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Tor’s Patrick Nielsen Hayden on the future of SF and books
August 27, 2009 | 5:42 pm
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By Chris Meadows
io9 has interviewed Tor editor Patrick “pnh” Nielsen Hayden, co-blogger of Making Light, about the future of science fiction. Nielsen Hayden (it’s a compound surname) has some interesting things to say, much of it about e-books.
pnh “believes print books will continue on into [the] future,” but has himself been reading e-books since the era of the Palm Pilot. (In the comments, he outs himself as the nameless “editor of science-fiction books” cited as an enthusiastic Palm Pilot convert in a 1998 Salon Magazine article.)
The small visual inconvenience of e-books is made up for with find and search functions, and the fungibility of digital text. My authors deliver manuscripts to me electronically – I encourage that. I will be happy if I never have to carry around 500 sheets of 8×11 paper ever again. That’s me, and I process text for a living.
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.
Tor.com was a place where people complained about lack of availability of e-books for a while. Before we launched the site we had this free e-book giveaway and people thought Tor.com would be all about e-books. But it really wasn’t. E-books are phase B and C.
Tor, pnh explains, recognizes that the e-book market is far from settled yet, and does not want to get locked into any single platform in these still-early days of the market.
pnh also feels just as I do about the spectre of “interactivity” in e-books: linear narrative fiction has been around for a long time. Despite the suggestions of some that “interactivity” will be the wave of the future, it doesn’t appear that persistent narratives are going anywhere. He also has some interesting (and, for a professional editor, perhaps unexpected) things to say about fanfic.
This is a fascinating interview; don’t miss it.
Technorati Tags: pnh,making light,tor,publisher,editor,patrick nielsen hayden,nielsen hayden,fanfic,science-fictionwise,e-books,palm pilot,Salon Magazine
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Comments:
“…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
You’re almost certainly right. Highflown metaphors + field one doesn’t actually know anything about = FAIL.
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.
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.
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.
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.