A rolling stone gathers no rest, so I’m off for yet another adventure in a couple of days; this time I’m going to the French Alps to injure myself terribly whilst attempting to snowboard. That’s one part of the coolness mentioned in the title, but I’ll spare you the obvious additional pun. Instead I’ll follow that line of thought: two days ago the temperature here in Sweden dropped considerably…and suddenly. As I decided to walk home from work at 7-8 PM I was prepared for the temperature we’ve so far had this “winter” – around freezing at worst, and more often than not a few degrees plus. Celsius that is. We may be close to the polar circle, but we have this nice thing called the Gulf Stream just metaphorically outside our metaphoric window to heat things up. Still, the so-called winter has been extremely hot and this sudden drop to -10 degrees took me by complete surprise. I had forgotten how it feels to take a long brisk walk but still not get warm; my fingers were like flesh-covered pieces of bone only mildly heated by the circulatory system and overall body heat. …Oh crap, my similies suck.

That’s another part of the coolness, but I think it’s time I got to the point and mentioned the real thing I had in mind. A few years ago I realized that my literary explorations in youth curiously had omitted Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. I bought it, read it, and liked it. And subsequently forgot about it. Until a week ago or two when I ordered books from the Sci-Fi Bookstore up in Stockholm. “Hey. What’s this? Rama II? The Garden of Rama? Crap, I’ve forgotten to read the sequels!” As I was reading Rama II I came upon something very cool: one of the characters in the book quoted a famous saying.

This is where one of my readers objects: “What’s so cool about that? Dude, didn’t you note that Richard’s small robots quote Shakespeare all the time. Quoting things is not unusual in that book.”

Ah yes, but at first I didn’t recognize from where I knew this quote. I had to pause and think about it a few seconds. The original quote is: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic.” And guess who wrote it. Of course it was Mr. Clarke himself.

I really started at that. My esteem for Clarke just rose a bit further: in his book he assumes that characters two hundred years in the future will be aware of his quote. That’s cool by itself. And with all probability true. But the fact that he had made a masterful stroke at combining the invented world with the real world was also cool; by making his character discuss the saying he brings an immense sense of life to the novel. It’s not a parallel future – it’s our future. We use that saying now, and it’s such a profound statement that we can imagine that future people will hold it as truth as well. It all fits in. And it also corrects a major pet peeve of mine: when movies, books or other media explains too much. Take the example of a vampire movie in which no of the characters are previously aware of what a vampire is. What the hell? Who doesn’t know what a vampire is? Sure, the writers might feel the need to introduce the concept somehow…but doing it like this they break the illusion that things are happening in the world we live in. Clarke correctly assumes that the current world knows of his saying, and extrapolates that future generations will know it as well since it’s a good quote. That’s thinking immersively.

Granted, I don’t know who exactly wrote that bit. It could very well be his co-author, as an inside joke. The idea still holds, though.

Now, onto effects of the media. As I read Rama II I could recall some rumours that Clarke was a paedophile. “Oh well,” I thought, “he writes well anyway.” Then I decided to look him up on Wikipedia – and was surprised to see that he was completely cleared of the rumours. But did I recall that? Of course not. Media had probably fed me all the sensational news about the famous writer’s paedophilic tendencies, but forgotten to make a big thing out of the fact that it turned out to be (if one can trust that) untrue. Regardless of whether it’s true or not, I find it highly fascinating that I’ve thought the rumour to be true for all these years. All because media reported it long ago.

Sometimes my own susceptibility surprises me. And I view myself as relatively critical; imagine what Mr. Joe Regular thinks. (Of course, he probably doesn’t know who Clarke is. But you know what I mean.)

As a final interesting tidbit, the temperature drop here in Sweden completely took me by surprise. I wonder if media informed about it beforehand – I haven’t watched the news for a week or more, so if they did I completely missed it. I wonder if my disinterest with media reports is a result of my steadily growing cynism regarding what they report. I wonder if I should stop wondering so much.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.