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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: IF-like passage in a book I'm reading
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Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 00:45:42 GMT
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Dennis G. Jerz <JerzDG@uwec.edu> wrote:
>I haven't read the book yet, but here's a quote from what might be the
>passage David mentioned. I found it in a review of the book on
>
>http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/05/24/powers/index1.html
>
>"You pace about, astonished. From the once-mythical far side of this cube,
>you look back across the ocean of air. Seeing your corner like this, from a
>distance -- your mattress, radiator, chain; the grubby country that
>swallowed you entire -- it looks bounded, known, livable."

I have posted before about how I suspect the second-person
present tense device in IF derives from the narrative mode
of pencil-and-paper RPGs, although I suspect only Crowther
knows for sure. I'm not sure what the source of that tense
is prior to RPGs; did people construct stories out loud in
that mode of speech?

Although the "locked cell" situation described above is rather
IF-ish (cliche, even), I have to wonder whether everyone would
still leap to this conclusion if an author who had never heard
of IF had produced a section in second-person present tense as
an experiment. Certainly if a familiar-with-IF author chose to
do this, he or she would have to consider what effect it would
have on people unfamiliar with IF; and if that effect is still
an interesting one, couldn't an author unfamiliar with IF also
recognize the possibility of that effect and choose to produce
it in every reader, not realizing that some readers would have
prior familiarity with it and have a different reaction?

SeanB
(who has no clue what effect certain "odd" music tracks on the "Wall
Street" soundtrack were intended to have on the viewer, since he had
already been listening to "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" for years)
