already sinking into oblivion (like my novel). Most people these days would be hard pressed to name the biggest-selling novelists of the early 20th century, let alone the dilettantes of the 19th century, aside from those they were forced at gunpoint to study at school. Patrick Dennis was a best-selling novelist in the 1950s, but by the
time the 1970s rolled around he was already a nobody, or rather, a forgotten butler for the CEO of McDonalds. And in spite of Stephen King’s colossal output and millions of copies sold, he could well go the same way. Maybe not as a butler for Mark Zuckerberg, yet those 82 or so novels of his and those countless film adaptations could be all but forgotten in a soon-ish Future World preoccupied with a completely different species of pop culture. Ernest Cline resurrects the glories of early video games in his novel Ready Player One, which was adapted by Steven Spielberg. In this dystopian, if not prosaic future, video games and other pop culture of the distant past are something to be idolised and avidly memorised. Cline lays on the references thick and fast and just doesn’t let up. The cinematic version is fairly slick and a lot of fun, yet upon reading the novel I found myself sometimes drowning in these pop culture references, like I was wading through some bloated cut-and-paste Wikipedia nerd-school assignment. Yeah, I admit it, I’m jealous of his success. Then again, according to Wikipedia the novel did receive quite a few scathing reviews for its poor-quality writing and the book’s “Peter-Pan-ish infatuation with childishness, which comes coated in a stench of stale Doritos, Jolt Cola and lowbrow smugness”. The Daily Beast doesn’t pull its punches.
All sci-fi stories set in the future must forge their own path when dealing with pop culture of the current times. In Star Trek Beyond (2016), Simon Pegg and friends are able to work into the plot the Beastie Boys’ hit song Sabotage by joking about it being classical music. Still, die-hard trekkie fans complained that the rap song was woefully out of place. But it’s actually a common trope in sci-fi: misconstruing a piece of ancient pop culture for something else and making a joke out of it. The list of novels and films that get away with this trope in one form or another is as long as a Star Wars prequel with a young Darth Vader in love. Sometimes the joke is lost on reviewers though, even outside of sci fi. Bret Easton Ellis, for one, was slammed for getting his music references all wrong in his controversial novel American Psycho (spoiler: he did it on purpose to show what a vacuous shit his serial-killing yuppie was).
Like the hero of Ready Player One, the main protagonist of The Swimming Pool from Another Freaking Dimension has one foot in the future, another in the pop culture of the past. Rather than video games, Dezzy’s weakness is for horror movies of the 1970s and 80s. Set in the 2040s, the novel gets around a lot of its references simply by attributing them to Dezzy’s quirky father, who has passed away and left him with a whole lot of 80s baggage. Other references are justified by Dezzy’s film academy days or his hazy knowledge of these old movies, similarly to the way that Sabotage is viewed as classical music in Star Trek. And a little like American Psycho, Dezzy’s misinterpretations of past movies is sometimes intentional, just to make a crappy joke. Other times the misunderstanding is genuine, such as when Dezzy and Sonia first discover those steampunk smartglasses. Thus, I’ll leave you with a quote from that passage to finish off with:
“What spectrum are these things working in anyway?” Sonia had the headset in her hands, inspecting the various lenses in the weak light of that UV cluster. “It can’t be
just infrared. Maybe it’s some other wavelength reacting with the UV, creating this optical illusion. Because that’s all this is, a clever optical illusion, right?”
“This is no illusion,” I said, actually afraid to approach that black archway, which seemed to be vibrating ever so minutely within my granulated vision.
“Okay, not really an illusion,” she conceded. “But maybe these goggles function like the viewfinders in one of those hidden object games my grandfather used to play on his old iPad. You know, if you got stuck you got to use a magnifying glass or something similar to find the last hidden objects.”
“Viewfinders,” I echoed, amused by the name. “My dad, too, played those early detective games, along with some first-person shooter called Candy Crush.”
All sci-fi stories set in the future must forge their own path when dealing with pop culture of the current times. In Star Trek Beyond (2016), Simon Pegg and friends are able to work into the plot the Beastie Boys’ hit song Sabotage by joking about it being classical music. Still, die-hard trekkie fans complained that the rap song was woefully out of place. But it’s actually a common trope in sci-fi: misconstruing a piece of ancient pop culture for something else and making a joke out of it. The list of novels and films that get away with this trope in one form or another is as long as a Star Wars prequel with a young Darth Vader in love. Sometimes the joke is lost on reviewers though, even outside of sci fi. Bret Easton Ellis, for one, was slammed for getting his music references all wrong in his controversial novel American Psycho (spoiler: he did it on purpose to show what a vacuous shit his serial-killing yuppie was).
Like the hero of Ready Player One, the main protagonist of The Swimming Pool from Another Freaking Dimension has one foot in the future, another in the pop culture of the past. Rather than video games, Dezzy’s weakness is for horror movies of the 1970s and 80s. Set in the 2040s, the novel gets around a lot of its references simply by attributing them to Dezzy’s quirky father, who has passed away and left him with a whole lot of 80s baggage. Other references are justified by Dezzy’s film academy days or his hazy knowledge of these old movies, similarly to the way that Sabotage is viewed as classical music in Star Trek. And a little like American Psycho, Dezzy’s misinterpretations of past movies is sometimes intentional, just to make a crappy joke. Other times the misunderstanding is genuine, such as when Dezzy and Sonia first discover those steampunk smartglasses. Thus, I’ll leave you with a quote from that passage to finish off with:
“What spectrum are these things working in anyway?” Sonia had the headset in her hands, inspecting the various lenses in the weak light of that UV cluster. “It can’t be
“This is no illusion,” I said, actually afraid to approach that black archway, which seemed to be vibrating ever so minutely within my granulated vision.
“Okay, not really an illusion,” she conceded. “But maybe these goggles function like the viewfinders in one of those hidden object games my grandfather used to play on his old iPad. You know, if you got stuck you got to use a magnifying glass or something similar to find the last hidden objects.”
“Viewfinders,” I echoed, amused by the name. “My dad, too, played those early detective games, along with some first-person shooter called Candy Crush.”
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