books: June 2005 Archives

Once, in a little used-book store, I swear to God I found of copy of The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern... not the "good parts" version by William Goldman. I wish I’d bought it, because I know no one will believe me...

There is an online catalog of all these books-within-books (and damn! I thought of doing this ages ago), and it’s The Invisible Library. This is where you’ll find The Red Book of Westmarch by Bilbo Baggins, and Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations, and Suggestions for the Amelioration of Sick-Bays by Dr. Stephen Maturin...

*sigh* As if there weren’t enough real books that I’d never get to reading if I lived to be 1000 years old...

I recently reread, in preparation for the big Spielberg/Cruise adaptation, H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, and for the hell of it, I also reread 1975’s Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds, a delectable bit of fan fiction by Manly W. Wellman and Wade Wellman. As you might deduce from the title, the book purports to set the record straight, so many of us having been misled by that troublemaker Wells, about what really happened during the Martian invasion, and how the world’s foremost consulting detective was instrumental in saving the world.

Geeks didn’t invent fan fiction, probably (though I can’t think of an example from literature before the rise of the geek that might qualify as fanfic). But from the lowliest, most atrociously written example of Kirk/Spock "slash" to the rows upon rows of Star Trek and Star Wars novels that crowd out other SF at your local Borders, fanfic is, like it or not, one of geekdom’s great contributions to world literature.

That’s not a bad thing. We Xers may have been the first generation of kids to be plopped in front of the tube from infanthood and left to fend for ourselves, but fanfic is proof positive that we are no mere passive consumers of pop culture -- we’re active participants in interpreting it. Technology has made it easy for us to take it further than ever before, as with fan films. (Attention: The folks who brought us the hilarious "Troops" have a new Star Wars fan film for our geeky pleasure: I.M.P.S Relentless, "an epic documentary... of the best damn job in the galaxy.")

But that’s not the proper measure of the influence fanfic has had on the wider culture. This is: A fan film won the Oscar for Best Picture a few years back. And one of the grandest names writing literary fiction today, Isabel Allende, has a new book out. It’s called Zorro, and it’s fan fiction. It might be prettied up some, but let’s call it what it is.

Who knew? Isabel Allende is a geek.

I recently gobbled up Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede’s Sorcery and Cecelia, a delightful little trifle that’s what might have resulted if Jane Austen had learned to write at Hogwart’s School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. The novel’s subtitle is "or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: Being the Correspondence of Two Young Ladies of Quality Regarding Various Magical Scandals in London and the Country," and that kinda gives you a sense of the playful tone of the book, which takes the form of a series of letters between two cousins over the course of the London "season" in 1817. Kate has been swept off to the city for all the society doings -- the balls and dances and comings-out of respectable young ladies -- while Cecelia is stuck back home in Essex, but even though their only contact is via postal mail, which keeps each of them days behind the other’s news, they still manage to jointly fly headlong into social catastrophe, maneuver their aristocratic betters in a tea-party of a chess game to resolve the disaster, pick up some rudiments of proper magic (such as how to use charm bags to ward off evil spells), and of course fall in love with dashing and fascinating young gentlemen along the way. The whole thing is wonderfully clever, sophisticated fun (even if it is rather mysteriously labeled "young adult fiction"), and I’m looking forward to reading the sequel, The Grand Tour: Being a Revelation of Matters of High Confidentiality and Greatest Importance, Including Extracts from the Intimate Diary of a Noblewoman and the Sworn Testimony of a Lady of Quality. The sublime wit and supremely understated snark implied by the subtitle alone tickles me something awful.

Sorcery and Cecelia is emblematic of a certain impishness in geek culture: a willingness to combine things we love in unexpected ways. And it’s not just books I’m talking about: it’s everything from self-described "brick artist" Nathan Sawaya’s life-size sculpture of Han Solo in carbonite made out of Legos to all the many dioramas mounted in Peeps -- those disgusting blobs of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup some people consider confections -- commemorating such things as The Lord of the Rings. It indicates a certain instinctive urge on the part of creative geeks to not only create but to comment on the pop-culture universe out of which the new material springs. Fine art and high culture have always engaged in that kind of commentary about the fine art and high culture that has preceded it, but what geeks are doing suggests that "low" art -- or at least some "low" art -- is worth exploring and re-exploring, too.

I’m just finishing up Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, which I’d never read before but felt I finally should if I wanted to consider myself a real armchair scientist, and I’m fairly disappointed to discover that it isn’t blowing my mind like I thought it would. It’s a profoundly influential book, of course, but it was so profoundly influential when it was published in 1976 that its ideas have disseminated and been so widely appropriated that they’re become part of the scientific common knowledge, or at least a common set of dominant assumptions -- I’ve absorbed the gist of Dawkins’s argument through much of my reading, in more recent books and magazines, in the fields of biology and evolutionary thought to the point where I almost can’t believe that what Dawkins was saying could ever have been considered controversial. It all seems so... obvious.

One thing that did strike me, though, is Dawkins’s discussion of memes, the intellectual equivalent of genes -- I’m not sure I ever realize he coined the term in this book -- and subsequent ruminations on computer networks and how malicious e-viruses could infect them. Even in the revised 1989 edition, the one I’m reading, Dawkins is anticipating the public Internet, and it occurred to me that if someone wanted to invent a vector along which the memes for geekiness could travel, she couldn’t have done a better job than with the Internet, which combines the typically geeky love of computers and technology with the typically geeky love of never shutting up about the things we love. We took a tool we loved to play with -- computers -- and used it to spread the geek memes, and we did it so well, and got everyone else to love it so much, that it’s part of what has helped the geek aesthetic go mainstream. Geeks have been sitting around at science fiction conventions, for instance, since the 1940s dissecting films and books, and now folks of all stripes, whether they’d call themselves geeks or not, are spending inordinate amounts of time at sites like Television Without Pity, geeking out over the season finale of Lost or Alias or 24... all of which, in their own ways, are supremely geeky shows.

This idea -- about how a generation of people predisposed to embracing gadgets and obsessing about the things we love met the technology that allowed us to do interesting and entertaining things with our obsessions -- is, in the broad sweep, much of what Geek Philosophy the blog is going to be all about. For the moment, I think it will suffice to say that my first computer, a TI 99 4/a -- which I received for Christmas in either 1979 or 1980, when I was 10 or 11 -- and my first VCR (well, the first family VCR) arrived in 1984, when I was 15... and that’s when my adventures in geekdom really took off.