Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough
(quoteinvestigator.com)272 points by sohkamyung 3 days ago
272 points by sohkamyung 3 days ago
The second chapter of Anne McCaffrey's 'Dragonflight', written in 1968, opens with: "F'lar, on bronze Mnementh's great neck, appeared first in the skies above the chief Hold of Fax, so-called Lord of the High Reaches."
Maybe because I read a lot of scifi and fantasy, despite not having read any Anne McCaffrey, but that doesn't seem particularly hard to parse or understand.
I seem to read more fiction now than I ever have, but much of it now slips through publishing (and editing)
So novels that start like that make me read uphill. Way better to plunge into the book.
The first few lines of books I recently liked...
"DEATH CAME FOR him through the trees."
"Gallegher played by ear, which would have been all right had he been a musician - but he was a scientist. A drunken and erratic one, but good."
“Like any good story, it began with a girl. It was supposed to end with a bullet."
"The level was at his top lip now. Even with his head pressed hard back against the stones of the cell wall his nose was only just above the surface. He wasn’t going to get his hands free in time; he was going to drown."
a little conflicted on this one:
"ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1988, the Jason Taverner Show ran thirty seconds short. A technician, watching through the plastic bubble of the control dome, froze the final credit on the video section, then pointed to Jason Taverner, who had started to leave the stage. The technician tapped his wrist, pointed to his mouth."
The books that made me read uphill in sentence 1 loosely correlate with the rest of the book.
Makes me think of the MrBeast pdf from yesterday wrt the first crucial seconds of a youtube video.
it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I love reading either.
I'm reminded of the Illuminatus Trilogy, which at times is barely more than proper nouns arranged into sentences at random. like Finnegan's Wake but with more flower power
What's funny is that this register and conceit is one that I dearly love among science fiction and fantasy writers,
provided they fulfill the implicit promise, that on a second reading all such things will be clear.
It's an intentional device. Andre Norton is particularly adept at this: when accounting for my deep love of her many thin "pulp" novels, many of which exist in the same universe, something I regularly praise is the way she almost as a signature drops you without exposition into drama.
The conceit of a chatty expositional conversational narrator who can in effect be imaged to be turning to their friend-from-out-of-town to helpfully explain what this thing is or what the significance of that is—often with a presumed familiarity with the frame of reference their audience might hanve—is by contrast a crutch and now most characteristic of what we call Young Adult fiction.
Trust in the reader, and trust in their sufficient interest to file such things away, is, I think, characteristic of a different era—one that demanded more of readers. I don't think it's a coincidence that our own era finds this off-putting.
We're lazy now, and we have small token windows.
EDIT: and I could probably have reproduced, or at least completed, that line of McCaffery's, from memory—though that particular book shows its age and its history in being the first short story she wrote about her world Pern. She got a lot softer and more sentimental as she went along, and less prone to patriarchal stereotypes she brought along from her work as a romance writer.
McCaffrey is on that TV Tropes list, I have only read a few of her novels and she does jump out for obvious examples of this trope.
It's tricky to write an opening sentence though. We all recognise "Call me Ishmael" and probably "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is obvious to lots of people but for example, "I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods" doesn't exactly promise Breakfast at Tiffany's does it?
By the second chapter I think you've earned a lot of leeway, either the reader is engaged and will soldier on despite your six new nouns and what might be a new word or possibly a new meaning for a word they know already - or they have probably set the book down some time ago and will never see this sentence anyway.
Fortunately, science fiction left behind those inclinations. The cyberscapes of the glittering arcologies where street sams zero every gonk, rimbo, and cyberpsycho that comes their way for fun, eddies, or to just to look nova to their favorite input or output demand your data be crystal, choom.
I can't remember the details, but sometime in the '70s or '80s a sci-fi magazine ran a contest: take a short text (something like "a man gets onto a bus and notices another man wearing an unusual hat") and rewrite it in the distinctive style of a sci-fi writer of your choice.
The winning results were pretty entertaining. I only remember the Heinlein entry having something like "Why, he's using plasteel for his helmet liner instead of ferrocrete!"
"My breath froze into pink pretzels." was the only bit of the excerpt I found interesting. I suppose pretzel is a bit of a kitschy choice for the centre of a metaphor, but the overall effect of it was to raise some interesting questions: is there a breathable atmosphere for humans that could precipitate pink ice breath? is our protagonist even human? is there a shop nearby selling Judaism-adjacent baked goods?
"My breath froze into pink pretzels."
It's the word "pretzel", honestly. I can cover breath freezing pink by the standards of the era, no problem. Took a shot to the lungs & helmet and left to die on the ice planet. I doubt that would "really" produce frozen pink breath but what we would now consider "hard" sci-fi that would care about that sort of thing generally didn't travel with this sort of purple prose so that's not really an issue.
But pretzels? Why is your breath freezing in pretzels? Even pretzel "rods", let alone twists?
As a sci-fi writer who likes a spot of silly world-building myself, this line doesn't seem particularly absurd to me, but it does paint me a mental image of something the author very likely didn't intend to communicate:
Picture a world whose surface is covered in an ocean of hyper-oxygenated dense fluid (like the kind used in liquid-breathing experiments.)
(The fluid isn't cold! The "freezing" isn't a description of the temperature, but of motion ceasing.)
Now imagine this fluid with the appearance of a gel ant farm, with eaten-through trails in it — but rather than these trails being hollow, they're full of a cotton-candy-like pink "fluff".
Why? Through some kind of chemical reaction, exhalation of the now-CO2-saturated-and-warmed fluid into the medium, causes the formation and rapid expansion of a (pink!) aerogel, where the "gel" is "something from the fluid, plus water from your breath" and the "aero" is "nitrogen and CO2".
This aerogel is neutrally or even positively buoyant relative to the dense medium — so it doesn't fall or pour out of your mouth, but rather worms its way out, curving around your face in a random, pretzel-like extrusion pattern, fighting its way out, pushing against the working fluid.
I would imagine that, to continue to breathe safely in this strange medium, you would have to 1. always breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth; and 2. ensure that the reaction product of your exhalation doesn't linger to stick to your face as it forms.
So the optimal way to survive, would be to constantly, briskly walk backward, with this exhalation product extruding away from you like a rocket engine's exhaust (or perhaps more like spaetzle) as you walk.
I imagine you would frequently walk through trails of (your own or others') exhalation product. Which might feel somewhat like walking through gathered up hunks of spiderweb.
I also imagine that this reaction would probably be happening to some degree in your throat and lungs as well, rapidly giving you something like silicosis. Depending on how much tension you want in the plot, you could either just embrace this as "putting a timer on" getting off this planet; or you could posit that the character would be able to pry just the filter from their rebreather, using it to ensure that the reaction never occurs inside of them (but further increasing the strain of breathing in this medium.)
The atmosphere isn't homogenized perfectly, leading to turbulent condensation.
Micheal Crichton's Sphere mentions this (actual) fact in regards to certain gases, such as Helium, being needed in high pressure environments to counter act oxygen poisoning and nitrogen narcosis, but due to differing thermal properties, can lead to hot/cold spots, thermal turbulence, etc.
I revisited a summery, carefree 90s hit last year, and I immediately exclaimed, "these guys are ON DRUGS!"
https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Len/Steal-My-Sunshine
Confirmed by promo video footage
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose
Enlightening article - this is the exact complaint I have with the world-building Bungie does, and now I have a word to describe it. Halo is somewhat grounded, with Humans feeling familiar but the Covenant are both literally and literally (!) purple. Destiny is (IMO) so full of pink pretzels that it's undecipherable to newcomers.
I have to admit i read the comments before i read the article and this comment made me feel like I was having a stroke
> Even the mere act of walking out to one's "car", opening the door, getting in, and zooming away could be an act of adventure.
It's incredible how much screen time is dedicated to the opening/closing of car doors and the the driving of cars into/out of parking lots or driveways. Tho I guess this somewhat reflects life in America.
I'll be damned! One of my favorite Chandler quotes, I've posted this a lot of places over the years.
That said, the last time I looked into it sources all agreed that the comic strip Barney Google was a very well-known pop-culture reference when Chandler wrote this, and will surely have been the first thing he or anyone he talked to would think of when hearing "Google". (TFA mentions this as if it was one of several possibilities, but the others seem very shaky.)
So it seems pretty clear he meant it, and expected the reader to take it, as a silly last name.
>So it seems pretty clear he meant it, and expected the reader to take it, as a silly last name.
A lot of these 'mysteries' that get brought up over and over online tend to have very easy to figure out answers, but people would rather be confused for some reason.
They are words out of their context and humans love to make meaning. Think how surreal things will get now that time has sped up from Chandler’s time.
As mysteries they are powerful. So far there was only 1 commenter that knew of Barney Google. The knowledge spreads the mystery dies.
I knew nothing of the passage before this thread and when I was reading through the comments. I thought this was recent sci-fi that was being posted at a site called tv tropes.
The Google reference was obviously a future form factor for Google services.
> Chandler played cricket when he was young, and he may have been influenced by the term “google” which is applied to balls which break or swerve.
I think the author means “googly”
In my pre-Google youth we also called them googly eyes and I honestly believed that was why Google picked that name. I always imagined the two OOs as eyes, sort of like amazons a->z arrow is a smile.
See also the campfire classic "going on a bear hunt" and the line "two big googly eyes..."
This book from 1931 deserves a mention as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Google_Book
it includes verses like:
The sun is setting –
Can't you hear
A *something* in the distance
Howl!!?
I wonder if it's –
Yes!! it *is*
That horrid Google
On the prowl!!!
Reminds me of the people who looked for time travelers, hoping they would have betrayed themselves through chronologically wrong Google searches or tweets.
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/google-search-fails...
The whole thing:
"I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Brylls ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Brylls shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn’t enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough. He was right."
I like how Chandler writing sci-fi sounds exactly like Chandler writing one of his gumshoe stories. It's terse and tense and cynical. The protagonist drives a vehicle into some kind of ambush, and everything's incredibly snappy (including the scenery). Not at all like the actual sci-fi author who turned the parody into a complete story, and felt compelled to discuss something in the middle of the action, and ruined the pace.
I don't think "Google" here is a machine or all-knowing entity, sounds more like it's just some guy. With prior experience of disintegrating Brylls.
William Gibson on Chandler:
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...
Via
“ GIBSON When science fiction finally got literary naturalism, it got it via the noir detective novel, which is an often decadent offspring of nineteenth-century naturalism. Noir is one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary impulse went in America. The Goncourt brothers set out to investigate sex and money and power, and many years later, in America, you wind up with Chandler doing something very similar, though highly stylized and with a very different agenda. I always had a feeling that Chandler’s puritanism got in the way, and I was never quite as taken with the language as true Chandler fans seem to be. I distrusted Marlow as a narrator. He wasn’t someone I wanted to meet, and I didn’t find him sympathetic—in large part because Chandler, whom I didn’t trust either, evidently did find him sympathetic. But I trusted Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandler’s ancestor, even though they were really contemporaries. Chandler civilized it, but Hammett invented it. With Hammett I felt that the author was open to the world in a way Chandler never seems to me to be.”
Assuming, of course, that The Gibson hasn’t been hacked.
The moderators have said that machine generated submissions and comments are not welcome on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945628
There was an old text generator program from the 80s called "Travesty":
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/50200-travesty
That's basically all ChatGPT is being used for here, so I think it's OK. It's not like a fake user, or "I ran the question through the chatbot and now I'll show you the output because I have no idea myself".
What book is that?
Edit: Found it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale
It gets funnier if you consider the meme that Elon Musk is an alien who is building rockets just to go back to his home planet. :)
Makes me think of
https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/01/detecting-time-trave...
And also Asimov's classic End of Eternity
https://ia800500.us.archive.org/13/items/calibre_library_68....
where a time traveller who overshoots his target and winds up too far in the past posts a classified on March 28, 1932 with a picture of a mushroom cloud and the title
All (the)
Talk
Of (the)
Market
https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1950-02-25/flipbook...
I'd say real genre writers such as Heinlein, Asimov, and Doc Smith were always more careful how they used neologisms and didn't just drop them out rapid fire in search of affect. But you sure see that in parodic material such as Calvin and Hobbes (which would parodize Chandler and sci-fi)
"Mr. Google, the best filing clerk in the firm. Filing & Office Management: A Constructive Monthly Magazine on Business Methods. July 1921."
The quote in full is: "I Had Exactly Four Seconds To Hot Up the Disintegrator, and Google Had Told Me It Wasn’t Enough"
Barney Google aside, it's worth wondering whether the same process that led to Google being called Google instead of Googol is what led Chandler to use that word: it's a memorable, alien-sounding word, misspelled.
As a kid in the 80s, my parents bought an encyclopedia set that also had a set of companion books for kids. This is where I first learned about a google, and it was definitely google not googol. So it's been "misspelled" for quite some time if that's your belief
I don't know why it'd be a matter of belief, it's a known word with a known prescriptive spelling. I'm sure the encyclopedia editors would have liked to get it right. But it's an interesting anecdote. A googol is an uncommon item of vernacular usage, and basically trivia for most people. I remember hearing "a googolplex" on elementary school playgrounds, as an example of a number so large you couldn't conceive of it. "You're stupid times infinity", "No, you're stupid times infinity to the googolplex power", and so on. And since the word doesn't follow intuitive spelling rules in English, I imagine it would have been very easy to spell it wrong in the 80s, unless you happened to both have access to specific resources, and remembered to look it up.
In one of the episodes of the 1970's Japanese anime series Gatchaman (known in North America in a heavily edited and abridged form as Battle of the Planets) there is a sequence in which a navigation screen is shown. A destination point is shown with a pin mark exactly like that balloon thing on Google Maps. I can't remember which episode. I don't have that series on any hard drive any more.
I'm reminded fondly of the opening chapter to QNTM's Fine Structure, which sets up the story with a similarly baffling (yet self consistent, in my opinion) but wildly evocative narration of a blazing dogfight across a multiverse of hyperspaces.
One of the ways I failed to enjoy Max Gladstone's Empress of Forever was that it seemed hellbent on coining a significant new glossary worth of vocabulary along the way. I had to be well rested and attentive to muddle through with some marginal comprehension of any given chapter's plot, I certainly couldn't read it while drowsy or distracted.
> the book “In the Plex” by journalist Steven Levy presented the following explanation for the name choice:
>> Page’s dorm roommate suggested they call it “googol.” . . . “The name reflected the scale of what we were doing,” Brin explained a few years later.
>> Page misspelled the word, which was just as well since the Internet address for the correct spelling was already taken. “Google” was available.
This is interesting, since the story I heard was that they settled on the spelling after an early investor made a check out to that spelling.
This is largest juxtaposition between familiarity and nostalgia against an outright alien uncanny facade of fiction.
A dissociative, delirious, memory. Orthogonal to our current experience, but barely.
These two songs are the closest I could find in an analogous auditory form.
Ah, this is an article about parody of sci-if slop.
I had way too much trouble realizing the article wasn’t just machine generated nonsense. Poe’s law strikes again.
Chandler's parody sounds as if somebody discovered salt and immediately put a spoonful into their dish. Still while I read through it I was curious about every term used. While if it featured mundane things like doors, guns, grass and whatever I'd be immediately bored.
Nick Lowe, in The Well-Tempered Plot Device, is quite brutal in his criticisms.
A 'googly' is not a google, what is this nonsense hahaha. Seriously getting Baader-Meinhof from this website which I used to trust.
The name Google was chosen because it's kind of sciency and sounds funny.
Googly, Goggle, Gogle...
It's a funny word that's been used for 100+ years. No irony necessary for a word to be reused for its intended purpose.
"Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction. It’s a scream. It is written like this: “I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. Then I got stuck into some kind of infinite reload loop on iOS Safari for this site- I thought it was lockdown mode but it’s nice to know it’s just generally broken"
Worked fine for me on iOS safari just now. Maybe it was temporary?
Go easy on calling yourselves "QI", the hugely entertaining BBC TV show might have some qualms about this.
For those who have not dipped into the so-called Golden or Silver Age science fiction, Chandler's pastiche is quite accurate. There was a lot of what TV Tropes (warning: TV Tropes) refers to as "Call A Rabbit a 'Smerp'": https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmee...
Even the mere act of walking out to one's "car", opening the door, getting in, and zooming away could be an act of adventure.
It would still be quite purple [1], though. A well-known trope of the time. For some reason TV Tropes hadn't covered it yet, though, so I guess we should cut the authors some slack on that front.
I would consider "My breath froze into pink pretzels." effectively unredeemable, though. Malzberg's rehabilitation attempt on that fails, in my opinion, and by the time someone wrote around it I think the surrounding prose would already have passed the Purple Event Horizon itself.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose