My week at fantasy camp ends in the world of fantasy. The “Fray Poster as Hero” genre corner of my library has two volumes, illustrating the range of psychological motivations within The Fraygrancy.
For those who enter on breaks from daily professional responsibilities, I recommend Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers, published in 1995 when the “world web” was a fresh metaphor, not an apparent typo. This postmodern novel begins with a 35-year-old professional, trying to avoid getting down to work, discovering the brand new medium. His goal, at least at first, was to distract himself. His shifting attitude touches close to home for me.
A flavor:
The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence finally completed its program, when the terminal drop box brought the last barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we’d still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways not to say it.
Yet I could not log off.
Happily for the protagonist and hopefully for the rest of us, surfing eventually unleashes a burst of creativity, which leads him to embark on a new project: teaching a computer to pass a comprehensive English literature exam. Highly recommended.
On the other hand, if you enter “The Fray” not to pass time but to achieve world domination, your novel is the science fiction classic, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, published in 1985(!). Card’s imagined chat rooms anticipate the real thing with uncanny accuracy.
Ender and his siblings are the product of some kind of “Seed” experiment, bred for leadership. Ender is training to command the army that will save the Earth from an invading alien force. His 12-year-old brother and 10-year-old sister embark on a plan to take over the Earth’s government. Too young to be taken seriously in public, they create political personae by debating each other over the Net in a long-running flame war. They frame seductive populist arguments, expecting that some day they will be called to world leadership by popular acclaim. They start by posting pseudonymously in open political chat rooms, then develop a following and get their own electronic commentary columns, then …
One last time, thanks from all of us to The Fray and to Michael Brus, Maureen Cosgrove, and Moira Redmond at Slate. Will, Joe, and everyone else, let me know if you’re ever in Philly. For anyone with the fortitude to follow this “Breakfast Table” to the end, lunch is on me.
Arthur
