I'd love to have your thoughts on this -

What should a novel be in the Information Age? What traditional elements are vital, which are are important, and which are becoming less so, in your opinion? Should nothing change at all? How should a reader interact with the 21st century novel? Should it be interactive? (are all novels interactive?). What about collective authorship/ownership? What about communities/fans? It seems that fiction is the last area where works are novel covered/remade/remixed, should it stay that way, or would you love to see, say, a David Mitchell version Moby Dick? Should texts be fixed and sacred or always evolving and changing, or somehow both? What about the medium - book, ebook etc etc etc. There's a lot to go at here!

Whatever thoughts you have, I'd love to hear em and I reckon others around these parts would too...

S

Wow, that is a big question, and I think is very much dependent upon what the author and/or reader consider a novel to be.

If your definition of a novel is a bound stack of paper then you don't really have a lot of room to change or expand upon that; Raw Shark Texts, House of Leaves, A Humument, and unbound books are at the limit of what can be done with a physical book.

But if you are willing to go beyond that definition the possibilities open up; to expand upon what heartbreak said, I think the story should always come first; don't try a gimmick simply for the sake of the gimmick - do it in service of the story.

The Amazon Kindle and associated e-book formats point in a direction that books can go; making the text of the book fully searchable, every word can be looked up in a dictionary, or made into an audio book (admittedly a poor one, with computerised voice and no inflections of a trained actor). There are many times, and I know I'm not the only one, where I've used Amazon's "look inside" feature or Google Book Search to find a particular passage in a book, and then turned to my physical copy of that book to continue reading.

Access to other readers and points of view can also expand a book's scope; while the basic concept of any book discussion forum can be seen as merely an electronic version of the book group, there are differences: all the discussions are searchable and can be referenced, and their global nature involves people and ideas you might never have encountered.

Then there are cases like Twitter - can you write a novel when you are constrained to write 140 words at a time? (see 140novel, Matt Richtel, and Richtel's NY Times blog post on Twillers)

Penguin also tried to experiment with digital fiction with WeTellStories.co.uk; they told one story through Twitter and blogs; another story was mapped out on Google Maps; and yet another was a choose your own adventure-style fairy tale.

Ted Nelson's concepts of transclusion and the Xanadu Project also offer an interesting perspective on the nature of text from the 1960s/70s.

The recent O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference touched on some of this and included a demo of the print on-demand Espresso Book Machine, for those who don't like electronic books.

And as you noted, Steven, remixing a novel can also be interesting, but you have to either seek the author's permission or argue it as fair use; authors like Cory Doctorow putting Creative Commons licenses on their works certainly opens up the (legal) possibility for the novel to take on a life of its own through fan fiction, etc.

Very interesting Steven; that's one to follow.

I also forgot to mention DailyLit.com, for those busy people who live inside their e-mail inboxes and don't have to time to pick up a book, instead they get e-mailed short chunks at intervals of their choosing.

Or, if the author really wants to punish themselves, they could set up a wiki; the work would then be under continual revision theoretically forever, with the ability to compare current drafts with previous drafts.

In 2006 Slate published an e-mail conversation between two authors, one more eager to play in the digital world than the other, "The 21st-century novel".

On the one hand they offered the idea that some writers might go technophobic, "take our cues from those austere Dogma filmmakers who stick to hand-held cameras and natural lighting and won't even put music in their movies unless an actor in the scene turns on a radio or tunes a flute. We could declare a new doctrine, Phone-damentalism, and purge our fiction—and perhaps our lives—of all the advanced communications technology that seems more and more like separation technology. Then, we could go back to staging those classic scenes where people gather in one room to talk or amass on one battlefield to fight."

Conversely they also looked at the opportunities, some of which we've touched on: weblinks, which can be "symbolic narratives in themselves, and aren't merely used as footnotes or illustrations"; feedback; timing, where the novel "can be written and read, that is, in the same political and cultural moment"; and multimedia.

Some very interesting ideas and links cg, thanks for sharing.
Mia - I don't think you failed the question at all, thank you for your thoughts.

S

ps - On the radio the other day, I heard a doctor saying that a person only develops an opinion on a topic by hearing themselves speak about it. Sounds crazy, but true apparently. Maybe that's why I'm enjoying this thread so much!

Thank you for asking; I find it a fascinating question, since we are in this state of change, and criticism thereof, from lengthy prose to "txt spk", from "all rights reserved" to "some rights reserved".

I've been remiss in mentioning that there is a think tank that has been examining this, and related, questions for some time - The Institute for the Future of the Book. From their "mission statement": "The printed page is giving way to the networked screen. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress." I also recommend their blog.

See their site for McKenzie Wark's book Gam3r 7h30ry as an example of a possible electronic layout with reader comments for each section of the book.

I also found the cautionary comments by musician Momus interesting, who attended an Institute-hosted debate on the future of the library: "I wondered if it wasn't time for literature to come full circle back to Homer, and become something spoken again rather than written and read -- because computers can do that for us."

And although Momus is rightly concerned about the longevity of digital media versus paper and stone, that doesn't mean there aren't people, such as the Long Now Foundation, trying to solve the problem.

But as Momus notes in his blog we should also keep in mind Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message"; to what extent, if any, do we perceive differently Homer's Odyssey on the printed page, the computer screen, or an audiobook? Or is it only "21st century novels" that are different - do we get the same textual impact listening to the audiobook versions of Raw Shark Texts and Only Revolutions, or are they even comparable?

I think the 21st century novel should be much like the raw shark texts; involving, having some interactivity (negatives), fragments spread out all over the place so that people have to talk to eachother and meet up to share. finding a passage of code which has to be solved just like in the book... I think this is what's in the future of books.
Sometimes I think books feel too passive, and once you read it it's over. done.
Now, There are much more to explore and find. Find clues to find more clues. interactivity. community.

my thoughts.