Note the two corrections to my notes on the GDC, I misspelled Pekko Koskinen’s last name, and I mistakenly said the Strange Attractors team at Ominous Development Studios were students. I’ve been playing that game by the way, it’s soothing.
After I used iTunes for a few days it broke my install of Windows XP because I *gasp* dared to take out the iPod before the sluggish and vengeful Apple-ware gave me permission, and now my machine’s at the shop getting the operating system rebuilt. [Though maybe the machine probs are unrelated to iTunes, you never really do find out these things.] Anyway I do love my iPod. I’ll write more on it later. Changing my worldview. Since I’m machine weak, I’ll just recycle old pix today.
I'm wrestling with the question of what kind of novel people would write if they had postsingularity style mind amplification, helper agents, planetary ultra-wideband access for all, etc. Store it as a waking dream, as a VR, as a game? I call this a metanovel.
I’d like to get all Borgesian and Stan Lem-ish on this problem's ass. Think of a variety of oddball new ways to write a novel. (I consulted my Collected Stories by Borges already, but need to get hold of a copy of Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum (reviews of nonexistent books) for more inspiration.]
Metanovel design patterns:
Lifebox. A metanovel that feels like a person’s whole remembered life. The art of a lifebox novel is to tweak it so that the life is a bit more interesting than your own. A lifebox novel will normally be a temporal interval of a life, possibly the whole thing. You could artificially limit yourself to hovering near the main character (third person objective) instead of inhabiting them (first person), but the third person option doesn’t make that much sense.
Inventory. This is a way of organizing a Lifebox novel. Think of Charles Simmons’s book where he goes over his experiences with various ordinary kinds of things, like a water chapter, a frying-pan chapter, a vagina chapter, a freckles chapter. hats, tongues, bicycles, dogs, trees, drugs, food, cars, clothes, teaching, voice, fish, shit, wind, kites, airplanes…. Or instead of themes, you could organize the Lifebox around locations, like by telling everything that happened in each important location in your life.
Multithread. A metanovel that’s like a movie, but with complete mental records of everyone in it. Possibly have it really be like a movie, and have the offscreen records as well. Fake a lot of the internals on a need-to-know basis, like the way you could make an infinite VR by having the landscape be created on the fly.
Forker. A metanovel that includes all N to the Nth possible options. Jorge-Luis Borges hints at this notion in his story, “The Garden of Forking Paths.”
Reverse Forker. Jorge-Luis Borges discusses this story pattern in his tale, “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain,” describing an (imagined) book called April March by Quain. April March begins with a somewhat ambiguous scene of a man and a woman talking, and is followed by three versions of what happened to the man and woman the day before, each of which is followed by three versions of what happened the day before that.
Mirror. A factual account of a scene followed by a metanovel version of the scene, possibly followed by a further transformed version of the scene, possibly including the metanovelist imagining the metanovel version…
Props. A metanovel from the point of view of object or objects that are passed around; one thinks, in a melodramatic vein, of a gun or a treasure. Alain Robbe-Grillet got into this zone.
Hive. A metanovel in which the “characters” are groups of people.
Animal. P.O.V. of an animal. Doesn’t need to be meta, strictly speaking, I mean look at Call of the Wild. But having the orphidnet and the possible brain access could let you really get into an animal’s p.o.v. I’d love to fly or swim.
Timeslice. An exhaustive description of everything happening in a city or a smaller zone, the description limited to one instant of time.
Reveal. A metanovel detective story that proposes the wrong solution to the crime, but with loose ends that allow the user to in fact winkle out the correct answer. This is a Borges idea. Doesn’t really need to be a metanovel, but the meta might make it possible to make this work better.
March 27th, 2006 at 11:04 pm
Stanislaw Lem died today (March 27, 2006). He was a giant of SF and of literature generally. His classic SF novel SOLARIS is one of my all-time favorite novels.
March 28th, 2006 at 10:18 am
Sorry to hear about the death of Stanislaw Lem. Weirdly synchronistic to have that info pop up today when I’m already thinking about him. I just went to the Locus SF magazine website http://www.locusmag.com and found a link to his home page, http://www.lem.pl/cyberiadinfo/english/main.htm
I first came to admire him after coming across “Memoirs Found In A Bathtub” in,I think, the library stacks at Geneseo. I anagramed his name to make a character called “Mel Nast” in my novel SOFTWARE.
He made it to 84, which is a great age, 12 * 7, so his life was a cosmic year of seven-year-months.
March 28th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
Rudy, If I were kiqqed and writing a metanovel it would probably be a virtual reality where the characters went on living after the story ended and wrote their own chapters. Did Ishmael retire to the Old Sailor’s Home? You could re-enter and ‘read’ it over as a story, in which my order is imposed upon them, or just drop in and see what they’re doing. If I did it right, maybe they’d be bored and write their own metanovel. Or build bodies and escape the book.
But, maybe if I was hyped up to godlike near-perfection I wouldn’t feel any need to make art.
March 28th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
I like the idea of having a clever metawriter pal that emails you chunks of metanovel that you experience as lucid dreaming every night. Just as in waking life, you can influence some events, but ultimately, you have no idea where the story will lead.
I also like the idea that the action and reactions of everyone who experiences the metanovel are fed back into the metatext, so it can evolve and mutate like a virus. The more people who experience it, the more it changes, until it eventually barely resembles the original version. Imagine if Moby Dick turned into an H.P. Lovecraft story, or Charlotte’s Web, or a doomed love story between Capt. Ahab and his pegleg, told from the P.O.V. of the pegleg!
March 30th, 2006 at 7:24 am
44 Views! Wow, the big time. Is the view counter for comments? Do you have a hit counter also?
How about the google meta-novel? Meaning that I get to come into it in any way I choose. I think the question to ask is what does the postsingular experience of the world look like, the novel would reflect that and amplify that. The novelist seeks to take our experience of the world and call our attention to particular aspects of that experience to tell her story or present her view or the world.
March 31st, 2006 at 12:51 pm
The more I think about it, the kiqqie metanovel might be a world or city of interesting people – same as emilio suggests, a google novel – just pick a spot and watch the characters, who all have interesting lives and stories. Walk into a bookstore and see what books THEY read. Google recent history and culture, or go to a department store and look at the things on sale. Check out the music on the radio. The architecture.
If it was sucessful, most of the details would be amusing or interesting. How would a critic evaluate the artistic merit, though? Best one wins the Piggie Award?
I ran home for lunch and found YLEM waiting, and flipped quickly over interviews of you and BWA at last year’s ICFA. Your comments re AI stuff struck me, that an AI would have no murky subconscious as well as no glands. Maybe that’s what advanced AIs would need from us – we plug in and provide that randomness and emotional tone they lack. The Pig is Big because it’s unpredictable?
April 2nd, 2006 at 6:53 pm
You could repurpose the whole Renaissance ‘Memory Palace’ thing. In ancient times, people would generate virtual buildings in their head where they could save specific memories, hooking them onto suitably bizarre props. Almost like hyperlinking really.
Alternatively, you could explore the inner lives of autistic savants, the kind like that boy – Gilles Trehin I believe – who has held an entire imaginary city in his head since he was 12 or so. There are others that did similar things: Marcel Storr, Henry Darger and a couple of others.
April 30th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
The Inventory novel sounds like Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons” (that’s prose poetry, but same idea, I think). The main sections are “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms,” and then there are smaller sections on things like “A carafe” and “Roast beef.” One of the main sections is not divided up into shorter bits, but you might find it interesting because I think it has a lot to do with eddies, repetitions, and maybe even the “gnarly”–although that’s a guess, since the first time I heard that term used the way you use it is at the Festival of Books lecture you gave today, in LA.
The Hive reminds me of some of Stein’s plays, in which “Five” says something, “Three” says something, etc. But maybe it’s “Five” say something, and “Three” say something. The words haven’t yet clued all readers into whether or not she has one or more people talking at the same time, although I tend to believe that multiple people are talking, entering and leaving the stage together, etc.
I’m not sure you have a word that describes Stein’s murder mystery, “Blood on the Dining Room Floor,” but it does something weird to the genre…but maybe not the “Reveal.” I think she might be getting the reader more and more confused about what the crime was.
May 16th, 2006 at 11:54 pm
I would like to write a metanovel, but I have enough trouble trying to get my “normal” novels published. However, there was a Mehta-novel recently, made up of plagiarized chunks of other novels. (Hee!) They pulled that one off the shelves, though I’ve seen copies. (_How Opal Mehta Got a Life_, etc.) This “scandal” spawned several contests in which the point was to write a story using ONLY sentences and paragraphs you had stolen from published novels. I set about to do this, but it turned out it took 20x longer than writing original text. (The Mehta-novel wasn’t ALL plagiarized chunks, though it was said to contain passages from at least four other novels.)
Your _Master of Space and Time_ is one of my favorite books. Too bad I can’t get blunzed.
–Shalanna (I have a livejournal that’s eponymous) (see, that’s not a hyperlink either)