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."

Re:Great...

[Viking Coder]

What do you mean there's no link? RTFA.

www.greatamericannovel.com [greatamericannovel.com]

Re:Great...

[maan]

Oops, my bad...it's right there... For anyone else, the site is here [greatamericannovel.com].

Maan

Kind of reminds me of Portal

[Anonymous Coward]

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.....

Iain M. Bank's take

[kilf]

There is a large portion of Iain M. Bank's "Excession" that is told as a series of communications between distant and powerful AIs. The joy of these pages is that they read pretty much like a cross between IRC logs and usenet digests. The same petty cliques and tendancies are on display. Even a sort of "TINC" concept is there.

Each message is topped and tailed by a fictional, futuristic header and footer with an addressing mechism, timestamp, location and the like.

I recommend it to all.

Re:What If it's a...

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit, don't people even read the blurbs anymore?

The software doesn't work like EA's old Majestic game... it's a self-contained program that creates a fake interface to the story's "emails".

F-R-Not-R

[obsidianpreacher]

Here's the free registration NOT required link [nytimes.com]

From the article:

Thom Swiss, editor of The Iowa Review Web and a professor of English at the University of Iowa who focuses on those forms of hypertext, said that to him Mr. Brown's creation seemed mechanical. "While inventive if buggy, I'm not sure how useful it is," he said. "At this stage of its development, it's more of a game and less literature - and not because of the pulp story but because the formal elements of composing the piece are given to you: you just fill in the content."

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" ...

Portal from Activision

[FromWithin]

A long time ago (1986 I think), Activision published a game called Portal [the-underdogs.org], 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 [spray.se] Protocol [gb64.com] which, although much more interactive, effectively work in the same manner via an icon-based system. A brilliant game, by the way, highly recommended.

It's been done

[jd142]

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.

Official Site

[beeglebug]

More information about the novel, the software and the author can be found here [greatamericannovel.com].

It's not a bad read actually, even if the idea is not exactly new...

Shuteye Town

[jefu]

For those interested in such things, there is also "Shuteye Town" by R. F. Laird, author of the puzzlingly odd and brilliant "Boomer Bible" [boomerbible.com]. Unhappily it is all MS Word files so I've never been able to explore it correctly and can only report this at second hand.

Re:A first in a new genre?

[kin_korn_karn]

A Mind Forever Voyaging, Infocom, 1984.

Best game title ever, btw.

Re:Been there done that

[blancolioni]

Well, if you'd RTFA, you'd have found out that what they're describing has nothing in common with Choose Your Own Adventure books, except perhaps that both can be implemented on a computer.

I swear, every day Slashdot gets more and more like a bunch wanna-bes sitting in a circle watching somebody else do all the work, saying "that sucks" every five minutes.

(DEN does, in fact, suck. But at least I read the article to find out why)