So I have a dream in a drunken haze of my friend Brendan's (Dr. Strangehug) birthday. It starts out with science granting us a marvelous new way of copying books. It's a huge vat of clear goo. You submerge the book you have into it, and 20 minutes later, an exact copy of the book is created next to it, except it's on that crappy computer paper from the 1980s and it's stapled together. I say, "Cool!" when I see this happen, but the person teaching me is more skeptical, saying, "Yeah, well, it ain't so great. If you don't let it dry all the way, the ink smears."
Then there is a campaign to stop book piracy using this method. As if kids downloading the new Justin Timberlake song are gonna start running off copies of Moby Dick to screw the evil book industry. At the end, I remember thinking, "What if I put something ELSE in the gel?"
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3 comments:
book replicator?
Deduct 50 cool points from Manley.
Yeah, well, you'll be sorry when you're reading one of my slimy replicated books. THEN we'll see who's cool.
I don't like this idea of genetically engineered books. Just one more thing that can give you cancer.
Not to mention the inevitable mutations. Imagine a literary world in which mutated copies of The Metamorphosis contain an extra chapter in which the Kaiser attacks Gregor Samsa with a giant fly-swatter. Sure, it'd be great reading, but it would also change the entire dynamic of the story from morbid alienation and emotion oblivion to a really funny tale about a guy in a pointy helmet trying to smush a huge bug with a swatter the size of a howitzer.
You know, maybe I've been too harsh on this book-cloning idea...
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