I've been kicked off of the internet many times, and I've announced a miraculous return to the digital livin' on more than a few occasions. I'm guessing I'm up to 5.
For the past two months my ISP, Primus, has been sitting on its thumbs and enjoying it way too much to fix my internet connection. Finally, literally 58 days into The Great 'Net Scare of '05, the fixed the damn thing. Frickin' idiots.
This is also my 60th entry on this-here blog, not counting the old Starman site.
The subject, today, is Warren Ellis' Global Frequency, an inspired premise and a series that left me wanting more. Essentially, just to ruin the surprise, instead of a super-team that swoops down from the heavens to save us poor, pathetic mortals, the Global Frequency is a network of skilled people around the world who, when need be, respond to 'the call' (they all have funky cell phones) and use whatever skills they have to save lives. They're kind of like Thunder Birds for a posthumanist age.
I say 'posthumanist' because there's a wiff of the emboddied but the dislocated going on. These characters, and the cast changes every issue depending on who answers the call, are part of a mutually-beneficial, extended network, instead of a central hero or even a team of heroes. The book is essentially democratic. You get to save the day by merit, and you get to do it yourself. It combines the child-like fantasy of being the hero with a powerful socio-political message.
It's not quite totally decentred, unfortunately. That would have been a bit more of a writing challenge, but this series has two regular characters, the leader/organiser of the Global Frequency, Miranda Zero ('not her real name, but the only one you're getting'), and the network interface point (sexy punk chick named Aleph). Aleph has a base of operations somewhere under New York city, in which is housed her huge computers that manage the various interfaces, and Miranda seems to have inexaustable resources coming from somewhere.
I can imagine a low-tech, totally decentred version of this story. Simply a bunch of people with chat windows and cell phones and email who discover horrible things happening and, instead of relying on a central source of organisation or funding, rely on the power of the network. Need a helicopter? There's a member of the Global Frequency who flies a news chopper ten blocks away. Need someone to translate Sanskrit? There's a professor from Egypt on the line for you. You could do all of this without a central character or any 'marvelous toys.' As for the origins of the whole thing, maybe nobody knows? The creation of high-tech communications technology might just 'give rise' to these kinds of global communities, which is itself a fun idea to play with in a sci-fi book.
Of course, totally decentering the story would take some of the fun out of it from a writer's and a reader's standpoint, but it would also inject a certain kind of fun back into it, not to mention creating a truly unified premis.
Posted by orion at October 6, 2005 9:25 AM | TrackBack