Posts Tagged ‘novel’

Two new Wordpress errors:  if you see the “financial advice” post appear in your feed, it’s not supposed to have gone public yet… and if you see this post doing anything weird, it’s because Wordpress is giving me fits with posting at the correct times.

Now that I’ve finished whining, on to the post…

“It wasn’t written like I thought it would be,” he said.

“How so?” I asked, although I had warned him the book isn’t what most people expect.

“I thought it would be written from Dracula’s point of view,” he said. “Instead it’s written from Jonathan’s.”

Written fr… what?

Then I remembered which generation I was dealing with, and it all made sense.

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series is now at the height of its popularity (the cynic in me expects the books to be “so yesterday” in a year or two). In case your personal world has been teenager-free for the last twelve months or so, Twilight is about a teenage girl named Bella Swan who falls in love with Edward Cullen, who happens to be a vampire.

Part of me is rolling its proverbial eyes right now.

Part of me wants to send Meyer a thank-you note for getting teens to read.

The English teacher in me is taking full advantage of the situation by pushing my students to read Wuthering Heights, which (according to Wikipedia) is Bella’s favorite book, and Dracula, the granddaddy of all modern vampire novels.

So this obliging young man had paid a visit to our school’s media center and checked out a copy of Bram Stoker’s novel. About a quarter of the way through the book, he commented that he was surprised the narrative wasn’t from Dracula’s point of view.

It’s a Victorian vampire novel, I thought. Why on Earth would it be written from Dracula’s point of view?

Then I realized my confusion was the result of a generation gap. From this fifteen-year-old’s perspective, it made perfect sense for Dracula’s voice to carry the narrative forward. After all, teens and vampires have a lot in common.

…Now, after I make that statement, your reaction indicates your age. If you’re old enough, you’re thinking something like, “Did he just say that? Holy crap… he really doesn’t like teenagers, does he?”

If you’re young enough, on the other hand, you’re thinking, “Well, duh, I mean, vampires rock. I wish I could be one!”

Think about it. Vampires get to stay out all night, sleep all day, and wear all black. Vampires captivate their prey with forceful and often rather sexy charisma. Vampires are, like, dark and gothic and wicked. They’re the rock stars of the undead.

On the other hand, Stoker’s narrator (Jonathan Harker) is a bloomin’ lawyer. Not. Cool. At. All.

My student was fully enjoying the novel, however, and I expect he finished it over Christmas break. Too bad I couldn’t be there when he encountered the character Renfield, who is possibly the coolest vampire-groupie ever.

Never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula? As I told my student (and as he discovered), it’s really not what most people expect. Modern vampire fiction is mostly a pale, cliché-ridden, and rather juvenile imitation of the original. Go buy it… or if you’re strapped for cash, Project Gutenberg has text and audio downloads for free. So you really have no excuse.

Likewise, you might be surprised by Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights if you haven’t picked it up yet. Project Gutenberg can help you out again with the text, but you might have to visit LibriVox to get the audio download.

Now, go read.

One thing vampire children are taught is, never run with a wooden stake. — Jack Handey

Apologies for missing my regular Saturday post.  I’ve got a lot going on during Christmas vacation with my wife, and tomorrow we leave town for our delayed honeymoon.  I’ll try to post again this Saturday, but we’ll see.  Maybe we’ll get snowed in up in the Smokey Mountains!

*Apologies if this lands in your feed reader twice… Wordpress got all wonky when I hit “publish.”

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all. — Isaac Asimov

Amazing Stories!

Asimov might be accused of a certain amount of bias in this matter, but that doesn’t mean he’s incorrect.  Our “salvation,” in the cultural sense, does depend on the kind of speculation and imagination that our science fiction authors have made their life’s work.

Western society has spent the last century completely reinventing itself every five or ten years… “five” more frequently than “ten” in the last five decades, especially.  Most of our cultural metamorphoses have been centered around the preservation and distribution of data.  Once the nineteenth century had brought color photography and the radio, the stage was set for people to tinker, fiddle, jury-rig, and otherwise improvise all kinds of new and exciting novelties.

For a quick summary of the last 70 years of information technology, I recommend the list “Technological Milestones of the Computer Era” by Dennis F. Herrick.  I was originally going to post such a list here… but it was a long list in an already long post.

As we enter the new millennium, many of us are cancelling our home phone services, scrapping our MP3 players, leaving our digital cameras on the shelf, and tossing our pocket notepads in the recycling bins.  Why bother with all of that junk, when our cell phones have taken over these functions (and so much more) anyway?

The obvious question is, “where do we go from here?”  The obvious question, however, may not be the most important.  The question we might need to worry about is, “how can we prepare ourselves for the next century better than our ancestors were prepared for the last?”

Think about these examples:

• Identity theft apparently took our society by surprise… our responses to this threat have mostly been reflexive reacting rather than preemptive planning. 
• Identity theft of another sort was the topic of a recent post here on Shreds of Truth… send me your name and resume, and I will work you up a fradulent MySpace profile guaranteed to get you fired from your job, or your money back. 
• The concept of email security seems to have been ignored in our recent presidential campaign, and email has been around since the 1970s! 
• Even worse, we spent decades warring against the production and distribution of child pornography; now we buy our children camera phones so that they can produce and distribute it themselves.

I am no Luddite.  I love technology.  I especially love the responsible, thoughtful, and well-informed use of technology.  Unfortunately, technology sometimes develops so rapidly that our cultural understanding of it lags behind.

The dilemma:  how do we solve or prevent problems arising from the use of technology that hasn’t been invented?

The answer:  by conceiving of the technology and the problems it poses before the technology appears on store shelves.

 So, wait, that means we need to predict the future, right?  How can we know how a particular piece of technology will be (ab)used before it has become available?

Through science fiction, that’s how.

In the 1970s, Orson Scott Card had already envisioned a remarkably accurate version of the Internet — a global, computerized medium for sharing communications, news, and information.  In his novel Ender’s Game, he also correctly predicted some of the risks inherent in a global computer network:  trolling, anonymous abuse of communications systems, deliberately deceptive online profiles, malicious hacking, invasions of privacy, and so forth.

Ender’s Game was published nearly twenty years before the news flash arrived in most Americans’ homes that their twelve-year-old sons and daughters were chatting online with (and giving personal information to) dangerous pedophiles masquerading as middle-schoolers.

The reaction, more often than not, was “OH MY GOSH do you mean to tell me that some people on the Internet are LYING ABOUT THEIR IDENTITY?”  The shock was nearly tangible.  The outrage was nearly palpable.  And every forward-thinking teen who had read Ender’s Game had seen this (or something similar) coming for a long time.

Now… if you’re interested to see what’s coming within the next twenty years… and to think about how to protect your children from it… go read Charles Stross’s Accelerando.  To get your attention hooked, I’ll share with you the first few sentences of the novel, copied and pasted from the free (!) online version linked above.

Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich.

It’s a hot summer Tuesday, and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: He’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.

He wonders who it’s going to be.

(Accelerando e-book licensed under CC-by-nc-nd Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license by Charles Stross.)