> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
That first sentence characterizes the novel's diegetic (in-narrative) setting by giving the sky a property of an alternate medium (television). Unlike gentler rhetorical assertions such as simile, the declaration that the sky possessed a property of television suggests that the setting--like the intra-diegetic setting of the (Morrocan) beach in which an unnamed adversarial AI imprisons Case--is also a media construct in which the reader is imprisoned.
In other words, the media topology structuring the novel's outermost narrative is a recursive formation of one medium inside another medium and this structure is timeless. It's merely recursion.
However, fully understanding the literary (as opposed to narrative) significance of such a structuration depends upon knowing what television was and why any of its channels might be "dead" as opposed to "live".
A useful point of comparison can be found in William Shakespeare's _As You Like It_ (II.VII.139-143)
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. [. . .]
EDIT: Fix predicate in first sentence. Formatting. Change "at" to "a" in penultimate sentence.
That's a very interesting take. I never took it to have such a deep meaning, I took it rather at face value (and its face-value-interptretation if you will): that is was visual white noise (vaguely like driving into the snow at night, perhaps?). I took the metaphorical meaning to be that the sky was indistinct, somehow pointless (like watching no channel), conjuring up bleakness and futility.
In other words, I took it to be a device to transport ambience, not structural meaning.
> In other words, the media topology structuring the novel's outermost narrative is a recursive formation of one medium inside another medium and this structure is timeless. It's merely recursion.
Interesting. I had meant to re-read it anyway. I shall pay attention to your perspective, see how it shifts my perspective of the rest of the book.
> However, fully understanding the literary (as opposed to narrative) significance of such a structuration depends upon knowing what television was and why any of its channels might be "dead" as opposed to "live".
To my kids, a "dead channel" would look uniformly blue.
Or like a 404 page perhaps, these day :-D
> The significance is timeless, drawing power from the assertion that life is in fact lived on a stage.
I feel you might be you're over-thinking it there, in the sense that the actors in a TV show wouldn't be seeing static. Only viewers would.
Thanks for sharing your perspective, I found it really interesting.
I say that as someone that finds that line rather nice.
(Copy and paste the link, referrer shenanigans.) https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/
Also, thanks for mentioning the copy/paste referrer nonsense. Didn't realize they blocked referred links from here and was curious what the reference was for a time. :)
It is a very nice line.
However, it's dated to the point of losing its meaning.
Like rotary phones :-)
Last television I hooked up using a digital antenna would simply not show anything if the signal didn't exist. If you had poor signal, you'd get more compression artifacts. Nothing there should translate to the white noise image.
Right?
Could they research it and find the answer? Yes. But that is different from just knowing it.
This makes it unlike the stage imagery, which is still accurate.
If you'd like to be literal about it, dense snowfall, perhaps?
Anyway, the point, I think, was that it shouldn't look like any sky today, but rather like a futuristic sky.
That said, it's one of my favourite books.