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The Novel as Software
LukePieStalker writes "Former English professor Eric Brown has published the first work in what he claims is a new literary category called the 'digital epistolary novel', or DEN. 'Intimacies', based on an 18th century novel, requires the DEN 1.2 software. The program's interface has windows for mock e-mail, instant messaging, Web browser and pager, through which the narrative unfolds. For those wishing to create their own works in this genre, Mr. Brown is marketing composition software called DEN WriterWare."
Great: first of all there's no link in the NY times article to find where this guy's homepage is. Then I go to google, and the first link is a guy named "Eric Brown" who's an FBI top ten wanted person. But hey, this Eric Brown has published a guide to all Eric Browns on the net. Thank you!
Maan
Interesting concept. Sometimes it would feel nice to virtually live another life in such a detailed manner. This one is making me sleepy.
Now if only Microsoft could do something with this.....
*naps in his cube dreaming of malware-infected reading materials*
Interesting idea. But new literary category? Please.
I imagined a choose your own adventure novel online. If you pick the machine gun turn to page 36 if you pick the rocket launcher turn to page 54.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
Really, this seems very much like the concept of .Hack//Sign.
That game takes place in a massively multiplayer online RPG; the events unfold through happenings in the world, posts to the message board and e-mail. It seems like this "novel" is very much the same thing, but perhaps more in depth.
In either case, as far as literature goes, there's no need to have people clicking around to get to the next part. That, to me, says "game". This can just as easily be accomplished in a book with a bit of narration.. it seems just an attempt to shift the style of narration.
-DrkShadow
Portal was a great Sci-fi novel that I read back on my trusty C-64 back in the mid 80's. It was kind of like reading a series of emails and logs, and every so often it would provide you with "resarch material". Ah the good ole days.....
The epistolary form requires the reader to put additional effort into understanding the author's intent. It died out as a viable form more than a hundred years ago as authors realized their readers didn't want to put that much effort into reading. So they came up with the "omniscient narrator." (Hey, cool, now I don't have to think at all, the author is telling the story as if he were god, so I can trust everything he says!)
I doubt that people today are much more interested in putting effort into their reading than they were 100 years ago.
My predicition is that the DEN will not revolutionize writing.
Read any good sonnets lately?
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
WTF?!?
-m
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# Modus Ponens
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From the article:
And I couldn't agree more. I don't see this style as being appealing to me. Neat concept, but it's not quite "it"
topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
A long time ago (1986 I think), Activision published a game called Portal, and C64, PC, Amiga, Mac, etc. It is an interactive novel where an intelligent computer pieces together the story of why nobody is left on the Earth. The pieces come as memos, effectively e-mails, and you can browse other parts of the system for various bits of information on characters, events, etc. It's very absorbing and is obviously predates this "new" thing by nearly 20 years!
There are other excellent games from around the same time like The Fourth Protocol which, although much more interactive, effectively work in the same manner via an icon-based system. A brilliant game, by the way, highly recommended.
Griffin and Sabine (and the followups) did this with dead trees back in the late 80's early 90's. The book contained a series of letters, postcards, etc. between the two main characters. And unlike all the novels that were written in letter form before, the letters and post cards were physical objects in the book.
It's one of those oh-so-clever ideas that gets done once just to show it can be done, then is never done again because it's not that great of an idea.
There was even a video game like this. I think it was Majestic, http://www.gamezone.com/gamesell/p16652.htm , that I'm thinking of. You could give it your beeper number and it would call you, etc. A one person LARP.
...where you were sent e-mail, pages, called at work and home, on your cell phone, faxes, etc. Each event was a clue to a mystery, or an indication you had to go look for something.
I seem to recall the game folding itself up and going away immediately after the Trade Center Tower Attack.
Other than the phone and fax events, this sounds quite similar, and I suspect it may end up with some of the same flaws.
The primary flaw that I see with this is that I personally have no problem reading bits and pieces out of dozens of books, often several different books by the same author. This is purely my decision, and I am in a mindset for that book when I go back to reading it, because I choose to be. Getting IM's, e-mail, etc as "Novel" content, seems to me to be eliminating the reader's election to get back into the frame of mind for properly processing the content, and I suspect will end up being ignored.
Then again, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
You never know...
Well, you cannot pirate a novel, since if you copy it, it's not novel any more, is it?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yet another contribution to that age old conundrum. Other posters have weighed in on whether they like it or not, and whether it is even a new genre citing similar approaches going back over a hundred years.
..." That said it all.
An Anonymous Coward dismissed it entirely saying it was not even literature. Isn't it, though?
The one point that caught my eye was the last sentence. "Mr. Brown is marketing
Is it art, or marketing ploy? Considering that even television commericals are considered by some to be art, one wonders.
I've always been in the "art for art's sake school." The fact that Mr. Brown is marketing his 'genre' diminishes the value of his 'literature', at least for me. But does that mean that it's not art?
The program's interface has windows for mock e-mail, instant messaging, Web browser and pager, through which the narrative unfolds.
Just browsing through the table of contents...
Chapter I: John deletes his spam
...
Chapter II: John closes a million popups
Chapter III: John deletes more spam
Chapter IV: John cybers **hotChIcKa69**
Chapter V: John deletes more spam and sets up a new mail client
Chapter VI: John closes more popups, installs Mozilla
Chapter VII: John deletes more spam, puts his fist through the monitor
Chapter VIII: John goes to the hospital