Fantasy! Science fiction! Hard fiction? True fiction???
Sunday March 22nd 2009: I’m traveling back home from the
Apart from that and that I liked this type of festival and enjoyed it very much there was this about story telling, one of the main reasons for this festival. Shelly and I visited many good events where one was discussing fantasy and science fiction and I learned that these genres somehow are distinguished from one another or at leased are supposed to be. This among other things was a question about future and past, where fantasy was supposed to take place in the past and science fiction in future. I also learned that science fiction also was divided into different categories, where “Hard science fiction” was something new for me. Honestly, I find it both difficult and a bit strange, the so strict sorting and labeling writing as it appeared at this event. I mean, I do understand sorting writing to guide the reader’s finding stories they are interested in, but isn’t it the story that should come first hand and thereafter apply one or more suitable labels to it?
Anyway it was fun listening to the explanations. So full of new insights and not quite understanding the difference, believe it or not, Shelly and I went out for a fantasy sushi dinner (it will remain as a good memory of the past) and after that we extended the evening going to a fiction bar (in the future we will be told what happened). Okay, true or not, here’s my version of that late fiction bar visit.
It had become late, but in the world of fantasy and fiction, late is something relative and for us it was a good excuse being out late, like my watch stopped and Shelly couldn’t find hers and so on. Shelly had gotten a new gizmo dude xPod something she was playing around with. It could do anything Shelly said and it did. It had a bunch of new exciting features where one was a red line on a map showing the way from one place to another. The map could be zoomed in and out and displayed in various styles showing buildings and such more or less detailed. “You just have to follow the red line between the red and green pins on the map” Shelly said, and we did. It also showed us where we were in that same map or rather it showed that gizmo dude’s location. An awesome little thing it was showing two bewildered X-marked women getting lost all the time, moving back and forth along that red line trying to figure out directions. I mean, that thing obviously assumed it was not needed to rotate the map for us according to cardinal points, making Shelly and I take off in opposite directions all the time. I mean ordinary old fashion paper maps have north, south, east and west printed out on them, but not this stupid thing.
Now, this gizmo dude was also a phone able to send text messages and at this very real Miller fiction bar I was supposed to send a short message to Marianne telling about our progress getting lost… Sorry, I mean telling about the book festival of course. The dude’s very small touch screen and its many times smaller interactive keyboard keys felt like a boxing fight with giant gloves on my hands rather than regular typing. These keys on the touch screen were so small that a one finger touch, i.e. my finger, generated a several character code rather than intended a one single letter. And trying to delete just one of these code letters almost always deleted the whole screen. So the dude and I didn’t exactly get along that well. But as I’m a positive person, the beer was good.
Anyway I’m a stubborn person too, so I continued fiddling around with that stupid dude xPod thing and I must have done something wrong (always did) pressing a number of keys at the same time. The gizmo flipped out and suddenly changed screen to something quite different. Instead of my text message screen it switched to mapping the interior of the bar where we were. But not only the room was mapped; people including us were displayed as some strange letter coding. Neither Shelly nor I were able to figure out what had happened and the menu commands displayed on the screen were all weird looking ancient Chinese writing or something like that. I of course tried to find my way back to my text message screen, but instead I dug myself deeper and deeper into something I had no idea of what it was. Strange screens, menus and bar map images were replaced by yet stranger ones, showing maps of the same bar but the people letter coding were changing with each new map in both style and color, as if I was digging a hole through various layers of something Shelly and I had no idea of what it was.
Suddenly something happened as I touched the screen. Three people character codes lit up on the screen with a red line connecting them as in a triangle. Who were they? Shelly and I look in the direction the gizmo dude pointed out for us. All three of them stood out from the rest in the bar in a spooky kind of way. As I looked at each one of them they turned like looking back at me and Shelly. Gizmo reacted too and as a trackback ping three new small windows opened, obviously representing each one of them. Curly White, Face Wrinkle and Tophead Beard where displayed in black text and in red text under, like a warning sign, it was displayed “Connected”. I got both embarrassed and a bit scared, somehow there was a connection made and I had no idea what to do. “Give it to me” Shelly said, snatching gizmo back.
Shelly tried every button on the display, but the screen was as if locked to these three people and wouldn’t change. Shelly lay down gizmo on the table and stepped down from her rather high bar stool, “I’ll go and check what this is all about” she said curiously looking at me and then turning her head in the direction towards Curly White. The Curly White red warning letters on gizmo’s display started to flash more and more intense with Shelly approaching Curly who was bringing her beer…
Hmm… I wonder if there’s a maximum length for blog entries? I mean this about science fiction or what ever I should call it, would you be interested in this? It’s just a future thing and that gizmo dude is not invented yet, or is it? Naa… you’re not interested knowing what happens next, are’ya?
