Comment by bitwize

I realize you say this somewhat in jest, but I want to respond to this because the first sentence of of William Gibson's _Neuromancer_ is paradoxically both timeless and time bound.

> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

That first sentence characterizes the novel's diegetic (in-narrative) setting by giving the sky a property of an alternate medium (television). Unlike gentler rhetorical assertions such as simile, the declaration that the sky possessed a property of television suggests that the setting--like the intra-diegetic setting of the (Morrocan) beach in which an unnamed adversarial AI imprisons Case--is also a media construct in which the reader is imprisoned.

In other words, the media topology structuring the novel's outermost narrative is a recursive formation of one medium inside another medium and this structure is timeless. It's merely recursion.

However, fully understanding the literary (as opposed to narrative) significance of such a structuration depends upon knowing what television was and why any of its channels might be "dead" as opposed to "live".

A useful point of comparison can be found in William Shakespeare's _As You Like It_ (II.VII.139-143)

  All the world’s a stage,
  And all the men and women merely players;
  They have their exits and their entrances,
  And one man in his time plays many parts,
  His acts being seven ages. [. . .]

The significance is timeless, drawing power from the assertion that life is in fact lived on a stage. On the other hand, the description is also time bound (as well as culturally circumscribed) depending as it does on the greatly diminished (since Elizabethan England) medium of live performance.

EDIT: Fix predicate in first sentence. Formatting. Change "at" to "a" in penultimate sentence.

It didn't really make sense then either. No sky looks like television static. Jeff Minter's Polybius game pokes fun at it by showing the text "The sky was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel" -- before thrusting you into a level that literally had a static sky.

Surely there are a few masterpieces where explanations are given in magic-babble.

I'd argue it's poor writing that needed to refer to the amount of data, for anything. TNG really lost its way in technobabble.

The mechanics are supposed to get out of your way and Numenera’s Cypher system seems to do that job well.

The setting too leaves a lot of room and options for a good DM to expand into and build upon.

You can base almost any kind of story in Numenera, with tech levels ranging from primitive to medieval to hyper-sci-fi.