Word: andersen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...THERE A PART FOR HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN...
...hurtling down on the Web. It's called the e-market; it's coming soon to an industrial-era sector near you, and Ma may turn out to be its avatar. "Moses' intellect operates on a plane well above mere mortals'," says Joel Friedman, a managing partner at Andersen Consulting, which last month agreed to develop and sell e-market software and services with BizBots. "And we think he might have built a better mousetrap...
...fecund is Andersen's satiric gift, and so broad his scope, that he almost incidentally sprays tiny rat-a-tat bullets at Alec Baldwin, Rupert Murdoch, Stephen Jay Gould, AIDS-awareness ribbons and the word lite. With a sweeter brand of malice, he takes direct (and hilarious) aim at Wall Street money-manager/pundit/provocateur (and TIME columnist) James J. Cramer, who is clearly the model for one of his more memorable characters...
...Andersen wisely sets his satire in the Tomorrowland of the year 2000, where he is free to imagine things that are two degrees beyond plausible. But, you soon realize, the culture's capacity for cheesiness is so vast that everything he imagines could, and probably will, happen. "Push TV," for instance, which can't be turned off: "Pressing the off button only switches the set to a low-power mode, during which advertising copy appears noiselessly on the screen." Or a network's "Seamlessness Initiative": the characters in each show connect to the characters on all the other shows...
...Irony," Andersen writes at one point, "is now embedded in the language, ubiquitous and invisible." He's right, of course, and his own ironic take sometimes makes him seem so arch you could almost drive through him. But it is nonetheless a joy to watch him at work, ricocheting off everything putrid and tinny in our culture. Whatever you call the thing after postmodern, Turn of the Century is it--something post-postmodern, a commentary on commentary. That may not make much of a novel, but it sure is fun to read...