3 ms·
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
by Borrible 4y ago
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
- eru 4y agoFamously re-used by Neal Stephenson to refer to a blue sky.
- tinco 4y agoI think you mean Neil Gaiman? and I'm not sure if it's really famous.. at least not as famous as its use in Neuromancer?
- duskwuff 4y agoCorrect, that was Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere: > The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel. He's written about the change in meaning of that line: https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/1546178115038334977 https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/1546178115038334977
- eru 4y agoI probably mixed people up. Well, not as famous as in Neuromancer, definitely.
- kolanos 4y agoI thought he was describing a gray sky? Are there televisions that display blue static?
- thfuran 4y agoNot static, just solid blue.
- eru 4y agoThe TV detects the static and replaces it with solid blue.
- michaelt 4y agoThe first use was in Neuromancer by William Gibson, in 1984, referring to a classic analog TV showing gray-white static. Modern digital, smart, auto-tuning TVs will show an error message rather than static when there's no signal available [1], so later authors have used modified homages like: "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." in Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/notinteresting/comments/3mgxca/what_my_tv_does_when_theres_no_signal/ https://www.reddit.com/r/notinteresting/comments/3mgxca/what...
- Borrible 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813407 And not to forget: "The sky was the color of a dead laptop display, silver-gray and full of rain." - Charles Stross, The Family Trade. 2004 "The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel—which is to say it was a bright cheery blue.!" - Robert J. Sawyer, Wake. 2009 There are probably more.
- svieira 4y agoMy favorite is from _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ by G. K. Chesterton: ---- "Poet, whose cunning carved this amorous shell, \ Where twain may dwell." "The peculiarity of these fine though feminine lines," continued "Thunderbolt," "is, as we have said, that they praise the hansom cab by comparing it to the shell, to a natural thing. Now, hear the author of 'Hymns on the Hill,' and how he deals with the same subject. In his fine nocturne, entitled 'The Last Omnibus' he relieves the rich and poignant melancholy of the theme by a sudden sense of rushing at the end— 'The wind round the old street corner \ Swung sudden and quick as a cab.' "Here the distinction is obvious. 'Daisy Daydream' thinks it a great compliment to a hansom cab to be compared to one of the spiral chambers of the sea. And the author of 'Hymns on the Hill' thinks it a great compliment to the immortal whirlwind to be compared to a hackney coach. He surely is the real admirer of London. We have no space to speak of all his perfect applications of the idea; of the poem in which, for instance, a lady's eyes are compared, not to stars, but to two perfect street-lamps guiding the wanderer. We have no space to speak of the fine lyric, recalling the Elizabethan spirit, in which the poet, instead of saying that the rose and the lily contend in her complexion, says, with a purer modernism, that the red omnibus of Hammersmith and the white omnibus of Fulham fight there for the mastery. How perfect the image of two contending omnibuses!"”
- eru 4y agoI think, I might have mixed up Charles Stross and Neal Stephenson here!