Comments on: Tor’s Patrick Nielsen Hayden on the future of SF and books

By: Steve Jordan

Steve Jordan — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 03:55:17 +0000

My feeling is that the linear narrative exists outside of the media it is presented in, like all narrative styles. It persists in music, in movies and television, in oral traditions, and even in some visual arts. There’s nothing about e-books that demand they must follow a specific narrative format; they can follow whatever format you want to apply to them.

As the linear narrative is very natural to humans, I doubt it will go anywhere. The linear form will be with us for quite some time, coexisting with whatever other narrative forms we develop.

Of course, there’s a point in which an interactive novel ceases to become a novel, and becomes something else entirely. Once you have that, you probably need more than an e-book to hold it.

By: Chris Meadows

Chris Meadows — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:08:59 +0000

A number of writers have made predictions that stories will become more interactive in the future. Most notably Vernor Vinge, who features interactive "novels" in a number of his stories—True Names for instance, and Rainbows End. The problem to me is that these predictions have always typified the "if you build it they will come" fallacy. Unless people wake up one day and think, "Hey, I'd really like my books to be interactive! That would be really neat!" then there's not any demand for it. And if there's not any demand for it, people aren't likely to care about it even if it becomes available.

By: asphalt

asphalt — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:37:37 +0000

the speculation about narrative becoming ‘interactive’ is interesting. i’ve been thinking about it superficially for some time — ever since i played my first cd-rom adventure game. but something about interactivity and *narrative* has just struck me.

when someone’s telling me about his or her day, that’s linear. he or she might call up an e-mail message on his or her smartphone to show me, and then say, “isn’t that outrageous?” but that’s a line within a line. same when i’m telling. i don’t foresee myself ever telling a friend about the events of my life in any kind of *interactive* way over beers after work. i may digress a bunch of times, but that’s not the same as adding interactivity or suddenly becoming ‘multimedia’.

*is* print narrative is still an analog for talking/telling? are we changing how we talk?

i’ll think about it some more.

By: Steve Jordan

Steve Jordan — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:33:25 +0000

pnh seems shrewder than most to recognize that there is still a lot of room for development, in potentially unpredictable and certainly interesting ways, in the e-book industry. E-books represent a unique combination of electronic media, distribution, marketing and usage, and as such, can’t be stuffed into the same pigeonholes as other media products.

By: Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Patrick Nielsen Hayden — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 03:40:32 +0000

You’re almost certainly right. Highflown metaphors + field one doesn’t actually know anything about = FAIL.

By: Don Lloyd

Don Lloyd — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:35:21 +0000

“…He notes that e-books’ market share has historically been small, but is now growing logarithmically, and addresses Tor’s much-maligned e-book strategy…”

I suspect that growing ‘exponentially’ was closer to what was intended. A variable that grows logarithmically would be the pedestrian series of 1,2,3 as the base 10 logarithms of 10, 100, 1000.

Regards, Don