Ur (novella)

Original release

King said, speaking about Ur:

The delivery mechanism to my mind is secondary for me as a writer. [...] But I did this once before with a story called Riding the Bullet and I never had so many guys in suits come up to me and ask me questions. But they didn't want to know about the story, they didn't want to know about the process, they wanted to know about the delivery system, but to me that's secondary. [...] I think people will be more interested in the business aspect of [Ur] than they will in the story. I would never have agreed to it if I didn't think it was a pretty good story. I decided I would like to write a story for the Kindle, but only if I could do one about the Kindle. Gadgets fascinate me, particularly if I can think of a way they might get weird. I had previously written about homicidal cars, sinister computers, and brain-destroying mobile phones; at the time the Amazon request came in, I'd been playing with an idea about a guy who starts getting e-mails from the dead. The story I wrote, Ur, was about an e-reader that can access books and newspapers from alternate worlds. I realized I might get trashed in some of the literary blogs, where I would be accused of shilling for Jeff Bezos & Co., but that didn't bother me much; in my career, I have been trashed by experts, and I'm still standing.

King's agent, Ralph Vicinanza, has stated that downloads of the novella at Amazon.com have reached "five figures" in about three weeks, while also denying the novella is an infomercial for the Kindle. King's publisher, Scribner, released Ur as an audiobook on February 16, 2010. In an interview in October 2010, King stated that he did not write the novella for the money: "I did it because it was interesting. I'm fairly prolific. It took three days, and I've made about $80,000. You can't get that for short fiction from Playboy or anybody else. It's ridiculous."

Plot

Wesley Smith, an English teacher at a Kentucky college and book aficionado, wants to go "New School" after fighting with his girlfriend and buys a Kindle. Due to a minor mistake in his credit card number, he is sent a pink Kindle (even though at the time, Kindles were always white). Slowly he realizes that this edition was meant for another Wesley Smith from a parallel universe.

Smith's Kindle has a peculiar function called UR that can search multiple timelines for data. Smith finds four books Ernest Hemingway wrote in an alternate universe where he lived for three more years. Further searches reveal written works by Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare from other timelines. Wesley also discovers yet another function concerning newspapers that were published in an alternate universe.

Smith tells a friend and a student about the Kindle. The three try to connect to an issue of The New York Times from an alternate reality but find to their horror that no papers are published on the day they requested. They learn that in this alternate reality, the world ended when the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated into World War 3 in November 1962.

Using the UR feature on his Kindle, Smith also discovers that a busload of students will be killed by a drunk driver in less than three days. He seeks out help to track down the drunk driver and keep her from killing the students. He is successful, although he realizes no one other than his two friends will know.

However, he is wrong. When he gets back from his success, he finds that Low Men in Yellow Coats (as introduced in King's 1999 book Hearts in Atlantis) are waiting for him, ready to punish him for using the forbidden function of the Kindle. He argues that perhaps this change was meant to happen – how else could he have gotten the Kindle otherwise? His argument does not fully sway the Low Men, but they feel it best to simply keep it from happening again by confiscating the Kindle, leaving Wesley alone to ponder the enormity of a world he thought he understood. Soon afterward, Wesley learns his girlfriend may want to reconcile with him.