At 08:59 PM 13/03/01 -0500, Jim F wrote:
>Daniel F. Galouye's _Simulacron-3_ (1964),
>which I google was the basis for _The 13th Floor_ (I haven't
>seen the movie).
It was certainly the basis for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's WELT AM DRAHT
(1973). I haven't seen that one either, but I'm told that whereas Galouye's
book (which I reread a few months ago, and wasn't entirely disappointed)
has two VR levels, Fassbinder just has the real world and the sim world.
>The road ended a hundred feet away!
>
>On each side of the strip the very earth itself
>dropped off into impenetrable, stygian blackness--
>
>No stars, no moonlight, only the nothingness within
>nothingness that might be found behind the darkest
>infinity..."
>Those were the days :->
They were indeed, but then two decades before SIMULACON-3 aka COUNTERFEIT
WORLD appeared in 1964, Heinlein's sublime `The Unpleasant Profession of
Jonathan Hoag' (1942) ended:
< `Run down the window, Cyn.'
She complied, then gave a sharp intake of breath and swallowed a scream.
He did not scream, but he wanted to.
Outside the open window there was no sunlight, no cops, no kids--nothing.
Nothing but a grey and formless mist, pulsing slowly as if with inchoate
life. They could see nothing of the city through it, not because it was too
dense but because it was--empty.
[...]
When they go to bed at night, before he turns out the light, he handcuffs
one of his wrists to hers. >
Ah yes, always with the inchoate pulsing...
Damien Broderick
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