T/S Survey: Is personal technology bad for plot?
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Was Philip Roth the American author who worried about the affect of the 1969 moon landing on literature? I think he was.
Anyway, an American author said something like this: The moon landing was so extraordinary that literature would have a difficult time competing with such magnificent real events. In other words, if your country just successfully landed a flying vehicle on the surface of the moon, what the hell can you do in a novel, or other fiction, that will compete for and capture the imagination as strongly?
I once put the moon-landing-versus-literature question to Salman Rushdie at a literary conference, and his answer confirmed what I thought: Literature always adapts to magnificent realities and then can surpass them, if it hasn’t already. Doubleday published Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles in 1950. French novelist Gustave Le Rouge had published a novel in 1908 about travel to Mars via mental telepathy. Fiction is the only way we will or should to go to Mars. (If you’re reading me, Mr. President, then please forget the big red rock — put the money into Hubble 2.)
I wonder, however, about personal technology — iPhones, GPS units, and those e-Pez dispensers — in relation to plot. Could these things screw up plot royally?
I ask this after thinking over the weekend about the end of a short story I’d posted in installments across a succession of six Fridays, “Young Leonard Goes Feral.” My main character, Leonard de Freese, reacts to and runs into (hated) technology constantly, such as digital trail cameras, thermal imagers, and Tasers. The plot hinges on these encounters.
However, how can you have a great chase sequence these days with GPS? Think back to the detective novels of Chandler, Hammett, and Spillane. What would you think if Mike Hammer or Philip Marlowe just put a GPS tracker on a car instead of following it? Can you picture Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchem holding an iPhone?
Well, no, you can’t, especially because they’re dead. But you get what I’m saying, yes?
So, I submit to you, the T/S audience, three questions:
1. Does literature always successfully adapt plot and character to the technology of its time?
2. Is fiction set in a pre-digital world more enjoyable than that which occurs post-1990? Why or why not?
3. Whose are the first five numbers in Humphrey Bogart’s iPhone?
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re 1) In “Chinatown”, a 70’s story about the 30’s, the detective uses cheap pocketwatches placed under the tires of the target’s car, in order to time his movements. Place the story in the present day, & the detective would happily use a GPS tracker to do the same job more completely and efficiently- but the web of malice, corruption, perversity, and betrayal, that is the real core of the story, is timeless, and the technology involved becomes mere period detail. So, yeah- a competent writer can pretty easily adapt the plot to the technology of the story’s time- and character is universal, plot and tech adapt to it. I’m with Rushdie on this.
2) Not going to address this one, except to observe that science-fiction, as a literary genre, seems to me to have deteriorated since the late 80′, early 90’s. That might be because of commercial reasons, or the tropes may have become exhausted; but maybe the post-digital world has caught up with the need to imagine a future of amazing technological wonders. (As somebody who grew up reading Dick, Zelazny, Clarke, Delany, et al, I WAS amazed by the world of 2001- I was also mighty f**king digusted and disappointed by it. Where’s my goddam 2-helicopter garage, anyhow?)
3) I bet Robert Benchley was/would have been in the top 5- they were great drinking buddies. Hell, I’d have liked to have gotten drunk with those two.
Speaking of technology, SOMETHING sent a surge of eyeballs to the jellyfish story. Congrats, I guess.
[...] T/S Survey: Is personal technology bad for plot? – Scott Bowen … [...]
In a stoke of Irony….Humphrey Bogart was utilized in an iphone commercial.
Watch here:
http://www.modaentertainment.com/iphone.html