Remake (novel)
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In this book, Connie Willis displays a dystopic near future, when computer animation and sampling have reduced the movie industry to software manipulation. It is also a love story.
[edit] Synopsis
Tom is a remake artist. He does the soulless and soul-destroying work of editing movie stars in and out of digital copies of movies, which are the only kind that still exist. The movies are all fake, but the money is very real, so there are constant legal battles over who has the rights to use which actor's image. Since the movies themselves are continuously available, the actors have to be continually edited in and out as the vagaries of court decisions demand.
Tom fills the rest of his time with the usual Hollywood pastimes, popping pills and poking popsies. Then he meets Alis, who is the classic girl from the heartland come to realize her dreams in Hollywood. Except nobody makes movies the old way anymore. Anybody can be in a movie - just pay your money at the booth on Hollywood Boulevard, and they will video you and digitize you into your own personal copy. Alis wants more. She wants to make her own movies and dance with the stars. Tom is soon astonished to see her appearing in movies he has been given to edit. She appears to have travelled back in time. Or is she a ghost from the past, as in the movie Portrait of Jennie ?
Life in this LA is different. Nobody drives. Transportation is provided by the Sliders, which are basically rooms that teleport from point to point around the city. Supposedly this trick is done using the Casimir effect, an obscure quantum physics phenomenon. Travelling this way can be unnerving, as the "walls" of the rooms are interfaces to unreal spaces. However, you can always watch a movie on these walls while you wait for people to walk in and out, complain, argue, eat etc. until the next Slide happens.
Tom falls for Alis, of course, possibly because she is the only unattainable woman in the city. For her part she wants Tom's help but not much else. Tom gets her access to the editing machinery so she can get work. She keeps popping up in movies, however. How is she doing it ? He finds out that she's been using the equipment in the Sliders, projecting herself into movies on the "walls", dancing with Fred Astaire. Are the Sliders really time machines ? What's real anyway ?
