Neal Stephenson Unveils His Digital Novel Platform

pickens writes "The NY Times reports that Neal Stephenson's company Subutai has released the first installment of Stephenson's new novel, Mongoliad, about the Mongol invasion of Europe, using what it calls the PULP platform for creating digital novels. The core of the experience is still a text novel, but authors can add additional material like background articles, images, music, and video and there are also social features that allow readers to create their own profiles, earn badges for activity on the site or in the application, and interact with other readers. Stephenson says the material is an extension of what many science fiction and fantasy novels already offer. 'I can remember reading Dune for the first time, and I started by reading the glossary,' Stephenson says. 'Any book that had that kind of extra stuff in it was always hugely fascinating to me.' Jeremy Bornstein says Subutai is experimenting with a new model for publishing books and says the traditional model of paying for content may not hold up when the content can 'be canned and sent around to your friends for free,' but that people will hopefully still pay for content if 'the experience is so much more rich, so much more involving.'"

Comments

The Great Expectations Marketing Strategy

[ideonexus]

So it's a serialized novel, like Dicken's Great Expectations or Stephen King's Green Mile, where you get readers to subscribe for a year, and then get more money from them when you publish the finalized ebook or hardcopy. I'm sure this format could work and make money, but the fact that the NYT's ran this article, with a link to the website, which doesn't yet have a "Subscribe" option yet marks a sorely missed opportunity.

I'll be interested in seeing how this turns out. As many commenters have noted, it's nothing new, and reading for long stretches on a desktop, laptop, iPad, or cell phone is uncomfortable. I tried to write a novel using MediaWiki and allowing user contributions, but the online format drove people away. Illustrations might make it more appealing, but user contributions could quickly make it go the way of Oort-Cloud, lots of people posting mediocre content and nobody reading any of it.

Re:No thanks

[eddy the lip]

Except you don't have to keep subscribing to read what's already written. You keep that, DRM free. The subscription is for continued new content.

Re:Stephenson just isn't a techie any more...

[IICV]

Science fiction sales must be really plummeting, since all the authors want to leave the genre as soon as possible. They write a few scifi novels and then switch to fantasy, or, in Stephenson's case, historical fiction.

I'm guessing you're unacquainted with Alastair Reynolds, then, or pretty much any other author who writes "hard" science fiction.

And the thing is, really, most "science fiction" authors aren't really writing science fiction. William Gibson, for instance, wrote the original Neuromancer manuscripts on a typewriter - he's about as technical as any other English major, and it really shows even in Neuromancer. Neil Stephenson, despite having written a couple of pretty good sciencey fiction novels, isn't really into it - he's much more of a nerd who does a bunch of research into something and then writes a story about it, as can be seen even in Snow Crash (ancient Sumeria), Cryptonomicon (the history of cryptography), Anathem (the history of logic and philosophy) and Diamond Age (the fundamentals of computation). Of course he's going to go off and write something else - he's not really interested in writing about science fiction, he seems to be far more interested in doing historical research and writing a story about it. It was basically a coincidence that he became known as a science fiction writer.

If you look at the actual hard SF authors, on the other hand, they've been quietly pumping novels out since the genre was invented. Greg Egan's been consistently publishing hard SF, as have Stephen Baxter, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear and Charles Stross. Heck, Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon novels and Iain M. Banks's books (when he publishes like that) probably count too, though they're not really so much science fiction as they are fantasy in a sciencey setting.

Look: if you can't find authors who consistently publish good science fiction novels, you're just not looking in the right places.