Shouts From Down Under

Age or Era? What do we write next?

In fifty years from now, will paper books be a nostalgic thing we used to once have, now just something to chuckle about, the waste of trees, labour intensive old fashioned (smelly and sweaty) way of communicating.

Yes, now everyone just has a chip sewn into their wrist from birth, updated every 10 years, that contains all the information, and memory requirements to boost their brain capacity well into the two thousand one hundreds.

The chip will have it's easy to use, intuitive interface on the surface of the eyes, so people will just think the clicks instead of using a mouse or fingertip.

Is this what will happen?

Will E books be THE books?

I was chewing over this worrisome question today.

We shouldn't mix up ERA with AGE.

Even when we wonder about subject matter, and genre, and what we should write in the future. What is going to appeal to the readers coming on?

Should we only write what I call instant gratification novels / stories? Those where its short, banging along, the thing is smacked onto the table, seen, read, enjoyed and finished. All done. Quick, not a huge amount of detail, a plot that's not philosophical, not too deep subject matter, and doesn't require huge amounts of free time, or patience, to read through from cover to cover.

Well, we would if we thought that it's the Era that matters.

Maybe I'm wrong ok? But I've wondered about this for a while.

Is the ERA disappearing for long winded deep, intricately detailed novels with lots of thinking required, twists, mysteries, triple bluffs, and twin reversed double overhead back-flips?

Or is it just the AGE of the reader?

Surely, surely the deep thinking big thick novel will still be here centuries from now.

I'm thinking of the young ones who will grow older as these years go by, a couple decades from now, the 20 somethings will be 40 somethings, and they'll have a different way of looking at life than now? They'll have older children, mortgages getting through the hard scrabble years, coming up to having the car paid off (this all assumes there's not another war soon).

I like to write stories that have some sort of message in there.

Not necessarily a story where you feel like you've gone to visit the Delhi Lama, or received a long letter from the Pope, or been invited to scale an isolated mountain in Tibet to find your inner person etc.

But I do like to write with some reason.

For example.

Once upon a time, some people were born, lived and died and some got married, had children who also lived and died. They lived reasonably happy safe lives, and time continued to pass infinitely.
The end.

Besides being boring and lacking any conflict or romance that we are told is required for fiction to be saleable, this tiny story has no meaning or reason for being written, or read, except perhaps to pass some of that time, and send the reader to sleep, or to give librarian's lives meaning.

Stories should mean something.

After you've read my stories, I'd like it to be that you think, ahhhh, that was, that story was...hmmm, yes...thought provoking. There's more to this novel than you first think! But ah haaa, I'm onto you Author Person.

Yes, I'm onto your little game! This book has lots of hidden meanings, deeper fundamental whatsies, and a whole truck load of inner morals, added courageous soapbox grandstanding, plus fibre, niacin, iron and Vitamins D3, E and C.

I'm betting that even in a couple hundred years, paper books, or a synthetic paper, will still be as popular as today. That's if there's people here to read them.

Maybe the machines will have taken over by then.

And it truly will be a new Era.

Who will fix the machines if there are no humans, and the screen is blue and it says ERROR?
What if all it needed was one little pebble, apple or hailstone to hit the ENTER key and everything be going again.

Sparky