The writers of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Grosse Pointe Blank and Sherlock Holmes have spent the last ten years searching the Mojave desert for Rocky II, a fake boulder put there by Ed Ruscha:
“A BBC crew filmed Ruscha during its creation for a 1980 documentary, which also captured him depositing the work somewhere in the desert, where it has apparently remained ever since, indistinguishable from all the other rocks around it. … Rocky II is so mysterious it neither appears on the call for information about missing artworks listed on the artist’s website, nor in the catalogue listing all his known works – almost as if its existence has been intentionally obscured.”
Tor explain why the future of publishing is short:
“When the book wars sweep across the galaxy, and the blood of publishers runs down the gutters of every interstellar metropolis, the resource we fight for will not be paper, or ink, or even money. It will be time. For our readers, time is the precious commodity they invest in every book they decide to purchase and read. But time is being ground down into smaller and smaller units, long nights of reflection replaced with fragmentary bursts of free time. It's just harder to make time for that thousand-page novel than it used to be, and there are more and more thousand-page novels to suffer from that temporal fragmentation. Enter the novella …”
“As a child I was always struck by The Time Machine, in particular the part at the end where he goes to the far future and everything has changed: there are the giant crabs and so on. I was always artistic as a kid. I remember at the age of 8 or 10 years old, drawing comic strips, and one of them was actually my own retelling of The Time Machine. I had fun creating my own future creatures that had evolved from those of the modern day. Not that there was any scientific point to it: it was just the background to the story. … Years later, I was watching a TV programme about tiger conservation with my Dad, he turned to me and said ‘Why save the tiger? The tiger will become extinct. Everything becomes extinct, other things evolve’. And I thought – that’s a very unhelpful attitude, but it started me on a learning curve about evolution, and I realised that he was right: everything does become extinct, other organisms develop to take their place. And I began to think to myself, if things become extinct, what evolves to take their place?”
Benjamin Myers on endangered punctuation in modern fiction:
“My aim in writing is to physically impact on readers. I like the idea of being able to quicken someone’s heart-rate who is, say, three thousand miles away – and maybe, three years in the future. Or perhaps make them sweat a bit. Or get their adrenaline going. To do that, I think a writer needs to be able to accelerate and decelerate when required, and stripping writing down to the bare bones can help. Taking out a lot of punctuation can make it more poetic too. The entire flow of Beastings changed when I decided to take out speech marks and commas. Instead of creating a stream-of-consciousness effect sentences instead became stubbier, blunter. Chiselled.”
I wrote a few words about the backs of things:
“We’ve held on to as much of the physicality of things as possible, little mementos that help us navigate abstract forms, familiarity holding our hand and reassuring us that technology isn't that scary after all. Cover artwork remains, even if its function has been diminished somewhat. It's the other side that's getting left behind in the big migration to our hard drives. Back covers, a rational but unfortunate omission from the future.”
That is all.