The Future Has Arrived
I had an extraordinary movie experience the other night. I went with some friends to see "Avatar," and I discovered that everything I had heard about this movie is true. The computer graphics are by far the best I have ever seen, and the 3D enhances the effect a thousand-fold. In fact, the viewer is so caught up in the story, so swept away, that he or she forgets that a weird pair of plastic glasses covers one's eyes.
Movie viewing has come a long way since the days of those dinky little cardboard frames with the red and green plastic lenses. These IMAX glasses fit very well and comfortably over one's own glasses, allowing one to enter the world of Pandora and lose oneself in the spectacle of color, music, adventure, romance. I cannot recall when I have been so caught up in a movie! One feels one is truly walking through that lush forest, or floating in the space station, or racing across the sky on those lovely (what are they called?) flying creatures. The 3D effect is so complete that it seems we have taken a huge evolutionary step in the culture of films. How can anyone be satisfied with flat 2D after this?
And what, you might be asking yourself, does this have to do with books? Everything! We are witnessing rapid changes in all the ways we do things, draw information, amuse ourselves, and the book is not being left out. We will always have books made of cardboard covers and paper pages (or at least, they should be around for a while), but people are becoming "screen" oriented. Little children are learning to read on computer monitors. Children's books now appear on flat screens so that boys and girls are becoming geared toward the screen rather than the printed page. Is this a bad thing? Some writers believe it is, but I don't. As long as people continue to read, as long as children are taught to love stories and books, then what does it matter if the words appear on paper or a screen?
Even my own books are now available for electronic download onto Amazon's Kindle ("Green City In the Sun," "The Blessing Stone," and "Virgins of Paradise" to name just three). See all my kindle books at amazon.com.
