The Novel Viewed As Moldy Bread

Way back at the dawn of time, I used to do research on hypertext. This was the early Eighties and the Web hadn't been invented yet. It was a time of wonderful freedom - like the days before the IBM PC and its Microsoft operating system were invented, when there were dozens of different personal computer architectures and dozens of different operating systems. Once the IBM PC appeared, all that diversity was quashed. Well, the Web did the same for the many budding hypertext systems - all those brilliant ideas were trampled in the rush to the lowest common denominator.

Which is all very dreary, but what's it got to do with writing? Not much, really. It's just that I've started writing a novel as a hypertext and I've been pondering the many ways such an object could be structured. I have a strong urge to write it as a linear structure - beginning-middle-end and everything lined up neatly in between. Something in me says this is how a book should be. But I'm fighting it. I'm trying to force myself out of this groove and to play around with some ideas.

The first, obvious, thing to do would be to have the main plot be linear with a few loops out along the way into sub-plots. The main line and the sub-plot loops could then have little spikes off them for discursion, or minor character backgrounds. This isn't so bad, it may even be something like the real 2-D structure of a book if it didn't have to be 'flattened' into a 1-D line. But there is more that could be done.

The main plot could be a number of threads - different character perspectives, different emphases on the themes of the book, or different interpretations of the action. These threads could be bundled into particular outcomes, based on decisions made one way or another throughout the book. With this approach, the book is now, effectively, many books, depending on the paths you take.

But a book isn't necessarily a sealed entity. As a hypertext, it can grow tendrils out into the wider world of knowledge and opinion. Obscure references can be linked to their exegesis in Wikipedia, the social and political context of the story can be expanded indefinitely, technical terms can be explained, maps can be referenced, animated models and video can reveal what even the best writing might leave unclear. Like a mold growing on the loaf of the Web, the book can thread its ever-branching hyphae throughout its host's body.

It's all fascinating, and the possibilities reminded me of those far-away days, scribbling diagrams on whiteboards, struggling with graph theory, and trying to hammer SGML into something computable.

But what about the reader? How much complexity can a reader take? How many divergent plotlines will a reader tolerate? How many different points of view does a reader actually want to take on a story? Where does a hypertex stop being a novel and start being intellectual masturbation? I'd be glad to hear your thoughts.

In the end, to be kind to my readers, I will probably go with a simple structure - the one I called 2-D a couple of paragraphs ago. But, oh, the possibilities!

Angry Robot

'Angry Robot' sounds sort of cute doesn't it? You can just see the little fella with its glass eyes popping and its jointed metal arms waving agitatedly. It makes me wonder whether this is really the image Harper Collins UK had in mind when they named their new sci-fi imprint.

I read in SF Scope today that Harper Collins' newly-appointed Publishing Director, Marc Gascoigne, will run the imprint as a stand-alone unit and that he's all fired up with enthusiasm and exciting ideas and intends to "build a new wave of authors in the genre". (Which made me smile, I have to say, imagining a production line where Angry Robot Authors are rolling off the conveyor belt, eyes popping and arms waving.)

More seriously, though, going on the few words of quoted comment from Mr. Gascoigne, his plan seems to be to ride on the back of "other areas of mass-media such as movies, television and computer games [which] have enjoyed massive popular success across a variety of SF and Fantasy subjects." Not surprisingly, then, he seems to want to target "hard-to-reach audiences like teenage boys." So, movies, games, TV and teenage boys, all mentioned in the same paragraph by Mr. Gascoigne. Looks like authors with shoot-em-up space operas, preferably with some yeuky horror sequences and a hot babe or two, should mail them off to Angry Robot asap.

When I was a teenage boy, I wasn't hard to reach at all. In fact, I went out hunting for sci-fi and I couldn't get enough. It was all grown-up stuff too - Ballard, Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Huxley, Vonnegut, and so on. Not a YA writer in sight in those days. Have teenage boys changed so much in a few decades? Or have marketers simply found a different kind of teenage boy to sell books to - the kind that used to kick footballs (and other teenage boys) rather than read but who now shoot simulated aliens (and simulated people) in simulated worlds?

Oh look, I'm getting all bitter and cynical again. I'm sure Angry Robot will be a fine imprint, publishing imaginative, high-quality writing by a new wave of intelligent and thoughtful writers. And, if it is, I wish it all the best.

Ebook Readers And Ebooks Aren't There Yet

I would love an ebook reader that really worked. Sadly they don't exist yet. These are the reasons I probably won't be getting an ebook reader for some considerable time.

First and foremost, I worry about access to my books. With paper books, they're always available. You just have to pick one up and it's ready to read, even if you haven't touched it for twenty years or more. With ebooks, this is not the case and might never be the case. Digital Rights Management (DRM) and file formats are two technical issues with ebooks that could render a book I buy now unusable in twenty years.

First, think about file formats. How many of the file formats available today will still be usable in twenty years? Which of the technologies that exist to read them will still be around in twenty years? If I'd had a library of ebooks on Atari or Commodore, BBC Micro or Sinclair QL machines and formats, what could I buy today to read those books? If I had my library safely backed up on cassette tapes of five-and-a-quarter inch floppy discs, what could I use now to retrieve them?

When you consider that the life of a paper book may be at least your own lifetime and maybe very much longer, just think how much technologies have changed in that time. Just think how much faster they are changing now.

DRM is a completely different issue but has similar problems. My main gripe with DRM is the notion that when I buy a book, I don't actually own anything except a license to read it (on a certain technology). Each time I want to read an ebook under some DRM regimes, I need to ask permission by logging in to the owner's service to verify my identity and my ownership of the license. I can't lend my ebook to other people. I can't pass my library on to my children. It isn't clear for most of these schemes, how I could resell my ebook. The business models around DRM are not customer friendly.

But that is only part of the problem with DRM and ebooks. What happens when the company that owns the book and licences my copy goes bust? Hopefully, a similar company will pick up the rights and carry on providing access. But what if it doesn't? Where is my book then? Does this mean that, if I buy an ebook, I have to trust that the company that supplies it will last my whole life, or that I'll be fortunate enough that an unbroken chain of companies will own the book and keep my access going?

And that isn't all. What if I change my ebook reader technology? Can I guarantee that the DRM that used to work to provide access on my old technology will now work on my new technology? What if I change readers every two years for the next two decades? What are the chances that I'll end up with a reader that has backward compatibility for the rights management scheme that was enforced by my first ebook reader? It is the same technical problem as for file formats. They change. Technology changes. There is no guarantee of backward compatibility forever. Sooner or later, one's library will become obsolete and inaccessible.

Frankly, I don't want that to happen to my books. I have many books in my shelves at home that were published fifty or more years ago. Will people in fifty years time be able to say that about their e-libraries? Or will books have to be constantly re-published – and re-purchased - so that they can be read on the new technologies yet to come?

So access is an issue that bothers me. The other main problem I have with ebook readers is less important (because I think it is a problem that will be solved one day) but is one which currently prevents me buying an ebook reader. They are just not as good as books. They are not as easy to use. You can read a book comfortably in a very wide range of lighting conditions, from bright sunlight to a gentle night-light. You can easily navigate within a book. You can add any number of bookmarks. You can annotate it. You can take it with you on holiday without needing to take a charger or worry about whether there will be telecoms access on the appropriate network when you get there. You can set it aside for a month and pick it up without finding its battery is flat. You can change your broadband supplier without losing access to your library, or your favourite bookshop. You can have one or a dozen books on the go at the same time, without needing extra readers. You can lend a book to someone else, without having to give them your reader too and making all your other books inaccessible. You can scan or photocopy or OCR a book and do things with the image or text-block you have created which, as long as they are within the 'fair use' provisions of copyright law, won't land you with a lawsuit from your book licenser for DRM infringement. The simplicity and practicality of a paper book make it easy to operate. You don't need to learn a new interface each time the technology changes because the technology doesn't change.

One day, an ebook reader will emerge which is as easy to use as a real book but we are still a long way away from it and, as long as there are dozens of different ebook readers on the market, each slightly different from the next, the problem of there being no perfect reader will always be with us. We are still waiting for the ebook equivalent of the Apple Mac to be invented. When it is, no doubt the equivalent of IBM or Microsoft (Google? Amazon?) will come along and clobber it and then take twenty years to take us to where we could have been all along.

Of course, the world has to go through the excruciating process of switching from paper books to ebooks – with all the mistakes and losses this will entail. I dread to think what will happen to books that are published today in exclusive deals with a single technology platform supplier. In ten or twenty years they may not exist in any form that anyone can actually read anymore. What becomes of ebooks for which there never was a physical copy? Do we just lose them forever?

The 8^th Edition of the Hutchinson Encylopedia (1988), for which I wrote the computer entries, became one of the very first books in the world also to be published on CD ROM. I'm very glad I have a paper copy of this book, though, since the proprietary format of the CD ROM version required the installation of its own, platform-dependent reader. My first Sci-Fi novel was written on a BBC Micro and saved on discs that really were floppy. That the whole of this technology died off and disappeared many years ago seemed fine until the day I lost the paper printout. Which is to say, if you live long enough (and I'm not that old!) you will have seen examples of the way that modern ebooks and ebook readers are headed.