Syntho-techno-compu-speak...of the FUTURE!

(Listening to: Dave Matthews Band, Crash)

(No list this week. I was too wiped out on either Saturday or Sunday to write anything coherent; believe me, I tried. I promise one for this week.)

So I've been watching a lot of Mystery Science Theater 3000 recently. More specifically, I've watched the episode Overdrawn at the Memory Bank a few times. If you haven't seen this one, you should -- it's easily one of the funniest. And the best part is how much Mike and the 'bots share my loathing for that idiotic "futuristic" dialogue that infects so many bad science fiction screenplays. You know what I mean: suddenly everything has a bizarre hyphenated prefix, like "compu-" or "syntho-", that kind of thing. (And one point in Overdrawn, Tom Servo gets fed up with it and starts angrily mocking it at every possible opportunity -- "Oh, they opened the syntho-flavo-door!" And a man and a woman are shown in bed together, he sings, "And then I sing you off to syntho-sleep after the techno-love....")

The worst part about this crap is how fake it is. Who the hell talks like this? I'll give you an example. If, in 1985, someone had written a screenplay which posited the future appearance of AOL's instant messenger program, allowing distant people to chat through their computers, everyone would have referred to the process as something stupid: "I'm going to compu-speak with Mike tonight." "We were micro-texting about that yesterday."

All this complaining about futuristic dialogue is actually a very roundabout way of plugging Simon of Space, the online novel I've been reading. It takes several thousand years from now, so characters don't speak like we do...but their dialogue still feels natural, not clumsy and stupid. (My favorite is the profanity. The euphemisms we have as curse words are scaled back to the actual words themselves: "shit" is now "faeces;" "fuck" is now "coitus" or "fornicate," depending on the context; and "sucks" is now "fellates." It's hilarious when someone roars, "What is this coital faeces?" in a completely serious context.)

If you're not reading Simon, you should be. Really. It's absolutely brilliant. Go forth and do so now. Though you should probably start at the beginning if you'd like to understand what's going on.