352 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published January, 1982 by Fawcett Crest
Important commentary on the year 2000
*Will be expanded into a longer Amazing Stories column*
Lets head to the future. The faaaaar future of the year 2000 (Sing it in your best falsetto. This book was published the same year ET and Blade Runner came out, and it had an 18-year runway. My copy, has been on my shelf only about five years. The book is not an experiment to project what TV would look like in 2000, although that would have been a worthy experiment, and interesting in a different way.
Compiled in the early 80s by Issac Asimov, Charles G Waugh and master anthologist Martin Harry Greenberg, I am assuming grabby Asimov mostly lent his name and wrote the introduction, none the less this is an important collection. The stories range from the 50s when TV was barely a thing to the 60s and 70s. So as I read each story I found myself looking to the credits to figure out what year each piece was published.
Asimov opens the book with an essay, and the book is divided into two parts. The control of TV and the content. Asimov lays out the intention of the book with the quick essay, in some cases giving his thoughts on the stories he finds most important. He rightly points out that before the genre had a name Hugo Gernsbeck was writing about Television, even using the term, although Telephotes never happened.
The Asimov story is one of the better ones of his I have read from 1955. In this story, TV is not made by writers and directors but “Dreamers,” “Well, I don't know. Dreamers are hard to come by, I hear.”
“They are. They are. But your son Mr. Slutsky is not a dreamer yet. He might never be. $500 a year is a gamble for us. It's not a gamble for you. When he's finished school, it may turn out he's a dreamer, yet you've lost nothing. You've gained maybe $4000 altogether. If he is a dreamer, he'll make a nice living and you certainly haven't lost then.”
This reminded me of Ken Liu’s recent novel about AI and influencers called “All That We see or Seem.” This a cool idea.
Underrated writer William Tenn (pen name for Philip Klass – who mentored David Morrell, I believe) comments on advertising written in 1951. “History can be as dangerous as a traffic accident; it can happen to people. And 'cause even more damage. One fine day about the year 2208, say a bright cheerful and maybe too smart for his own good young man wakes up to find he's tripped over his cleverest idea and crashed into a brand new age.”
A way back when, early in the 1900s, people began listening to record players instead of trudging off to vaudeville theater through cold and wet. Later, in the radio era, most top-level executives were finding dictaphones more efficient than human stenographers and mechanical sorters better than an army of file clerks. At the peak of the television boom, every bride dreamed of owning a vocal axe kitchen someday that would exactly obey her most casual command to heat a roast for such and such a time and base it at such and such intervals.
With deluxe models, of course, came a set of flavor fix Rheostats which, among other talents, could mix salads according to the recipe of a famous chef slightly better than the chef could himself. Then along came all-purpose radar broadcast power; Television went three-dimensional and became tildar inexpensive enough so that every Eskimo could own a set and incidentally, the only industry where an actor might make a living.”
While this passage is super dated, there are several things I love about it. Tenn’s story The Jester is one of the most charming stories, very funny and written so early in the existence of TV.
The only story in the collection I had read before was the short but interesting piece “The Idea,” by Barry Malzberg. Maybe I am biased because I interviewed Barry twice, but this weird one caused me to re-read it twice, thinking what did I miss? Similar to reading R.C. Matheson’s Red. After reading it for a third time, I felt stupid. Howard pitches an educational TV, and with every person he pitches it to, the idea gets manipulated into a less truthful piece with the executive. Really smart story.
One of the predictive stories is Theodore Sturgeon’s “…and now the News.” It is about news overload; in a way predicts doomscrolling. Frank Herbert’s story is about how quick TV can spread information; wait till he hears about the internet.
Perhaps the best, most predictive story is Damon Knight’s 1976 story “I See You,” that slyly predicts more than TV but how neighbors spy on each other through social media. “The viewer is your babysitter, your television your telephone(the telephone lines are still up, but they are only used as signaling devices; when you know somebody wants to talk to you, you focus your viewer on him, your library your school. Before pub,erty you watch other people having sex but even your curiosity is easily satisfied after an older cousin initiates you at fourteen; you are much more interested in doing it yourself. The Co-op teacher monitors your studies, sometimes make suggestions, but more and more as you grow older leaves you leaves you to your own devices. You are intensely interested in African prehistory, in the European theater, and in the anti-civilization of Epsilon Eridani 4. Soon you will have to choose.”
It starts with watching neighbors but turns into watching everything.
TV 2000 is more of an artifact than it is a good anthology. There are a couple skippers for sure. Anyone interested in look at the back history of the genre. The way the genre predicted TV is fascinating, and with hindsight of all these years even more interesting still.
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