For those who have not dipped into the so-called Golden or Silver Age science fiction, Chandler's pastiche is quite accurate. There was a lot of what TV Tropes (warning: TV Tropes) refers to as "Call A Rabbit a 'Smerp'": https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmee...
Even the mere act of walking out to one's "car", opening the door, getting in, and zooming away could be an act of adventure.
It would still be quite purple [1], though. A well-known trope of the time. For some reason TV Tropes hadn't covered it yet, though, so I guess we should cut the authors some slack on that front.
I would consider "My breath froze into pink pretzels." effectively unredeemable, though. Malzberg's rehabilitation attempt on that fails, in my opinion, and by the time someone wrote around it I think the surrounding prose would already have passed the Purple Event Horizon itself.
The second chapter of Anne McCaffrey's 'Dragonflight', written in 1968, opens with: "F'lar, on bronze Mnementh's great neck, appeared first in the skies above the chief Hold of Fax, so-called Lord of the High Reaches."
Maybe because I read a lot of scifi and fantasy, despite not having read any Anne McCaffrey, but that doesn't seem particularly hard to parse or understand.
I seem to read more fiction now than I ever have, but much of it now slips through publishing (and editing)
So novels that start like that make me read uphill. Way better to plunge into the book.
The first few lines of books I recently liked...
"DEATH CAME FOR him through the trees."
"Gallegher played by ear, which would have been all right had he been a musician - but he was a scientist. A drunken and erratic one, but good."
“Like any good story, it began with a girl. It was supposed to end with a bullet."
"The level was at his top lip now. Even with his head pressed hard back against the stones of the cell wall his nose was only just above the surface. He wasn’t going to get his hands free in time; he was going to drown."
a little conflicted on this one:
"ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1988, the Jason Taverner Show ran thirty seconds short. A technician, watching through the plastic bubble of the control dome, froze the final credit on the video section, then pointed to Jason Taverner, who had started to leave the stage. The technician tapped his wrist, pointed to his mouth."
The books that made me read uphill in sentence 1 loosely correlate with the rest of the book.
Makes me think of the MrBeast pdf from yesterday wrt the first crucial seconds of a youtube video.
it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I love reading either.
I'm reminded of the Illuminatus Trilogy, which at times is barely more than proper nouns arranged into sentences at random. like Finnegan's Wake but with more flower power
Compare with the first sentence of The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien:
> There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.
except for 'Arda', every new word is defined/clarified.
I'm a huge LOTR fan and a moderate Silmarillion fan, and I can see how maybe Tolkien is guilty of this 'new words for familiar things' problem.. I guess when Tolkien does it, I'm enchanted, e.g. the first non-introduction line in _Fellowship_:
> When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
To me this immediately evokes: we're in a foreign land, but it's going to be vaguely small-town England in its manners and interests.
> it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence.
F'lar is unexplained within that sentence. Mnementh is also unexplained, but sounds like a constellation.
Fax and the High Reaches are explicitly marked as the names of a person and a place. Those are going to appear as proper nouns no matter what genre you're reading. It's the only possible way to do things. This is like complaining that Robin Hood's primary antagonist is the Sheriff of Nottingham. What's the complaint?
Not surprisingly, Robert Anton Wilson, one half of the writing team behind Illuminatus, was a huge fan and scholar of James Joyce. Indeed in the first volume, the character Epicene Wildeblood writes, a damning dismissal of what is obviously meant to be the trilogy itself, describing it as "a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce"[1]. I can't think of anything more Joycean. (Epicene doesn't think much of science fiction either, even when she transitions into a more relaxed Mary Margaret Wildeblood in the later Schrodinger's Cat trilogy.)
> it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I love reading either.
Even so. If the sentence was something like "Kowalski's Mosquito soared high above the Führerbunker, Hitler's final redoubt in Berlin," no one would find that problematic. McCaffrey's sentence is only troubling if you've already assumed that made-up names are inherently bad writing.
The thing about the alternative you offer is that none of the names in it are made-up, other than that Kowalski may be a fictional character.
There is nothing inherently wrong with made-up names, and some genres will require more than others, but I suspect that sentences in the style of McCaffrey's are partly intended to draw in the reader who feels, vaguely and probably subconsciously, as someone who has the inside scoop on esoteric knowledge from having deduced what sort of entities these names denote. To be clear, I am not immune to the effect, and it can be pleasant in small doses if the rest of the story is engaging.
My first paragraph is very well true. The second one says "there is nothing inherently wrong with made-up names", which seems to be in agreement with what you hold to be true.
I am also entirely in agreement with the position that no significant criticism of the author can be made from a single sentence, especially when presented without context.
Made-up names are bad to read for me too. I don't like too many things in my head with unfamiliar names. I can't think of things with unfamiliar names, and it bothers me.
That sounds very unpleasant. I'm sorry. With all respect, though, I think we can agree that that's an issue with the reader, not the writer? If I read a novel with a lot of Vietnamese characters and locations, say, I might well have some difficulty telling them apart, but that doesn't mean that Vietnamese names are bad writing.
On a more serious note, I watched a Chinese drama with my parents, and the fact that the characters' names were in Chinese caused enormous problems for them.† This is hard for me to empathize with, but clearly it's something that some people can't handle.
† Another thing that caused them problems is that Chinese characters are addressed differently by different people, sometimes by name, sometimes by title, sometimes by a kinship term that will vary with the relationship between speaker and addressee....
That's easier for me to empathize with; it causes difficulties for me too, but those difficulties are mostly in the nature of nailing down a bunch of different pieces of information about each character, not in the nature of "why are you speaking a language that isn't English?!?"
>† Another thing that caused them problems is that Chinese characters are addressed differently by different people, sometimes by name, sometimes by title, sometimes by a kinship term that will vary with the relationship between speaker and addressee.
I have that problem with watching anime, especially slice-of-life types where you have 20 people all in school uniforms and with realistic hair colors and such. They'll all be called 3-4 different names and have no real distinguishing characteristics.
I don't think foreign names are 'bad writing' but I do experience more difficulty keeping track of names that are in a language I'm completely unfamiliar with.
English names already have an allocated space in my brain. Fake names that follow the pattern of English names are usually easy to slot into the existing system. Names in my second language can be slightly more difficult but I seem to have developed a similar system of breaking them down and storing them. But names that don't fit into patterns I'm familiar with can be like trying to memorize completely arbitrary strings of information.
For example (grabbing some Aztec mythology names) "Tlaltecuhtli" won't be accurately stored beyond the first syllable or two until I've seen it many, many times, and if there's another character called "Tlazolteotl" I'm likely to mix them up.
But I will never ever remember how to spell the name. It’s like the perfect combination of letters that are just alien to me. I usually find it by searching “hiccup github duplicate finder”
>English names already have an allocated space in my brain. Fake names that follow the pattern of English names are usually easy to slot into the existing system.
I often 'round' them to the nearest English name or just see a long string of letters and mentally think 'the guy with the S name'. It gets confusing when there are additional weird names all starting with S though. Even relatively short names, if they are weird, I'll notice halfway through the book that I've been mentally pronouncing them as if 2 of the letters were swapped in a way to feels more natural.
Oh that was great. In no small part because Burgess's slang is rooted in real etymology so it's not entirely a foreign language so much as creative use of our own. Snowcrash is similar in this respect.
My original example was going to be, a young person reading an adult book with a large vocabulary. I decided that might come off as rude, so I changed it, and maybe lost some impact.
Put more bluntly: having a reading disability does not obligate all authors to write to your reading level.
>Put more bluntly: having a reading disability does not obligate all authors to write to your reading level.
This, although it's not even always a disability related issue. Sometimes things in life aren't made for you, and you'll be happier understanding that. It's similar to complaining that an advanced mathematics textbook wasn't understandable given your baseline understanding of maths. It's not being written for you.
What's funny is that this register and conceit is one that I dearly love among science fiction and fantasy writers,
provided they fulfill the implicit promise, that on a second reading all such things will be clear.
It's an intentional device. Andre Norton is particularly adept at this: when accounting for my deep love of her many thin "pulp" novels, many of which exist in the same universe, something I regularly praise is the way she almost as a signature drops you without exposition into drama.
The conceit of a chatty expositional conversational narrator who can in effect be imaged to be turning to their friend-from-out-of-town to helpfully explain what this thing is or what the significance of that is—often with a presumed familiarity with the frame of reference their audience might hanve—is by contrast a crutch and now most characteristic of what we call Young Adult fiction.
Trust in the reader, and trust in their sufficient interest to file such things away, is, I think, characteristic of a different era—one that demanded more of readers. I don't think it's a coincidence that our own era finds this off-putting.
We're lazy now, and we have small token windows.
EDIT: and I could probably have reproduced, or at least completed, that line of McCaffery's, from memory—though that particular book shows its age and its history in being the first short story she wrote about her world Pern. She got a lot softer and more sentimental as she went along, and less prone to patriarchal stereotypes she brought along from her work as a romance writer.
McCaffrey is on that TV Tropes list, I have only read a few of her novels and she does jump out for obvious examples of this trope.
It's tricky to write an opening sentence though. We all recognise "Call me Ishmael" and probably "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is obvious to lots of people but for example, "I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods" doesn't exactly promise Breakfast at Tiffany's does it?
By the second chapter I think you've earned a lot of leeway, either the reader is engaged and will soldier on despite your six new nouns and what might be a new word or possibly a new meaning for a word they know already - or they have probably set the book down some time ago and will never see this sentence anyway.
Ooh this is fun trivia - originally dragons had a hard time with human names, so it became a tradition for dragon riders (particularly males) to adopt the dragon’s pronunciation as an honorific. So “Simon” becomes “S’mon.”
You say it with a bit of a slur - suhMON or fuhLAX - where the first syllable is not only unemphasized but uttered as quickly as possible then slurred into the next. F’lar really is just “fuhLAR”
Unlikely, since no English speaker would be able to pronounce that cluster. The odds are overwhelming that it represents nothing at all, just like the apostrophe in "don't".
In Finnish, the apostrophe marks a syllable break between instances of the same vowel, and sounds like a very short pause. Maybe they use Finnish spelling rules on this planet.
Example word: vaa'an — genetive of "vaaka" = "scale"
Fortunately, science fiction left behind those inclinations. The cyberscapes of the glittering arcologies where street sams zero every gonk, rimbo, and cyberpsycho that comes their way for fun, eddies, or to just to look nova to their favorite input or output demand your data be crystal, choom.
I can't remember the details, but sometime in the '70s or '80s a sci-fi magazine ran a contest: take a short text (something like "a man gets onto a bus and notices another man wearing an unusual hat") and rewrite it in the distinctive style of a sci-fi writer of your choice.
The winning results were pretty entertaining. I only remember the Heinlein entry having something like "Why, he's using plasteel for his helmet liner instead of ferrocrete!"
"My breath froze into pink pretzels." was the only bit of the excerpt I found interesting. I suppose pretzel is a bit of a kitschy choice for the centre of a metaphor, but the overall effect of it was to raise some interesting questions: is there a breathable atmosphere for humans that could precipitate pink ice breath? is our protagonist even human? is there a shop nearby selling Judaism-adjacent baked goods?
It's the word "pretzel", honestly. I can cover breath freezing pink by the standards of the era, no problem. Took a shot to the lungs & helmet and left to die on the ice planet. I doubt that would "really" produce frozen pink breath but what we would now consider "hard" sci-fi that would care about that sort of thing generally didn't travel with this sort of purple prose so that's not really an issue.
But pretzels? Why is your breath freezing in pretzels? Even pretzel "rods", let alone twists?
As a sci-fi writer who likes a spot of silly world-building myself, this line doesn't seem particularly absurd to me, but it does paint me a mental image of something the author very likely didn't intend to communicate:
Picture a world whose surface is covered in an ocean of hyper-oxygenated dense fluid (like the kind used in liquid-breathing experiments.)
(The fluid isn't cold! The "freezing" isn't a description of the temperature, but of motion ceasing.)
Now imagine this fluid with the appearance of a gel ant farm, with eaten-through trails in it — but rather than these trails being hollow, they're full of a cotton-candy-like pink "fluff".
Why? Through some kind of chemical reaction, exhalation of the now-CO2-saturated-and-warmed fluid into the medium, causes the formation and rapid expansion of a (pink!) aerogel, where the "gel" is "something from the fluid, plus water from your breath" and the "aero" is "nitrogen and CO2".
This aerogel is neutrally or even positively buoyant relative to the dense medium — so it doesn't fall or pour out of your mouth, but rather worms its way out, curving around your face in a random, pretzel-like extrusion pattern, fighting its way out, pushing against the working fluid.
I would imagine that, to continue to breathe safely in this strange medium, you would have to 1. always breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth; and 2. ensure that the reaction product of your exhalation doesn't linger to stick to your face as it forms.
So the optimal way to survive, would be to constantly, briskly walk backward, with this exhalation product extruding away from you like a rocket engine's exhaust (or perhaps more like spaetzle) as you walk.
I imagine you would frequently walk through trails of (your own or others') exhalation product. Which might feel somewhat like walking through gathered up hunks of spiderweb.
I also imagine that this reaction would probably be happening to some degree in your throat and lungs as well, rapidly giving you something like silicosis. Depending on how much tension you want in the plot, you could either just embrace this as "putting a timer on" getting off this planet; or you could posit that the character would be able to pry just the filter from their rebreather, using it to ensure that the reaction never occurs inside of them (but further increasing the strain of breathing in this medium.)
Don't forget the the, uh, pink widows? _Rosencrantz_ ("they're pinkish and make you dead, like him and Gildunstern"). Venemous ambush predators, low density (mostly made of this aeogel with hydrogen bladders). About an inch across and 8 inches long, like pink hovering snakes. They float, hiding in the exhalation contrails, waiting for prey to blunder into them.
The atmosphere isn't homogenized perfectly, leading to turbulent condensation.
Micheal Crichton's Sphere mentions this (actual) fact in regards to certain gases, such as Helium, being needed in high pressure environments to counter act oxygen poisoning and nitrogen narcosis, but due to differing thermal properties, can lead to hot/cold spots, thermal turbulence, etc.
I never understood why the spaceplane had an atmosphere with helium in it, though. Either Crichton messed up or got confused about the mixing issues there (as well as the massive logistics problems, the plane was huge).
The spaceplane had an completely imcompressible hull, no synthetic atmosphere was required - in fact, serendipitulously an overkill herring, was the perfect atmosphere for humans.
It was the underwater habitat that had the possibility of extreme temperature gradient fluctuations.
It was at standard pressure (sea level ish)? And the nitrogen's fine for coming and going to the habitat as you wish (without the bends) because the pressure's so much lower? What about the oxygen toxicity from breathing normal air? Is that also fine because of the low relative pressure of the oxygen containing gas?
Enlightening article - this is the exact complaint I have with the world-building Bungie does, and now I have a word to describe it. Halo is somewhat grounded, with Humans feeling familiar but the Covenant are both literally and literally (!) purple. Destiny is (IMO) so full of pink pretzels that it's undecipherable to newcomers.
> Even the mere act of walking out to one's "car", opening the door, getting in, and zooming away could be an act of adventure.
It's incredible how much screen time is dedicated to the opening/closing of car doors and the the driving of cars into/out of parking lots or driveways. Tho I guess this somewhat reflects life in America.
Easy transitional/establishing shots. Serves the same sort of purpose as when the show/movie serves up some wide shots of a city or the country, informing the viewer "we are at a new location," but more personal.
I'll be damned! One of my favorite Chandler quotes, I've posted this a lot of places over the years.
That said, the last time I looked into it sources all agreed that the comic strip Barney Google was a very well-known pop-culture reference when Chandler wrote this, and will surely have been the first thing he or anyone he talked to would think of when hearing "Google". (TFA mentions this as if it was one of several possibilities, but the others seem very shaky.)
So it seems pretty clear he meant it, and expected the reader to take it, as a silly last name.
>So it seems pretty clear he meant it, and expected the reader to take it, as a silly last name.
A lot of these 'mysteries' that get brought up over and over online tend to have very easy to figure out answers, but people would rather be confused for some reason.
They are words out of their context and humans love to make meaning. Think how surreal things will get now that time has sped up from Chandler’s time.
As mysteries they are powerful. So far there was only 1 commenter that knew of Barney Google. The knowledge spreads the mystery dies.
I knew nothing of the passage before this thread and when I was reading through the comments. I thought this was recent sci-fi that was being posted at a site called tv tropes.
The Google reference was obviously a future form factor for Google services.
In my pre-Google youth we also called them googly eyes and I honestly believed that was why Google picked that name. I always imagined the two OOs as eyes, sort of like amazons a->z arrow is a smile.
See also the campfire classic "going on a bear hunt" and the line "two big googly eyes..."
Reminds me of the people who looked for time travelers, hoping they would have betrayed themselves through chronologically wrong Google searches or tweets.
"I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Brylls ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Brylls shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn’t enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough. He was right."
I like how Chandler writing sci-fi sounds exactly like Chandler writing one of his gumshoe stories. It's terse and tense and cynical. The protagonist drives a vehicle into some kind of ambush, and everything's incredibly snappy (including the scenery). Not at all like the actual sci-fi author who turned the parody into a complete story, and felt compelled to discuss something in the middle of the action, and ruined the pace.
I don't think "Google" here is a machine or all-knowing entity, sounds more like it's just some guy. With prior experience of disintegrating Brylls.
“ GIBSON
When science fiction finally got literary naturalism, it got it via the noir detective novel, which is an often decadent offspring of nineteenth-century naturalism. Noir is one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary impulse went in America. The Goncourt brothers set out to investigate sex and money and power, and many years later, in America, you wind up with Chandler doing something very similar, though highly stylized and with a very different agenda. I always had a feeling that Chandler’s puritanism got in the way, and I was never quite as taken with the language as true Chandler fans seem to be. I distrusted Marlow as a narrator. He wasn’t someone I wanted to meet, and I didn’t find him sympathetic—in large part because Chandler, whom I didn’t trust either, evidently did find him sympathetic.
But I trusted Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandler’s ancestor, even though they were really contemporaries. Chandler civilized it, but Hammett invented it. With Hammett I felt that the author was open to the world in a way Chandler never seems to me to be.”
Assuming, of course, that The Gibson hasn’t been hacked.
Great review, thanks for the link. His point that it's easier to forecast and accept the future than to understand the time before television or telephones really got under my skin.
Well... Wernher von Braun wrote a SF novel in which the first mission to Mars discovers native Martians. These live underground and use hyperloop-like tunnels for transportation, and their leader is called the "elon"...
where a time traveller who overshoots his target and winds up too far in the past posts a classified on March 28, 1932 with a picture of a mushroom cloud and the title
All (the)
Talk
Of (the)
Market
As literature I think (1) it reads like Chandler, (2) reads like a non-genre writer imitating the genre such as E.B. White in The Morning of the Day they Did It (who even scoops Rachel Carson)
I'd say real genre writers such as Heinlein, Asimov, and Doc Smith were always more careful how they used neologisms and didn't just drop them out rapid fire in search of affect. But you sure see that in parodic material such as Calvin and Hobbes (which would parodize Chandler and sci-fi)
When Google first came on the scene, I often mistyped its domain name as googol.com. At some point since 1999, Google bought googol.com and redirected it to their site.
Barney Google aside, it's worth wondering whether the same process that led to Google being called Google instead of Googol is what led Chandler to use that word: it's a memorable, alien-sounding word, misspelled.
As a kid in the 80s, my parents bought an encyclopedia set that also had a set of companion books for kids. This is where I first learned about a google, and it was definitely google not googol. So it's been "misspelled" for quite some time if that's your belief
Maybe on purpose. Most print encyclopedias included small typos and small fake articles, so they could prove plagiarism if needed. (I use that same excuse to explain all my published errors:-)
I don't know why it'd be a matter of belief, it's a known word with a known prescriptive spelling. I'm sure the encyclopedia editors would have liked to get it right. But it's an interesting anecdote. A googol is an uncommon item of vernacular usage, and basically trivia for most people. I remember hearing "a googolplex" on elementary school playgrounds, as an example of a number so large you couldn't conceive of it. "You're stupid times infinity", "No, you're stupid times infinity to the googolplex power", and so on. And since the word doesn't follow intuitive spelling rules in English, I imagine it would have been very easy to spell it wrong in the 80s, unless you happened to both have access to specific resources, and remembered to look it up.
In one of the episodes of the 1970's Japanese anime series Gatchaman (known in North America in a heavily edited and abridged form as Battle of the Planets) there is a sequence in which a navigation screen is shown. A destination point is shown with a pin mark exactly like that balloon thing on Google Maps.
I can't remember which episode. I don't have that series on any hard drive any more.
I'm reminded fondly of the opening chapter to QNTM's Fine Structure, which sets up the story with a similarly baffling (yet self consistent, in my opinion) but wildly evocative narration of a blazing dogfight across a multiverse of hyperspaces.
One of the ways I failed to enjoy Max Gladstone's Empress of Forever was that it seemed hellbent on coining a significant new glossary worth of vocabulary along the way. I had to be well rested and attentive to muddle through with some marginal comprehension of any given chapter's plot, I certainly couldn't read it while drowsy or distracted.
Sadly, Google (Gemini) is aware of the quote, and does not provide an unbiased determination as to whether four seconds is enough to hot up the disintegrator.
Chandler's parody sounds as if somebody discovered salt and immediately put a spoonful into their dish. Still while I read through it I was curious about every term used. While if it featured mundane things like doors, guns, grass and whatever I'd be immediately bored.
For a moment I thought quote-investigator was a LLM startup app, and was about to be seriously impressed by the attention to detail, citation list and meticulously formed credits, but alas, the origin was just a squishy human.
"Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction. It’s a scream. It is written like this: “I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. Then I got stuck into some kind of infinite reload loop on iOS Safari for this site- I thought it was lockdown mode but it’s nice to know it’s just generally broken"
For those who have not dipped into the so-called Golden or Silver Age science fiction, Chandler's pastiche is quite accurate. There was a lot of what TV Tropes (warning: TV Tropes) refers to as "Call A Rabbit a 'Smerp'": https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmee...
Even the mere act of walking out to one's "car", opening the door, getting in, and zooming away could be an act of adventure.
It would still be quite purple [1], though. A well-known trope of the time. For some reason TV Tropes hadn't covered it yet, though, so I guess we should cut the authors some slack on that front.
I would consider "My breath froze into pink pretzels." effectively unredeemable, though. Malzberg's rehabilitation attempt on that fails, in my opinion, and by the time someone wrote around it I think the surrounding prose would already have passed the Purple Event Horizon itself.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose
The second chapter of Anne McCaffrey's 'Dragonflight', written in 1968, opens with: "F'lar, on bronze Mnementh's great neck, appeared first in the skies above the chief Hold of Fax, so-called Lord of the High Reaches."
Maybe because I read a lot of scifi and fantasy, despite not having read any Anne McCaffrey, but that doesn't seem particularly hard to parse or understand.
I seem to read more fiction now than I ever have, but much of it now slips through publishing (and editing)
So novels that start like that make me read uphill. Way better to plunge into the book.
The first few lines of books I recently liked...
"DEATH CAME FOR him through the trees."
"Gallegher played by ear, which would have been all right had he been a musician - but he was a scientist. A drunken and erratic one, but good."
“Like any good story, it began with a girl. It was supposed to end with a bullet."
"The level was at his top lip now. Even with his head pressed hard back against the stones of the cell wall his nose was only just above the surface. He wasn’t going to get his hands free in time; he was going to drown."
a little conflicted on this one:
"ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1988, the Jason Taverner Show ran thirty seconds short. A technician, watching through the plastic bubble of the control dome, froze the final credit on the video section, then pointed to Jason Taverner, who had started to leave the stage. The technician tapped his wrist, pointed to his mouth."
The books that made me read uphill in sentence 1 loosely correlate with the rest of the book.
Makes me think of the MrBeast pdf from yesterday wrt the first crucial seconds of a youtube video.
Consider Phlebas?
it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I love reading either.
I'm reminded of the Illuminatus Trilogy, which at times is barely more than proper nouns arranged into sentences at random. like Finnegan's Wake but with more flower power
Compare with the first sentence of The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien:
> There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.
except for 'Arda', every new word is defined/clarified.
I'm a huge LOTR fan and a moderate Silmarillion fan, and I can see how maybe Tolkien is guilty of this 'new words for familiar things' problem.. I guess when Tolkien does it, I'm enchanted, e.g. the first non-introduction line in _Fellowship_:
> When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
To me this immediately evokes: we're in a foreign land, but it's going to be vaguely small-town England in its manners and interests.
> it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence.
F'lar is unexplained within that sentence. Mnementh is also unexplained, but sounds like a constellation.
Fax and the High Reaches are explicitly marked as the names of a person and a place. Those are going to appear as proper nouns no matter what genre you're reading. It's the only possible way to do things. This is like complaining that Robin Hood's primary antagonist is the Sheriff of Nottingham. What's the complaint?
Not surprisingly, Robert Anton Wilson, one half of the writing team behind Illuminatus, was a huge fan and scholar of James Joyce. Indeed in the first volume, the character Epicene Wildeblood writes, a damning dismissal of what is obviously meant to be the trilogy itself, describing it as "a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce"[1]. I can't think of anything more Joycean. (Epicene doesn't think much of science fiction either, even when she transitions into a more relaxed Mary Margaret Wildeblood in the later Schrodinger's Cat trilogy.)
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Illuminatu...
> it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I love reading either.
Even so. If the sentence was something like "Kowalski's Mosquito soared high above the Führerbunker, Hitler's final redoubt in Berlin," no one would find that problematic. McCaffrey's sentence is only troubling if you've already assumed that made-up names are inherently bad writing.
The thing about the alternative you offer is that none of the names in it are made-up, other than that Kowalski may be a fictional character.
There is nothing inherently wrong with made-up names, and some genres will require more than others, but I suspect that sentences in the style of McCaffrey's are partly intended to draw in the reader who feels, vaguely and probably subconsciously, as someone who has the inside scoop on esoteric knowledge from having deduced what sort of entities these names denote. To be clear, I am not immune to the effect, and it can be pleasant in small doses if the rest of the story is engaging.
That maybe very well be true, but it still doesn't indicate any problem with the McCaffrey sentence.
Also note that it's the start of the second chapter, so some of those nouns may have been introduced already.
My first paragraph is very well true. The second one says "there is nothing inherently wrong with made-up names", which seems to be in agreement with what you hold to be true.
I am also entirely in agreement with the position that no significant criticism of the author can be made from a single sentence, especially when presented without context.
>McCaffrey's sentence is only troubling if you've already assumed that made-up names are inherently bad writing.
This is honestly the core component of most criticisms of genre fiction as far as I've seen.
Made-up names are bad to read for me too. I don't like too many things in my head with unfamiliar names. I can't think of things with unfamiliar names, and it bothers me.
> Made-up names are bad to read for me too.
Aren't all names made-up?
call them new names then
That sounds very unpleasant. I'm sorry. With all respect, though, I think we can agree that that's an issue with the reader, not the writer? If I read a novel with a lot of Vietnamese characters and locations, say, I might well have some difficulty telling them apart, but that doesn't mean that Vietnamese names are bad writing.
> but that doesn't mean that Vietnamese names are bad writing.
Not everybody agrees: https://www.jesusandmo.net/wp-content/uploads/2011-05-31.png
On a more serious note, I watched a Chinese drama with my parents, and the fact that the characters' names were in Chinese caused enormous problems for them.† This is hard for me to empathize with, but clearly it's something that some people can't handle.
† Another thing that caused them problems is that Chinese characters are addressed differently by different people, sometimes by name, sometimes by title, sometimes by a kinship term that will vary with the relationship between speaker and addressee....
That's easier for me to empathize with; it causes difficulties for me too, but those difficulties are mostly in the nature of nailing down a bunch of different pieces of information about each character, not in the nature of "why are you speaking a language that isn't English?!?"
>† Another thing that caused them problems is that Chinese characters are addressed differently by different people, sometimes by name, sometimes by title, sometimes by a kinship term that will vary with the relationship between speaker and addressee.
I have that problem with watching anime, especially slice-of-life types where you have 20 people all in school uniforms and with realistic hair colors and such. They'll all be called 3-4 different names and have no real distinguishing characteristics.
I don't think foreign names are 'bad writing' but I do experience more difficulty keeping track of names that are in a language I'm completely unfamiliar with.
English names already have an allocated space in my brain. Fake names that follow the pattern of English names are usually easy to slot into the existing system. Names in my second language can be slightly more difficult but I seem to have developed a similar system of breaking them down and storing them. But names that don't fit into patterns I'm familiar with can be like trying to memorize completely arbitrary strings of information.
For example (grabbing some Aztec mythology names) "Tlaltecuhtli" won't be accurately stored beyond the first syllable or two until I've seen it many, many times, and if there's another character called "Tlazolteotl" I'm likely to mix them up.
Same. One of my favorite duplicate file/similar image finders is https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka
But I will never ever remember how to spell the name. It’s like the perfect combination of letters that are just alien to me. I usually find it by searching “hiccup github duplicate finder”
assuming it's Polish or Czech, it's pronounced ch-kavka, if that helps
>English names already have an allocated space in my brain. Fake names that follow the pattern of English names are usually easy to slot into the existing system.
I often 'round' them to the nearest English name or just see a long string of letters and mentally think 'the guy with the S name'. It gets confusing when there are additional weird names all starting with S though. Even relatively short names, if they are weird, I'll notice halfway through the book that I've been mentally pronouncing them as if 2 of the letters were swapped in a way to feels more natural.
You seem to be suggesting that it's good writing style to make your reader struggle as if with a foreign language?
Ever read A Clockwork Orange? Guessing that didn't go over well with you.
Oh that was great. In no small part because Burgess's slang is rooted in real etymology so it's not entirely a foreign language so much as creative use of our own. Snowcrash is similar in this respect.
My original example was going to be, a young person reading an adult book with a large vocabulary. I decided that might come off as rude, so I changed it, and maybe lost some impact.
Put more bluntly: having a reading disability does not obligate all authors to write to your reading level.
>Put more bluntly: having a reading disability does not obligate all authors to write to your reading level.
This, although it's not even always a disability related issue. Sometimes things in life aren't made for you, and you'll be happier understanding that. It's similar to complaining that an advanced mathematics textbook wasn't understandable given your baseline understanding of maths. It's not being written for you.
I guess I don't interpret bmacho's comment as relating to disability, just a general objection to excessive weird words a la https://xkcd.com/483/
It reminds me of opening the bible - especially the books in the old testament- or any old compendium of legends from ancient civilisations.
What's funny is that this register and conceit is one that I dearly love among science fiction and fantasy writers,
provided they fulfill the implicit promise, that on a second reading all such things will be clear.
It's an intentional device. Andre Norton is particularly adept at this: when accounting for my deep love of her many thin "pulp" novels, many of which exist in the same universe, something I regularly praise is the way she almost as a signature drops you without exposition into drama.
The conceit of a chatty expositional conversational narrator who can in effect be imaged to be turning to their friend-from-out-of-town to helpfully explain what this thing is or what the significance of that is—often with a presumed familiarity with the frame of reference their audience might hanve—is by contrast a crutch and now most characteristic of what we call Young Adult fiction.
Trust in the reader, and trust in their sufficient interest to file such things away, is, I think, characteristic of a different era—one that demanded more of readers. I don't think it's a coincidence that our own era finds this off-putting.
We're lazy now, and we have small token windows.
EDIT: and I could probably have reproduced, or at least completed, that line of McCaffery's, from memory—though that particular book shows its age and its history in being the first short story she wrote about her world Pern. She got a lot softer and more sentimental as she went along, and less prone to patriarchal stereotypes she brought along from her work as a romance writer.
McCaffrey is on that TV Tropes list, I have only read a few of her novels and she does jump out for obvious examples of this trope.
It's tricky to write an opening sentence though. We all recognise "Call me Ishmael" and probably "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is obvious to lots of people but for example, "I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods" doesn't exactly promise Breakfast at Tiffany's does it?
By the second chapter I think you've earned a lot of leeway, either the reader is engaged and will soldier on despite your six new nouns and what might be a new word or possibly a new meaning for a word they know already - or they have probably set the book down some time ago and will never see this sentence anyway.
I think proper nouns get a bit more of a pass in terms of purple prose.
I also enjoy the non-standard punctuation, e.g. F'lax -- how would you pronounce that?
Ooh this is fun trivia - originally dragons had a hard time with human names, so it became a tradition for dragon riders (particularly males) to adopt the dragon’s pronunciation as an honorific. So “Simon” becomes “S’mon.”
You say it with a bit of a slur - suhMON or fuhLAX - where the first syllable is not only unemphasized but uttered as quickly as possible then slurred into the next. F’lar really is just “fuhLAR”
The apostrophe here most likely represents a glottal stop (as in Hawai'i).
Unlikely, since no English speaker would be able to pronounce that cluster. The odds are overwhelming that it represents nothing at all, just like the apostrophe in "don't".
In Finnish, the apostrophe marks a syllable break between instances of the same vowel, and sounds like a very short pause. Maybe they use Finnish spelling rules on this planet.
Example word: vaa'an — genetive of "vaaka" = "scale"
IIRC, dragonriders always elide part of their name, and indicate the gap with an apostrophe. It's consistent and explained in the text at some point.
Fortunately, science fiction left behind those inclinations. The cyberscapes of the glittering arcologies where street sams zero every gonk, rimbo, and cyberpsycho that comes their way for fun, eddies, or to just to look nova to their favorite input or output demand your data be crystal, choom.
I can't remember the details, but sometime in the '70s or '80s a sci-fi magazine ran a contest: take a short text (something like "a man gets onto a bus and notices another man wearing an unusual hat") and rewrite it in the distinctive style of a sci-fi writer of your choice.
The winning results were pretty entertaining. I only remember the Heinlein entry having something like "Why, he's using plasteel for his helmet liner instead of ferrocrete!"
I would love to see a Gene Wolf rendition of that
"My breath froze into pink pretzels." was the only bit of the excerpt I found interesting. I suppose pretzel is a bit of a kitschy choice for the centre of a metaphor, but the overall effect of it was to raise some interesting questions: is there a breathable atmosphere for humans that could precipitate pink ice breath? is our protagonist even human? is there a shop nearby selling Judaism-adjacent baked goods?
It's the word "pretzel", honestly. I can cover breath freezing pink by the standards of the era, no problem. Took a shot to the lungs & helmet and left to die on the ice planet. I doubt that would "really" produce frozen pink breath but what we would now consider "hard" sci-fi that would care about that sort of thing generally didn't travel with this sort of purple prose so that's not really an issue.
But pretzels? Why is your breath freezing in pretzels? Even pretzel "rods", let alone twists?
As a sci-fi writer who likes a spot of silly world-building myself, this line doesn't seem particularly absurd to me, but it does paint me a mental image of something the author very likely didn't intend to communicate:
Picture a world whose surface is covered in an ocean of hyper-oxygenated dense fluid (like the kind used in liquid-breathing experiments.)
(The fluid isn't cold! The "freezing" isn't a description of the temperature, but of motion ceasing.)
Now imagine this fluid with the appearance of a gel ant farm, with eaten-through trails in it — but rather than these trails being hollow, they're full of a cotton-candy-like pink "fluff".
Why? Through some kind of chemical reaction, exhalation of the now-CO2-saturated-and-warmed fluid into the medium, causes the formation and rapid expansion of a (pink!) aerogel, where the "gel" is "something from the fluid, plus water from your breath" and the "aero" is "nitrogen and CO2".
This aerogel is neutrally or even positively buoyant relative to the dense medium — so it doesn't fall or pour out of your mouth, but rather worms its way out, curving around your face in a random, pretzel-like extrusion pattern, fighting its way out, pushing against the working fluid.
I would imagine that, to continue to breathe safely in this strange medium, you would have to 1. always breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth; and 2. ensure that the reaction product of your exhalation doesn't linger to stick to your face as it forms.
So the optimal way to survive, would be to constantly, briskly walk backward, with this exhalation product extruding away from you like a rocket engine's exhaust (or perhaps more like spaetzle) as you walk.
I imagine you would frequently walk through trails of (your own or others') exhalation product. Which might feel somewhat like walking through gathered up hunks of spiderweb.
I also imagine that this reaction would probably be happening to some degree in your throat and lungs as well, rapidly giving you something like silicosis. Depending on how much tension you want in the plot, you could either just embrace this as "putting a timer on" getting off this planet; or you could posit that the character would be able to pry just the filter from their rebreather, using it to ensure that the reaction never occurs inside of them (but further increasing the strain of breathing in this medium.)
Sounds like something Peter Watts might have invented. I like it, sort of; almost plausible, barely survivable, and deeply unpleasant.
Don't forget the the, uh, pink widows? _Rosencrantz_ ("they're pinkish and make you dead, like him and Gildunstern"). Venemous ambush predators, low density (mostly made of this aeogel with hydrogen bladders). About an inch across and 8 inches long, like pink hovering snakes. They float, hiding in the exhalation contrails, waiting for prey to blunder into them.
mosquito eels with diseases
The atmosphere isn't homogenized perfectly, leading to turbulent condensation.
Micheal Crichton's Sphere mentions this (actual) fact in regards to certain gases, such as Helium, being needed in high pressure environments to counter act oxygen poisoning and nitrogen narcosis, but due to differing thermal properties, can lead to hot/cold spots, thermal turbulence, etc.
I never understood why the spaceplane had an atmosphere with helium in it, though. Either Crichton messed up or got confused about the mixing issues there (as well as the massive logistics problems, the plane was huge).
The spaceplane had an completely imcompressible hull, no synthetic atmosphere was required - in fact, serendipitulously an overkill herring, was the perfect atmosphere for humans.
It was the underwater habitat that had the possibility of extreme temperature gradient fluctuations.
It was at standard pressure (sea level ish)? And the nitrogen's fine for coming and going to the habitat as you wish (without the bends) because the pressure's so much lower? What about the oxygen toxicity from breathing normal air? Is that also fine because of the low relative pressure of the oxygen containing gas?
I'll have to revisit the chapter but I believe there was a few pages about the door, and a large hiss.
I assume the spacecraft detected and matched the artificial habitats - that's what I had meant, not surface atmosphere.
I revisited a summery, carefree 90s hit last year, and I immediately exclaimed, "these guys are ON DRUGS!"
https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Len/Steal-My-Sunshine
Confirmed by promo video footage
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose
Enlightening article - this is the exact complaint I have with the world-building Bungie does, and now I have a word to describe it. Halo is somewhat grounded, with Humans feeling familiar but the Covenant are both literally and literally (!) purple. Destiny is (IMO) so full of pink pretzels that it's undecipherable to newcomers.
I have to admit i read the comments before i read the article and this comment made me feel like I was having a stroke
> Even the mere act of walking out to one's "car", opening the door, getting in, and zooming away could be an act of adventure.
It's incredible how much screen time is dedicated to the opening/closing of car doors and the the driving of cars into/out of parking lots or driveways. Tho I guess this somewhat reflects life in America.
Easy transitional/establishing shots. Serves the same sort of purpose as when the show/movie serves up some wide shots of a city or the country, informing the viewer "we are at a new location," but more personal.
I'll be damned! One of my favorite Chandler quotes, I've posted this a lot of places over the years.
That said, the last time I looked into it sources all agreed that the comic strip Barney Google was a very well-known pop-culture reference when Chandler wrote this, and will surely have been the first thing he or anyone he talked to would think of when hearing "Google". (TFA mentions this as if it was one of several possibilities, but the others seem very shaky.)
So it seems pretty clear he meant it, and expected the reader to take it, as a silly last name.
>So it seems pretty clear he meant it, and expected the reader to take it, as a silly last name.
A lot of these 'mysteries' that get brought up over and over online tend to have very easy to figure out answers, but people would rather be confused for some reason.
They are words out of their context and humans love to make meaning. Think how surreal things will get now that time has sped up from Chandler’s time.
As mysteries they are powerful. So far there was only 1 commenter that knew of Barney Google. The knowledge spreads the mystery dies.
I knew nothing of the passage before this thread and when I was reading through the comments. I thought this was recent sci-fi that was being posted at a site called tv tropes.
The Google reference was obviously a future form factor for Google services.
> Chandler played cricket when he was young, and he may have been influenced by the term “google” which is applied to balls which break or swerve.
I think the author means “googly”
Yep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googly
I'm old enough to recall my youth glueing irises loosely encased in occipital domes onto craft projects. The kids today call them googly eyes.
In my pre-Google youth we also called them googly eyes and I honestly believed that was why Google picked that name. I always imagined the two OOs as eyes, sort of like amazons a->z arrow is a smile.
See also the campfire classic "going on a bear hunt" and the line "two big googly eyes..."
There's a documentary called Mountain Talk and the folks in the Appalachians used an adjective "si-goggling" which meant out of square, crooked.
Lots of similarities there, too.
This book from 1931 deserves a mention as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Google_Book
it includes verses like:
I own a copy of the 1979 edition and the illustrations are just wonderful.The Google:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/The_Goog...
Reminds me of the people who looked for time travelers, hoping they would have betrayed themselves through chronologically wrong Google searches or tweets.
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/google-search-fails...
We are real though.
Sorry I missed our coffee date next Tuesday.
The whole thing:
"I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Brylls ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Brylls shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn’t enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough. He was right."
I like how Chandler writing sci-fi sounds exactly like Chandler writing one of his gumshoe stories. It's terse and tense and cynical. The protagonist drives a vehicle into some kind of ambush, and everything's incredibly snappy (including the scenery). Not at all like the actual sci-fi author who turned the parody into a complete story, and felt compelled to discuss something in the middle of the action, and ruined the pace.
I don't think "Google" here is a machine or all-knowing entity, sounds more like it's just some guy. With prior experience of disintegrating Brylls.
William Gibson on Chandler:
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...
Via
https://archive.ph/qmwKj
“ GIBSON When science fiction finally got literary naturalism, it got it via the noir detective novel, which is an often decadent offspring of nineteenth-century naturalism. Noir is one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary impulse went in America. The Goncourt brothers set out to investigate sex and money and power, and many years later, in America, you wind up with Chandler doing something very similar, though highly stylized and with a very different agenda. I always had a feeling that Chandler’s puritanism got in the way, and I was never quite as taken with the language as true Chandler fans seem to be. I distrusted Marlow as a narrator. He wasn’t someone I wanted to meet, and I didn’t find him sympathetic—in large part because Chandler, whom I didn’t trust either, evidently did find him sympathetic. But I trusted Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandler’s ancestor, even though they were really contemporaries. Chandler civilized it, but Hammett invented it. With Hammett I felt that the author was open to the world in a way Chandler never seems to me to be.”
Assuming, of course, that The Gibson hasn’t been hacked.
Great review, thanks for the link. His point that it's easier to forecast and accept the future than to understand the time before television or telephones really got under my skin.
>sounds more like it's just some guy
That should be apparent to anyone that can read, I think people just like to pretend to be dense for some reason.
Well... Wernher von Braun wrote a SF novel in which the first mission to Mars discovers native Martians. These live underground and use hyperloop-like tunnels for transportation, and their leader is called the "elon"...
What book is that?
Edit: Found it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale
It gets funnier if you consider the meme that Elon Musk is an alien who is building rockets just to go back to his home planet. :)
Makes me think of
https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/01/detecting-time-trave...
And also Asimov's classic End of Eternity
https://ia800500.us.archive.org/13/items/calibre_library_68....
where a time traveller who overshoots his target and winds up too far in the past posts a classified on March 28, 1932 with a picture of a mushroom cloud and the title
As literature I think (1) it reads like Chandler, (2) reads like a non-genre writer imitating the genre such as E.B. White in The Morning of the Day they Did It (who even scoops Rachel Carson)https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1950-02-25/flipbook...
I'd say real genre writers such as Heinlein, Asimov, and Doc Smith were always more careful how they used neologisms and didn't just drop them out rapid fire in search of affect. But you sure see that in parodic material such as Calvin and Hobbes (which would parodize Chandler and sci-fi)
"Mr. Google, the best filing clerk in the firm. Filing & Office Management: A Constructive Monthly Magazine on Business Methods. July 1921."
https://x.com/dennistenen/status/1017125225484505090
The quote in full is: "I Had Exactly Four Seconds To Hot Up the Disintegrator, and Google Had Told Me It Wasn’t Enough"
When Google first came on the scene, I often mistyped its domain name as googol.com. At some point since 1999, Google bought googol.com and redirected it to their site.
Barney Google aside, it's worth wondering whether the same process that led to Google being called Google instead of Googol is what led Chandler to use that word: it's a memorable, alien-sounding word, misspelled.
As a kid in the 80s, my parents bought an encyclopedia set that also had a set of companion books for kids. This is where I first learned about a google, and it was definitely google not googol. So it's been "misspelled" for quite some time if that's your belief
Maybe on purpose. Most print encyclopedias included small typos and small fake articles, so they could prove plagiarism if needed. (I use that same excuse to explain all my published errors:-)
I don't know why it'd be a matter of belief, it's a known word with a known prescriptive spelling. I'm sure the encyclopedia editors would have liked to get it right. But it's an interesting anecdote. A googol is an uncommon item of vernacular usage, and basically trivia for most people. I remember hearing "a googolplex" on elementary school playgrounds, as an example of a number so large you couldn't conceive of it. "You're stupid times infinity", "No, you're stupid times infinity to the googolplex power", and so on. And since the word doesn't follow intuitive spelling rules in English, I imagine it would have been very easy to spell it wrong in the 80s, unless you happened to both have access to specific resources, and remembered to look it up.
In one of the episodes of the 1970's Japanese anime series Gatchaman (known in North America in a heavily edited and abridged form as Battle of the Planets) there is a sequence in which a navigation screen is shown. A destination point is shown with a pin mark exactly like that balloon thing on Google Maps. I can't remember which episode. I don't have that series on any hard drive any more.
I'm reminded fondly of the opening chapter to QNTM's Fine Structure, which sets up the story with a similarly baffling (yet self consistent, in my opinion) but wildly evocative narration of a blazing dogfight across a multiverse of hyperspaces.
One of the ways I failed to enjoy Max Gladstone's Empress of Forever was that it seemed hellbent on coining a significant new glossary worth of vocabulary along the way. I had to be well rested and attentive to muddle through with some marginal comprehension of any given chapter's plot, I certainly couldn't read it while drowsy or distracted.
> the book “In the Plex” by journalist Steven Levy presented the following explanation for the name choice:
>> Page’s dorm roommate suggested they call it “googol.” . . . “The name reflected the scale of what we were doing,” Brin explained a few years later.
>> Page misspelled the word, which was just as well since the Internet address for the correct spelling was already taken. “Google” was available.
This is interesting, since the story I heard was that they settled on the spelling after an early investor made a check out to that spelling.
This is largest juxtaposition between familiarity and nostalgia against an outright alien uncanny facade of fiction.
A dissociative, delirious, memory. Orthogonal to our current experience, but barely.
These two songs are the closest I could find in an analogous auditory form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE5JMEu5hZA
Sadly, Google (Gemini) is aware of the quote, and does not provide an unbiased determination as to whether four seconds is enough to hot up the disintegrator.
Claude refuses to answer because it won't assist with information about weapons.
Ah, this is an article about parody of sci-if slop.
I had way too much trouble realizing the article wasn’t just machine generated nonsense. Poe’s law strikes again.
Chandler's parody sounds as if somebody discovered salt and immediately put a spoonful into their dish. Still while I read through it I was curious about every term used. While if it featured mundane things like doors, guns, grass and whatever I'd be immediately bored.
Nick Lowe, in The Well-Tempered Plot Device, is quite brutal in his criticisms.
https://ansible.uk/Ansible/plotdev.html
Balls that go in the opposite direction (of normal) is called Googly
I still have no idea how to reconcile by merging with gravitational time dilatation being infinite at event horizon.
I often wonder what would happen if the founders didn’t misspell the word. And today we would be saying Googolled.
I'm not saying that it was time travel, but it was time travel.
A 'googly' is not a google, what is this nonsense hahaha. Seriously getting Baader-Meinhof from this website which I used to trust.
Love the irony of someone mocking science fiction being an accidental prophet
The name Google was chosen because it's kind of sciency and sounds funny.
Googly, Goggle, Gogle...
It's a funny word that's been used for 100+ years. No irony necessary for a word to be reused for its intended purpose.
Something something infinite monkeys, something something Nostradamus. I'm sure Captain Beefheart lyrics are prophetic too, like Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish.
His lyrics are prophetic but somehow he always plays the exact opposite note than one might expect.
The old man the boat.
The horse raced past the barn fell?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/apollos-gift-of-prophecy-dodg...
For a moment I thought quote-investigator was a LLM startup app, and was about to be seriously impressed by the attention to detail, citation list and meticulously formed credits, but alas, the origin was just a squishy human.
I get stuck into some kind of infinite reload loop on iOS Safari for this site, anyone else?
No issue for me on Safari, on both iOS 18 and macOS 15. But I know what you mean regarding the infinite reload loop, it happens to me on Bloomberg.
Yep same, I thought it was lockdown mode but it’s nice to know it’s just generally broken!
"Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction. It’s a scream. It is written like this: “I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. Then I got stuck into some kind of infinite reload loop on iOS Safari for this site- I thought it was lockdown mode but it’s nice to know it’s just generally broken"
Worked fine for me on iOS safari just now. Maybe it was temporary?
No problem for me with Chrome on Android.
I was today years old when I found out about Quote Investigator :-)
Go easy on calling yourselves "QI", the hugely entertaining BBC TV show might have some qualms about this.
https://www.qi.com/
The website has existed since at least 2010, so I guess they are aware and have considered this.