Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/09/16/hot-sf/

by sohkamyung • 2 years ago

276 124 2 years ago

sohkamyung• 2 years ago

The quote in full is: "I Had Exactly Four Seconds To Hot Up the Disintegrator, and Google Had Told Me It Wasn’t Enough"

Chandler played cricket when he was young, and he may have been influenced by the term “google” which is applied to balls which break or swerve.

I think the author means “googly”

emmelaich• 2 years ago

Yep.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googly

qup• 2 years ago

There's a documentary called Mountain Talk and the folks in the Appalachians used an adjective "si-goggling" which meant out of square, crooked.

Lots of similarities there, too.

fundad• 2 years ago

I'm old enough to recall my youth glueing irises loosely encased in occipital domes onto craft projects. The kids today call them googly eyes.

IggleSniggle• 2 years ago

In my pre-Google youth we also called them googly eyes and I honestly believed that was why Google picked that name. I always imagined the two OOs as eyes, sort of like amazons a->z arrow is a smile.

See also the campfire classic "going on a bear hunt" and the line "two big googly eyes..."

pimlottc• 2 years ago

I get stuck into some kind of infinite reload loop on iOS Safari for this site, anyone else?

tsujamin• 2 years ago

Yep same, I thought it was lockdown mode but it’s nice to know it’s just generally broken!

throw310822• 2 years ago

"Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction. It’s a scream. It is written like this: “I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. Then I got stuck into some kind of infinite reload loop on iOS Safari for this site- I thought it was lockdown mode but it’s nice to know it’s just generally broken"

MobiusHorizons• 2 years ago

Worked fine for me on iOS safari just now. Maybe it was temporary?

CoastalCoder• 2 years ago

No problem for me with Chrome on Android.

latexr• 2 years ago

No issue for me on Safari, on both iOS 18 and macOS 15. But I know what you mean regarding the infinite reload loop, it happens to me on Bloomberg.

causal• 2 years ago

Love the irony of someone mocking science fiction being an accidental prophet

giraffe_lady• 2 years ago

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/apollos-gift-of-prophecy-dodg...

Cthulhu_• 2 years ago

Something something infinite monkeys, something something Nostradamus. I'm sure Captain Beefheart lyrics are prophetic too, like Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish.

detourdog2• 2 years ago

His lyrics are prophetic but somehow he always plays the exact opposite note than one might expect.

kylebenzle• 2 years ago

The name Google was chosen because it's kind of sciency and sounds funny.

Googly, Goggle, Gogle...

It's a funny word that's been used for 100+ years. No irony necessary for a word to be reused for its intended purpose.

scotty792• 2 years ago

Chandler's parody sounds as if somebody discovered salt and immediately put a spoonful into their dish. Still while I read through it I was curious about every term used. While if it featured mundane things like doors, guns, grass and whatever I'd be immediately bored.

zooq_ai• 2 years ago

Balls that go in the opposite direction (of normal) is called Googly

bisRepetita• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the people who looked for time travelers, hoping they would have betrayed themselves through chronologically wrong Google searches or tweets.

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/google-search-fails...

lostemptations5• 2 years ago

We are real though.

nick3443• 2 years ago

Sorry I missed our coffee date next Tuesday.

julesallen• 2 years ago

Go easy on calling yourselves "QI", the hugely entertaining BBC TV show might have some qualms about this.

https://www.qi.com/

gpvos• 2 years ago

The website has existed since at least 2010, so I guess they are aware and have considered this.

card_zero2• 2 years ago

The whole thing:

"I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Brylls ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Brylls shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn’t enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough. He was right."

I like how Chandler writing sci-fi sounds exactly like Chandler writing one of his gumshoe stories. It's terse and tense and cynical. The protagonist drives a vehicle into some kind of ambush, and everything's incredibly snappy (including the scenery). Not at all like the actual sci-fi author who turned the parody into a complete story, and felt compelled to discuss something in the middle of the action, and ruined the pace.

I don't think "Google" here is a machine or all-knowing entity, sounds more like it's just some guy. With prior experience of disintegrating Brylls.

zeristor• 2 years ago

William Gibson on Chandler:

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...

Via

https://archive.ph/qmwKj

“ GIBSON When science fiction finally got literary naturalism, it got it via the noir detective novel, which is an often decadent offspring of nineteenth-century naturalism. Noir is one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary impulse went in America. The Goncourt brothers set out to investigate sex and money and power, and many years later, in America, you wind up with Chandler doing something very similar, though highly stylized and with a very different agenda. I always had a feeling that Chandler’s puritanism got in the way, and I was never quite as taken with the language as true Chandler fans seem to be. I distrusted Marlow as a narrator. He wasn’t someone I wanted to meet, and I didn’t find him sympathetic—in large part because Chandler, whom I didn’t trust either, evidently did find him sympathetic. But I trusted Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandler’s ancestor, even though they were really contemporaries. Chandler civilized it, but Hammett invented it. With Hammett I felt that the author was open to the world in a way Chandler never seems to me to be.”

Assuming, of course, that The Gibson hasn’t been hacked.

CamperBob22• 2 years ago

Great review, thanks for the link. His point that it's easier to forecast and accept the future than to understand the time before television or telephones really got under my skin.

Suppafly7• 2 years ago

sounds more like it's just some guy

That should be apparent to anyone that can read, I think people just like to pretend to be dense for some reason.

fenomas• 2 years ago

I'll be damned! One of my favorite Chandler quotes, I've posted this a lot of places over the years.

That said, the last time I looked into it sources all agreed that the comic strip Barney Google was a very well-known pop-culture reference when Chandler wrote this, and will surely have been the first thing he or anyone he talked to would think of when hearing "Google". (TFA mentions this as if it was one of several possibilities, but the others seem very shaky.)

So it seems pretty clear he meant it, and expected the reader to take it, as a silly last name.

Suppafly7• 2 years ago

So it seems pretty clear he meant it, and expected the reader to take it, as a silly last name.

A lot of these 'mysteries' that get brought up over and over online tend to have very easy to figure out answers, but people would rather be confused for some reason.

detourdog2• 2 years ago

They are words out of their context and humans love to make meaning. Think how surreal things will get now that time has sped up from Chandler’s time.

As mysteries they are powerful. So far there was only 1 commenter that knew of Barney Google. The knowledge spreads the mystery dies.

I knew nothing of the passage before this thread and when I was reading through the comments. I thought this was recent sci-fi that was being posted at a site called tv tropes.

The Google reference was obviously a future form factor for Google services.

xipho• 2 years ago

For a moment I thought quote-investigator was a LLM startup app, and was about to be seriously impressed by the attention to detail, citation list and meticulously formed credits, but alas, the origin was just a squishy human.

jerf2• 2 years ago

For those who have not dipped into the so-called Golden or Silver Age science fiction, Chandler's pastiche is quite accurate. There was a lot of what TV Tropes (warning: TV Tropes) refers to as "Call A Rabbit a 'Smerp'": https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmee...

Even the mere act of walking out to one's "car", opening the door, getting in, and zooming away could be an act of adventure.

It would still be quite purple [1], though. A well-known trope of the time. For some reason TV Tropes hadn't covered it yet, though, so I guess we should cut the authors some slack on that front.

I would consider "My breath froze into pink pretzels." effectively unredeemable, though. Malzberg's rehabilitation attempt on that fails, in my opinion, and by the time someone wrote around it I think the surrounding prose would already have passed the Purple Event Horizon itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose

Jerrrrrrry8• 2 years ago

  "My breath froze into pink pretzels."

The temperature in the synthetic atmosphere wasn't precisely enough to prevent the character's exothermic respiration from condensing, inconveniently.

jerf2• 2 years ago

It's the word "pretzel", honestly. I can cover breath freezing pink by the standards of the era, no problem. Took a shot to the lungs & helmet and left to die on the ice planet. I doubt that would "really" produce frozen pink breath but what we would now consider "hard" sci-fi that would care about that sort of thing generally didn't travel with this sort of purple prose so that's not really an issue.

But pretzels? Why is your breath freezing in pretzels? Even pretzel "rods", let alone twists?

AStonesThrow• 2 years ago

I revisited a summery, carefree 90s hit last year, and I immediately exclaimed, "these guys are ON DRUGS!"

https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Len/Steal-My-Sunshine

Confirmed by promo video footage

idiotsecant• 2 years ago

I have to admit i read the comments before i read the article and this comment made me feel like I was having a stroke

setgree3• 2 years ago

The second chapter of Anne McCaffrey's 'Dragonflight', written in 1968, opens with: "F'lar, on bronze Mnementh's great neck, appeared first in the skies above the chief Hold of Fax, so-called Lord of the High Reaches."

ryangs• 2 years ago

I think proper nouns get a bit more of a pass in terms of purple prose.

tialaramex• 2 years ago

McCaffrey is on that TV Tropes list, I have only read a few of her novels and she does jump out for obvious examples of this trope.

It's tricky to write an opening sentence though. We all recognise "Call me Ishmael" and probably "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" is obvious to lots of people but for example, "I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods" doesn't exactly promise Breakfast at Tiffany's does it?

By the second chapter I think you've earned a lot of leeway, either the reader is engaged and will soldier on despite your six new nouns and what might be a new word or possibly a new meaning for a word they know already - or they have probably set the book down some time ago and will never see this sentence anyway.

Suppafly7• 2 years ago

Maybe because I read a lot of scifi and fantasy, despite not having read any Anne McCaffrey, but that doesn't seem particularly hard to parse or understand.

aaroninsf• 2 years ago

What's funny is that this register and conceit is one that I dearly love among science fiction and fantasy writers,

provided they fulfill the implicit promise, that on a second reading all such things will be clear.

It's an intentional device. Andre Norton is particularly adept at this: when accounting for my deep love of her many thin "pulp" novels, many of which exist in the same universe, something I regularly praise is the way she almost as a signature drops you without exposition into drama.

The conceit of a chatty expositional conversational narrator who can in effect be imaged to be turning to their friend-from-out-of-town to helpfully explain what this thing is or what the significance of that is—often with a presumed familiarity with the frame of reference their audience might hanve—is by contrast a crutch and now most characteristic of what we call Young Adult fiction.

Trust in the reader, and trust in their sufficient interest to file such things away, is, I think, characteristic of a different era—one that demanded more of readers. I don't think it's a coincidence that our own era finds this off-putting.

We're lazy now, and we have small token windows.

EDIT: and I could probably have reproduced, or at least completed, that line of McCaffery's, from memory—though that particular book shows its age and its history in being the first short story she wrote about her world Pern. She got a lot softer and more sentimental as she went along, and less prone to patriarchal stereotypes she brought along from her work as a romance writer.

shadowgovt• 2 years ago

Fortunately, science fiction left behind those inclinations. The cyberscapes of the glittering arcologies where street sams zero every gonk, rimbo, and cyberpsycho that comes their way for fun, eddies, or to just to look nova to their favorite input or output demand your data be crystal, choom.

bentcorner• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose

Enlightening article - this is the exact complaint I have with the world-building Bungie does, and now I have a word to describe it. Halo is somewhat grounded, with Humans feeling familiar but the Covenant are both literally and literally (!) purple. Destiny is (IMO) so full of pink pretzels that it's undecipherable to newcomers.

permo-w4• 2 years ago

"My breath froze into pink pretzels." was the only bit of the excerpt I found interesting. I suppose pretzel is a bit of a kitschy choice for the centre of a metaphor, but the overall effect of it was to raise some interesting questions: is there a breathable atmosphere for humans that could precipitate pink ice breath? is our protagonist even human? is there a shop nearby selling Judaism-adjacent baked goods?

PhasmaFelis6• 2 years ago

I can't remember the details, but sometime in the '70s or '80s a sci-fi magazine ran a contest: take a short text (something like "a man gets onto a bus and notices another man wearing an unusual hat") and rewrite it in the distinctive style of a sci-fi writer of your choice.

The winning results were pretty entertaining. I only remember the Heinlein entry having something like "Why, he's using plasteel for his helmet liner instead of ferrocrete!"

tetris11• 2 years ago

I would love to see a Gene Wolf rendition of that

acchow• 2 years ago

Even the mere act of walking out to one's "car", opening the door, getting in, and zooming away could be an act of adventure.

It's incredible how much screen time is dedicated to the opening/closing of car doors and the the driving of cars into/out of parking lots or driveways. Tho I guess this somewhat reflects life in America.

fwip• 2 years ago

Easy transitional/establishing shots. Serves the same sort of purpose as when the show/movie serves up some wide shots of a city or the country, informing the viewer "we are at a new location," but more personal.

NKosmatos• 2 years ago

I was today years old when I found out about Quote Investigator :-)

kps• 2 years ago

Sadly, Google (Gemini) is aware of the quote, and does not provide an unbiased determination as to whether four seconds is enough to hot up the disintegrator.

pigeons• 2 years ago

Claude refuses to answer because it won't assist with information about weapons.

karaterobot2• 2 years ago

Barney Google aside, it's worth wondering whether the same process that led to Google being called Google instead of Googol is what led Chandler to use that word: it's a memorable, alien-sounding word, misspelled.

dylan604• 2 years ago

As a kid in the 80s, my parents bought an encyclopedia set that also had a set of companion books for kids. This is where I first learned about a google, and it was definitely google not googol. So it's been "misspelled" for quite some time if that's your belief

wpollock• 2 years ago

Maybe on purpose. Most print encyclopedias included small typos and small fake articles, so they could prove plagiarism if needed. (I use that same excuse to explain all my published errors:-)

karaterobot2• 2 years ago

I don't know why it'd be a matter of belief, it's a known word with a known prescriptive spelling. I'm sure the encyclopedia editors would have liked to get it right. But it's an interesting anecdote. A googol is an uncommon item of vernacular usage, and basically trivia for most people. I remember hearing "a googolplex" on elementary school playgrounds, as an example of a number so large you couldn't conceive of it. "You're stupid times infinity", "No, you're stupid times infinity to the googolplex power", and so on. And since the word doesn't follow intuitive spelling rules in English, I imagine it would have been very easy to spell it wrong in the 80s, unless you happened to both have access to specific resources, and remembered to look it up.

Jerrrrrrry8• 2 years ago

This is largest juxtaposition between familiarity and nostalgia against an outright alien uncanny facade of fiction.

A dissociative, delirious, memory. Orthogonal to our current experience, but barely.

These two songs are the closest I could find in an analogous auditory form.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE5JMEu5hZA

nashashmi• 2 years ago

I often wonder what would happen if the founders didn’t misspell the word. And today we would be saying Googolled.

scotty792• 2 years ago

I still have no idea how to reconcile by merging with gravitational time dilatation being infinite at event horizon.

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

Makes me think of

https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/01/detecting-time-trave...

And also Asimov's classic End of Eternity

https://ia800500.us.archive.org/13/items/calibre_library_68....

where a time traveller who overshoots his target and winds up too far in the past posts a classified on March 28, 1932 with a picture of a mushroom cloud and the title

   All (the)
   Talk
   Of (the)
   Market

As literature I think (1) it reads like Chandler, (2) reads like a non-genre writer imitating the genre such as E.B. White in The Morning of the Day they Did It (who even scoops Rachel Carson)

https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1950-02-25/flipbook...

I'd say real genre writers such as Heinlein, Asimov, and Doc Smith were always more careful how they used neologisms and didn't just drop them out rapid fire in search of affect. But you sure see that in parodic material such as Calvin and Hobbes (which would parodize Chandler and sci-fi)

cyberax• 2 years ago

I'm not saying that it was time travel, but it was time travel.

dhosek• 2 years ago

When Google first came on the scene, I often mistyped its domain name as googol.com. At some point since 1999, Google bought googol.com and redirected it to their site.

nbernard• 2 years ago

Well... Wernher von Braun wrote a SF novel in which the first mission to Mars discovers native Martians. These live underground and use hyperloop-like tunnels for transportation, and their leader is called the "elon"...

phkahler• 2 years ago

What book is that?

Edit: Found it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale

ilamparithi• 2 years ago

It gets funnier if you consider the meme that Elon Musk is an alien who is building rockets just to go back to his home planet. :)

aaronharnly• 2 years ago

This book from 1931 deserves a mention as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Google_Book

it includes verses like:

  The sun is setting –
  Can't you hear
  A *something* in the distance
           Howl!!?
  I wonder if it's –
  Yes!! it *is*
  That horrid Google
  On the prowl!!!

I own a copy of the 1979 edition and the illustrations are just wonderful.

jujube3• 2 years ago

The Google:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/The_Goog...

Nihilartikel• 2 years ago

I'm reminded fondly of the opening chapter to QNTM's Fine Structure, which sets up the story with a similarly baffling (yet self consistent, in my opinion) but wildly evocative narration of a blazing dogfight across a multiverse of hyperspaces.

mtndew4brkfst• 2 years ago

One of the ways I failed to enjoy Max Gladstone's Empress of Forever was that it seemed hellbent on coining a significant new glossary worth of vocabulary along the way. I had to be well rested and attentive to muddle through with some marginal comprehension of any given chapter's plot, I certainly couldn't read it while drowsy or distracted.

renewiltord• 2 years ago

A 'googly' is not a google, what is this nonsense hahaha. Seriously getting Baader-Meinhof from this website which I used to trust.

kazinator• 2 years ago

In one of the episodes of the 1970's Japanese anime series Gatchaman (known in North America in a heavily edited and abridged form as Battle of the Planets) there is a sequence in which a navigation screen is shown. A destination point is shown with a pin mark exactly like that balloon thing on Google Maps. I can't remember which episode. I don't have that series on any hard drive any more.

soyiuz• 2 years ago

"Mr. Google, the best filing clerk in the firm. Filing & Office Management: A Constructive Monthly Magazine on Business Methods. July 1921."

https://x.com/dennistenen/status/1017125225484505090

mannykannot3• 2 years ago

Nick Lowe, in The Well-Tempered Plot Device, is quite brutal in his criticisms.

https://ansible.uk/Ansible/plotdev.html

thaumasiotes5• 2 years ago

the book “In the Plex” by journalist Steven Levy presented the following explanation for the name choice:
> Page’s dorm roommate suggested they call it “googol.” . . . “The name reflected the scale of what we were doing,” Brin explained a few years later.
> Page misspelled the word, which was just as well since the Internet address for the correct spelling was already taken. “Google” was available.

This is interesting, since the story I heard was that they settled on the spelling after an early investor made a check out to that spelling.

Modified30192• 2 years ago

Ah, this is an article about parody of sci-if slop.

I had way too much trouble realizing the article wasn’t just machine generated nonsense. Poe’s law strikes again.

Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough

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