I tagged Ethan Zuckerman’s post abpout video “windows” to other places in a links dump recently. The idea is to put big video screens and cameras in fast-food restaurants around the world, and provide virtual “windows” into other restaurants in other countries. In talking about the idea, Ethan threw out a great aside:
(If I were Cory Doctorow, say, I’d write a short story about the idea rather than wondering how to build it, where a group of kids in Brazil befriend another group in China that they meet randomly over the monitor. The keep returning to the restaurant at pre-agreed times, hoping the random algorithm will connect them to their friends, rather than to a room of bewildered, unsmiling Germans.)
I mentioned this to Kate the other day, as we were driving down to Boston to visit her parents for the weekend, and she replied “Of course, if it were a Mike Resnick story, he’d spot the Perfect Woman through the window, and spend the rest of the story chasing her.” Which, of course, set us off on how this idea would be used by various SF authors:
- If it were a Neil Gaiman story, the windows would occasionally look in on fast-food restaurants in mythological cities.
- If it were a Bruce Sterling story, the window thing would be a brilliant digression in a lerger plot about… capitalist… terrorist… computer hackers… I don’t remember what, but the window thing was really cool.
- If it were an Iain Banks story, the window thing would somehow lead to people having kinky sex, and possibly running afould of gangsters.
- If it were a Vernor Vinge story, the computer controlling the windows would become self-aware, and start match-making between people in different countries.
- If it were a China Mieville story, the windows would look in on the squalid kitchens of fast-food restaurants in other countries, and everybody would be miserable.
The possibilities, of course, are endless. So leave your favorite in the comments.
If it were a Steven Brust story, the windows would look not into fast-food restaurants but gourmet ones, and there would be many loving descriptions of the food.
If it were a C.J. Cherryh story, the windows would be desperate glimpses viewed into others actions seen by the overwhelmed and horribly short of sleep protagonist.
You really don’t want to know what would be in the window of the HP Lovecraft story.
One I forgot to include:
If it were a David Weber story, the fry cook at one franchise would use the video system to become CEO of the company, through the sheer force of her personal awesomness.
If it were a J. R. R. Tolkein story, the windows (called Palantir) would look into kitchens in Mordor.
If it were a C. S. Lewis story, the windows would look into kitchens in Heaven and Screwtape’s bureaucratic Hell.
If it were an H. P. Lovecraft story, the windows would look into kitchens in a hyperbolic 4-dimensional world where his abominated fish dinner would be featured, perhaps with ichor oozing eldritch tentacles.
If it were an Arthur C. Clarke story, the windows would look into kitchens in the future of spectacular technology, from which ordinary human beings had mysteriously vanished.
If it were an Isaac Asimov story, the windows would look into kitchens in such a way that no window would harm, or by inaction, allow a human being to be harmed; second, th obey all human requests unless that violated the previous point; and third, so long as it did not contradict the two previous points, preserve the window technology itself.
If it were a Robert Heinlein story, the windows would look into kitchens behind mirrors (if a dark Fantasy) or the future (robotized or under alien domination), or showing lots of copulating libertarian Capitalists.
If it were a Ray Brabdbury story, the windows would look into kitchens of 1920s small town Illinois, but with a circus coming into town.
My wife just came dowstairs to brew fresh coffee, and adds this.
If it were a Stephen King story, the windows would look into kitchens of fast food restaurants in Maine with meticulously realistic set decoration of brand-name props where somebody who looks exactly like you is hideously and disgustingly murdering people.
If it were a Philip K. Dick story, in every window you would see a perfect simulacrum of yourself. At the end of the story you realize they’re all real people and you’re an android.
And, speaking of magical windows, and on the influence of great Astronomical art on your truly as a child:
Under the River to Grandmother’s House We Go
by
Jonathan Vos Post
At Nanny Tillie’s place in Elizabeth
Haunted by Japan that I did not know
Blue pagodas on plate’s porcelain glow
The other world is a birth, is a death.
Curley, my grandfather, in muddy trench
Smoke from roasting rats covers the gangrene stench
At Aix-les-Chapelle in World War One,
Supply lines cut, chlorine, the French, the Hun.
Up early, Holland Tunnel, arrive by noon
Thinking: “Is Genghis Khan a Jewish name?”
Tobacco hug, kiss scented with perfume,
A man? Asians see a rabbit in the Moon,
Forest mushrooms, tea at the table brewed.
Korean newsreel before the cartoon.
Question the mystery? It would be rude.
Jewish families go out for Chinese food.
Haunted by starving children, read aloud
The lyrics of “The Mikado,” confused,
Sense a secret, she’s snoring as she snoozed,
My mother in the other room, a crowd
Of shadows slide across the curtain shroud
Cast by headlights from Warinanco Park,
Staten Island Ferry: Noah’s Ark?
Long after dark, dreams of a mushroom cloud.
My tongue in the gap where there is no tooth.
Embarrassed by the Jewish calendar,
13 months in a year, that must be wrong?
It made no sense to me. It was the truth.
Alternate worlds in the words of a song
He sang to me, lighting his meerschaum pipe,
Blew smoke rings at the daguerreotype.
It was just yesterday. It was so long.
I’d been to Nassau, second honeymoon
For Mom and Dad; and Florida that time
With clown-fish under glass-bottomed boats,
Sweet Ovaltine in a silver spoon,
And pie he said was genuine Key Lime.
I thought I’d never ever get to go
To the blank parts of the map, Mexico,
Canada, that hung on the schoolroom wall,
Or Titan, ringed Saturn in the sky,
In that mural by Chesley Bonestell
Glowing at the Planetarium,
Fingertips in my ears, squinting my eyes,
Pretending: “I’m looking through the glass
Of a space helmet. I have oxygen
Enough to last until I reach the dome.”
Lost in the tunnel. Lost life. Lost home.
2144-2320
5 Dec 2006
Copyright © 2006 by Jonathan Vos Post
VosPoem.doc
If the windows were in Earthsea, the food would mysteriously ripple off through the screens to wherever the maintenance of theEquilibrum demanded that it should go: “Feast in Gont means famine in the East Reach”.
Robert Jordan…there would be windows in 30 different countries, and these would all be interrelated. It would only take about 13 volumes to tell the whole story.
James P. Hogan – the windows would occasionally flash on the same restaurant but a year in the future, with increasingly dire predictions as the protagonists struggle to avoid their fates. (Thrice Upon a Time is for me the definitive time travel story.)
Robert Heinlein, early days: – during a brawl, the protagonist gets thrown at the screen and passes through to its scene. Which is not on Earth. Now he has to get home again. But Libby figures out how the windows do this and rescues him.
Robert Heinlein, later days: – the windows would not be in restaurants, they’d be in bedrooms. ILTRTYI.
Bob Shaw already wrote this one. Kinda. Slow Glass. In 1986 I suggested putting cameras in tourist spots and having a cable channel for them. I should have followed up. See also second RAH idea above.
Neal Stephenson actually proposed something similar: that every CCTV surveillance camera be put up on the internet… for people to watch in a fractional-screen window. (And when you in Kansas see a car being broken into in Canberra, you call the cops.)
Then there’s Bill Gates’ version of Windows…
Each of the windows turns blue at unpredictable intervals…
If it were a Chuck Palahniuk story, the windows would show people participating in an increasingly twisted series of repulsive acts in a bid to get more attention.
If it were a Neal Stephenson story, the windows would have been invented by a Waterhouse and would be pivotal to the adventures of a Shaftoe. The history and physical workings of the windows would be meticulously described in long digressive sections.
If it were a Robert Charles Wilson story, the windows would suddenly appear without warning, throwing society into chaos as their origins and implications are studied.
If it were an Ayn Rand story, the misuse of the windows by the weak-willed masses would compel their handsome, wealthy, athletic, super-genius billionaire inventor to destroy them rather than see them so corrupted.
If it were a Kim Stanley Robinson story, the windows would enable a group of neo-primitivist environmentalist mountaineer scientists to save the world from the evils of corporations and greed.
Bob Shaw already wrote this one. Kinda. Slow Glass. In 1986 I suggested putting cameras in tourist spots and having a cable channel for them. I should have followed up. See also second RAH idea above.