Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

The other day I startled out of my doze and discovered I was in the car with my wife, The Duchess.

ME: Wha? Where are we going?

D: The movies. Be quiet.

I fell back into a fitful doze and dreamed of robotic tumblers that fill themselves with whiskey. When I awoke again, I had been gently laid into a seat in the theater, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was just beginning. The Duchess goes on a movie tear around this time every year, because all of the award nominations are out and she wants to see all the nominated movies, even if they are movies she would normally back away from in fear. Naturally, I come along, like luggage.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (TCCBB) is a pretty good movie; I’ll even admit to being a little choked up by it, as it is profoundly sad – or at least was to me. I wouldn’t put it in any Top-10 Lists, because I think it’s approximately two centuries too long, but what works in the movie works extremely well, and I am a big fan of David Fincher so it gets a pass on the fact that I missed the best years of my life sitting through its middle arc.

So, TCCBB is pretty good. The real question is, is it Science Fiction? I’m not aware of any festering controversy over this question, it’s just something that occurred to me. On the one hand, the main character is born a tiny old man and ages backwards physically, and forwards mentally. That sure ain’t natural, and while no scientific explanation is ever offered for this, it many generally defined senses of the term, that makes the story SF/F.

On the other hand, nothing that happens in the movie – at all – depends on the curious case of its protagonist. You could have re-written this film with Benjamin Button born a sickly, disfigured child who slowly grows healthier and more traditionally handsome as he ages and almost nothing about the story, save a single decision near the end, would need to be changed. Roughly 95% of the story would be exactly the same.

This is because nothing is really done with the incredible idea of a man aging backwards. Now, he’s not aging backwards in a time-travel sense, aware of the future; he’s only physically aging backwards. But still, nothing is done with this idea, really: Aside from some jokes, Benjamin’s life proceeds along a pretty natural path that is almost totally unaffected – outwardly – by his condition.

So much could have been done, of course. A young child in a wizened old man’s body. A 75-year-old man filled with experience and knowledge in a teenager’s body. The experience of going senile as a 10-year-old (admittedly touched on – lightly –  in the film). There were light efforts at some of this, but not much, and you really could remove the “gimmick” and still have the same film, the same themes, the same feel, and practically the same dialogue.

If the SF concept at the core of a story doesn’t actually make much difference, is it SF? And does it matter?

It’s an interesting question. If you get extreme and loose with the rules, you could probably retell a lot of SF/F as mainstream fiction, removing all weirdness, future science and whatnot – some stories more than others. But I don’t think it’s an unreasonable requirement that in SF/F stories the SF/F concept has to be central to the story – in other words, it has to affect the characters and world around them to such an extent that removing it would destroy the story.

Then again, I drink. TCCBB is a damn fine movie, so this is not meant as an attack on it, just a rumination. In the end, I firmly believe questions like this one are much less important than the overall success of a story, so I don’t hold anything against TCCBB at all. Although I’ll probably not watch it again until I have a few years to spare.

Sometimes the advance of technology that is leading us inexorably towards a Skiffy Future (flying cars! face transplants! digital monies!) isn’t all that great. Take, for example, digital music. Most of us know that the popular MP3 format for digital audio is not the greatest as far as quality goes – it is, after all, a compression algorithm that takes the huge tracks you find on a CD and makes them small enough to be easily transmitted over Internet connections or to be stored in mass quantities on tiny handheld devices. The advantages of such a format are obvious to all of us – hell, not only is every CD I own residing on my hard drive as MP3s, every cassette tape I own is also sitting there as MP3s. Everyone loves MP3s exactly because they are portable and infinitely copyable.

At a price, of course: The MP3 format, I am told, is not so hot when it comes to audio quality. It’s compressed, after all, and that means that data that sits comfortably on a CD or in a FLAC file gets squeezed in. Which is all well and good if you’re taking a pristine, uncompressed format like a CD and making personal files for yourself – if you’re corrupting your music for portability’s sake, that’s on you. But now we hear that the music industry is mixing thier songs specifically for MP3 (this via BoingBoing via Slashdot), because they know that everyone is just going to rip the songs into that format anyway, and this means the source data on your CD is going to be sucky to begin with.

In other words, the advance of technology has ruined the technical quality of your audio. And you know what? I don’t care.

I have what Scientists of the Future call Tin Ears. My friends mock me for the large sampling of 96Kbs MP3 files I have in my collection, most made long ago before I clearly understood the process, yet I can’t be bothered to re-rip them into better quality, because, frankly, I can’t tell much difference. Which puts me in a quandary: On the one hand, if nothing is done our future will be a dystopia filled with tinny highs and muddy lows. On the other, I won’t be able to tell the difference personally, and it’s not like there isn’t a good trade off here. Personally, even if I could tell the difference between CD-quality and MP3-quality, I might accept the downgrade in exchange for the portability and ease-of-copying.

I also think there’s a certain Quality Horizon, a point beyond which improvements become meaningless. I consider, with heavy thoguht, those fancy new Blu-Ray DVDs. And I ask, who cares? Sales are sluggish precisely because folks look at the roughly 1000 DVDs they’ve bought over the last few years, peer owlishly at the supposedly greatly improved quality of the new issues, and can’t really see the point. Why bother? There’s no obvious mechanical upgrade like there was between cassettes and CDs or VHS and DVD – no better portability, longevity, or bonus features. Just the assurance that the overall quality of the thing is better. Which it probably is, but not necessarily to an extent that makes upgrading worth it.

My personal Quality Horizon, when it comes to audio, is pretty low. I’m a man whose music collection was at least 65% songs taped off the radio, commercials and all, at one point. Do I look like someone who can tell whether I’m listening to a CD or an MP3?

That’s one good thing about being a writer: Electronic formats don’t necessarily threaten to downgrade my words. I mean, sure, it might downgrade my royalties as you all gleefully download my books from torrent sites, but at least the super-high-quality prose itself will be preserved, right? Don’t answer that.

Over at The New Yorker (via Slashdot), there’s yet another article about how newspapers are dying. I don’t doubt this is true, and that the day may come when print newspapers are no longer a part of our daily lives.  My real question is, why do we care so much?

The death of print newspapers does not equate with the death of news, after all; something will take its place, whether it is shiny new digital newspapers of some sort (the kind in the movie Minority Report would be nice) or blogs or, I dunno, psychic news beamed into your head until you can hear the screams and smell the coppery blood. There will be some sort of news delivery, is my point. Yet when it comes to the Death of Print (including my beloved, cherished, fetishized books), we all get very hand-wringy and upset.

I love print. My love for books as objects is pretty well-established, and my wife and I actually get a newspaper delivered (sadly, it is the entertaining but news-dubious Daily News) and we actually read our local paper (The Hoboken Reporter) every week. Of course, we’re old and stodgy, and we also read a huge volume of Internet-delivered material, from blogs to CNN.com. While I would miss print if its death should ever actually arrive, but I don’t doubt for a moment that there’ll be something to replace it. So why get all weepy about it? I mean, I’m one of those annoying folks who has gone on record about never buying a Kindle, yet I view the death of print with something approaching apathy.

I think the worry people have about it has more to do with not wanting the world to change than with any real concern for the Future. We all get to know how the world works, and we don’t like sudden, cataclysmic change (which rarely happens anyway). When we think of the Death of Print (it would be helpful to imagine a flash of lightning and a roll of thunder – possibly with a Wilhelm Scream – every time I use that phrase) we tend to imagine it all happens in one week: bookstores bulldozed, newspapers vanished, and the wall-sized televisions that never turn off installed without our knowledge or permission, and us older folks left to the mercy of Teh Kidz who know how to work all the new tech. Change is scary, and it’s natural to imagine that a world without Newspapers would be a worse place simply because none of us have ever known such a world.

Personally, I think print is going to be replaced – at first – with print-like things. E-book Readers are made to resemble books, and I think E-newspapers will resemble newspapers. At least until the usefulness of mimicking an old technology is past, if it ever is. After all, Word Processors still look very much like a piece of virtual paper in a typewriter, for no reason whatsoever. (I still own and sometimes use an ancient manual typewriter, as well – I am a Secret Luddite, ain’t I?) Change is seldom sudden and jarring, for the simple reason that sudden and jarring doesn’t sell well, and the main goal of all these products is to get you to part with your pesos. No one is going to want to scare you away by insisting you have a small device surgically implanted into your brain so you can view the new HoloNews Needlecasts, after all.

And really, if we enter into a Brave New World where you get your iNews on your iPhone via Steve Jobsian avatar speaking with a Max Headroomish stutter, will it be so bad? Trust me, thugs will still be robbing bodegas in The Bronx and terrorists will still be lobbing bombs into trains in Mumbai, and someone will still be writing about it all.

That’s the key: The writing. That’s why when authors (even dimwits like me) write up dystopian futures, we always remove literacy and make everything be televised somehow.

Bad Writing in Movies

LEST we forget, movies and TV shows get written too. And plays. And advertising jingles—the term writing covers a lot of ground, some of it sad and strewn with rotting carcasses, some of it merry and lined with beautiful gardens. This wide field means there’s also a lot of room for bad writing, about which Your Humble Correspondent here knows entirely too much.

When you do something on a professional level, you tend to lose some of your wonder for it. It’s an unfortunate consequence: Magicians don’t get wide-eyed when cards are made to disappear, computer programmers don’t get excited when email pops up on their screens, and writers wince and groan a lot when terrible dialog afflicts our television shows, books, or movies. We see the connective tissue, and we know all the tricks.

Normally, I can keep my mouth shut. Normally, I can manage to swallow clunky lines that fall to the ground with an ear-popping thud. Normally, I can handle a surfeit of cliche and a heavy hand with the purple—this because I am a firm believer in the Rules of Polite Society, that web of semi-transparent rules that keeps our world functioning, and one of those rules is that you don’t bother other folks with endless snobbish assessments of the quality of your entertainments. We’re writers, after all; for a lot of us, the reason we started writing in the first place was dissatsifaction with the stuff on TV and in the theaters, leading us to try and do it right.

Recently, though, I’m losing control of my temper when it comes to one time-honored tradition of Bad Writing: The Moron Line.

<tiny fists of rage>

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The Non-Transformative Nature of Technology

Have you ever noticed how two things seem to be true of just about every generation, at least in the modern age: Every generation believes they are special and will change the world. Somehow they represent a new and innovative form of human and/or citizen, and every generation seems to believe we’re just about to enter the Epoch of Science Fiction, wherein technology, human evolution, and, well, who knows—maybe magic?—combine to transform life as we know it.

I don’t really expect this to ever happen, to be honest; technology has been marching on for thousands of years, and while the pace of development, invention, and adaptation appears to be increasing, so far nothing has quite managed to alter the fundamental aspect of humanity—what it means to be human. Technology certainly augments our abilities, but the goals we ply those abilities towards haven’t changed all that much, nor have our motives and limitations as a species.

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