The History of the Future of Books

Bones of the Book by Robert Moor, is one of the best essays yet on the future (and by default, the past) of books and reading.

Here's the thing. Human beings are inherently narrative creatures. We do not like randomness, and we do our best to take what we see, however random it might appear at first glance, and make a story out of it. The night sky, with a bazillion stars stretching out into infinity? Not our cup of tea. We have to find horses and hunters and scorpions. We create myths, we compile conspiracy theories, we do whatever we can to take the random empirical data that life provides us and transform it into a story. Our lives are not random blasts of consciousness; they are biographies with a beginning, a middle and an ending. As a matter of fact, our inherent narrative compulsion goes beyond just connecting the dots of existence. We add that Aristotelian business of making classic drama out of it, with those beginnings and middles and endings. No good story ends in the middle. No good story starts at the ending. Narratives have form that must be followed, if they are to satisfy our inherent story-loving nature.

Not that storytellers haven't experimented. What, exactly, is the beginning of the circular novel Finnegans Wake? What about William Burroughs's clipping and pasting at random? The problem with these experiments is that as experiments, they may get us to think about the elements of narrative, but as narratives, they just don't do the job. If James Patterson (and his co-authors) wrote like James Joyce, he wouldn't have two books on the bestseller list this week.

Moor's article talks about some noble experiments with electronic storytelling. And I think, although he doesn't express it as I have, that he appreciates the need for the direct and straightforward Aristotelean storytelling forms. Nevertheless, I think when we get to the future of electronic fiction, as compared to electronic books, the one thing he misses is the role of the game, which is hypertext at its heart, going wherever, and nowadays, that wherever may not be prescribed by the creators. You create your own narrative, whatever it might be, and that satisfies, provided that the electronic world in which the narrative takes place is satisfying on its own digital terms.

I love this subject. We are so at the edge of incredible creations that we can't even imagine. We may be at the cusp of a new way of creating narrative unlike anything we have seen before. We could take our narrative instince to the next level.

I can't wait to see as much of it as I can.