Bokelskere.no

"It's called the Schrödinger Night Fever principle."

"I don't understand."

"It's simple. If you go to see Saturday Night Fever expecting it to be good, it's a corker. However, if you go expecting it to be a crock of shit, it's that too. Thu Saturday Night Fever can exist in two mutually opposing states at the very same time, yet only by the weight of our expectations. From this principle we can deduce that any opposing states can be governed by human expectation - even, as in the case of retro.deficit engineering, the present use of a future technology."

"I think I understand that," said Landen. "Does it work with any John Travolta movie?"

"Radio waves scramble their energy field," he explained. "Spooking's dropped big time since the mobile phone network kicked in. I' amazed there are any ghosts left at all."

Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for oruselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work - the writer may have died long ago.