Bluetooth Man

I started to post an old piece I had written, but I just finished the Walker Percy novel, and it has me thinking about philosophers and novelists and what a hard job it is to write a modern/post-modern/post-post-modern book that people will actually read. The various genres of literature – fantasy, science fiction, westerns, historic, etc., take us out of our mundane world in a fairly straightforward way. We move into the writer’s world or into their time, learn the rules and the boundaries, and the story then unfolds before us.

Sometimes things throw us off. I remember several years ago reading a Max Brand western called, I think, The Seventh Man. The hero is not a bad man, but he is a wild throwback of sorts who lives outside civilization. He helps a man sought by the law by taking the fugitive’s mare, Gray Molly, and leading the sheriff and his men away from their quarry. One of the pursuers deliberately shoots the mare in an attempt to end the chase. The hero escapes but vows revenge on all the members of the posse for the mare’s unnecessary death. He is able to carry out his revenge, in part because of his companions -- a magnificent stallion and a highly intelligent wolf or wolf-hybrid. The climax of the story is a long chase across country, and the hero is nearly undone by something he doesn’t understand: technology. Though those who are after the hero have no horses that can match his steed, the telephone has made its appearance, and it is used by a clever official to run down the avenger.

I was ambivalent. I understand the use of new technology as a plot point, whether it is the telephone, the telegraph, railroads, barbwire or whatever – man versus machine, the end of the frontier – all of those things are part of the historical reality. Technology changes and forces the culture to change. Dealing with it can make an interesting story, just generally not one I prefer. I like worlds where there is no GPS, no computers, no cell phones, telephones, or telegraphs, where there’s open space and room to get lost.

The more gadgets you hang on anything, the less it becomes a human endeavor. Sure, humans still build the gadgets – at least I think humans were involved in creating Vista – but many of these devices create limits as much as they create opportunities. I’m obviously not against technology, but I think we have to be careful and choose wisely to find things that make us stronger and more independent rather than weaker and more dependent.

It seems to me that as we have less and less privacy, it becomes increasingly difficult to describe or diagnose the human condition. The more our lives are open and viewable, the less we actually see. Consider the celebrity phenomenon. You can know everything about a sports figure or a movie star or a politician, but their actions, thoughts and beliefs can become contaminated by their own image. We see too much of them, and, they, in effect, see too much of themselves. That is, they see too much of what they are trying to make themselves appear to be. I am afraid we will soon learn this is precisely the case with Obama. He is like a man caught in a hall of mirrors unable to distinguish where he actually stands.

Any literary work that attempts to depict man in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is forced to work with and around rapid technological advances. It is difficult not to get trapped by gadgetry. Take, for example, that classic movie The Thing, made, I believe, about 1982. The computers and some of the other equipment look archaic, but it works for the story. Try to remake that movie and set it in 2010 and the plot would have to change in several points to make sense. I wonder how many recent movies or action/adventure novels set in the current time frame have a conveniently inconvenient loss of cell phone service or loss of the cell phone at some point. Stories often turn on isolation and the lack of communication between various parties. It is going to look more and more contrived for people not to think of Google or not having security videos or not taking pictures with their camera phones.

Look there -- it's a David Gemmell heroic fantasy novel and a guaranteed bluetooth-free zone. I know where I'm headed.