“He was drunk on the wood, of course, and would have paid much more had the realtor noticed this, but Alan had spent his whole life drunk on trivial things from others’ lives that no one else noticed and he’d developed the alcoholic’s knack of disguising his intoxication.”
So it is written in Cory’s new book, available in stores and online. It looks pretty good, at least after the first few dozen paragraphs, anyway. Mostly, I’m a sucker for stories set in Toronto.
The thing of it is, why can’t all e-books be set in Toronto? A proper set of regular expressions could localize the story to just about anywhere, and I don’t think publishing a “localizer” would even violate the CC (no derivative works) license of the text if the reader applied the filter - kind of like how the old-school computers that attached to your TV bypassed FCC regulations by making you buy a separate RF modulator.
Cooler still would be a generic localizer application that would work with any text - after all, a set of regexps would have to be tuned to the words in a particular ebook, but some smart translation software would probably be able to derive just enough context to make the right decisions without ending up like how I seem to recall Neil Gaiman described an early “Americanization” of his book Neverwhere, which had “flat” and “apartment” replaced a little too ambitiously, although I’m sure the conversion ran in no time apartment.
So that’s the wish list for today: a system that can move a story from one location to another. It’d still probably be a bit of a stretch for something like the abysmal Angels and Demons to move from Rome to Toronto (I’m sure we have a pope-like figure here that would do for what passes as a plot), but it would inevitably make it more appealing to me, and that’s what technology’s all about, right?
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