Tag: science fiction

How Did I Miss “The Giver?”

The Giver sized upThe movie is coming.  I saw the trailer.  But it wasn’t the story I thought it was; it turns out that all these years the book I remembered as Lois Lowry’s The Giver was in fact Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s The Keeper!.  Which is pretty embarrassing given that I reviewed that one for The Washington Post.  And The Giver?  I hadn’t even read it.

Yesterday I did.  I so wish I had been 14 when I found it, but it was published in 1993 and won the Newbery Medal in 1994 so that’s past not only my 14th birthday but that of one of my son’s!  It’s very gripping and beautifully written, but there’s been so much YA dystopian fiction since then that it’s hard to imagine the punch in the gut it must have been when it appeared.

As a veteran of the Divergent trilogy and The Hunger Games (and, ok, the Twilight Series but they don’t count) as well as countless post-nuclear–holocaust novels and a ton of cyberfiction, I’m an old hand in this neck of the woods.  Even so, the intent of The Giver is a little different.   There’s no hunger, no war, not even any pain.  It’s a twisted version of John Lennon’s Imagine.

Except, of course, it isn’t.

The “sameness” that rules this world has murdered color and music and laughter and love.  Oh – and babies, too.  One person, “the Giver” is the sole custodian of all memories of the bitter, the painful and the sad.   We know this will not stand.  And that’s the point.

We had a sign up in my college dorm – a banner across the front porch: “Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.” — William Faulkner, The Wild Palms  Those are the words and feelings of young people and artists.  And it is the battle against nothing the Lowry offers her young readers.  As she told the New York Times:   “Kids deserve the right to think that they can change the world.”

When the Giver helps our young hero Jonas decide that beauty and emotion are worth the terrible prices we pay to be fully human, we are all empowered to imagine that we can — no must, join him.  Take a stand.  Change a mind.  Solve a problem.  Correct an injustice.  Fall in love.  Break our hearts or someone else’s.  Be alive.

And that’s the power of The Giver, as the rest of you have probably known for years.

 

WILLIAM GIBSON, NEUROMANCER, THE WEB AND THE NEWSPAPER

William_gibson
I’m a big William Gibson fan.  His new book Spook Country —
just arrived and I’m struggling to wait to start it on an upcoming beach
weekend instead of plunging in like I did with Harry Potter.  It was
he – and his book Neuromancer,
published in 1984, that led me onto the Internet in the early 90s, well before most of my
friends.  Once I dove into cyberspace (Gibson coined the word) I never
looked back.

Neuromancer was Gibson’s first book .  Much of his early work was a dark view of a connected
world full of data pirates and megacities ("the Sprawl" in the US and
"Chiba City" in Japan) with skies, in one of his most famous quotes, "the color of television, tuned to a dead 
channel."
I believed as I read Neuromancer and then all of his subsequent work that it was a preview of a
possible future and that parts of it were already on their way. 

This appeared in Reuters today:   U.S. consumers this year will spend more of
their day surfing the Internet than reading newspapers or going to the
movies or listening to recorded music, according a study released on
Tuesday. The report comes from the highly-regarded private equity firm
Veronis Suhler Stevenson, which examined consumer behavior to inform investment strategies.  Where would future ad money (hence revenue, hence good investments, I assume) go? 

When I began working online, I encouraged clients to include
their URLs in their ads and on their business cards.  In the 90s, a major LA newspaper ran ad trailers in local movie theaters.  Of course I urged them
to include their website URL at the end of the ad.  Concerned about cannibalizing the print product , they declined to do so.  I tell you this just to demonstrate how much has changed and how little many thought leaders realized what was going on around them (I also once heard Michael Eisner – on a public panel – call the Internet a fad – but that’s another story.) 

The study goes on to report
that TV still rules: “in 2006 consumers
spent the most time with TV, followed by radio, which together combined for
nearly 70 percent of the time spent with media. That was followed by recorded
music at 5.3 percent, newspapers at 5 percent, and the Internet at 5 percent.” It then predicts that this year “the Internet will move up to 5.1 percent,
while newspapers and recorded music each move down to 4.9 percent.”

 Except for the fact that  it appears to have omitted consideration of the many of us, particularly younger people, who multi-task and have the TV, radio or music playing while we’re online, it makes sense.  More and more, our lives are online — and our identities too.  More and more the world emerging from the imagination of William Gibson is becoming our world.

Here’s a final thought – a little out there but not totally unreasonable considering the Gibson constituency.  Wikipedia tells us "in his afterword to the 2000 re-issue of Neuromancer, fellow author Jack Womack goes as far to suggest that Gibson’s vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the internet developed, (particularly the World Wide Web) after the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. He asks: What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?"