From: (No Email available)

Date: 2003-03-06 11:31:14

Comment:

Here is a clip from an interview with the author of the story.  Maybe this will help to understand it...

The idea that started the Ring was "What if four men died in different places at the exact same time?" Then I had to think of what these men had in common, something they had caught. A virus? Maybe a virus that kills exactly one week after someone is infected. So they had to be together at in the same place at that time. Then the problem became deciding on what the virus was. A toxin in the food? No, it would have to be something you could see. A ghost? No, not in this day and age.

I was thinking about this when I looked next to my word processor and saw a videotape. Oh, yeah, so I'll have the four people watch the video tape. But what's on this tape? It's not a coherent, logical story, just a string of fragmentary scenes. When creating those images, I had to refrain from thinking logically. I randomly lined up the thoughts that were floating around in my head and just typed them all out at once.

Later, I put myself in Asakawa's shoes to analyze the video images I had described. I realized that the images could be separated into two categories: images that are floating or hidden in the scenes, and images that can actually be seen with the naked eye. I had to make some distinction between the two. How could I do this? Some of the images pass through your retina, but you don't actually see them, and so you don't blink. The images that you can see with your naked eye cause you to blink and are held inside by the black curtain of that blink. And then later I inserted these blinks into the story. Well, these images that you can see as they pass into your eye, how were they copied onto the tape? Were they broadcast from somewhere? Were they the result of pirated signals? No. Then I began to think that it could be nensha (the ability to project images onto paper, photographs, etc. with the mind). Alright, so I'll go with nensha.

Then I began to read up on ESP. Before that, I hadn't been thinking of putting a psychic in the story. I wasn't really interested in it in the beginning, but I did some reading on the topic. You know, about Professor Fukurai and so on. The story of the Ring really began to unfold from there.   you can read this interview at
http://ringworld.somrux.com/koji.htm
If you read the rest of the interview you might get the same impression i did which is that the series of stories about samara don't center around the morgans.  they just happened to adopt a freak-psychic child and the U.S. movie doesn't give us any answers as to why she is evil or psychic or where she came from to begin with.