Undertow

[mistersleepless]

What if Mr Hyde had had kids

Comments

[nerd_king]

The world is already influenced hugely by the fictional.

Take Spider Jerusalem's incontinence pistol. In ten years that might become a reality, created perhaps by a guy who doesn't even remember reading your comic. Maybe he just overheard a conversation about it a few years ago and it lodged itself into his subconcious.

Cloning, space stations, laser weapons, tanks. All written about decades if not centuries before they appeared in real life.

It makes you think, if something else had been written about instead - would that have come to pass too?

[mistersleepless]

The Bowel Disruptor was based on late 80's/early 90's Non Lethal Weaponry papers.

[radiumx]

To be fair, low-level subsonics DO cause people to dump themselves

[nerd_king]

Forget that - give me a cyberarm, night-vision cybereyes and a lightsaber any day.

[shadowblue]

Reading that may have been worth it just for the crack about the wino surrender-monkeys.

Someday, I want a little robot to follow me around that does nothing but unobtrusively hold up a white posterboard sign that says 'DRAMATIZATION' in squarish black lettering.

[cleobourne]

Thank you. :)

jack the ripper

[rufus]

normally i don't recommend her, but, you might find Patricia Cornwell's _Jack the Ripper: Case Closed_ to be interesting reading.

[agent13]

Interesting in that "Start with a conclusion, try to find evidence that supports it, ignore evidence that disproves it" sort of way?

[rufus]

While there is some of that, definitely, I thought it was an interesting take on the many alternate theories surrounding the Ripper. Some of it, such as the DNA testing (?!) seemed kinda, you know, out there. But worth reading if you're interested in the the whole Jack the Ripper Thing. And I liked that she at least attempted to use archival sources and even may have turned up additional archival evidence.

Plus the reproductions of Walter Sickert's paintings next to the crime scene photos were seriously creepy.

I normally don't much care for Cornwell's writing, especially her fiction, because I basically just think it's bad. She was annoying at times with this book as well, but I did get the sense she was at least *trying* to find the truth.

[dodds]

i saw her tv documentary & thought she was needlessly vicious towards Sickert, especially the final scene where she goes on about the evil she can see in his eyes from a B&W reel of footage. At least Alan Moore's character assassination of Gull had some flair and style to it.

[doetja]

Diarists are particularly prone to the mild schizophrenia of seeing all they do and all that happens to them from a fictional point of view. We overhear a snatch of conversation at the supermarket and we're writing witty comments in our heads, laughing about it with our on-line mates. We make ourselves up, write ourselves up, filter the world through our next LJ post.

We could be empty vessels, with no past, no future, no identity. Letting the eternal present be, not cheating ourselves of it with ideas of who we are.

I suppose that's what the Zen masters do. The rest of us just live our own fiction.

[gunn]

There's a fabulous book of essays called "Inscribing the Daily" on diarists- one of them addressing the way journaling has become more and more fictionalized as it's become less and less private. The rest of the world isn't all we've made larger than life.

"In public private diaries, the author creates and presents a central character, herself, as seen through a central consiousness, also herself."

It's a great book- I'm tempted to quote massive portions of it, as it applies to what Mister Ellis has put so eloquently about the self-rewriting of a society, but I think it's unnecessary.