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by snowwrestler
19 days ago
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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. |
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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...