Cheers, Jon A.
I went and checked at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BT97AO/002-4249447-7730454 and Jon is quite right. Twenty years seems a long way away, but Sony are probably just scheduling it that far off because during the Great iPod Content Uprising Years of 2013-2024 people aren't going to have much time for things like actually watching films, what with gathering together in places where the iPodPeople can't get them and shooting them in the brain and all that stuff, and it's only after the Man-Droid-iPod Peace Treaties of 2024 that anyone gets back to the serious business bringing out DVDs of long-forgotten movies.
Alternately, I suppose it could be an Amazon.com typo and MirrorMask could be coming out on the last day of this year. That would be nice.
Reading Anansi Boys, I'm noticing that current technologies are mentioned quite frequently. In a way this sort of nails the book down to a very specific slice of time. Do you ever worry that including very contemporary things in a story gets rid of any ambiguousness as to the era in which it is set, possibly making it less "timeless?"
Also, I was very amused to see one of my favorite movies, Eraserhead, in the book, and it got me wondering what your thoughts on the film may be.
-jason.
oneiromancerproductions.com
Not really. I like to think that anything that relies on people being people is going to be pretty timeless, no matter when it's set. Someone once said that if you create a real person in fiction you can make an Everyman, but if you set out to create an Everyman you'll just make a formless sort of nobody, and I suspect that the same could be true of trying to set something in a timeless now. You don't dismiss Jane Austen or P. G. Wodehouse, or even Douglas Adams, for writing about their time, after all.
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I'm answering questions about ANANSI BOYS over at http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/ -- Spoilers abound, so you may want to give it a miss if you have not yet read the book.
So, to entertain you and allow me to close a bunch of tabs, first some wonderful words from foreign tongues; here's a link to an apparently semi-official site for the Lestat musical (with a nice bit of Dave McKean art); this blog's official birding consultant has been picked on the team to go and look for the legendary Ivory Billed Woodpecker and that she's listing what she's allowed to take on this pleasure-cruise; Jonathan Carroll sent me a link to a site that allows the devout to accessorize their iPod shuffles appropriately; Archimedes' killer mirrors probably didn't work as advertised, alas; and Batton Lash's Supernatural Law is now a webcomic. I thangyew.