Starship Titanic is the greatest, most fabulous, most technologically advanced interstellar cruise line ever built. It is like a cross between the Queen Mary, the Chrysler Building, Tutankhamen's tomb, and Venice. Furthermore, it cannot possibly go wrong. . . .
Sadly, however, seconds after its launch it undergoes SMEF, or Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure. And disappears.
Except, everything's got to be somewhere.
Coming home that night, on a little known planet called Earth, Dan and Lucy Gibson find something very large and very, very shiny sticking into their house. . .
The idea for Starship Titanic first surfaced in the way that a lot of ideas originate, as a mere couple of sentences out of nowhere. Years ago it was just a little digression in Life, the Universe and Everything. I said that the Starship Titanic had, shortly into its maiden voyage, undergone Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure. It's just one of those bits that you put in while you are waiting for the plot to develop. You think, 'Well, I'll develop another quick plot while I'm about it.' So it sat there as a couple of sentences in L, U & E and after a while I thought, 'Well, I think there is a little bit more to this idea,' and tossed it around for a while. At one point I even considered developing it as a novel in itself and then thought, no, it sounded too much like a good idea, and I'm always wary of those.
In the mid eighties I did a text-only computer game version of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide with a company called Infocom. I had a lot of fun working on it. The player gets caught up in a virtual conversation with the machine. In writing such a thing you are trying to imagine and prepare for the reactions of a virtual audience.
There's a lot you can do with text, as several thousand years of human culture can attest, but it seemed to me that what the computer enabled us to do was to reach back to the days before printing and recreate the old art of interactive storytelling. They didn't call it interactive in those days, of course. They didn't know of anything that wasn't interactive, so they didn't need a special name for it. When someone stood up and recounted a story, the audience responded. And the storyteller responded right back at them. It was the coming of print that took away the interactive element, and locked stories into rigid forms. It seemed to me that interactive computer-mediated storytelling might be able to combine some of the best of both forms. However, while the medium was still in its infancy, along came computer graphics and killed it off. Text may be a very rich medium, but it looks boring on the screen. It doesn't flash and hop about and so it had to give way to things that did.
Название: Starship Titanic Автор: Jones Terry Издательство: Аудиокнига своими руками Эту книгу озвучил: Simon & Schuster Audio Год выпуска: 2015 Жанр: General Fantasy, Фантастика Аудио кодек: mp3 Битрейт аудио: 32 kbps Продолжительность: 05:34:00 Качество: Отличное Размер: 68.67 Мб Язык: Английский
