Now, for most people, I suppose it isn't as exciting as getting an executive copy of EverQuest and being able to change it so a dragon can be slain by only one strike of the sword instead of a hundred, but I still think there is something very deep and very profound about the fact that, in the modern day, one can actually travel "inside" books and literally alter the manuscript if they want. You really have to sit back and think about it for a second: In the past , if you wanted to alter a book, you could have done it, sure, but guess what you would have had to do, before the age of computers? In the first place, you would have had to actually taken the effort to re-write it, since you could have never gotten your hands on the original manuscript pre-written for you (and obviously you cannot delete things on a printed page), and secondly, well, once you are actively re-writing it in your own handwriting, it doesn't really feel like you are "altering" something so much as re-creating it, does it? Hence the age old idea of plagiarism and all of that, and therefore the basic impossibility of having this sense that you could actively ALTER the text.....
In our own age, however, one must think: We now exist in a time where I am able to download a text file of an entire completed book that is written exactly as the book is published, and then from there, if I want, I can just jump in wherever, and start inserting my own sentences, or of course deleting them at will. This might not seem profound to people, until you remember (or hear for the first time) what I was saying in the last article about EverQuest: In my day as a boy, the idea that anyone besides the actual original creators of the game could eventually find themselves with a copy of the game on their hands, which could be freely altered, was absolutely unthinkable. And, in our own time, this is essentially still the case with books, because most people are still only thinking of books as these things that exist on a printed page. In other words, they think of a book as a collection of words that cannot be erased, or deleted, or randomly changed. You can burn a book, or rip out pages, but you can't actually scratch a word off the page and change it. Not even one.
Alas, in our own time, like I said: the manuscripts themselves have actually entered into the public domain, and now we are in an age of screens, and not just paper. Therefore, I can legally download every single book written in the USA throughout the entire 19th century on my hard drive, and have it as a text file, and just start deleting huge chunks of it, or adding huge chunks to it, whenever I want. Hell...I could maybe even do that and then distribute the files that I have edited and mislead people downloading said files to think they are the ORIGINALS. If we are to start discussing a science fiction plot, one imagines that this is one if there has ever been one. I mean, can you even begin to imagine the disaster of certain texts being altered or re-arranged or .. "cut"? To say things they aren't supposed to say? In fact, it's almost kind of creepy, because it reminds me of one of the last lines that comes to us from the Bible, when the write tells us the following "...And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll." Another similar verse says the same thing; but instead of talking about removing words, it warns you - -what else -- not to add any.
A little strange, don't you think? This is from Revelations 22:19, and it goes to show, I feel, whether or not you believe it, just how deadly serious a manuscript really is. A manuscript that can be altered is a rather dangerous manuscript. It is, in a manner of speaking, suddenly incomplete all over again. You can do anything you want to it. You can change the entire theme...meaning...anything. Hence the threat at the end of Revelations....
At this point of course, many a reader might be wondering why I am talking about all of this, and what I think it might mean for, say, the future of writing. Personally, I have for some time now started to think it might mean a lot, and I do think that books, in the future, are going to be looked at very differently than they are now. I think there might come a point in time when the re-arranging and altering of famous books might actually become something that people may very well start to do in droves, for fun, in a way that we now find unthinkable.
For example, in our own time, mostly thanks to the Internet, we have seen the rise of fanfiction, where people take famous characters and then insert them into their own imaginary scenes and stories, et cetera. In the pre-Internet age, this would have been considered very much ridiculous I feel, and a waste of time. I feel like characters seemed glued to a page back then, before the Internet, and I also feel that they did not feel as communal either, since often, in the pre-Internet age, you may have felt like you were the only person who had ever read a book in your entire little town.
Now it has some sense to it, howeve,r because there is a built in audience waiting to read this stuff online, even if it cannot sell. Thanks to the Internet, you know you are not the only person reading a text anymore. You can log onto a site and find 1000 other people who love it more than you do. Hence re-creating the characters seems to have some real sense to it. Well, this is how I think it is going to be when it comes to this altering of the famous texts and scenes, in the future. I can even imagine a time when it might become an absolute craze to pick up these so-called unauthoritative "alternative texts". For example, to again mention the EverQuest Project 1999 simulation, the entire goal of it has basically been to delete everying that the developers did after 2001, which is when the game became wildly popular and they started trying to make it easier, and more child friendly. The people who set P99 have literally deleted everying that came after 2001. Nothing has been saved....
Well, so it would be with the famous texts too, something tells me. For instance, when I read Lord of the Rings, I very much enjoy the Hobbit, and I also enjoy the first book, the Fellowship of the Ring, but once I hit the Two Towers book, I always sort of fall off. I don't like where Tolkien started go from there, sometimes. It is not my favorite. There are also, perhaps, certain parts in the book that I sometimes look at , and I think "He could have written this differently" or "added someone in here". This will be what the alternative texts accomplish for us. You might be able to get a copy of the Hobbit that has been altered to make it so that almost every line in the book is the same, except for where Bilbo is described as being a hobbit. In the altered version, he will be described as a gigantic ugly troll every time he comes up, and he will be called Nazgom instead of Bilbo. The entire book will be the same, except for that. That will be the only change. Or maybe you will pick up a copy of the Fellowship of the Ring where Legolas is no longer a man, but a woman named Galriel, and instead of being described as a fair skinned white elf, she is described as a dark skinned black elf. Again, all of the book is the same, except for this one part. Every bit where Legolas is mentioned willb e cut, rearranged, and twisted into being made about Galriel the black elf . It might be the case that some major scenes are altered too -- why not? Instead of Boromir getting by killed the orcs and their arrows, for example, Gandalf decides to slaughter him and shear off his head in secret, then lies about it to everyone, saying orcs did it, and of course, since Gandfalf is so trustworhy, everyone believes him. In the altered version, this would be just some random scene thrown in between all the other original ones. I personally find the very idea of this all exhilarating.
A lot of people in the modern day would, of course, call all of this "butchering" and they would consider it, one imagines, an egregious sin to alter texts in this manner. Copyright holders would also find it absolutely unthinkable that anyone would ever do this. But the future is not going to be our own time, the future is going to be a different place, and the other thing that is very important to mention here is that, so long as the actual original text of the book is safe somewhere, who the hell really cares about altered versions, and how many may or may not exist somewhere? It reminds me, in fact, of some interview I read once with an author whose books had been adapted into films many times, and the interviewer asked him "...how do you feel to know that people say your books have been destroyed by the films?" And the writer points off to a bookshelf and says "..I've no idea what they are talking about. My books are right there. They are just fine. I've never even seen the movies....but the paychecks are nice...."
This exchange essentially goes to show that we have, as a culture, been playing around with "alternative texts" for quite awihle -- especially in the cinema --- but we are still kind of cautious when it comes to it, and this is especially the case when it comes to actually altering the original text itself. We create film adaptations that definitely alter things, we recreate things for certain environments, but often we never edit the original lines. My idea here is saying: go forth, children, and re-arrange the manuscripts if you can. Download the text files and begin to cut into them with your scissors. Begin to add to them. Change things that they tell you to never change. Delete things they say to never delete. Kill off the hero character in the literal first chapter!
(( P.S. Click here if you want to see me have some fun with this))
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