"Cell" by Stephen King - anti gun or just stupid?

[akodo]

It's fiction. If there can be cellphone induced zombies, then there can be colt .45 revolvers with safeties on them.

I've seen this excuse used before, and I don't buy it. It is the author's job to create the world. He can create what he wants, but it is also his job to inform the readers of the rules of his world. If he wants it to be the real world +/- a few key details, well then he needs to get his real world facts right.

Otherwise you run into too many scenarios where any author can just invent magic to get his hero out of any scene. You want zombies cause by cellphones? sure. However, you have the hero outrun the motorcycle the biker thugs are casing him with because he was a highschool track star? Well, at least you better introduce that superpower beforehand, or allow the hero to be astounded by his own feat, or something. Even within his own created world, the author must be consistant. The audience/reader will never be able to be in suspension if the author is constantly deviating from the real world because the audience will never know when the character is really screwed or when some fictional power or device will allow him to easily escape.

Science fiction frequently has this problem, it is one of the reasons sci-fi never really gets as gritty or as horror filled. Look at all the times in Star Trek when there is some problem beaming people from place to place. Then some guy mumbles some stuff and wiggles some things around and poof, back to normal.

Even in a world with zombies, I expect a person burried alive to run out of air and die. Sure, in a world with cell phone created zombies, the author is in his rights to do anyhting he wants, but it is my real world understanding of the limited time a person can survive in a tiny closed space that gives the scene it's drama. If the person is able to live indefinately without oxygen, that sucks any dramatic potential out of the scene. If you don't know when the author is going to throw in a silly new rule, ALL dramatic scenes lose their potency

 

[Joe Demko]

Yeah, because getting the details right about guns is the most important there is for a novelist! Authors who make technical errors about guns are ignorant, stupid, untalented, and COMMUNIST!!!!!!

 

[Tommygunn]

Look at all the times in Star Trek when there is some problem beaming people from place to place. Then some guy mumbles some stuff and wiggles some things around and poof, back to normal.

It's called the Hiesenberg Compensator. If you don't get the polarity between the Hiesenberg Compensator and the matrix buffer correct, you'll invert the nadion flow and wind up spraying your atoms all over the universe!!!
Don't you know ANYTHING about basic transporter technology????

 

[Joe Demko]

I've seen this excuse used before, and I don't buy it. It is the author's job to create the world. He can create what he wants, but it is also his job to inform the readers of the rules of his world. If he wants it to be the real world +/- a few key details, well then he needs to get his real world facts right.

If a safety on a revolver looms that large to you, then perhaps you'd be better off reading technical manuals. What do you want? A fictional history of revolver development in King's fictional universe explaining why a revolver in a particular story has a safety? Such a digression might interest you, but I suspect it would derail the narrative for me. BTW, a revolver with a safety doesn't violate any "real world rules" nor does a single action revolver with a swing-out cylinder. There have been a very few real revos with safeties and there is no reason why a single action revolver couldn't have a swing out cylinder should somebody care to design and make one. King's worlds aren't our world. His Dark Tower series, if it accomplishes nothing else, makes that abundantly clear over and over.

 

[JBB]

Come on, guys. Its just a book.

 

[wheelgunslinger]

King was a great writer.
Maybe Cell isn't his best work, but it's certainly a great example of good narrative, dialogue and other important elements of good fiction.

I don't mind the glaring gaps in gunny knowledge. But then, I sat through 4 years of lit classes in college and am a writer. I kinda understand some of the finer points.

I loved the Tower series, but was also disappointed with the end. But, I understood why he did it.

It's just a story. So King is not pro-gun. He's allowed.

 

[Logan5]

You've got to admit, Cell gives the impression that he had a much larger book pushing at the back of his eyeballs, and just phoned it in. It was careless, it was poorly edited, and it would have made a lot more money if he'd held off for a few months research into cell phones, firearms, or both. I got the impression that he had some brilliant ideas, but couldn't carry it through into a really good story for whatever reason.

 

[LightningJoe]

I suspect many writers are like Ian Flemming; they believe that people who know (or care) enough to object to gun-information errors are kooks. Essentially, if you can't detect the errors, it's no problem; if you can detect the errors, you're a nut.

 

[BigO01]

Comparing King to a great author is like comparing the inventor of the Pet Rock to Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Gram Bell .

Their success is based on money made from their ventures which is really nothing more than a testament to the stupidity of the general public and the garbage they buy .

The greats do research to make their books as accurate as possable even on subjects they care nothing about .

King is and always has been to lazy to bother researching anything especially guns .

Nor does he care if even his fiction is outlandishly imposable or stupid .

In IT the big bad bogey man was a spider from space who lived underground and somehow controlled peoples minds and appeared as a clown .

In Silver Bullet we had a gunshop owner selling shotguns "single actions $100 and Double Actions $200" like such things exist and the prices are based solely on the action type of guns .

His The Stand and the "walking Dude" was just ridiculous from the word go .

 

[Joe Demko]

Their success is based on money made from their ventures which is really nothing more than a testament to the stupidity of the general public and the garbage they buy .

So the many millions of people who buy King's work (including a fair number of your brethren at this very board) are all stupid?

The greats do research to make their books as accurate as possable even on subjects they care nothing about .

An example or three would strongly bolster this assertion. By your criteria, William Shakespeare isn't a great writer. His work is loaded with historical inaccuracies, anachronisms, and other errors.

 

[Atticus]

I don't like Edgar Allen Poe. Ravens are junk.

 

[Biker]

I have a little .25 Raven and it goes *bang* every time!

Biker

 

[Jrsmith]

Never read cell past the first few chapters, just didn't appeal to me like some of SK's other books (most of which I have read) so I never got to that part.

As a reader I have noticed many problems with his firearms usage across books, but who cares? I love William Gibson and his ilk, and his view on cyberspace and hacking (eventhough his early stuff was written before Gibson owned a computer..) are generally laughable, but still entertaining to say the least.

As for Roland's 'swing out' SA revolvers... hey, those guns came from Roland's world which, as we can see, is very different from ours.. who's to say that wasn't the accepted style over there, fantasy can do what it wants sometimes.

By the way, I loved the ending to the Dark Tower, I felt it fit the story perfect.

 

[the pistolero]

Stephen King has sold many, many millions of copies of his books. He is wildly popular all over the world. Overrated? By all those people?

Argumentum ad populum, perhaps? Shania Twain fans lurrrrve this one. "She's sold millions of records, she must be great!" mmmmk, if you say so...
FWIW, I loved the movie adaptation of King's "The Body"...although I did get a kick out of Gordie cocking the .45 after he fired it.

 

[Joe Demko]

Argumentum ad populum, perhaps?

Perhaps. However, I'm still not buying into the idea that the general public are stupid and, therefore, anything they like is without value. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Hemingway, et.al. all wrote for popular audiences in their day. If you (generic you) don't like Stephen King, then I think that it should be enough for you to say "I don't like Stephen King." If he's not to you taste, then he isn't. When we start getting into blanket criticisms and condemnations of everybody who does like his work, then you start losing credibility.

 

[Darkness]

I actually do like most of King's works, though primarily his older stuff. His lack of basic research regarding the revolvers for what really is a primary plot element in his Dark Tower series is mildly irksome. Yeah, it can be explained away because both the Big Revolvers and Jake's dad's Ruger .44 magnum were both constructed in alternate worlds.

They definitely bother me less than the constant "chuck-chick!" that all guns seem to make on tv / in movies whenever they are pointed at someone (even the revolvers).

Back on topic, when I read Cell, I didn't think of it as anti-gun.

 

[spaceCADETzoom]

I'm still not buying into the idea that the general public are stupid and, therefore, anything they like is without value.

I don't think he was saying that...I'm pretty sure you didn't think so either. Just in case: they're saying that simply because a great deal do believe something is of merit, doesn't make it automatically good. Dickens, Twain, Hemingway, have been academically and intellectually admired, studied, deconstructed, etc. Can the same be said about King save for the occasional popculture/etc studies? Shania Twain was brought up. I can bring up Survivor, Jackass, American Idol, and so forth. THey're not without merit, sure...I guess. But my negative opinion of them is not because they are popular, or because I think that they're viewed by idiots. It's the content taken by itself. RE: King...I guess that's up to interpretation. Myself, I don't feel strongly either way.

Tom Clancy, on the other hand....not a fan. He writes like he does interviews...and how I'm assuming he is in real life...like a pompous [...].

AS far as King's inaccuracies, akodo's post summed it all up. Suspension of disbelief is impeded by such things, and "it's fiction" is an awfully lazy answer. If it's "his world, his rules," he has to stay consistent...

 

[onlinebiker]

The one I got a chuckle out of -- is in the first Dark Tower - "The Gunslinger"...

When the hero Roland guns down the entire town of Tull -- he keeps reloading his single action till "The tips of his fingers sizzled and burned. Neat circles were branded into the tips of each one"

Odd thing to do considering you only touch the cold unfired cartridges....
....

 

[Rule556]

I like most of King's short stories and about a fourth of his novels. I thought his non-fiction books were pretty good, too. I cringe every time I come across some massively stupid gun mistake, but those mistakes are hardly important enough to ruin the story. I guess I'm just not pedantic enough for some members of this crowd.

Here's something I've always wondered. Why do the people who dislike King's work, his writing style and his personal politics even bother reading or posting in a thread about him?

 

[PX15]

spiroxlii:

Ever read "Salem's Lot"?

I believe "Salem's Lot" was one of his earlier books, and I enjoyed it very much. There have been at least two television versions of this book but neither, imo, gave justice to the novel.

My pet peeve is when a writer has a character "put the safety" on his revolver... Happens all the time..

Regards,

JPomeroy

 

[Kipling79]

I have only read about 50% of the posts here but...

AS far as the "swinging the barrel" on a revolver, could he have been referring to some of the original revolver designs where the entire frame flipped forward instead of to the side like modern revolvers? Not sure, this is one of the few King books I have not read.

As far as King being "anti-gun", I don't think that is so. I think his use of guns is similar to his use of good v. evil in his books. Many mothers (like my own) didn't like me reading King's books because of the "evilness" they talked about; but these people didn't realize that King's evil was always opposed by the forces of good... Same with the guns, many of his novels have guns being the saving grace for the hero, but on the other hand, he is not shy of portraying some guns owners as "nuts", and we all know such people really do exist.

Shoot.. the in the Dark Tower series, firearms are the Holy Grail of that fictional society. In that "post apocolyptic" atmosphere, the rarity of guns and their benefit to those who still posses them is one of the running themes to the series.

 

[Ragnar Danneskjold]

I much prefer Tom Clancy. Now there's an author who goes to outrageous lengths to make things, including gun related facts, believable and realistic.

 

[Atticus]

Argumentum ad populum, perhaps? Shania Twain fans lurrrrve this one. "She's sold millions of records, she must be great!" mmmmk, if you say so...

Regardless of anyone's opinion...King's body of work (including the movies made from it) probably put him more in the category of the Beatles...not Shania.
He may not be an intellectual giant, or a gun expert, but he is great at character development, and at turning the ordinary and mundane into something terribly wrong and horrifying...something millions of people can relate to. King questions the sanity of nearly all of his characters (and readers), or the environment in which they exist; which we all do at one time or another.
King makes us all understand that the nice man next door could be a Ted Bundy or John Gacy...or worse.

 

[hoji]

Or a Dean Koontz book where the cop had fired his 45 revolver 5 times because the empties were ejected on the floor. A later edition of the book had the gun changed to an automatic.

Koontz actually is a gun guy. At least believes in "shall not be infringed". Mistakes like the one above can often be blamed on editing by the publisher.