Doctor Sleep
The now middle-aged Dan Torrance (the boy protagonist of The Shining) must save a very special twelve-year-old girl from a tribe of murderous paranormals. On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless; mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and spunky twelve-year-old Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the "steam" that children with the "shining" produce when they are slowly tortured to death. Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father's legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant "shining" power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes "Doctor Sleep." Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan's own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra's soul and survival.
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What Hacker News says
- Non-fiction:
On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins
How To Create A Mind - Ray Kurzweil
The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker
The Origin of Wealth - Eric Beinhocker
The Signal and the Noise - Nate Silver
The Money Culture - Michael Lewis
Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations - David Warsh
Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing - John E. Kelly III and Steve Hamm
The Idea Factory - Jon Gertner
Winning The Knowledge Transfer Race - Michael J. English and William H. Baker
Wellsprings of Knowledge - Dorothy Leonard-Barton
If Only We Knew What We Know - Carla O'dell and C. Jackson Grayson
Started, but haven't finished yet:
The Discipline of Market Leaders - Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema
Marketing Warfare - Jack Trout and Al Ries
Naked Statistics - Charles Wheelan
Wiki Management - Rod Collins
Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal - Ayn Rand
Fiction:
NOS4A2 - Joe Hill
The first four books in the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman
Innocence - Dean Koontz
Deeply Odd - Dean Koontz
Doctor Sleep - Stephen King
The Black List - Brad Thor
Most of The New Lovecraft Circle - an anthology of Lovecraft mythos stories by contemporary writers
And started re-reading Asimov's Foundation last night. I've read the original trilogy before, but this time I intend to read all seven books. But I'm starting with Foundation and going to the end, before going back to the prequels.
- When I heard they were making a movie of Doctor Sleep, knowing that the final 20% of the book is absolutely untranslatable to coherent movie content, I could not understand how they could close it. In the end, they more or less worked around the finale, which is basically a series of psychic battles fought remotely. It's a tolerable movie.
One example of a truly unfilmable King/Bachman novel is Thinner, though maybe it could now be done, at great expense, with AI (there was a ridiculous TV version, though).
I interviewed him, when I was aged 16, in 1983, and asked him about The Shining. He was in a conciliatory mood on the topic that day, but re-emphasized how little he thought of Kubrick's shot choices for the scene where Danny discovers Wendy reading his manuscript.
To that criticism, Kubrick responded over the years that if we had just been jump-scared by Jack suddenly appearing over Wendy's shoulder as she read, we would have felt relief and even started laughing to blow it off, which would have undermined the tension Kubrick was looking to build past this point in the scene.
- I feel like the biggest criticism I can make of Gibson is that he plots.
Most novels have a plot. But the good ones don't let you in on it. As you say, the characters rush around for MacGuffins, and you characterized it as "creaky"--that's a good word for it. I have not always been the biggest Stephen King fan (as an author; growing up in Maine, I've always been a fan of King-the-person) but On Writing is an excellent book. I don't have my copy right here so I can't quote what he says about plotting (paraphrased: "try not to") but this quote from an interview with Goodreads resonates strongly with me:
"I start a book like Doctor Sleep [his most recent book] knowing just two things: the basic situation and that the story will create its own patterns naturally and organically if I follow it fairly...and by fairly I mean never forcing characters to do things they wouldn't do in real life...For me, the first draft is all about story. I trust that some other part of me—an undermind—will create certain patterns."
So long as your beginnings and ends are only modestly far apart, short stories (and I again agree that Burning Chrome is probably his best work) let you get away with a lot more of this. But novella and novel-length works can't hide the machinery of a plotted-out story as well unless you are inordinately good at it. (And I mean, this is a ding against authors like J.R.R. Tolkien as much as Gibson; it's not like he isn't in good company with this weakness.)
