Rereading for writing...

[alexpgp]

I started rereading some old favorites, with an eye toward how they were written. Among the volumes on my list is John D. MacDonald's A Tan and Sandy Silence.

However, just because I've got a somewhat different outlook doesn't stop me from picking up on some nice passages. For example:

The trouble with the news is that everybody knows everything too fast and too often and too many times. News has always been bad. The tiger that lives in the forest just ate your wife and kids, Joe. There are no fat grubworms under the rotten logs this year, Al. Those sickies in the village on the other side of the mountain are training hairy mammoths to stomp us flat, Pete. They nailed up two thieves and one crackpot, Mary. So devote wire-service people and network people and syndication people to gathering up all the bad news they can possibly dredge and comb and scrape out of a news-tired world and have them spray it back at everybody in constant streams of electrons, and two things happen. First, we all stop listening, so they have to make it ever more horrendous to capture our attention. Second, we all become even more convinced that everything has gone rotten and there is no hope at all, no hope at all. In a world of no hope, the motto is semper fidelis, which means in translation, "Every week is screw-your-buddy week and his wife, too, if he's out of town."

That was written wa-a-ay back in 1971, during the stone age of news reporting. I wonder what MacD would have to say about, say, CNN?

Cheers...

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Second, we all become even more convinced that everything has gone rotten and there is no hope at all, no hope at all.

Sadly, this appears to be the actual state of affairs by the time The Green Ripper rolls around.

From somewhere early in The Green Ripper:

"How did the conference go?" I asked.

He shook a weary head. "These are bad days for an economist, my friend. We have gone past the frontiers of theory. There is nothing left but one ugly fact."

"Which is?"

"There is a debt of perhaps two trillion dollars out there, owed by governments to governments, by governments to banks, and there is not one chance in hell it can ever be paid back. There is not enough productive capacity in the world, plus enough raw material, to provide maintainance of plant plus enough overage to keep up with the mounting interest."

"What happens? It gets written off?"

He looked at me with a pitying expression. "All the major world currencies will collapse. Trade will cease. Without trade, without the mechanical-scientific apparatus running, the planet won't support its [a number] billion people, or even half of that. Agribusiness feeds the world. Hydrocarbon utilization heats and house and clothes the people. There will be fear, hate, anger, death. The new barbarism. There will be plague and poison. And then the new Dark Ages.

[...]

"How much time have we got?"

"If nobody pushes the wrong button or puts a bomb under the wrong castle, I would give us five more years at worst, or twelve at most."

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

The numbers are a little off (Two trillion? For the whole world? That sure dates the dialog!).

Seeing as how you are much closer to the publishing industry than I am, have you heard any rumor of the possible existence/publication of a last, unpublished McGee?

Personally, I would tend to doubt such an animal exists. Too much time has gone by for such a vehicle to be commercially viable, methinks.

Cheers...

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Not only have I heard the rumours about Black Border for McGee, I contributed to them by posting an April 1 review of it.

If it existed, nobody I know of has seen a copy.