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To skim or not to skim
Apr. 16th, 2010 05:50 pmI'm finding myself really struggling to read Doomsday Book all the way through without skimming or just skipping ahead to the end. It's not the length, and it's not the slow-moving plot (I'm quite fond of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell; 'nuf said on those points).
It's that the "modern" half of the book suffers badly from Antique Future Syndrome. I can roll with the idea of a future with time travel and everlasting gobstopper candy and enhanced immune systems, but I just can't roll with a future with all those but no cell phones, especially when the lack is being pointed to every page. Having video phones* but no mobile communications is a very antique future indeed, and the "we can't contact this person with this vital information!" went out as a plot point over a decade ago.
I hope the other books aren't that dated. Blackout was at least written after the invention of the cell phone, pocket computer, and ipod.
*Random factoid: My father worked on one of the original videophone concepts back in the 60s and 70s, but the project was abandoned because "nobody wanted that; what if someone called as you got out of the shower?" Much like the ipod resurrecting the dying audiobook market, video communications needed a whole new delivery paradigm.
It's that the "modern" half of the book suffers badly from Antique Future Syndrome. I can roll with the idea of a future with time travel and everlasting gobstopper candy and enhanced immune systems, but I just can't roll with a future with all those but no cell phones, especially when the lack is being pointed to every page. Having video phones* but no mobile communications is a very antique future indeed, and the "we can't contact this person with this vital information!" went out as a plot point over a decade ago.
I hope the other books aren't that dated. Blackout was at least written after the invention of the cell phone, pocket computer, and ipod.
*Random factoid: My father worked on one of the original videophone concepts back in the 60s and 70s, but the project was abandoned because "nobody wanted that; what if someone called as you got out of the shower?" Much like the ipod resurrecting the dying audiobook market, video communications needed a whole new delivery paradigm.
