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We lost another analog medium last week, when broadcast television in the United States switched over to digital. They refer to this as “analog sunset” and it’s part of a multimedia trend.

Over the past couple decades we’ve seen digital transitions in music (from vinyl to CDs and MP3s), photography (from film grains to pixels), animation (CGI and Flash animation have eclipsed hand-drawn cells), movies and television (shot with digital cameras, digitally edited, and available for home viewing in digital formats–although the transition to digital projection at the theater is still ongoing), graphic art (likely to be edited, if not entirely created, on a computer), architecture (blueprints are made by CAD now, rather than T-squares and protractors), and video games (which are digital by necessity). Even telephones are moving from analog copper wires to digital cell phones and Internet telephony.

The bulk of our artistic expression is being stored and transmitted in the form of 1’s and 0’s, and I’m cool with that, mostly, because it decreases costs and increases choice. But nuances and subtlety are lost and the “ragged edges” either become straight lines or have to be intentionally pixelated. Digital music lacks the tone and fuzz of vinyl records, the discerning eye is drawn to photographs shot with real film, and we sure had a lot of good times with our old analog “rabbit ears” TV.

So what’s left in the world of analog? Newspapers…for now. But news publishers are failing because their product is outdated before it can reach its audience. They’ve incorporated digital processes in layout and production but they still need analog trucks, analog vending boxes, analog paperboys, and analog newsstands once the analog pages are printed.

I’d be surprised if the print newspapers are still with us in ten years, which will leave us only with…

Books, printed with analog ink on analog paper. Possibly magazines, too, and works of fine art–but how often does the average person buy an oil painting or sculpture?

Even with the Kindle and other digital book readers coming on, I don’t see paper books failing as quickly as print newspapers, which will likely make printed books the last big analog island in an ocean of digitization.

Ten years from now, when my daughter is 11, printed books may be the only works of analog expression she knows. Books will be the only creative works that don’t have to be plugged in or recharged; the only ones with a physical form that has to be stored on a physical shelf; the only ones that aren’t composed of bits and bytes. Everything else will come to her as pixels on a screen.

I don’t know if this is good or bad, and maybe books have already lost their “ragged edge” because they’re composed and edited on computers instead of typewriters or longhand. How different would my book have been if I’d written it with an ink quill? I’ll never know for sure but I suspect the difference would be significant.

But here’s the one thing analog has going for it: durability. Paper books, if properly stored and maintained, can last for centuries. Especially the ones printed on acid-free paper. By contrast, every known form of digital storage begins to fail after only a few years, even assuming the format remains in use.

That manuscript you saved onto a 5-3/4″ floppy ten years ago, using a word processing program that no longer exists? I hope you printed an analog copy for your records, because the digital version is gone, baby, gone–into the digital sunset!

Thanks to J.L. Bell of Oz and Ends for pointing me to this SF Signal post about the use of gods in fantasy. The question is…

In a created fantasy world, gods can proliferate by the hundreds. When building religious systems for fantasies, what are the advantages/disadvantages of inventing pantheons vs. single gods, or having no religious component at all?

I’m not going to address that question directly, because it’s already been done in that original post by luminaries in a constellation far beyond me, but it did give me a few thoughts to chew on.

Today, for stories set in an age of mythology and heroes, a pantheon of gods has come to be the expected norm–but that wasn’t generally true of the fantasy I grew up with. There were no gods in Middle Earth, Shannara, Pern, Xanth, Earthsea, Landover, or Oz–or if there were, they didn’t make a big enough impact to stick in my memory. The theology of Narnia was Christianity in a lion’s pelt. Some books set in Camelot depicted a lingering folk belief in the Celtic gods, but always in a doomed struggle against the encroachment of monotheism. Low fantasy characters like Conan the Barbarian were always running afoul of some members of the Temple of the Cult of Something-Or-Other, but they hardly ever got developed well enough to be called a pantheon.

But the fantasy shelves of the very late 20th and early 21st Centuries have been packed with gods-a-plenty from a generation of authors raised on Greek mythology in the classroom and after-school sessions of Dungeons & Dragons. Not just polytheistic systems of worship but real dei-ex-machina characters who interact with their mortal followers in the works like The Belgariad and Malloreon of David Eddings or Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Even in contemporary fantasy, Rick Riordan’s “Percy Jackson & the Olympians” novels posit the continued influence of the Greek pantheon over Western Civilization; mythological figures pervade the works of Neil Gaiman; Philip Pullman’s multiverse of “His Dark Materials” shows God as a figurehead among a multitude of angelic beings; the alternate universe of Jonathan Stroud’s “Bartimaeus Trilogy” is full of godlike demons; and I’m eagerly awaiting the final book of Garth Nix’s “Keys to the Kingdom” series with its pantheon of godlike Trustees in the House at the center of the universe.

My own personal confession is that I have an epic fantasy in my backburner files that’s probably my favorite story out of everything I’ve ever written, and it’s jam packed wall-to-wall with gods and goddesses. Having an active and intrusive pantheon immediately marks a story world as outside our current experience–which is the aim of any fantasy. The existence of gods influences histories, languages, cultures, politics, and lifestyles, and provides a jumping-off point for potentially world-shattering conflicts.

Part of it is probably that gods are fun to write, but I still like to blame Edith Hamilton and Gary Gygax.