On the future of books

Got to reading Transmetropolian by chance and it gave me an itch to write.

Transmet is the story of Spider Jerusalem, a pissed off journalist in the near future.  Transmet is co-created by Darick Robertson, who also co-created The Boys, one of the few comics worthy of the term "good" that's still being run.  Spider Jerusalem is a rip-off of Raoul Duke, the main character of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which in itself is a fictionalized autobiography of Hunter S. Thompson.  But Transmet predates the movie by a year and while parallel production is possible, I'm calling Transmet the first of the two.  Hunter S. Thompson got the honor of being on of Cracked.com's 6 Writers Who Accidentally Crapped Out Masterpieces: 

Thompson, never one for deadlines, responsibilities or coherence,
started sending his bosses pages ripped out of his personal journal. Go
ahead, try that at your job, see how it goes. Especially if your
journal includes paragraphs like this:

"The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of
which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the
car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of
grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter
acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of
multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a
quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw
ether and two dozen amyls."

But, if you're Hunter S. Thompson, your editor sends it off for immediate publication and you become the voice of your generation.

The lesson? Contrary to what your parents told you, drugs and motorcycle racing go together beautifully.

I can't say Fear and Loathing without saying: "We can't stop here.  This is bat country."


I'd like to write and the first thought is write a book, an endeavor I've started on three separate occasions with failure each time.  Do we even need books anymore?  Books in the traditional sense, I mean.  Heresy for an English teacher, but then again, I am a former English teacher, aren't I?  Removed from my position of trust because nobody trusted me.

Books on the other hand aren't the same as they were, if they ever were how we romanticized them as being.  Non-fiction dominates with self-help leading the charge at that brigade.  Behind that are observational humor of comedians and finally fiction.  We get things like Twilight and Harry Potter and book sets instead of books.  Serial novels.  Like how we perfected digital cellphone technology and said, "You know what?  I want my 21st century communications device to behave like a Vietnam walkie-talkie" we've been slipping backwards into the realm of the serial from the early days of cinema.  This sort of thing is blamed on the internet and television for giving us the attention span of a gnat, but fuck that thinking.  We're a generation raised on Nintendo with the answer to every question just a few keystrokes away, whether we're on the bus or getting coffee or at the office or at home.

Amazing coincidence that despite having an "inferior attention span" we run intellectual circles around the slow and old.  There's no more old and wise as people only a few years out of the loop need the help of the young to manage any amount of information.

"Read a newspaper."
"We have feeds of information coming to us constantly.  We know more about current events than you do and we know about the day's events before the newspaper prints what they feel is fit to print.  Anyone wishing for a sepia toned heyday of newspaper is in denial."


You know the best selling books of the last ten years?  Da Vinci Code, The Purpose Driven Life, Harry Potter, and two Chinese books.  I don't know the Chinese books, but their General Tso makes some great chicken.  Da Vinci Code was preceded by Angels and Demons and followed by The Lost Symbol.  Harry Potter is a 7 book series.  The Purpose Driven Life is 40 stand-alone mini-chapters.  I know we can attribute Potter and Da Vinci to the Trilogy Rule which states that anything worth a buck in media will get at least two sequels, but who says that we want a single story anymore?

If books are out, then where do you turn?  I know that some of the best writing I've read in the last five years has come out of comic books.  It makes sense that a serial story succeeds in a serial story society.  Maybe that's why were balls-deep in a superhero culture right now.  Twenty years ago, there wasn't a rapper with a Superman shield tattooed on them and Spider-Man was for little kids' underroos.  "Batman" was considered a risky venture at the time, but happened at just the right time.  1988-89 was the start of a superhero culturial beatdown which continues to this day.

You saw an explosion like this with arcades when in the late 70s they started popping up, but by the late 80s they were everywhere.  I played Robocop in my orthidontist's waiting room and there were two more cabinets to choose from.  Try to find an arcade today and you'd better be in Japan, cause that's the only place left that it thrives.  Of course, Japan has always been about 30 years behind the US culturally, so that's expected.  Video games were able to survive the implosion and oversaturation because they reshaped and reformed and found their way into homes as a new fixture.  We're going to have to see that with comics if they want to survive and with the freeway laid out by that restructure, we'll have a new avenue for books in serialized form.

Right now we have the Kindle doing well, but now we have several other companies with their own version of an electronic book.  That flat over priced type of monochromatic computer that lets you read with your hands, and carry a whole library with you.  Of course, netbooks do the same thing for cheaper and they do a lot more because they're real computers.  Give it a few years to see stylized netbooks combine the easy of e-readers with their price points.  Give it a few more years to get a thousand competing models with a heavy market share of a single software making them compatible and you'll get your new library.  You'll pick up this book and open it up and see a list of all the new news that you subscribed to or picked news based on your interests.  You'll see every book outside of a copyright and the option to buy anything in a copyright.  You'll have Stephen King continuing his chapter-at-a-time e-publishing and the other authors that follow suite.  The future of books, of news, of anything written, is in chunks that are available immediately after composition sent electronically everyday to a portable electronic device.

And when you start thinking about that type of publishing and you think about the serial nature of it all, you'll see that we're going back to Flash Gordon's and the Three Stooge's 15 minute adventures before the feature presentation, the syndicated cartoon strip of superheroes in the daily newspaper, and the shorter, self-contained chapters of Around the World in 80 Days and Gulliver's Travels.  If you don't believe me, you have look no further than the popularity of YouTube, the popularity of webcomics, and the popularity of serial story-writing in literature today.