Book Trailers

I recently read Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Amazing, just like his Baroque Cycle, Cryptonomicon and Snowcrash. Although I'd love to see a movie adaptation, I realise that they are probably too complicated and too niche to ever get to Hollywood. Then, I found a trailer for Anathem online. But it wasn't for a movie, it was for the book:



I'd never heard of book trailers before. Seeing it after reading it was weird - some characters were different than I had imagined, but the re-construction of the fight scene is done word-for-word. I'm not sure how I feel about this. It had fairly high production values, and it was quite cool to see how other people visualised the scences. However, there's always the danger of being dissapointed by another person's idea of the book. For example, although I loved Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, I didn't much like the look and feel of the film.

However, at least with a film converstion, you have a chance to read the book first. Could book trailers start limiting our imaginaitons? Am I sounding a bit like an old person? Maybe. I started looking for other book trailers.

After hearing about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I was thrilled to see a well-polished trailer for Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters:



Although I couldn't find any other high-quality productions, I quite enjoyed the trailer for the children's book How to Save Your Tail, a re-telling of the 1001 Arabian Nights. It actually made me want to read the book. Brad Meltzer's trailer was also good fun, and looked like it was just made for fun too.

However, most of them were just text, pictures and a voice over (lamented by Phyllis Miller). Some have the tell-tale Windows Moviemaker blue background, others are a bit more snazzy, but ultimately are no more informative than a back-cover blurb. I found this one particularly annoying.

It turns out that book trailers are not a new thing. Here's an article from 2006 which discusses the difficulty of presenting images without influencing the way people percieve their characters. In a more recent post, Jonathan Fields argues that book trailers don't work because marketing advisors don't understand that a straight-up commercial approach won't get a trailer to go viral.

Actually, I quite like the idea, and hope it catches on. I'll be keeping an eye out for book trailers in the future.

Immersive Worlds

A Replicated Typo recently posted on how bad the new Sci-Fi series Defying Gravity is. Charles Stross's blog on approaches to Sci-Fi is cited, basically making the point that a lot of Sci-Fis add lazers to ordinary dramas without thinking about the consequences for the characters.

It's a good point that many sci-fi programs seem to have fancy technology just for looking at, without any of it changing the way the characters interact or think about the world. However, there are some TV Sci-Fi shows that build the world from the ground up. My favourite example is the Ghost in the Shell spin-off TV series Stand Alone Complex. The show follows a team of anti-terrorists in the year 2030, where society has changed in response to the invention of e-brains and cybernetics. I often got the feeling that Masamune Shirow did not create a world, just write about one he happened to visit at some point.

There are two things that make SAC feel like a total immersion in a different world. Firstly, because it's animated, there is no difference between 'real' and 'CGI'. That is, suspension of disbelief is easier. Secondly, the new technology has a direct affect on the lives of the characters. Not only does the proliferation of cybernetics have an effect on what it means to be human, there are new ways to interact, and new ways to break the law (mind-hacking). Similarly, Orwell's invention of 'Thought-Crime' in Nineteen-Eighty-Four created a culture with new pressures.

As a side-note, also similar to Nineteen-Eighty-Four, SAC looks at the balance between public privacy and public security. However, the heroes of SAC are constantly hindered by lack of surveillance, and the viewer comes to empathise with their need for more information, quite contrary to the reader's response to Winston Smith's situation.

Back to Defying Gravity, it's difficult to see how a small crew going on a single journey aroud the solar system would change a culture. Perhaps Defying Gravity will eventually get around to this. I don't doubt that space travel can change a society's perception of itself, but how different is it from the moon landings for the average person?

Here we get to the root of the distinction between immersive worlds and drama-driven worlds. In the drama-driven world, the big change usually only occurs for a small, elite group of people. For example, Defying Gravity. In an immersive world, the big difference is global and the protagonists are more ordinary people who must survive in it. For example, Nineteen-Eighty-Four or Ghost in the Shell.

Furthermore, the aims of both approaches now becomes apparent. Ordinary society + extraordinary people = drama. Ordinary people + extraordinary society = social commentary/satire. The examples continue: Heroes vs. Dawn of the Dead, Star-Trek vs. Neal Stephenson's Anathem, Dr. Who vs. Watchmen.

So, maybe it's just a lack of satire that A Recplicated Typo is missing. If so, you've got the formula now, so go out and make your own show.