Now I'm Everywhere, Josh

I no longer have a bookshelf.

I still have many of the same books, but now they’re all digital. Assuming my Kindle is charged, the Internet is working, and Amazon hasn’t recalled the book or closed my account, I can read almost any title I want at any time. It’s very convenient, but it’s definitely missing something.

When I have children, I imagine they’ll sit with a Kindle or iPad in their laps and scroll through an endless sea of titles, looking at the pretty covers, jumping in and out of stories until they find what they’re looking for.

They won’t have the same experience I had as a child: standing in front of the towering bookshelf in the hallway, staring at the spines of shiny-jacketed books forming a frozen wave across shelves of stained wood. They’ll never pull down a book, take off the jacket (and put it back on the shelf–my Dad’s only rule about his books), take it to the comfy chair in the living room, and open to that first page without having Candy Crush only two clicks away.

The other day, I was going through another round of downsizing, and I started thinking about all the great titles my parents had on their bookshelf. If I’m going to be any kind of parent, I’ll need to have the same books that inspired me available to inspire my children. I have Replay and IT and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. What else is there?

Shadows by John Saul

Despite reading Shadows over and over again as a child, I had not read it again since my teen years. I remembered the story only vaguely: smart kids, virtual reality, brains. As I searched for it on Amazon, I thought to myself, Man, that must not have been a very memorable book if I could forget all about it for twenty years.

How very wrong I was.

Within the first five paragraphs, I realized that while I may not have consciously remembered this story, it turns out I have been ripping off John Saul for years.

There is something about Saul’s writing that feels immediately comfortable and familiar. Maybe it’s because it was one of the first examples of adult writing I’d encountered as a kid, or maybe because it’s just a simple, well-developed voice speaking to me from the page.

At first, I thought it was just Saul’s style of writing I had been copying all these years. As it turns out, I’ve also been stealing his ideas.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, he’s the one who put those ideas in my head.

I Don’t Plead The Fifth

Shadows has a great opening:

Shadows.

Timmy Evans woke up in shadows.

Shadows so deep he saw nothing.

Shadows that surrounded Timmy, wrapping him in a blackness so dense that he wondered if the vague memory of light that hovered on the edges of his memory was perhaps only a dream.

I first read that in ’92 or ’93. Twenty years later, I wrote this:

The smell of ether came first.

Kenneth Barnes knew by the sweet smell that vaguely resembled blueberry cotton candy that he was now stuck somewhere between worlds, a packet still in transit from Terrareal to the virtual world of VNet. Though he couldn’t see it, he felt the ether swirl around him, moving like a fog whose density and speed changed with every artificial breath he took, as if the ether were a womb adjusting to a new presence, intruding and withdrawing as the Barnes avatar took shape.

The absence of light played tricks on his eyes, bringing shapes out of the ether that weren’t really there: aged brick, gray and covered in some dark, slimy growth; blue-white LEDs flicking along a guide strip; ripples in a puddle of water, pushing past a half-finished cigarette. Ken tried to hold onto the images, but each one faded before he could fully examine it, slipping through his fingers like sand.

I can’t count how many times I’ve had a character awaken in a dark construct the way Timmy Evans awakes in his shadows. The image of being stuck in absolute darkness just feels so iconic, a foundation of any good story.

If that’s not enough coincidence for you, here’s another one:

How had he gotten there?

Instinctively, he began counting.

Even as he’d grown up and begun to talk of other things, the numbers were always there, streaming through his mind.

Now, in the terrifying darkness into which he’d awakened, he began to play with the numbers once more.

And just this month, during a free write:

“Looks like she’s seen some action,” said Jeff, turning the P226 over in his hands. He traced a scratch running along the left side of the barrel with his finger. “From your personal stash?”

Gordon nodded as mechanical arms in the video library of his mind sought out the tapes of a night some twenty years ago when the Sig and its identical brother had last seen action. Before the imaginary vidscreen could flicker on, Gordon began to count, running through an ascending list of integers as quickly as possible. It kept his brain busy until the impulse to relive the past faded from conscious thought.

These are two. There are dozens. It is absolutely amazing (to me).

The Path Chooses You

Considering the types of books I was reading as a kid, I could have ended up writing almost anything. Maybe something farcical like Sideways Stories from Wayside School, or horror like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I could have even ended up writing erotica thanks to a copy of Delta of Venus I probably shouldn’t have had access to at that age.

But no. I write about technology and identity and relationships.

Replay showed me the power of writing, but it was Shadows that sparked a question in my mind that I have been struggling to answer ever since: How do we move past our current existence? Do we upload our mind into a computer and live in virtual reality? Do we use augmented reality to escape the confines of our true self? It’s the same question in every novel I’ve written, even Perion Synthetics:

How do we escape our bodies?

Being born in the 80’s, the answer is probably: you can’t. The technology is on the horizon, but we’ve come far too late, and the sun is going to set before we reach it. If the profoundness of that realization is not worth writing about, then I don’t know what is.

Reading Shadows again has led me to another realization:

Replay is the reason I write; Shadows is the reason I write Science Fiction.

In Sum

If you haven’t read Shadows, you should definitely give it a shot. The technology may be dated, but it’s amazing how many things Saul got right. Although not written for children, it is tame enough for your preteen. It certainly didn’t mess me up… or did it?

One note though: you may want to steer clear of the Kindle version. It is riddled with numerous, inexcusable typos that I don’t believe were in the print version. Someone did a fast and dirty reformat to make the Kindle version, and it really shows. This book deserves better.

Further Reading: johnsaul.com