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Unique Visitors [MultiFormat]
eBook by James Patrick Kelly
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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: How are the Beverly Hillbillies like time travel? A disembodied time traveler finds the future is not quite what he expected.
eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fictio, ed. Al Sarrantonio, 2001
Fictionwise Release Date: July 2004
Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [168 KB], eReader (PDB) [20 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [6 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [6 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [56 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [76 KB], hiebook (KML) [23 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [32 KB], iSilo (PDB) [5 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [7 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [34 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [12 KB]
Words: 1619
Reading time: 4-6 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
 
It's strange, but when I woke up just now, I had the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies in my head. You don't remember The Beverly Hillbillies, do you? But then you probably don't remember television. Television was the great-great grandmother of media: a scheduled and sequential entertainment stream. You had to sit in front of the set at a certain time, and you had to watch the program straight through. The programs were too narrow-minded to branch off into other plot lines, too stupid to stop and wait if you got up to change your personality or check your portfolio. If you were lucky, you could get your business done during a commercial. No, you don't want to know about commercials. Those were dark years.
Anyway, after all this time--has it been centuries already?--I realized that The Beverly Hillbillies was a science fiction show. Maybe it's just that everything looks like science fiction to me, now. The hillbillies were simple folk, Jeffersonian citizen-farmers desperately scratching a nineteenth-century living from an exhausted land. Then--bing bang boom--they were thrust into the hurly-burly of the twentieth century. Swimming pools, movie stars! The show was really about the clash of world views; the Clampetts were a hardy band of time travelers coming to grips with a bizarre future. And here's the irony: do you know what their time machine was?
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