[aaroninsf]

I've always wanted to set up automation that updates the text for the book every so often to preserve original intent, by changing the language around quantities to <whatever would make a contemporary reader be impressed>

Replace "megabyte" with "exabyte" or whatever.

As an aside, there's a great essay I think in Metamagical Themas about the fuzzy task of translating literary works, which takes up the question of whether it would be valid and how to translate say Dickens into French, by relocating from London to Paris.

Part of the premise is that this is an impossible task because the referential systems are not truly analogous; the cultures aren't identical so some concepts literally have no direct translation...

...in Neuromancer the mere existence of a bank of pay phones has stood out as one of those things which even my little updater would break hard.

Also related: I've seen a slowly increasing number of complaints in book forums about text from relatively recent novels being silently updated, to change references from e.g. Myspace to Tik Tok or whatever, to try to keep the text feeling current... a perilous slope.

[snowwrestler]

And the bank of pay phones is one of the coolest little scenes in the book.

Put me on team “don’t update the text.”

Books are written in their contemporary cultural contexts. LeGuin said speculative fiction is about today even if the story is set in the future, and I agree.

So when you read Neuromancer, in some ways you’re reading a book that is about the 1980s in the U.S. So there are more fundamental anachronisms than just RAM and payphones, like a belief that east Asia had a lock on the future of advanced technology. Or that punk culture was cool and edgy and would endure.

[aaroninsf]

Oh, sure,

I am 100% not on team "quietly/secretly update the text" eg in ebooks...

...I was more thinking of this as an interesting "art" project of sorts, adjacent maybe to an annotated edition where readers can opt in to a different kind of experience.

For me the most interesting bit wou;d be the problem-space of how to "translate" the cultural signification across time, which I think we would agree is literally (heh) impossible and a dubious and Quixotic goal.

I think it was in The Mind's I that the open question of whether in translating Tolstoy one could and should re-situate the novel in London for English readers, or, re-situate Dickens novels in Paris for the French edition, etc...

...all of this just forces one to confront literary theory in a productive way.

Because I enjoy such theory and also absurdism it does feel like it would be fun to try in particular to produce an automated PKD-esque black-box automaton which duly tries via "AI" mechanisms to produce candidate translations for us of exactly those aspects of something like Neuromancer which are most significantly coupled to the time place and framing of its writing,

the landscape of features that were most problematic (comical!) to translate would I think also be a neat heatmap reflective of our cultural evolution from/diversion from that time place and framing...

[astrange]

You'd be stuck on how to update "the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel". Was never sure if that meant a starry sky or a bright blue one.

[fc417fc802]

Does that not refer to a complete and heavy overcast? A uniform gray from one horizon to the other without even a hint of where along its arc the sun might be.