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.
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 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 >Pattern Recognition 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, >Pattern Recognition 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 especially 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 >Pattern Recognition 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 >Pattern Recognition made me think about this. I also figure 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, Pattern Recognition, both will offer a look at the world we currently live in plus, a little slice of how we saw our future unfolding, back then. Now.
