We have the advantage
Today I borrowed Dean the first portion of a comic named Transmetropolitan, written by Warren Ellis in 1997. I think it’s a cyberpunk story. I’m not quite sure, and I don’t want to stick my foot in my mouth again. :p
This story features a gonzo journalist named Spider Jerusalem, who goes through a nasty, gritty future and reports the news with a gun and an attitude, basically. I was thinking about that, the fact that it is in a visual medium, and I also thought about the discussion on horror in class. We found that the scariest monster a writer can put onto paper is one that the writer doesn’t describe, because then the reader will fill in that blank with whatever fits the best to them. It’s a very effective strategy, but this doesn’t only apply to monsters. This applies to technology as well. You’ll see instances of this in steampunk books, books like The Difference Engine or Boneshaker where machinery is described in function, but not necessarily in form. As a writer, we do this when there’s a specific effect we’re going for and don’t want to lose the reader in details they won’t connect with. We have the advantage over the visual medium in that respect, don’t we? (Note: It’s worth a mention that the difference engine was an already-existing machine and had a distinct form, but if you didn’t know that when you read the book, you’d have filled in that gap anyway. It’s just an example.)
Warren Ellis in Transmetropolitan had his vision and he executed it fairly well, but he does depend upon an artist. This artist makes a physical depiction of the events, characters, and setting for the reader to see. Around this time, laptops were not very common. They were pretty new technology. In the comic, Spider uses a laptop to transmit a story that he was writing live, and this feed was given out to the city for everyone to read. It scrolled across electronic billboards, but it still looked like a typewriter in a way. In 1997, that laptop was sleek and badass technology. Today? It’s common. Tomorrow? Not so much in the impressive category. Not exactly what you would envision for a futuristic story. So they lose longevity in that respect. It’s going to age, and it’s going to age quickly.
The writer of the novel or short story or whatever, we don’t have that deficiency. That drawback, disadvantage. We don’t need to spell out what a laptop looks like. We can just say it was a high-tech interface and describe how the character interacts with it, and we alone are responsible for the delivery of the image. We shape it to our needs, and let the audience do the rest of the work. It ages well because it’s malleable.
The point: I always write from a cinematic stance, as I’m sure many of us do. I write my stories like a script. I write like my story is being filmed, not told. I try to keep in mind what things would look like in motion, how they would age, how redundant and future-proof it is or could become. I’m fully cognizant of that every time I introduce some bit of technology or pop culture into a piece (which is why I cringed a little bit when Spider asked for a 2gig camera device. Never mention specific measurements of memory or computer speed!). But if it was made into a movie or a comic or a cartoon, I lose that power. I can no longer control my great vision.
I had a grand thought about converting one of my favorite stories to a screenplay a long time ago and that drive is still within me, but after today I have doubts because of this. I mean, I’m sure it wouldn’t get greenlit and sent to 20th Century Fox post-haste or anything, but it was a great idea, and I have a lot of vision for it. Then I lose the power. I lose the suspension and I lose that connection to my darling, lovely reader in this common space that they enable and help me to create. But I look at the movies that were already made, based upon this great story, and it makes me want to cry because they’re just so damn awful and miss the mark by a wide margin that I find it insulting. I want a glorious tribute to a story written by a great writer, but there seems to be a cost that is perhaps not worth it. And that is the story of how I learned to respect Alan Moore, the things he did, and the decisions he made along the way.
Yes, I’m posting this at midnight with all of my homework done. These are things that actually keep me awake at night.
Also, Spider’s household appliances were on AI computer-code narcotics. That was my favorite.
There IS a line you have to play with when showing tech. You can go the “goofball” Flash Gordan or Back to the Future II approach, where the depiction will age just fine because it was never meant to be a serious depiction. But then, no one takes you seriously. =P
The break in your analogy is that with horror, we don’t show the monster because the viewer (reader) WANTS to see it; it holds suspense and, in the case of crappy horror with crappy visuals, minimizes the ‘Lame Factor’ that comes with a monster bred from a low budget and an unimaginative FX crew.
But with tech in fiction, it’s a matter of showing just the right (small) amount, and not making the reader feel like they’re missing something. It should be detailing that sounds cool and intriguing when glanced over, but does not need to be expanded upon. That have all the info they need and we can move on with the important shit. (Yes, I know that if you write about this cool machine with neat trimming, the reader wants all the details they can get, but that’s different, comparable to detailing about trees or a neat outfit)