Pengrin: Non Linear Narrative

The ever experimental dudes at publisher Penguin UK have something new brewing.

Ever since the emergence of the idea of hypertext, literature geeks [like myself] have been thinking about how non-linear narratives might be constructed.

You don't need clickable links to be hypertextual - Nabokov's staggeringly brilliant Pale Fire is a non-linear novel of sorts, where the exegetical footnotes to the preliminary poem are themselves the [meta]narrative.

But if you believe, as I do, that the generation that has grown up naturally creating their own hypertextual narratives as they click their way through the web, that transmedia narratives that leverage the true media behaviours of this generation are coming to the fore, and that people should read more in general because reading is for awesome people, then the time is ripe for another pop at hypertextual literature.

Jeremy has put a teaser post up on the Penguin blog, which suggests they might be up to just that, and with Dan Hon / Sixtostart, masters of the ARG, involved the results are bound to be interesting.

Go sign up here and see what's through the looking glass.

Comments

[John Grant]

sounds like it's going to be good, I'm a big fan of non linear (ie f***ed up) fiction, eg Cities of the Red Night

I heard a radio prog last year on the origins of the encyclopedia (the original Enlightenment one written by Diderot and others) and they apparently made use of cross referencing & footnotes to make scandalous points missed by catholic church censors
eg under the entry for "autophagy" (ie a variant of cannibalism) they put "SEE ALSO: Holy Sacrament". The other interesting thing being it took something like 20 years to put together, so the hyperlinks were massively planned ahead/dispersed in time

:J

[Faris]

hey dude - cities of the red night is one of my favourite books - I wrote my optional thesis at uni on Burroughs...
l
hypertextual easter eggs - brilliant - i was talking to a magazine editor last night and he said that they hide messages for themselves and those in the know in 'random' text sections...

[Faris]

there's definitely something about hiding things in plain site...

[mark stone]

The non-linear concept to writing was attempted in a Facebook group 'The facebook never ending story' named after the classic 80's fantasy adventure film 'The Never Ending Story'.

Potentially a great idea to start a story based on collaborative wall posts. When i joined i was looking forward to the literary cream of the Facebook-esphere contributing to a great story, which as it's in real time could literally never end (unlike the film of the same name, which, unfortunately did after 90 minutes).

However, it was been a disappointing effort from the 91 users (at time of this post) and only 12 wall posts which have remained after the administrator seems to have deleted some of the key parts of the story.

It would be great to see such a online concept with serious collaborative effort with famous authors eg J.K Rowling writes a paragraph, then Nick Hornby then Dave Gorman etc...

[Mauricio Mota]

Hey Faris,

A group from Brazil has been working with that for 12 years! They developed an engine where anyone could contribute on a narrative. They used it with the biggest broadcast tv in the country: while there was a fiction serie passing on the tube the audience had the opportunity to develop the same story but with a different plot from the mainstream. The leapfrog was that the team who created the engine was managed by a writer/Phd in Literature who saw that giving the platform was not enough: they had to teach narrative for the user during the experience. The tool was a hit and thousands of people contributed and the winner (with more read and coherent non-linear texts) got a trip to Europe (where the series took place). And it was in 2002 my friend. It's a shame they don't have the case in english

[cedric]

This collaborative writting you are refering about, isn't it what Surrealist were calling Cadavres Exquis... ALthough even if collaborative, the idea was not to offer a proper thread, but more to see the impact of random words generated by random writers in story-telling.

Otherwise, if you are keen on multithreading and its impact in culture (i.e. press, TV, games), you probably read Stephen Johnson's "Everything Bad Is Good for You". Accessible and inspiring... A nice catch up on the topic.

Keep on inspiring ideas, mate, be it in the states or on the other side of the pond.