Tickling Wolves - Some Thoughts Inspired by Fritz Leiber

I just finished reading a story about an invention called the Tickler. It starts out as a joke about a mechanical reminder so you wouldn't need a secretary (it was written in the early '60s) and ends up being a telepathic hive minded robot that controls the thoughts of the entire population.

Once I finished it, I opened up my laptop and this thing flashed at me at the bottom of the screen - "I'm Cortana. I can help you. Ask me anything." There's that circle next to it, white and ominous like some unblinking eye. It was eerie.

It's like the time I'd recently finished reading Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 where the main character's wife detaches herself from reality within a TV show that has become her family. The screens are three walls of the living room, she really wants the fourth wall put in, closing the reality, putting her on the stage with the actors and letting her exit the real world. Then I turned on the TV and saw an ad for Big Brother. That was eerie too.

I won't tell you how I reacted when I read about the original Big Brother. Let's just say I nodded a lot as I did.

It all sounds conspiratorial. Too far-fetched. We'd never let those terrible things happen, would we? Authors write what they know. We may stretch and play with ideas, but the ideas come from somewhere. Our world is changing, faster every day, it's difficult to keep up, sometimes we don't want to know everything that's going on, we find ways to tune out. We plug in to switch off - it's a strange dichotomy.

I'm not saying we're living in a dystopia. I'm not saying we're not either. It's hard to know. Are we heading for one? If so, how do we stop it? If we go one way can we be sure that isn't the way to dystopia? In the end what is dystopia? The underlying factor, in the stories of ticklers, book-burning firemen, omnipresent big brothers and others, is thinking. The masses, usually everyone, stops thinking. They may know a lot, they may be very switched on with the news, but they don't think. Nor do they dream. So let's never forget how to think - rationally - and to dream - irrationally and with abandon.

For the record, the story was the first of four in Fritz Leiber's The Night of the Wolf, a sort of anthology/paste-up novel. In the book it's called 'The Lone Wolf' but it was originally published as 'The Creature from Cleveland Depths' in Galaxy 1962.

Keep dreaming!

Happy Birthday Mr Verne

It's Jules Verne's birthday so I thought I'd reminisce a little about my experiences with the works of this wonderful creative spirit.

I can't remember a time when his name didn't mean something to me, that's probably a slight exaggeration but not much. Hearing about travelling with Captain Nemo in the bookshop at the beginning of The Never-ending Story became synonymous to me with adventure and the excitement you could have reading. I heard there was the man who went around the world in 80 days, and another who went to the centre of the Earth. These were thrilling concepts to my young imagination.

At some point I must have seen some of the 1950s film of Journey to the Centre of the Earth and the dinosaurs and volcanic eruption stayed embedded in my imagination. (So it was very exciting when I found it on DVD in a garage sale).

Despite these early impressions and the resulting desire I had to read his books, I was in my late teens before I read one. Even then it was his lesser known and quite short Master of the World. It's a sequel, to wrap up how bad a choice it was for a place to start, but in some ways it possibly was actually better than diving straight into the sea for an epic voyage. It was short and had plenty of action right from the start. It also had fantastic inventions and a mad genius hellbent on world domination. Thrilling stuff.

Since then I've read a handful more of Verne's novels, most notably 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days. The former is a worthy classic, it has scenes of suspense and drama, the action of fighting off cephalopods is breath-taking and Nemo is a brooding antihero ahead of his time. On the downside, Verne does go into some very nitty-gritty details about the technical aspects and the longitude and latitude etc. It is at times stifling and could interrupt the pleasure of some readers.

Around the World in 80 Days has fewer passages which really slow the action and romance. It's an action novel right through, but with a lovely whimsy to it, making it very accessible.

So with all that, what is the legacy of Verne for me? I think it's the sheer creative energy he had. He poured himself into writing his books, he gladly and openly tried to forge a new genre and was quite put out when HG Wells started getting credit for it too. His stories are fantastic yet nailed down with his reasoning, he could bring exciting adventure with serious drama, or send us on a whimsical romp. What he didn't seem to do was small. His stories are so vivid and full of adventure that even their echoes in our culture stirs the imagination. So happy birthday Jules Verne and thank you for the spark of dreams.

Keep dreaming!