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Standing in Line with Mr. Jimmy |
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Yes, the title comes from a line in the Rolling Stones song “You Can’t
Always Get What You Want” off the 1969 Let It Bleed album. It is
usually the case that my working titles are replaced sometime – several
times! -- before the final draft, but here the challenge I set myself
was to write a story about the title. Of course, the result has
nothing to do with the Stones’ song -- except that because I started
with a lyric, I was inspired to sprinkle invented song titles
throughout the narrative, something I had never done before. I’m still
waiting for someone to record “Double Parked on Trouble Street.”
I don’t really have that great a record of predicting the future, but I must say that I’m still pretty happy with the tech in “Standing In Line With Mr. Jimmy,” considering that it was published in Asimov’s in June of 1991. For all of you who read this on a PDA, you’re looking Mr. Jimmy’s great-grandfather right in the eye. I think his voice recognition component is only a few years away and, in today’s wireless world, ubiquitous computing is more Popular Science than Science Fiction. And this story is thinking hard about the consequences of the digital divide.
But for all that, this is a voice exercise about a street kid named Chip and the way he speaks and thinks and acts. He’s not savvy or rich enough to be a cyberpunk, although cyberpunks probably live in the nicer neighborhoods of this world. Chip is someone who hardly ever gets what he wants and yet he hasn’t let bad luck wear him down. He still has dreams, although he fiercely protects them with a classic bad attitude and a line of tough patter that owes everything to Raymond Chandler.
He’s one of my favorite characters.
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