I’ve had this happen to me, I’ll work on a metaphor, handcrafted and honed in a South Austin trailer park, and I’ll post it in a horoscope. A reader will respond to some element that I didn’t intentionally insert. It’s the nature of art. It’s part of letting the muse doing to the typing.
[url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0877959528/fishinguideto-20]Islands in the Net. By Bruce Sterling. Before a reader gets too far into the book, realize this, the book’s copyright is 1988. Certain aspects of the novel haven’t aged well. Yet there’s a thematic element running the course of the novel that, oddly enough, belongs in our current universe.
I finally finished reading [url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0399149864/fishinguideto-20]Pattern Recognition the other evening. It was every bit as good as I expected. There’s a problem, though, and I’m not sure how [i]]Pattern Recognition[/i] will age. Too many topical references to current technology.
Plus I have one serious nit to pick. Imagine a hotmail account that works all the time, without a flaw, plus never – according to the plot – receives any spam.
Fiction.
From a language and style point of view, [i]]Pattern Recognition[/i] is quite good. However, at the resolution of the novel, the denoument, I would tend to regard it a little as a fairy tale.
Yet, there are elements, though-provoking side-bars and pieces of the puzzle, that all have meaning [b]especially[/b] for anyone writing online these days. Worth the read, if nothing else, from the sheer pleasure of the prose itself.
One link I stumbled across in the online world included a brief note that the author of the page was working his way through [i]]Pattern Recognition[/i] slowly because he didn’t want it to end. The prose was that tasty. I would agree. Another link from that late night surf session included a story from Asia Times, that the online branch of newspapers are starting to generate profit whereas the regular, old newspapers are slowly sinking.
After spending a weekend at an outdoor festival, though, I realized that a number of folks aren’t wired, nor are they going to be wired anytime soon.
I don’t know if books will be replaced, but the newsprint media is slowly sinking.
I get 90% or better of my news online. The local press ingnores me, so I ingnore them. Arab and Russian news sources, plus BBC Online are lot more interesting, if not always factual, at least it’s news from a different point of view.
There’s a point though, two lines, as newspapers die off, and online media starts emerge, plus there’s the individual reporting, first-hand accounts, persoanl opinions and so forth. That adds a third line. Papers go down, online goes up, and someplace in the middle, there’s the individual.
I don’t know. But [i]]Pattern Recognition[/i] made me think about this. I also figure [url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0877959528/fishinguideto-20]Islands in the Net might prove to be better over time, if taken with a proper grain of salt. In its case, plus, I’m sure, in the future, [url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0399149864/fishinguideto-20]Pattern Recognition, both will offer a look at the world we currently live in [b]plus[/b], a little slice of how we saw our future unfolding, back then. Now.