Introduction: Major Spacer in the 21st Century
THIS IS THE OTHER ORIGINAL in this here ebook.
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The history of television was full of starts, stops, fights, backstabs, and the FCC coming down like a ton of bricks on people, even more than radio had been.
It was ready to go in the late ’30s (it broadcast the opening of the 1939 World’s Fair; NHK in Japan was going to broadcast the 1940 Olympics in Tokyo to department stores and theaters so the Japanese would leave the stadium to the gai-jin; there was a small worldwide unpleasantness that canceled them both; the BBC TV service was up and running in 1936 and shut down for the duration September 3, 1939, while showing a Mickey Mouse cartoon . . .). Experimental American television went off the air on December 8, 1941, and only started up again in 1946.
There were punchouts over airwaves, over channels and content; the big fight was over formats. There was the fight over color: When it started, the FCC was going to make everybody junk their TVs again (after just junking the prewar shortwave/FM sets mentioned last story)—easy to do when there were 10,000 sets, like in 1946; not so easy when there were ten million of them in 1950. In the middle of The Freeze from 1948-1952, when the FCC issued no new TV licenses, it was going to make everybody go back to an incompatible mechanical color TV system (I’m not making this up). Cooler heads (and those with NBC stock) prevailed, and held out for color-compatible broadcasting, and so on and so forth. Sound—HDTV—familiar?
Meanwhile, those who’d gotten a pre-1948 license pioneered on, showing old Brit and independent American movies—all the major studios held out from leasing movies to TV and made fun of it, and then tried everything—3-D, wide-screen, stereo, Aromarama and Smell-0-Vision, and blipverts—to get the audience back.
Sure, some of it was very bad (“radio with pictures”), comparable to the first couple of years of sound in the movies. But here and there, good stuff got done. There’s Kovacs over there. Some of the best writing ever done in this country was for the early Box.
Take a look at the TV work of Serling, Chayevsky, Vidal, Howard Rodman; all that Golden Age of Television stuff you always hear about—some of it was really good. The local stuff: There’s Zacherly in Philadelphia (and Bill Camfield in Ft. Worth—see “Occam’s Ducks”)—hundreds of people out there, figuring it out, what works, what doesn’t, what you could do live; wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could only record it some way? (Kinescopes—films of the TV monitors—always looked like they were made by your Uncle Norris fifteen minutes after getting his first Bell & Howell. . . .)
It was a new world; they soon found it wasn’t Radio with Pictures at all, or like anything else. It was Television. And they were it.
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This story shows what happens when you get a way swell idea, way late. It came to me in April of 1999, when everybody was waiting for Y2K (remember?). I wanted a story about the year 2000, but not about Y2K. Just set there.
I wrote it for a reading I was doing at the University Bookstore (University of Washington), with lots of hand props and primitive visual aids.
There was about one editor who could get it into print pronto, i.e., before 2000 A.D. I sent it to him. He wanted a few changes. I was so torqued (and I mean that in the original, good way) on the story that instead of doing a lot of changes to a novelette, I wrote him a whole other new short story (“London, Paris, Banana . . .”) for the rent that month. I sent this to another editor; there were revisions (short pause here while (1) the World SF Convention in Australia interferes, and (2) the USPS takes fifteen days to deliver a two-day Priority Mail manuscript); I sent it to a third editor whose venue dropped dead two days before the manuscript got there. We are now in December 1999. Since it was written for the April 1999 rent, and we are now almost in 2000, I said “Screw this, I don’t need the aggravation.”
What I merely wanted to do was show a major societal change, and how media-dependent we had become, and media-conscious we were since the early days of television broadcasting.
And I wanted to show it mostly through the life of one person; there at the beginning, maybe there at the end, too.