In Stephen King’s 2015 anthology, The
Bazaar of Bad Dreams: Stories, one of his twisted tales is a
novella called Ur
, originally published as an eBook
in 2009.
In Ur, an English professor who’s
wedded to books decides to take the plunge into electronic reading, and buys a
Kindle. When it arrives, it turns out to
be a *special* Kindle, which apparently has the ability to access eBooks from
other realities.
Then he finds out it can also read newspapers from the
futures of this and other realities, as well, which leads to a horrifying
revelation ….
This story bemused me for several reasons.
1) It’s often
been an interesting “What If?” kind of thought experiment: What if I could sidestep to a universe next
door (pace e e cummings) that didn’t
happen to have the Beatles, or Beethoven, and “compose” that music to great
acclaim in the new world?
Of course, my next depressing thought is that a world whose
history was so different as to not produce The Fab Four or the Great
Beetle-Browed One, would likely as not be a world that didn’t appreciate their
music. A whole lot of things led up to
great works, and trailed after them (streaming glories, pace Wordsworth), so it’s not as if I could come down from Mount
Sinai with the White Album and expect to get away with it, right?
2) The more
interesting amusement is how similar in basic concept this story is to one I
wrote in 1981, called “On the Cable,” about a guy whose cable box fritzes out
and gives him TV programming from other realities.
This amazes me and amuses me, that Mr King’s mind and mine
are twisted enough (in some of the same ways) to have independently come up
with the same concept. I feel honored
that I was able to dip into the same trough, so to speak, as that crafter of
great stuff.
Of course, there are other angles on the same idea, such as
CBS’s 1996-2000 Early
Edition.
“On the Cable” was concocted as an entry in The
Twilight Zone magazine’s short story contest. The first version had a downer ending.
I received this nice postcard back
Being a clueless, snotty-nosed type, I immediately took this
as encouragement and rewrote the story to come out happier. Since the story is the same until page 6,
that’s where this scan of the second version starts.
I didn’t win anything, but it was a fun effort.
When I read the King story in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams,
I was soon smiling as if greeting the child of a best friend, in whom I see a
family resemblance.
Mr King’s craft and talent take the idea to much more
realistic and outré heights, you’ll agree.
But I hope you’ll also agree with me that it’s kind of humorous that we
came up with semi-similar variations on the whole
foresee-the-future-through-technology angle.
Mr King, I salute you!
(Even though I like the cut version of The Stand better.) If you want to read more of my rejections, send me a note!
