dreamshovel

I’ve never read Stephen King’s “The Stand”, nor seen the movie. But I know it involves an end-of-the-world flu pandemic. With the Swine Flu hype escalating and references to “Captain Trips” percolating out of every social media stream, I figured I’d get the book before someone hits me with spoilers and anyway what better choice for bedtime reading in the midst of an actual influenza outbreak, right?
Proper pandemic protocol dictates that I order-in, thus avoiding tedious and harrowing interactions with possibly (oh noes!) INFECTED hosts. Obviously, this is a job for my trusty Sony eReader…

Popping over to the Sony ebook store I immediately find they have “The Complete & Uncut Edition”. Excellent! I hate how King’s novels always get cut down to a whispy scant 800 pages or so.
And the price is…US $35. Wow! That’s a lot for an ebook version of a novel published in 1978 by a super-popular author. Isn’t it? Since I find the Sony store prone to overpricing their books I’ll just look elsewhere.

OK, top of the search results: same edition ebook available from Random House. Hmm, US $50! No thanks.
A few dodgy torrent sources pop up, but I like books and authors and have this silly idea that artists should be compensated for their works. So no leeching. (hold that thought.)

Just for kicks, I check the Amazon store, as if I had a Kindle, but find only “Title is not available”. So much for that. It is however, fairly encouraging that other King ebooks recommended on that page are about $8 bucks each. And amusingly, a new DVD copy of the 1994 movie for sells for just $26. But to be fair it’s not the new “uncut” edition. Anyway King’s work is usually better in book form.

Other vendors offer the novel in a range of formats and prices, from $15 - $43, but none of the formats will work on my PRS-500 eReader. Hoorah for standards.
I could just grab the mobipocket version and do some conversion voodoo, but I’d like to avoid possible conversion artifacts and legal PITAs.

So for my $350 ebook reader I can either buy an unsupported version for about $15 bucks and perfom a possibly low-quality / quasi-legal format conversion or shell out $35 for a bona-fide Sony-compatible version of “The Stand’. And to think they say these things will never take off!

EPILOGUE:
OK, nevermind the ebook and H1N1 virus, how about regular, olde-school paper?

Amazon lists a range of hardbacks, used-new-first editions, $15-$500 + shipping, but since I have to go out anyway I decided to just swing by the local big-box bookseller. Unsurprisingly, they have it. The nice stack of fat paperbacks is prominently displayed right next to a speciality section of disease-disaster thrillers. Well that’s some responsive marketing, you sick puppies!

But the real disaster is the $8.99 paperback itself. Very poor quality, uneven printing, flimsy pages (all 1000+ of them). Worse even than the regular paperback edition of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (which literally fell apart in my hands as I was reading it).

A Prime Argument in any iteration of the somewhat silly “ebook vs paper book” debate involves the tactile and other sensory aspects of holding a physical book in the hands, riffling the pages, the the look, the feel, smell, etc. And also the keepsake element of a tangible object. This argument is largely neutered by shoddy printing and cheap bindings. Yeah, I know, it’s a mass-market paperback so what do I want? Well, how about something that allows me to experience the author’s art without eyestrain? How about something that doesn’t look like it will fall apart well before the 1000+ pages can be turned? I have a copy of the similarly massive “Swan Song” by Robert R. McCammon that I must have bought 15+ years ago. Its clearly printed pages are still intact and readable thus demonstrating that at least a nominal level of paperback quality IS possible.
After a few minutes of trying to convince myself to just buy the damn cheap paperback I walk out of the store empty-handed.

So in the end I’m left with the public library, that dependable bastion of the written word. And indeed I should have gone there first, since they had a nice hardcover copy of “The Stand” just sitting quietly on a shelf, waiting for me. I was mildly surprised that some other twisted soul hadn’t beaten me to it ;^)

POSTSCRIPT:
While I’m of the firm opinion that ebooks should be priced less than their paper-based versions, I might have paid about $15 or so had a compatible ebook version been available. It’s also clear that I’ve been spoiled by the crisp e-ink display of the Sony Reader (also on Kindle) as evidenced by my somewhat snobbish dismissal of the cheaply-done paperback. And whomever may benefit from hefty ebook pricing and cheap paperback printing the only certain thing is that, just as in the case of ‘piracy’, Stephen King lost a sale.

Libraries Rule!

Wafery thinness

Sometime in late 1982 maybe early 1983, I ran across True Names at the university library. It was a fairly quick read but when I finished I felt oddly out of sync with my surroundings, as if hours or even days had passed while I was reading. Such was the engrossing nature of the work. I must have sat there for another hour or so musing furiously about what I’d just read. And I was consumed for days, by the big ideas in that little book.

I recently re-read the novella and found it to be every bit as astonishing today, 25+ years on.
In terms of technology certainly things have advanced quite a bit since the 1980s, and all too often such rapid change dooms speculative fiction to quaintness. Occasionally however an author will really grok a technology progression and ride it right into tomorrow. Such is the case with Vernor Vinge, and True Names is notable for its descriptions of the emergence and leverage of mindspace, that particularly disruptive technology just now in its MMORG-3D infancy.

Once startling ideas become over time, commonplace. Today we are well along the path of integrating the “cyberspace” of the internet into our cultural fabric. And in these days when the “Singularity” concept is creeping ever into the mainstream (at least as half-baked trendy cliché), some of the mind-expanding aspects of True Names may not seem all that shocking. For example, in order to comprehend and manage data-streams beyond the handling bandwidth of basic humans, the protagonists learn to leverage extra-human sensory and processing tools, delegating lower level “awareness” to external computational processes much like the autonomic nervous system handles our breathing and other ‘background’ bodily processes without higher-level tending. It is at this point the flesh and blood protagonists transcend human awareness, in small steps at first, accelerating onward at an increasing rate. It is the cusp beyond which science, to the static observer, appears as magic. It is the seed of the Singularity.

Now this ground has been well-covered by a variety of authors in recent years, with notable efforts by John Barnes in Mother of Storms and Charles Stross in Accelerando. And probably even well before, in glancing blow, by Teilhard de Chardin. Indeed you could argue that this is an aspect of tool use that has been with us from the first fur jacket.

However at the time, as a punk kid knowing little about exotic phenomenology the “bootstrapping awareness” concept hit me like a lightning bolt. Even now it is, I think, one of the more powerful concepts illustrated by True Names. Barring self-extinction, Humans will continue to use, integrate and finally subsume a complex armamentarium of tools, ever increasing in power and ever decreasing in viable lifetime. Mindspace will inevitably exceed the mind.

In addition to their lush, adventurous prose Gibson and Stephenson gave us ‘cyberspace’ and ‘metaverse’, respectively, establishing themselves as visionaries of the modern internet-laced world. But prior to both, with his 1981 novella True Names Vernor Vinge provided a startling vision of extra-human mindspace, a vision that we are only now beginning to experience in the most primitive forms.

The fact that this classic and influential work was out of print for so long and remains somewhat obscure, when the shelves of your local big-box bookstore are larded with all manner of tedious crap is, well, a True Shame.