JakeSchuster aka Ostroff
11-17-2004, 08:56 AM
From the Independent (UK):
ScriptGenerator©®™
by Philippe Vasset, trans. Jane Metter
Writers - who needs them anyway?
By Nicholas Royle
12 November 2004
A geologist working in Liberia unearths a fragment of a manual for a piece of computer software, ScriptGenerator©®™, which purports to herald a new era in the creation of literature, cinema and television programmes. Provided they buy ScriptGenerator©®™, publishers, film producers and TV execs will no longer have to deal with pesky authors. The software will write scripts that can be tweaked for whichever medium or platform is appropriate.
Determined to locate the rest of the manual, the narrator sets off on an increasingly fantastical journey that will take him to Antwerp, Felixstowe, Rotterdam and, among other places, a Swiss hotel where the swimming pool is filled with milk.
Philippe Vasset's first novel is sly and clever, in many ways quite brilliant, and totally critic-proof. The death of the author is hardly an original concept but, as the manual tells us, "commercially, novelty in itself counts for much less than the illusion of novelty." The novel intercuts sections of the quest with pages from the manual, the former pitched somewhere between the glacial desperation of Anna Kavan's Ice and the dreamlike scenarios of Alain Robbe-Grillet.
By the time the narrator is holed up in his Swiss hotel, it is becoming hard to extract much sense from his account. We begin to wonder if we are lost in a script generated by corrupted software. As for the manual, its features are not unfamiliar. To turn a book into a film, reduce the number of plotlines; consider a story in which terrorists target monuments in a country, having been trained and funded by that country; a book about a young woman's sexual adventures "has every likelihood of selling well, particularly in France".
It begins to dawn on the reader that the manual, and Vasset, is not telling us anything we don't already know. Indeed, it's not difficult to think of several novelists whose work reads very much as if they had access to ScriptGenerator©®™'s "Zeitgeist index", which monitors the frequency with which themes and imagery appear in the media.
When we learn that the software will automate the marketing process, appending the first chapter of a forthcoming book to the end of the current one, and create authors, using actors to provide a public face, we realise that ScriptGenerator©®™ is already in use among publishers around the world. And the moment we understand that Vasset knows we realise that - that he knows we know there is already "an effective ruling class in the entertainment industry" - is the moment we decide he has written a perfect novel: a hermetically sealed artefact, acutely observed, viciously satirical and profoundly satisfying.
ScriptGenerator©®™
by Philippe Vasset, trans. Jane Metter
Writers - who needs them anyway?
By Nicholas Royle
12 November 2004
A geologist working in Liberia unearths a fragment of a manual for a piece of computer software, ScriptGenerator©®™, which purports to herald a new era in the creation of literature, cinema and television programmes. Provided they buy ScriptGenerator©®™, publishers, film producers and TV execs will no longer have to deal with pesky authors. The software will write scripts that can be tweaked for whichever medium or platform is appropriate.
Determined to locate the rest of the manual, the narrator sets off on an increasingly fantastical journey that will take him to Antwerp, Felixstowe, Rotterdam and, among other places, a Swiss hotel where the swimming pool is filled with milk.
Philippe Vasset's first novel is sly and clever, in many ways quite brilliant, and totally critic-proof. The death of the author is hardly an original concept but, as the manual tells us, "commercially, novelty in itself counts for much less than the illusion of novelty." The novel intercuts sections of the quest with pages from the manual, the former pitched somewhere between the glacial desperation of Anna Kavan's Ice and the dreamlike scenarios of Alain Robbe-Grillet.
By the time the narrator is holed up in his Swiss hotel, it is becoming hard to extract much sense from his account. We begin to wonder if we are lost in a script generated by corrupted software. As for the manual, its features are not unfamiliar. To turn a book into a film, reduce the number of plotlines; consider a story in which terrorists target monuments in a country, having been trained and funded by that country; a book about a young woman's sexual adventures "has every likelihood of selling well, particularly in France".
It begins to dawn on the reader that the manual, and Vasset, is not telling us anything we don't already know. Indeed, it's not difficult to think of several novelists whose work reads very much as if they had access to ScriptGenerator©®™'s "Zeitgeist index", which monitors the frequency with which themes and imagery appear in the media.
When we learn that the software will automate the marketing process, appending the first chapter of a forthcoming book to the end of the current one, and create authors, using actors to provide a public face, we realise that ScriptGenerator©®™ is already in use among publishers around the world. And the moment we understand that Vasset knows we realise that - that he knows we know there is already "an effective ruling class in the entertainment industry" - is the moment we decide he has written a perfect novel: a hermetically sealed artefact, acutely observed, viciously satirical and profoundly satisfying.