Comment by InternetOfStuff

> 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.

That's a very interesting take. I never took it to have such a deep meaning, I took it rather at face value (and its face-value-interptretation if you will): that is was visual white noise (vaguely like driving into the snow at night, perhaps?). I took the metaphorical meaning to be that the sky was indistinct, somehow pointless (like watching no channel), conjuring up bleakness and futility.

In other words, I took it to be a device to transport ambience, not structural meaning.

> 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.

Interesting. I had meant to re-read it anyway. I shall pay attention to your perspective, see how it shifts my perspective of the rest of the book.

> 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".

To my kids, a "dead channel" would look uniformly blue.

Or like a 404 page perhaps, these day :-D

> The significance is timeless, drawing power from the assertion that life is in fact lived on a stage.

I feel you might be you're over-thinking it there, in the sense that the actors in a TV show wouldn't be seeing static. Only viewers would.

Thanks for sharing your perspective, I found it really interesting.