I Got "The Matrix" Wrong - And That Inspired One of My Novels
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- Опубликовано: 27 сен 2024
- Before I ever saw THE MATRIX, I had theories about it - and those (dead wrong!) theories ended up becoming the inspiration for my novel ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED, NEVER OUTGUNNED. Here's how that all went down.
"The Matrix" at Amazon:
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"Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned" at Amazon:
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My retrospective of "The Matrix" (written in 2021):
www.infinimata...
Opening music: "Crystal City" by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio
Opening background: "XANNN" @ vimeo.com/1652... (Creative Commons)
My SF&F writing: www.infinimata...
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"Constructively jealous" is an excellent way of putting it that I haven't heard before
I should expand on that at some point! The basic idea is: you encounter something so good you say to yourself, "I wish I could do something like that." Then over time that jealousy and mere yearning turns into an actual plan. Instead of just looking at the finished artifact and wanting to copy it, you think about where it came from and what went into it. You dig into its roots, so to speak. And then you follow a similar path on your own, and combine it with whatever you bring to the table that's yours alone.
It reminds me of why I enjoy looking into the influences of those I'm most influenced by for my own writing/art, it really helps to demystify what may otherwise feel "mythically inspired" and puts everything into the greater worldly context of things being influenced by things which are influenced by things, and so on. Learning that Michael Kirkbride drew a lot from Dune while writing for Morrowind is a recent example (reading this comment section made me think of it lol), since I adore both settings, and it was cool too see that how different his output was compared to my own.
If you've read "Dune", your main character sounds like Paul Muhaidib, although in a completely different context.
I have, of course, read DUNE - and I wanted to avoid explicit parallels when possible: the character in question is older, for one; the setting is entirely different; his goals and motivations different; etc.
@@Infinimata I would expect as much. It seems like an idea that lends itself to quite a bit of variation.
I've had a similar thing happen a few times with promotional materials for movies i haven't seen. One being the 2003 movie 'Lost in Translation'. For some reason i thought the movie was about Bill Murray seeing Scarlett Johansson on the street and becoming infatuated with her, they have a relationship but the twist was he was making up the relationship in his head the entire time. He then finally meets her for real only for her personality to be completely different to the one he envisioned in his fantasy.
The movie is not about that but I thought my version was kind of interesting. Funningly enough there was a similar plot point in the Joker movie.
You have friends!?
😮😂
Yeah man! His friends are Sheldon, Howard and Raj. He even has a girlfriend called Penny.
A common SF inspiration is to take something totally wackadoodle, like Reese's interview at the police station in The Terminator, and say "What would it take to make this true?" (I'm convinced the writer of "Iron Sky" somehow hit on the notion of a Black man in a Nazi uniform in Times Square and built the movie around it.)
The issue is that it doesn't sound like Matrix movie.
*(Based on your description).
But it does sound like many other movies.
Like "Wanted" or "Minority Report" or "Adjustment Bureau" or "Kingsman"....
*
Or the TV shows.
It's a group of people who can predict the future & ... *(and/or have special abilities).
It has nothing to do with the Matrix.
"Wanted" instantly leaped to mind for me,ntoo.
That's pretty much the point - it's about how I started with one thing, but ended up with something entirely different in stages.
Minority Report came to mind for me, too. (and corporate america with financial analysts forecasting scenarios and business cases... too close to home?)
What a great channel! Such interesting topics. I think I should start binge-watching some videos now 🙃…
I’m curious-how did you come up with the idea for this channel- did you studied sth. in that field ? :)
This deserves a video all its own to explain, but the short answer is: after writing a bunch of books I had a lot of material about how I'd gathered subject matter and research for them, and decided to start offering that to other people.
I find this discussion is very interesting and similar to a situation, in spirit, that happened to me. Think of the phenomenon where a group of people show up at a store at the same time. This plays to the “Group think”. The collective consciousness being creative. Your book sounds like looper that came out roughly the same time with a similar lead up time. I had also been thinking about a zombie heist comic (at first) and then a novel, that took place in a quarantined off city. This company employs these men and women to collect items in the zombie zones. I wrote almost an entirely plotted outline and then boom… Army of the Dead comes out. Good thought experiment, cheers
I've seen "Looper", and I don't think my book bears any resemblance to that story at all. But I do get what you mean about how you'll sometimes see multiple parallel expressions of the same idea all come out at once.
I'm sorry but it sounds like the 2007 Nicolas Cage movie Next.
Heh, it's definitely not like that movie.
The premise of The Matrix was shallow in 1637 when Descartes proposed it, it was shallow in 1999, and it remains shallow today.