On Science Fiction & Electronic Text

Over the past several years, many of my waking hours have been devoted to the emerging possibilities of electronic text, hypertext, hypermedia and such for narrative. I have seen marvelous things, had a lot of fun, and spent an awful lot of my own money on equipment and software. Over this time, NYRSF has published a number of good articles on science fiction and hypertext by Stuart Moulthrop and others.

When I first began a dark fantasy hypertext (published a year ago by Eastgate Systems under the title In Small & Large Pieces) I believed that since there was no possible audience for what I was writing, I could do what I wanted. A year later, I because aware that there is an audience, just no distribution system, save mail order.

I began to develop choreographies for that mating dance between literature and money with the intent that a new form of science fiction evolve around the new technologies: a science fiction in which the math and the science can be included in the work as side-roads (when otherwise they would be stripped away), in which illustrations can be included at the author's discretion (because the cost of their printing would not be an issue), and in which the many immensely talented writers working in science fiction today could try their hands at solving the aesthetic problems of the new media.

I fear that in the short run I am to be disappointed; disappointed not by the talent or inclinations of the writers but by the market structure underlying all this. A year or so ago when I discussed with people what I had in mind, there were two kinds of responses: (a) Why don't you just publish on the web? Then you don't have to worry about type fonts or packaging; and (b) why are you sticking to this text-based stuff? (The implication being that print was almost dead anyway and that computer art that moved like television was the way to go.) And these represent two tangled trajectories in the electronic arc. The internet audience will put up with very low production values (although I suspect this is changing) but expects to pay nothing. The CD-ROM audience, if there is such a thing separate from its distributors, expects digital video, animation, color graphics, etc., and while they are willing to pay for the "product," on average, they are not willing to pay enough for it to cover the costs of the eye candy.

For the moment, I earn a good salary helping produce educational CD-ROMs. (The general fate of those of us who tried to write science-fictional hypertext seems to be that we got good jobs doing something else with the skills we learned doing it. I suppose I would seem foolish if I presented this as tragic.) But there are certain things I have learned to insist on in discussions of how things "ought" to work:

1. Regardless of whether information wants to be free, writers need to be paid.

2. The more I interact with interactive multimedia, the more I recognize the importance of the skills necessary for book design.

3. Editorial assistants always make less than programmers; any literary work that requires paid programming time is not cheap enough to produce for it to survive in the literary market place.

4. The chances of an electronic work not being obsolete in some way by the time it ships are very small. (Very obsolete is the equivalent of being out of print no matter how many are left in the warehouse.)

5. If the work you wish to publish is supposed to be literature, no amount of graphic design, flashy programming, or good distribution can replace the careful attention of a writer.