Teaser Tuesday: “Death Before Facebook”

It’s been quite a while since I did a Teaser Tuesday post, even though the whole reason I started posting on Tuesdays was that I discovered “Teaser Tuesday” is a thing and I figured I could fall back to it on weeks when I didn’t have anything else to write about, so I decided it was about time to trot one out ― not because the book I’m currently reading is any great shakes, but it has a couple of interesting things to recommend it. That book is a Skip Langdon mystery¹ called Death Before Facebook, by Julie Smith; or at least, that’s what it’s called now.

Now the premise of this book, which was published in 1994², is that a guy named Geoff fell off a ladder trying to rescue a cat from a roof. Intrepid detective Skip Langdon quickly discovers that Geoff was a science fiction fan. So obviously he must be a nerd.

What was it about these guys? she wondered. Why were they such a type— brilliant, withdrawn, dorky, into computers and science fiction? She knew the answer, or thought she did. They were unhappy with the real world, had little self-esteem (as Knowles Kennedy, who had a surfeit of it, had observed), and sought alternate universes.

Am I being personally attacked? I feel like I’m being personally attacked …

Anyway, the more intriguing aspect of the book, aside from its gross generalities about people who read SF, is that Geoff was also a user of a BBS³ called The TOWN. And this is where the book’s having been written in 1996 comes into play; the original title was New Orleans Beat, but it was changed at some point to the current title, Death Before Facebook, which could be seen as a rallying cry along the lines of “Death before dishonor!” except for, you know, not using social media. That’s not what it is, though; it’s just about timing, i.e., a death that occurred before Facebook existed. My initial reaction was to be annoyed that some marketing whizzes tried to make the book sound buzzy by updating the name, but now that I’m partway through it, what’s really interesting is just how well Julie Smith nailed The Way Things Are Now when writing this book 30 years ago (not all of which are negatives, but a lot of them are):

• People misrepresenting themselves online? ✅
• Online conspiracy theories? ✅
• People engaging in ad hominen attacks against others while hiding behind false identities? ✅
• Amateur sleuths using online resources investigating crimes they’ve heard about but have no connection to? ✅
• People posting way more details of their personal lives, gossip, medical information, etc., online than they really should? ✅⁴
• Doomscrolling until 3am? ✅
• People having friends online in far-flung locations they will likely never meet IRL? ✅
• Acronyms like “IRL”? ✅

Granted things like that were already going on with AOL and Prodigy (both of which get name-checked in the book), but it was nowhere near as widespread as it is now, and it’s really kind of prescient how far she has taken it in this book. I skipped ahead to the author’s note to get Smith’s own explanation of why she changed the title, among other things:

In 1994, when Mark Zuckerberg was ten and this book was first published as NEW ORLEANS BEAT, a title I never liked, you were cutting edge if you had high hopes for “virtual communities” and regularly posted on a BBS, or bulletin board service.

A BBS had a lot in common with Facebook. You could be great friends with people you’d never met, and you had the ability to communicate with a lot of people at once. But you didn’t choose your “friends”, you just joined up and posted on whatever topic entered your head. It was a little like a listserv, or even one of today’s specialized online communities, like GoodReads.

While the technology in the former NEW ORLEANS BEAT predates Facebook, the central idea— that if you post indiscreetly, something bad could come of it— remains as true today as it was all those years ago.

In converting the former NEW ORLEANS BEAT to an electronic edition, I was faced with decisions— to update? To revise? To do both? I made what may seem like a counter-intuitive choice— to revise but not to update. If I updated one thing, I’d have to update another. Suddenly everyone would have cell phones and the whole plot would be different.

And one other thing— it just wouldn’t be right. If you happen to read OLIVER TWIST today, do you expect everyone to drive cars? Of course not. A book should be true to its time— it is an artifact of that time, a record; even, in a sense, a bit of history, one of the few ways we have of keeping track of how things actually were then.

So I let it be. But I revised for the same reason I changed the title— because I could. No author is ever pleased with the finished project, but in the end we just have to let go. Now, with the advent of ebooks, we get another chance. In proofing the scanned document, I saw subplots and scenes I thought bogged the book down, so why not lose them? It’s a sleeker book now, a faster read, and maybe it’s better.

That’s also a really good point she makes about cell phones. I remember revising one of my books (the vampire one) to get it published, I was like, well, cell phones are a thing now, and that’s going to really interfere with the fact that lots of problems my characters are having would be resolved if they could just call each other from wherever they happened to be when they ran into the vampires. I handled this via various let’s call them maneuvers, such as:

• Moving scenes out into remote areas where there was no cells service (hey, that was a thing once!)
• Characters failing to initialize the voice mail on their cell phones so they couldn’t get messages (also a thing once!)
• Having the vampires actively sabotage cell phone towers (which is just good sense when you’re a vampire)

You get the idea. But when I worked on getting some later books ready, I just said to hell with it and explicitly left them in the past, when cell phones were rare and less multifunctional than they are now.

Now, when I was doing Teaser Tuesdays back in the day, this would be the point when I would include a teaser from the page of whatever book I was currently working on or editing, but since I’m not currently working on or editing anything I can’t do that this time. Instead, let’s bust out a couple of sentences from the aforementioned vampire book, Long Before Dawn, shall we? This is just after our main character, Roxanne, has had a vampire visit her house, as vampires are wont to do.

Her next call was to Barry, but he wasn’t home.  She tried his cell phone but he didn’t answer that either, and when she tried to leave voice mail, it told her his mailbox wasn’t initialized, so she hung up.  “Join the twentieth century, Barry,” she told the uncooperative receiver.

And, as previously mentioned, here’s where the vampires—not being stupid—disable “the only nearby cell phone tower”. In this case I have redacted the name of one of the characters, because:

On the roof of the arena, <REDACTED CHARACTER NAME> crouched on her hands and knees, watching the lot fill up with fresh meat.  Bob should be arriving any minute.  Most of her servants were here, hiding, waiting for her command to descend upon the rink and transform those within.  But first, they would have to make sure no one could get out.  Once Bob was inside, that would be his job, getting the place’s security to lock all the doors but this one.  Then they’d cut the phone lines; she’d already had her pets scout the area and disable the only nearby cell phone tower.  She checked Bob’s cell phone again, just to be safe.  No signal.

She smiled, then crushed the phone in her hand.

Before anybody could figure out what was happening, it would be too late, and she would have her army.

Ha, “the only nearby cell phone tower”. If I were to rewrite that again, they would have to take out like, what, twenty of them? Not to mention all the COVID-and-microchip-transmitting 5G antennas⁵. And since the towers these days are cunningly disguised as, you know, trees and such, they would have a hell of a time finding them all.

Well okay maybe not.

1. I use the term “mystery” somewhat loosely here because in at least one previous book, Smith did not play fair with clues, i.e., there weren’t been any; there were suspects, but Skip (and the reader) only found out whodunit because of an overheard conversation between some of them. I am not far enough into this book to know if that will be the case here. ↩︎
2. This will be important later. ↩︎
3. For all you whippersnappers who don’t know what a BBS is, you can click here to find out. ↩︎
4. Not that I would ever do that. Oh wait. ↩︎
5. Speaking of online conspiracy theories. ↩︎