Do you recall my blessing you, a couple of weeks ago, with about 1,300 words on podcasting and its relevance to the practice of struggling authorship?
Maybe not enough was said.
In that post I mentioned that podcasters are the Arthur Godfreys of today. I could have gone on to call them latter-day Tom Bodetts, as well. But for once, I exercised restraint. (Please count that in my favor, come the Final Tabulation.)
You may or may not know Tom Bodett as the guy from Motel 6 who says “we’ll leave the light on for ya.” The motel chain’s ad agency hired him because somebody heard his voice on NPR and thought he sounded like a guy who would stay at Motel 6. You know, a regular joe.
But I digress. What I was going to say is that podcasting makes me think of pod people, as in, you know, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Actually, the locus classicus of the species was just The Body Snatchers, a 1955 book by Jack Finney (one of Your New Favorite Writer’s favorite writers, by the way). When they made it into a movie in 1956, they added “Invasion of.”
Finney’s book was a sweet little story of spores or seeds or something that drift in from outer space, ripen into duplicate human beings inside large pods, and systematically replace the actual people they have emulated. Pretty soon the protagonist catches on, and then it’s a race to prevent all of Mill Valley, California, being replaced by a colony of soulless avatars. Once the premise is developed, Finney pretty much leaves off any pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo and just tells the thrills and spills of the human resistance movement fighting off the invaders. The book has been criticized for its want of Heinleinian (Asimovian? Clarkeian?) authenticity, but once Jack Finney starts spinning a yarn, it’s hard not to get tangled in its web . . . or pod, or whatever.
Which brought to mind the fact that podcasting is one of those arcane disciplines that rely on the development of modern, computer-based technology in order to have any basis at all. That’s only one of the things that makes it daunting to yours truly—a Twenty-first Century Man with the technical know-how of the Tooth Fairy.
I am firmly convinced, for example, that when my telephone dims its screen to 90 percent darkness without my commanding it to do so, it is exercising a purblind, autonomous, malicious will of its own.
And yet, Jack Finney stands as a shining example. A man with only a general liberal arts background, and some experience in the advertising business, he made a good living—as well as contributing to American mid-century culture—by writing stories that often fell under the science fiction rubric. He pulled it off by never letting pesky scientific details get in the way of a good story. His Time and Again stands as one of the great time-travel novels despite its resolute refusal to offer even a Rube Goldberg-style explanation of how time travel was supposed to have worked. He just massaged his protagonist’s psyche until he found himself in the 1890s.
Some chutzpah.
This is enough to give a techno-klutz renewed hope. If Jack Finney can do science fiction, surely Larry F. Sommers can wiggle cyberspace enough to snag a few guest shots on literary podcasts.
Stay tuned for further developments, but don’t stop the presses. Yet.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
