers from updating, and try the new version in a “sandbox” not available to the public. They then spend a frantic time finding and fixing whatever broke before updating the public servers.

This whole thing is part of configuration management: the discipline of keeping track of all your bits and pieces, and deciding when an update should happen. I worked for a startup for about 13 months during 1983-84, and the configuration manager had the perfect “passive aggressive” personality required by the job. He spent a lot of his time telling programmers “You don’t want to upload that fix to the shared version. Yes, it fixes a bug. But five of your colleagues are tracking down other bugs, and they’ll have to start over if your fix changes anything at all that affects their problems. And you don’t know that your fix doesn’t change anything that matters to them.”

He was probably the most critical employee we had. It’s a job where you get a lot of pushback and pressure, but it’s essential to your production timeline.

This series (currently 3 volumes¹) is an excellent tutorial for its intended audience: beginning writers of speculative fiction who are interested in learning the basics about the breadth of sub-genres of science fiction available for them to try. It should also be of interest to readers, but they might rate it slightly lower because they aren’t the intended audience. Each subsection included a brief history of a sub-genre, its basic tropes, and some writing exercises to try.

I found the books’ style engaging, and as a former teacher of a different subject, I appreciate their pedagogical . The history sections are often fascinating. I wasn’t aware that, in addition to writing Frankenstein (which can be viewed as the first novel where science is an essential element) Mary Shelley wrote one of the first apocalyptic novels, The Last Man, which in volume 2 we find out was also the first pandemic novel.

For a list of sub-genres in each book, see the authors’ website. Goodreads entry.

1. Of which I have read part of #2 as well as finishing #1 ↩︎

Once upon a time, Analog Science Fiction magazine had a book reviewer named Spider Robinson. His reviews were always valuable, even if you didn’t agree with them, because his stated purpose was to tell you what you needed to know to judge for yourself whether you would like the book or not. He didn’t use stars, or at least not insofar as I recall. You couldn’t possibly encapsulate what he wrote in something as simple as a number from one to five.

The problem with his kind of review is that it is labour intensive on the part of the seeker of new books. You have to scan a lot of reviews, each a paragraph or two, which in these days of “TL:DR” is more time and energy than some people want to invest. Reading a book is one thing. Scanning through a lot of prose to find one book that could be interesting is a lot of work. And few people want to write reviews of that length anyway.

In fact, I often see one star reviews that say explicitly, this book is not the sort of book I want to read. Or worse, this entire genre of books is not something I want to read (in which case, why did you bother to read it at all?) For a seeker of new books, that is an utterly useless remark.

Low star reviews are very often an expression of feeling or prejudice. How often have we seen movies we really like get rating-bombed? I once heard a prominent award-winning speculative fiction writer say that they only read four-star reviews, because those are people in your intended audience from whom you can learn something.

So, it seems to me that in this world of mass communication, the masses can’t really communicate what we want to know. Now, most of the books I buy were recommended by someone I trust (good old word of mouth) or written by authors I know, either established writers whose books I’ve liked, or fellow writers I have met through conventions or online.

Nevertheless, I have been told that writing reviews and giving ratings is extremely helpful to the authors, even if the review is short. I haven’t been doing it much; maybe I can improve. But if I am inclined to give three or fewer stars, I am going to think carefully about whether the book was meant for people like me.

Back in the 1960s, when the FLQ was blowing up mailboxes in Canada, people started thinking, “you know, this isn’t just regular criminal activity; we need to call it something different.” The word they came up with was “terrorism:” criminal activity intended to cause fear in the general population for political purposes.

The first time it became really clear to me that the word was evolving was during the Arab Spring, in Syria, when the president started calling peaceful protesters “terrorists.” Yes, they had a political purpose, but they weren’t trying to cause terror in the civilian population: they were the civilian population.

Fast forward to January 2026, when apparently in the United States you become a “domestic terrorist” when Immigration and Customs Enforcement unalives you. PBS News has an article on how the FBI defines “terrorism” – a little differently from the zeitgeist of the 1960s, but still involving fear and political purposes. But the definition also includes the phrase “influence government policy by intimidation or coercion” as one alternative, and apparently some American politicians (and federal agents) are easily intimidated. As in Syria, peaceful protesters are getting called “terrorists.”

And the FBI phrase about influencing government policy is a bit suspect. Aren’t some kinds of lobbying or pressure from corporations and oligarchs “influencing government policy by intimidation?” At present, however reprehensible, it isn’t illegal, and thus doesn’t fit my 1960s definition.

Words are supposed to mean something. I’ve come to accept the Merriam-Webster “descriptivist” policy of defining words as they are currently used, but it is sad when an old meaning becomes unavailable (or, at least, inexpressible except via a long phrase).

We no longer have a quick way of saying what “terrorist” meant in my youth.

Last night (January 2-3, 2026) the United States invaded Venezuela to capture the President, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, in an extremely expensive extraterritorial abduction to bring them to New York to face U.S. indictments related to drug trafficking. Well, at least, that’s the best summary I can write in a single sentence; there is a lot to unpack here, and my characterization is far from neutral. But what struck me as a Canadian during the late-morning press conference today was that Trump explicitly mentioned the Monroe Doctrine as a justification.

From my perspective as a Canadian, the Monroe Doctrine is also tied to the concept of “Manifest Destiny.” They are technically separate, but Wikipedia calls them “a closely related nexus of principles;” the two together can be vastly oversimplified as “the United States owns the entire Western Hemisphere.” Monroe was talking about the interference of colonial powers with U.S. interests anywhere in the Americas; it was part of his 7^th State Of the Union address on December 2, 1823. Manifest Destiny is more of a zeitgeist starting early in U.S. history (even before the Revolution) that the colonies had the right to expand westward, into “Indian land,” but, eventually, also into territory controlled by France and Spain. John Quincy Adams wrote in 1811 about taking over all of North America (a concept technically called “continentalism”). Apparently expansionist ideas about the Americas declined over the years, but in 1904 Roosevelt articulated a U.S. right to intervene in the affairs of Latin American countries. Hoover repudiated that idea in 1930 – but the 20^th century had many instances of the kind of interference Roosevelt was talking about.

So, in the context of Trump’s rhetoric in 2025 about making Canada “the 51^st state” as “an idea that made sense,” his reference to the Monroe Doctrine ramps up my concern about what (if any) limits there are on the U.S. unfairly pressuring Canada. We can at least expect a serious fight over the renewal of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, especially as Trump appears to reject the concept of win-win: a deal is “unfair” unless he wins and the other side loses.

Carney’s government is making a lot of effort towards reducing our dependency on the U.S.A, such as joining the European Unions’s Security Action for Europe, and expanding trade with many other countries. I just worry that he can’t get everything in place before we take a huge economic hit from the end of the USMCA. We elected him as the best person to deal with Trump; I just hope my fellow Canadians realize just how hard his job is if we start to suffer.