The Next Best Book Club discussion
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The Fridgularity Author/Reader Discussion
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I'm not finished with the book yet but I plan to be ready by the 8th!
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Looking forward to this!If anyone is having trouble imagining all the fonts mentioned, you can see the typography of Zathir, right here.
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Being a font nerd, I could see every font in my head. Still, that's a great help Mark.
BTW, Lori, I'm also in NEPA (Honesdale, PA), and I'm definitely not liking this NEPA version of spring. ;-)
I'm about a quarter of the way through. Loving it so far. This book really cracks me up! And eye opening at the same time.
I just bought this book for my Kindle yesterday. I'm hoping to read it in the next week, so I can join in on the chat!
It's a pretty quick read, Megan. I was drawn in by the humor and found it hard to put down.
Awesome, thanks Joe. I could use some humor and escape from the "real world" for a bit!
Both my husband and I are reading it. We're giggling at some of the scenarios, and it is coming up with conversations with others, especially when talking about technology in our lives.
Looking forward to joining the discussion - I'm about 90% through.
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Welcome to TNBBC and your book discussion, Mark! I'm so thrilled to host you for the next two weeks and LOVE you for sharing copies of your book.
I had such a great time reading this, and definitely think I would have a hard time adjusting - as some of your characters did - to a hostile internet takeover!
How in the world did you come up with the storyline?!
Hi Mark! I was given a copy of your ebook to read before this discussion - I spent so much of the time laughing, especially the beginning of the book. The way you describe things is amazing!I would also love to know how you came up with the idea for the book? Now that you've written it, I wonder, why didn't anyone write something about that earlier? The Internet... how addicted everyone is, how connected everyone is, how we couldn't live without it. Such a great storyline because we can all relate
ZATHIR reminds me of HAL, maybe before HAL grew up and went into space. HAL as seen through a "Douglas Adams" filter. Love the involved comdedic sequences. (view spoiler)
First of all, let me thank Lori for organizing this and the whole TNBBC network. It really is a thrill to get a chance to discuss my work with you guys.Like many of my ideas, the genesis of The Fridgularity began on the beach, where I like to walk. I had been musing quite a bit about how much time I spend on the Internet -- this would have been about the summer of 2010 or so -- where I was Tweeting up a storm and generally exploring social media as a way to promote my earlier books. I'd also been noticing amongst my students that they were TOTALLY absorbed by social media, particularly Facebook. (I teach web design, information architecture, digital imaging and so on at a university here in London.) So absorbed, in fact, that I started to notice they had trouble paying attention to everything. Even when I was sitting next to them, helping them with their own projects, their FB pages were open in a tab, they had their mobiles buzzing away, and their attention spans were about 5 seconds. And then I thought, what if all that was taken away? (Yes, it was a little professor's fantasy.)
And I had been joking for years about how we would need to design websites for all kinds of screens, including those in refrigerators. Then that began to happen -- fridges with web connections -- and it started to jell. What if the web itself became aware, and it only wanted to talk to us through our web-enabled fridges?
My first novel, The Amadeus Net, also features a self-aware network, though it is the network of one finite city, and its a secret. I thought it would also be interesting to see what effects the idea of self-aware machines would have on humanity in general, and then I was off to the races.
HAL is definitely an inspiration. As are many of the self-aware machines we've seen before ... the terminators, the androids in the Aliens franchise, Asimov's robots, and so on. So it's a tested trope in SF, but I wanted it to be a little more off-beat from what we've seen before, but still thought provoking and (I hoped) accessible to a wider audience.
Mark, you've written a delightful cautionary tale, with a nice touch of "ouch" humor.I wonder, what was the most difficult part for you to write? Were there relationships or characters or plot developments that created problems for you?
Thanks Sally. The transition from "nobody understands why the hell we lost the Internet and everything else" to the new reality, in which people are just trying to survive required quite a bit of rewriting before it worked.
Hey Mark, really enjoyed this read.. I found it very interesting about how many of the newer generation had to almost completely re-invent themselves due to their personalities being so embedded on the internet (and some couldn't even handle it all).. And this book really did make me laugh a few times (especially from Sona's cronies' attempts at breaking into various places dressed as gorillas or ZATHIR's distaste of hipsters).. This human person is curious as to why you chose a web-enabled fridge as ZATHIR's choice of communication medium to the main character. We know that It chose Blake because of his intelligence/philosophical nature (being un-biased and what not), and Blake had an odd relationship with his kitchen appliances already (describing their usage with sexual metaphors for instance), sooo am I on the right track here or is there some extra hidden meaning behind it that I completely missed?? And is it bad etiquette to ask a writer such a question??
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It's not bad etiquette at all, Mike. I'm afraid I don't have a pat answer, because I haven't really thought through if I want to reveal EVERYTHING in terms of motivations and meanings. What I AM prepared to tell you right now is that I had specific reasons for choosing the fridge as Zathir's mode of communication. The first is because, as I mentioned before, for years I'd been joking in my lecture on web design standards that we'll have to make sure our sites are compatible with fridges. And yes, I was a bit saddened that the first web-enabled fridge came out before the book, but this is one of the problems with writing near-future SF, a kind of Law, that reality tends to exceed expectations (the the Flying Car Corollary also has to be taken into consideration of course.)
The second, shallow, authorial question the fridge answered for me, was: "What is the funniest appliance to cause an apocalypse?"
In retrospect, I think I got the answer wrong to that second question, because I think I could have set this book in Japan and had the appliance be a web-enabled toilet. We're probably all glad that I erred.
So let's turn the question around. Zathir definitely had reasons for choosing the web-enabled fridge -- what do you think they may be?
Hi Mark. I'm about half done reading and loving this book. I love your sense of humor. Trying to picture myself in the place of the characters almost made me feel anxious. I kept asking myself, "well how would we do this?? And how would that work??" Living in the world we live in today makes it hard to imagine life w/o all the technologies we have really come to depend on!So I was wondering...peotry keep reapearing in the book. The different characters have different feelings about it. So I was wondering about your personal opinion of poetry. Do you read poetry? Have you ever written any? Have you read Leaves of Grass?
I've read most of Leaves of Grass (and I'm not sure which edition). I do enjoy poetry, but I must admit, a lot of modern poetry isn't my thing. Much old timey poetry isn't either, but I love Shakespeare, most of the Romantic poets (excluding Wordsworth and the loathéd The Prelude), some of the Victorians and some translations of ancient poetry hits me. I studied drama, and a lot of what I read, performed and directed is basically poetry in 3-D, so that is definitely an influence. I have been to some spoken-word evenings, and I think they're kind of cool. What I love about poetry is the sound and the absolute joy that poets have for the feel of a word on the tongue, the delicious sense and emotion those words can evoke. We've lost that, somehow. Watch Ken Burn's documentary and listen to the language used by ordinary people in their letters to one another, and try to deny it. So I think we're missing it in our culture; my thought in writing this into the book is that it is one of the things that we could rediscover without a surfeit of information bombarding us constantly and keeping us prosaic, sometimes in 140 characters.
We shall not speak of my attempts at poetry. MOST embarrassing, unless you include the haiku that I had published in the Mainichi Daily News "foreign" haiku column.
Chelsea's comments about "how would we do this?" made me wonder... if you didn't have a computer, would you have been able to write this book? Or, do you still write using a notebook and pen?
I would still be able to write this book without a computer. The first novel I wrote (unpublished, thank god) was composed entirely on a manual typewriter. If I was forced to write longhand then all bets would be off, unless I could train a typist to read my chicken-scratchings.
The other aspect that would have been much more time-consuming is some of the "fact-checking" on details of how things work. (HAM radio, for example.) However, I did all the principle research for my first book, The Amadeus Net, that way. This included having to understand: Mozart's life, the effects of a massive asteroid strike on Earth, survivalists, and so on, and all done without the use of Wikipedia.
Yes, indeed, I have been in libraries!
Mark wrote: "It's not bad etiquette at all, Mike. I'm afraid I don't have a pat answer, because I haven't really thought through if I want to reveal EVERYTHING in terms of motivations and meanings. What I AM ..."
Well, here's how I interepreted it.. This is probably going to sound ridiculous, but here it goes.. From the scene where Zathir first attempted communication with Blake, there were all these descriptions about "food intercourse" and what not, and at the "orgasmic chime" of the stove (if I recall correctly), Zathir sparked to "life".. To me, it was almost as if Blake metaphorically had intercourse with his kitchen appliances and sort of gave birth to Zathir, which would explain why Zathir was so latched onto Blake. Blake was like its mother/father.. See, told you it would sound ridiculous.. But I think there is more to it or I'm missing something, irregardless I liked the book very much..
I love that interpretation, Mike!Zathir does see Blake as a kind of parent at times, and Blake is referred to as the midwife of the Machine God on some occasions too. But Zathir has other ideas about why it should use the fridge -- remember, it first tries to contact him via an ATM, but ultimately has success with Blake's web-enabled fridge.
Mark wrote: "I love that interpretation, Mike!Zathir does see Blake as a kind of parent at times, and Blake is referred to as the midwife of the Machine God on some occasions too. But Zathir has other ideas a..."
Oh crap, that's right, I forgot about the ATM. So a machine that we get money from, then to a machine that we get food from.. Both things we need to survive, or constantly use.. I will think about this.
Hi Mark. I have to admit that the Fridgularity isn't the kind of book I usually read. I used to read a lot of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, but I mostly read literary fiction now. That being said, I really enjoyed this book. Lord Sona made me laugh a lot because my partner was addicted to World of Warcraft for the longest time, and I never played. I imagined that most of the people he was playing with/against were exactly like Lord Sona. As a computer programmer, I was fascinated by the idea of Zathir. Machine intelligence is an area I'm extremely interested in. I expect Google to go self-aware any day now. There's already a "Church of Google", which is a pretty terrifying thought.
Did you do a lot of research about Machine Intelligence, or did you just wing it? Zathir isn't quite how I would think of a Machine Intelligence, but it certainly is a plausible entity.
You wrote your first book on a typewriter? I didn't even know they made them anymore.
Were any of your characters inspired by characters in other books? I only ask because Lord Sona reminded me so much of Ignatius Reilly in John Kennedy Toole's CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES. The two characters are very similar in many ways. No, that wasn't a direct influence in my consciousness, but now that you mention it, I can totally see the connection. It's strange to think that there are things influencing us, even when we're not aware of them.
The only character who I had an absolute model for was Dr. Tundra, who also appears in my second novel, Marvellous Hairy, who is my own creation.
Geek writer question, Mark. Pantser or plotter? Do you fully outline all the scenes before writing or do you start writing and see where it goes. If you fully outline, is there a story structure you use, "Heroe's Journey?" "Save the Cat?"Thanks, about 60% in and really enjoying it.
Did you do a lot of research about Machine Intelligence, or did you just wing it? Zathir isn't quite how I would think of a Machine Intelligence, but it certainly is a plausible entity. You wrote your first book on a typewriter? I didn't even know they made them anymore.
I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the book, Joe, because I really was hoping to have readers who like both FSF and literary fiction get something out of The Fridgularity.
I'll admit to not doing a lot of extra research on the whole AI/machine intelligence thing because I did a HUGE amount of research when I wrote The Amadeus Net, which also has a sapient intelligence emerge from a network. I'm would have to put myself in the emergence camp when it comes to this idea. We're still learning how our own consciousnesses work, and until we fully understand that, I believe it's going to be difficult to replicate in a machine that doesn't share the same basic operating system as us. (And I'm certainly not the first one to write about this idea.)
I'm also intrigued by the notion that self-awareness requires a body, which I did do some reading about, and which I did incorporate into the character of Zathir. So, yes, I hope that for all the absurdity of it only wanting to communicate with one dude through is fridge, there is a certain plausibility to the entity.
And regarding typewriters -- I wrote that first book when I was a teenager, and they were plentiful then. Apparently Woody Allen still uses the typewriter he bought in the 40s to write all his manuscripts, which I find hard to imagine, because the computer just makes it so much easier.
Phil wrote: "Geek writer question, Mark. Pantser or plotter? Do you fully outline all the scenes before writing or do you start writing and see where it goes. If you fully outline, is there a story structure..."I'm an outline-pantser. I usually have a firm idea of how the book ends and begins, and I leave enough room for interesting discovery in the middle. (And sometimes that changes the ending and/or causes me to end up under my desk, hugging my knees to my chest, weeping. Whiskey is helpful in these situations too.)
This one was meant to be Hero's Journey, though I have written "Save the Cat" too (Marvellous Hairy), and a mix of both (The Amadeus Net).
Hello,First off, I'd like to thank Mark and TNBBC for the opportunity to read The Fridgularity. Though humorous, the story is thought provoking as well; while I'm not as dependent as Will (I don't frequent many social media sites), I rely heavily on the Internet. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't use it, whether it's at work or on my personal time.
Though I'm not as big a font snob as Blake, I did find his attitude funny since I can get like that sometimes. How did you decide on the feelings/attitudes that the fonts evoked? As I read the book I contemplated on my feelings regarding Comic Sans, a font I used to love when I was younger but now when I see it used I, in a knee-jerk fashion, don't take it (advertisement, notice, etc.) and/or the person using the font seriously. If you were tasked with the all-important duty of crafting or designating a sarcasm font (a dire need in this online culture), how would you design it or what existing font would you use?
Marie, there is a punctuation mark for sarcasm. The SarcMarkhttp://02d9656.netsoljsp.com/SarcMark...
I always wonder how authors come up with names for their characters. How do you come up with their names? Particularly the name Lyca?
I'm back again.Marie, I have no idea how I would go about designing a super-sarcastic font. The SarcMark is an excellent start, that's for sure. My graphic design skills are limited to Photoshop and CSS, so I don't know that I would have the chops to create letterforms on my own.
I did, however, do some reading before I decided to attribute ... wait this is probably a spoiler. (view spoiler)
To be honest, I'm not nearly as big a font nerd as Blake either, but I do teach web design, so I am aware of typefaces and the effect they have on our emotions.
I always wonder how authors come up with names for their characters. How do you come up with their names? Particularly the name Lyca?
Except for Zathir, all of the character names mean something. Sometimes they're a hidden code, sometimes a pun, and sometimes they're just a pointer to some kind of thematic link I'd like to make. Lyca, for example is the latter. (view spoiler)
I just finished the book a few days ago. It would have been great to have all the fonts in the book. I really appreciated your use or irony and the way that the Internet was a mechanism to destroying ourselves. I'm being intentionally vague here. Was there a specific event or story in recent years that served to inspire you for the topc?
The book is really a great way to think about the world as we know it. For example, people seemed so minimally interactive with what was around them! Which really is a great metaphor for how much we can miss when we are so attached to our phones, tablets, kindles, etc. and like some others I am curious about the roll of see in the book. Especially when the Internet "takes over"...tell us the motivation :)
Good questions, Kristen!As I mentioned at the top here, a lot of my motivation comes out of watching my students get more and more dependent on their social media and devices -- and then recognizing the same pattern in my own behaviors.
Does the following scenario sound familiar to any of you?
You are reading something online, let's say a really fascinating long article on Slate or Salon, or someplace similar -- an article that is about something you care about quite deeply. You read the first paragraph, and think, "I'm loving this, what a great article," and then dive into the second paragraph. But something happens to you on the way to the third, or maybe the fourth paragraph. Despite your interest, you're mouse is moving towards your email, or your Twitter account, or Facebook, and before you know it, you've left behind the article that actually had your interest, that was about a topic that you care about, and now you're Tweeting about grumpy cat.
Anyone?
I read Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, and he had the same experience. And I thought, what happens when we have this taken away? What happens to the people who've experienced nothing else?
That's one of the underlying motivations of telling this story. As you say, a cautionary tale.
Oh, and I had the fonts listed above too: you can find the fonts of Zathir, here.
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I also think social media and internet addictions are both hilarious and scary at the exact same time and that is why this book is ripe for conversation!
As for me, read an article ALL THE WAY THROUGH? Mark, haven't you heard that all the relevant information for any article that is written has been covered in the first two paragraphs because everyone knows that our attention spans suck (where's that snarcMark when you need it!)
The Internet distracts me way too much. This is a frequent occurrence at work (I shouldn't be admitting that, but we can all keep a secret here, I hope!): I'm in the middle of typing an e-mail to a colleague or responding to a message in my inbox when my attention just drifts to random websites that I simply MUST check right at that moment (Goodreads, Cute Overload, Daily Mail, WinterIsComing.net (I'm a big A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones fan), etc.), then five (or more) minutes later, I see the window where I was composing my message and I say to myself, "I thought I sent this already!"
I write for a social media news site, so I often run across stories about new social networks popping up, etc. It terrifies me that social media is how people get a lot of their news. (There's a new Pew Research State of the Media Report, and I think it was close to 50% of people get news from Social Media). Given the Filter Bubble effect, that just scares me. Clay Johnson calls it Epistemic Closure (Epistemic means cognitive). In other words, if you only see things that reinforce your beliefs due to the filter bubble, then you'll get into a loop where that's the only information you believe. (I've linked to books discussed at the bottom of this post.) Mark, On a lighter note: Did you consider putting Zathir's words in the fonts he was using? Was it a publishing limitation, or just a choice you made?
The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You
The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption
Thanks the for the links Joe. I've read about the filter bubble before, and the news issue was one that concerned me while I was writing the book. Excluding a brief period of history, we've always had our filter bubbles -- most newspapers, for example, started out as the mouthpieces for political parties/perspectives. The problem now is just how extreme the filter has become.And on the font front, I did, indeed, consider using the actual fonts, but it seemed quite distracting. (Also, less readable.) There is also the added problem that it would not work in the ebook and audio book formats (I have not done the latter yet, but I do plan to at some point.)
I agree Mark, I think using different fonts might've been a bit distracting
I'd like to add that I really enjoyed Blake and Lyca's relationship. I actually wish that area had been explored a bit more, but with saving the world and everything, I can understand why that's not really a priority :)
I'm glad you did, Marie. In my view, that is the most important relationship in the book. (That is a highly debatable -- if not controversial -- point, by the way.) I'd be interested to hear what you guys think.And Heather, I did actually try a couple of pages of dialog with the different typefaces. I just couldn't take it, especially when Zathir slipped into Gigi.
I definitely agree, Mark. I love how they are each other's family and how they hold each other in high regard. Daphne said it best later on in the book.What made you decide not to make Lyca straight? Did the idea of a romantic relationship between her and Blake cross your mind at all?
The Next Best Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You (other topics)The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption (other topics)
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (other topics)
Marvellous Hairy: -a novel in five fractals- (other topics)
The Amadeus Net (other topics)
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Next month's Author/Reader Discussion novel is the wonderfully twisted, futuristic The Fridgularity by Mark A Rayner.
Mark have given us 10 copies of the ebook (any format) and 2 print copies INTERNATIONALLY....
I loved this book if you are a social media junkie, I know you will too. Comment on the blog to throw your name in the hat to win....
http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...