Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

In Print is Dead, in the chapter about eBooks, I describe how we usually find fault with science fiction books and movies:

In every book or film or piece of art from the last century that has depicted the future – from Jules Verne to George Lucas – we usually fault it twice: first for the things that didn’t come true, and then for failing to see the myriad of changes that did take place.

But last week, as I read The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick, I was struck by a few passages that seemed to almost perfectly portray aspects of our current digital age.

Published in 1981, The Divine Invasion is part of Dick’s VALIS trilogy. Comprising the last three novels published before Dick’s untimely death at the age of 53, the books were based on a religious experience that Dick had in 1974 when he felt he was zapped by a pink laser that he believed was extraterrestrial in origin.

At one point in The Divine Invasion, a character named Emmanuel (who is actually God in the body of a child) is given an electronic device at his school. Called an “information slate,” the gadget sounds an awful lot like either an eBook device or a Tablet PC. Made by I.B.M. (which, in the future, is part of the government), Dick describes each slate as having a “pale gray surface” and containing “common microcircuitry” (which makes it sort of seem like a Kindle). Each student is given one, and each device is “plugged into the school” (which sounds a lot like either an intranet if not the Internet). Plus, the fact that every child gets one reminded me of this story from last week in The New York Times about how colleges are handing out iPods to freshman. The slates quiz the students, answering questions and giving out information.

In the early ‘80s — at the dawn of the computer revolution — this could have easily been imagined. The slates Dick describes sound a bit like an expansion of any number of gizmos that existed back then, even my beloved Dataman that I had in elementary school. The big difference is that none of those devices were networked with other devices (the closest I came to that was my Coleco Head-to-Head Football). More interesting than this is a description a few pages later about a holographic (and thus obviously electronic) version of the Bible:

…the Bible expressed as layers at different depths within the hologram, each layer according to age. The total structure of Scripture formed, then, a three-dimensional cosmos that could be viewed from any angle and its contents read. According to the title of the axis of observation, different messages could be extracted. Thus Scripture yielded up an infinitude of knowledge that ceaselessly changed. It became a wondrous work of art, beautiful to the eye, and incredible in its pulsations of color.

This is a pretty wonderful description, and it kind of reminds me of the online version of Gamer Theory from last year where each paragraph had a graphical and color-coded representation on the screen. If that website were able to be portrayed in 3D, and was accessed on something like an iPhone, where you could flip through its layers and turn it over and around with your fingers, then you’d be close to experiencing what Dick had envisioned.

But even more interesting than even this is that, a decade before the birth of anything resembling the Internet that we know today, and twenty years before the birth of Wikipedia, Dick writes about a kind of Creative Commons online version of the Bible, a living document which anyone can add to.

As the narrator describes:

It was an open hologram. New information could be fed into it. Emmanuel wondered about that, but he said nothing…

What he could do, however, was type out on the keyboard linked to the hologram a few crucial words of Scripture, whereupon the hologram would align itself from the vantage point of the citation, along all its spacial axes. Thus the entire text of the Bible would be focused in a relationship to the typed-out information.

Emmanuel, being God, of course has a few things to add to the Bible. However, he resists the temptation:

He wanted to feed that into the hologram of the Bible, as an addendum, but he knew that he should not. How would it alter the total hologram? he wondered. To add to the Torah that God enjoys joyful sport … Strange, he thought, that I can’t add that. Someone must add it; it has to be there, in Scripture. Someday.

In an age of living documents, and the constant updating of blogs, the day of people correcting and adding content to websites is today. Too bad Philip K. Dick isn’t alive to see it.