FUTURE TENSE: When it’s scary for the canary...
© 2000 by Spider Robinson; all rights reserved
Miners used to carry caged canaries. The canary lung is a bit more sensitive than the human, to deadly things like methane. If the canary suddenly began doing the Monty Python parrot sketch, the miners knew it was time to turn around. Good news for the miners. Not so good for the canaries...
Donald Westlake is (under his own name) the funniest writer alive. No better palliative could be given to a terminal cancer patient than a collection of his books, particularly his Dortmunder series. I myself might well have checked out long ago if it hadn’t been for his effect on my morale. Unlike Carl Hiaasen, a funny writer whose punchlines are punches and whose laughter is always bitter, Mr. Westlake generally manages a kind of humour that makes it possible to hope.
There’ve been exceptions. He once began a comic novel about people stealing a trainload of coffee from Idi Amin...but in researching, he quickly realized that while Amin was in one sense hilarious, he was also in a profound sense Not Funny At All. KAHAWA became a deadly serious novel--with, Westlake being Westlake, some unforgettable comic touches. And there’ve been other Westlake titles (HUMANS) where the humour gets a bit dark. But generally you can depend on him not to bring you down.
His latest book, THE HOOK, is about writers. Wayne Prentice is what’s called a “midlist” writer: fairly, not hugely, successful. But publishing has, in the last ten years, become just another business, with computers making all the decisions. If a midlist writer’s sales slip by even a few percent, the computer decides he’s a loser....and makes the prophecy self-fulfilling by shipping fewer copies of his next. This disaster has befallen Wayne: after decades of modest success, he’s become unpublishable. Editors agree his writing is as good as ever--but cannot buy it, at any price: the computer forbids it.
Naturally Wayne tries a pseudonym. But that only works if the publisher really doesn’t know it’s him. It’s hard to maintain a persona that is never available for an editorial phonecall...and in any case, after only three books, Wayne’s alter ego too has been killed by the computer.
He then meets Bryce Proctorr, who’s not a midlist writer, but one of the gods, above such worries: a King/Clancy/Grisham. HIS worries are a bitter, expensive divorce, and intractable writer’s block. So he makes Wayne a proposition. Wayne has a novel he can’t sell; Bryce has a megabuck contract for a book he can’t write. It’s simple, he says: we’ll publish your book under my name, we’ll split the money down the middle, and all you have to do is murder my wife, okay?”
I don’t want to give away anything, so I’ll just say here that I am myself a midlist writer, and I hope with all my heart nobody ever makes me such an offer.
That’s how bad it is in publishing, these days. Even Westlake, well above midlist, feels the pain. Every colleague I know who is not at Bryce Proctorr level is running scared.
The publisher’s computer isn’t the only one we’re scared of, either. Yours has us spooked. We’ve been hearing for years now that the Internet will to kill us all, and there are signs of that prophecy coming true. Right now my trade organization, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, is fighting cyberscum: soi-disant “anarchists” who are stealing copyrighted fiction and posting it on pirate websites in Russia, or in public newsgroups. It promises to be a long, ugly battle...and one we may well lose, de jure or de facto.
A similar quiet terror prevails among those of my acquaintances who are professional musicians. It begins to look like MP3 technology and its ilk may indeed spell doom for the recording industry as we know it, before very long...and none of the audioterrorists responsible has yet proposed any alternative system of keeping musicians alive to work. The thinking--if any takes place--seems to be that musicians record for the sheer joy, and will continue to do so for free, happily starving for the privilege of entertaining thieves. Musicians know better. There’s never been much money in live performance: if recording goes away too, it’s time to get a haircut, type a resume of lies, and try to sneak back into the world of day jobs.
Writers and musicians may be among the first artists to feel the fear--but we won’t be the last. Go to the Teletoon Channel, and check out STARSHIP TROOPERS or MAX STEEL. I happened across both yesterday while surfing, and was stunned. The computer animation on both is better than I imagined possible--and for all I know may not be anywhere near state of the art. I’m not talking about cartoon figures like those in TOY STORY or ANTZ, but simulated human beings, to such a high degree of realism that I estimate they’re only about a generation and a half away from persuading you you’re looking at video of actual events. The credits went by far too fast to be read (another modern trend that has artists terrified), but it was clear this miracle was produced by a mere skeleton crew of animators.
Animators are scared now...but in a few years, the actors will all wake up and start bleating in terror too. Because I’m not kidding, there are characters on MAX STEEL as cute, beguiling, intriguing and charismatic as any live actor you care to name. They can do stunts that would kill any human. And not one of them demands twenty million a picture, or throws tantrums on set, or comes to work stoned, or...
As for dancers and choreographers, they’ve always functioned in an environment of fear--there’s never been a time when dance was a sane career choice, even for the great ones--and the economics of the profession are currently, surprise, worse than ever. Furthermore, Canadian choreographers are now legally forbidden to cast their own works, and must employ whomever some bonehead judge decides. Henceforth plum roles will go to the dancer with the best laywers.
Artists are society’s canaries. We are choking to death. See us falling off our perches, all around you. And have the wit to fear for yourself. If nothing else, you’re in for some goddam depressing “entertainment.”
