Early Thoughts on Sean Kennedy's "Tales From the Afternow"
To the casual observer, within the first ten minutes of Episode One of "Tales From The Afternow," it seems like a new spin on an old premise: "The World Faces a Dystopic Future Caused Mostly By Our Own Arrogance."
When Kennedy made mention of Y2K and how the world DID end in Y2K, I immediately thought of the Y2K bug that was supposed to wipe out technology and I thought maybe we were going off of an alternate future where that happened. But, and this is my mistake, he's just talking about how the turn of the century happened to coincide with the end of the world. Okay, fine. And then he went on to talk about how the Patriot Act and Homeland Security basically used the word "terrorist" as a blanket accusation to focus attention on those who didn't conform to "the norm" and also to people who committed crimes that would not normally be defined as terrorism, i.e. hackers and media pirates. Okay, I'm starting to sense that familiar paranoia and dread of the sort of person who's online a LOT and lives in near constant fear that the government is eventually going to "wise up" to what they're doing and take away their intarwebs. "You don't understand!" they'll cry, "being a God in cyberspace was the only thing that validated me as a person! Don't delete the 5 million mp3s I got from bit torrents and Napster!"
Still. Around the time this was published, the word "terrorist" was being bandied about incessantly, and towards people who didn't merit the phrase. So I'll give him the point on this one because when he recorded this, there was an ever-present dread lingering in the air of this country for two big reasons. The first was, "Holy shit, when and where are they going to launch their next attack?" and the second was, "Oh my God, the paranoia from the first question is going to make the government crack down on everything and everyone so hard that we'll be a police state pretty soon."
I mean, people were understandably afraid of the future for a good LONG while after 9/11 and while that fear hasn't DIED, it has died down. When people realized that it wasn't just brown-skinned people getting hassled at the airport, they became paranoid. What if the reason they're hassling everyone isn't just to avoid being accused of profiling? What if they wanted to hassle everyone anyway and are just using 9/11 as an excuse?
So Kennedy assumes the worst and assumes that the government would eventually lump all criminals, particularly cyber-criminals, in with terrorists. I see where he's going, but I can't get the taste of bias out of my mouth. So he introduces the idea of the Listener's License which, long story short, effectively devestates media piracy. Then he makes ANOTHER leap, and I really do consider this to be a leap, to the point where you CAN NOT experience or create media without a Listener's License. He first introduces the idea as a way to cut the legs out from under the pirates, to render piracy useless. Fine. Clever. But when he pushes it further, into the Big Brotherish realm, that's where he starts to lose me.
But he still holds my interest. I'm waiting for him to tell me the name of the guy or the act that is the keystone of dystopia. I thought it would keep flowing out of Listener's License... but then a huge nuke goes off in the Middle East which leads to 13 nukes in total around the world being detonated, many in the atmosphere, which wipes out the Ozone layer which, in turn, makes going outside without protection a non-viable option.
I've just finished listening to episode two, and yeah, I know, I'm early into the series. That's why I'm entitling it "early thoughts" on this work. There were a lot of problems I had with episode one that he seems to have very neatly resolved in episode two. For instance, "He doesn't know what year it is and he says OUTRIGHT that he doesn't have a great idea of what happened and then he starts talking about it like he actually was THERE. How the fuck old is this guy and why is he talking more like a present-day angry liberal than a future-day prophet of doom?" It felt like, at times, that he had travelled TO the future FROM the past. Then in episode two, he reveals that he's been alive for over 100 years because of futuristic preservation techniques. OHHH, of course. Why didn't I think of that?
Oh, and he can remember intricate details about something that happened at LEAST a handful of decades ago, like the ENTIRE HISTORY of the Listener's License, but he can't remember his wife's name. I call bullshit.
So far, Tales From the Afternow sounds like what you'd get if a hippie's worst apocalyptic nightmare and a l33t haxor's worst apocalyptic nightmare got drunk, fucked, and had a kid. Now imagine that this chud baby's features, its each and every biological and psychological detail, are being dictated to you by that friend who likes to get you on the phone and ramble on about this thing that happened to him or this article that he read but he can never remember all the details and a lot of his stories are tangential and end with a promise of, "I'll explain that later."
He says he doesn't have any notes. Paper's hard to come by, but more than that, it's expensive. Yeah, but then you say that tablets are everywhere. You can't type anything into those? By the way, how is it that you broadcast your story back in time? With a magic PA system and a LOT of aluminum foil wrapped around a REALLY big antenna? You're telling me you DON'T have a computer of some kind and if you DO, that computer doesn't have a text program of any kind?
You know, where you could jot an outline with bullet points so you wouldn't have to pull this shit out of your ass all the time? Well, you know what, I'll give it to him. I imagine the software needed to broadcast a message backwards in TIME probably takes up a LOT of space on your C: drive, even in the future.
Don't even try to tell me that he's doing it in a stream of consciousness format because he's trying to maintain the integrity of the story. Even suspending my disbelief about the long, winding road toward the end of the world, integrity and realism went out the fucking window when he used his Chrono-Turntables and his enchanted Casio keyboard to incorporate the sounds of a fire pit and women sobbing and moaning into his broadcast.
So while I am willing to see where this story goes (mostly because I'm really bored and have nothing better to do) I've got to say that I'm confused at best and irritated at worst. Where did humanity go wrong, Independent Librarian Sean Kennedy the 6th? You keep asking us to help you, but instead of telling us things like, "Don't vote for George W. Bush," or, "Investing in Enron would be a bad idea," you mainly stick to telling us about how horrible the future is. Okay, maybe we, as your audience, CAN piece together your message and trace back the steps and figure out exactly what we need to do to avoid the apocalypse, but I doubt it. I don't think that the sort of people who are going to listen to and accept your message are the sort of people who can stop nukes from detonating in the atmosphere. And again, it's odd that you remember so many of the steps of how "this lead to this, which in turn, cause this, oh and then this happened," and you can't give us ONE NAME of who we might want to snipe.
It's early in the series though. It might get a lot better. I'm hoping it does. If things don't shape up by ep 4, I think I'll call it quits. The graphic novel might be worth reading, though.