Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mongoliad

http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/31/writer-neal-stephenson-unveils-his-digital-novel-the-mongoliad/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter-publisher-main&utm_campaign=twitter

by Tichy • 16 years ago

74 51 16 years ago

venturebeat.com

throw_away• 16 years ago

from their facebook, they're not launching until 00:01 PDT, so if you were like me for the next thirty-three minutes wondering why you can't download it yet...

zavulon2• 16 years ago

> Author Neal Stephenson has been credited for inspiring today’s virtual world startups with his novel Snow Crash.

Uh, shouldn't that be "Cryptonomicon"? Encouraging first sentence.

I'm very excited about this though. I thought "Anathem" was Stephenson's best since Snowcrash. I wonder how many pages the total effort is going to be.

jamesbritt3• 16 years ago

Have you read either book?

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

Did you read his comment ?

> I thought "Anathem" was Stephenson's best since Snowcrash.

Apparently that's a 'yes', since he has read Snowcrash.

masklinn• 16 years ago

> Uh, shouldn't that be "Cryptonomicon"?

Doubtful. There are no (t much anyway) virtual worlds in Cryptonomicon, though there is a "startup". Snow Crash, on the other hand, has the metaverse. So the qualification seems perfectly correct as far as I'm concerned.

I don't find that interpretation much more encouraging, though, as I'm not sure wtf they're talking about (second life?) and where they're trying to go with that.

whimsy• 16 years ago

Snow Crash also has a startup - Hiro helped write the metaverse... as a startup, if I recall correctly, but I might not.

He is also, as his business card says, "Last of the freelance hackers."

zavulon2• 16 years ago

Yeah I guess I missed the "virtual worlds" part and focused on "startups" part

mkramlich3• 16 years ago

Snow Crash came long before Cryptonomicon, and the former dealt more with virtual reality than the latter (IIRC).

However, Neuromancer and the other Gibson Cyberpunk novels came well before Snow Crash.

Also, Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings.

svv• 16 years ago

Vernor Vinge's "True Names" came out even before Neuromancer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names

quux• 16 years ago

Wait... what's this about a band before Wings?

stefs• 16 years ago

ah, that smells of a first step in the direction of the diamond age ai books. way to go, but one has to start somewhere.

mkramlich3• 16 years ago

I love Stephenson's novels but this project does not sound appealing. It comes off a bit like a bunch of Internet entrepreneurs got hold of him and said, "Hey, on the web, we have links and embedded images and stuff. It's called 'Hyper-Text' and is the latest craze. Can we use your name? What's your price?"

davidw3• 16 years ago

Yeah, I like sitting down with one of his books and immersing myself in it, not reading it on a computer. I really like his stuff, so I suppose I'll give this a go when I get a kindle later this year, but I'm skeptical.

WorkerBee• 16 years ago

Could you sit down with one of his books and read it on an iPad or kindle?

listic2• 16 years ago

I understand the immersion you are talking about. I think Kindle and the e-readers basically is the extension of the book form; a book delivered on another substrate.

On the other hand, interactivity makes possible the kind of immersion unachievable by non-interactive book. When you pick the knife - it is not the same as when you read that the character picks the knife.

listic2• 16 years ago

Why not? I think the world needs more experiments with forms of book and interactivity. It's a pity that the golden age of interactive fiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction) was also its stone age. Maybe it'll become a step in developing the interactive fiction further? As a fan of both books and computers I welcome any development of the medium.

mquander• 16 years ago

Come on, in no sense was the Infocom era the "golden age" of interactive fiction. In both quantity and quality of work, the "golden age" is from the mid-nineties through right now.

mkramlich3• 16 years ago

My point was that nothing about it sounded new. Most of it sounded mostly old. And from what little I've seen of the execution of their idea so far, it looked downright amateur and old skool. There are already lots of places online where people can independently publish, find and pay for media content, including having user profiles, badges and social networking elements. It's been/being done to death already.

confuzatron• 16 years ago

Stephenson is pretty tech savvy. I can't picture flim-flam merchants dazzling him with the concept of hyper text.

drinian• 16 years ago

More to the point, The Diamond Age basically describes an intelligent hypertext book.

cdr• 16 years ago

I think it's easy to misunderstand your point, but after I re-read your post I agree - Stephenson is about as tech-savvy a fiction author you're liable to find, but the fact that this project looks so poorly done makes you question how much he was actually involved.

aaronbrethorst2• 16 years ago

Snow Crash was originally going to be a graphic novel, and Stephenson once said that he 'spent more time on the project hacking code than writing prose.' (loosely paraphrased as I'm on my iPhone and can't find a citation at the moment)

microcentury• 16 years ago

'It’s spring of 1241, and the West is shitting its pants' Considering how much I have been looking forward to this, that is a terrible, teenage opening line for the website. And from Stephenson! Gah. I would have expected better.

krig• 16 years ago

Somehow I get the feeling he didn't write that blurb himself. Which makes me wonder just how involved he actually is. Although I guess I shouldn't complain that he is spending all his energy on the actual story and not on the web-stuff.

j-g-faustus• 16 years ago

From their FAQ:

  We are a bunch of friends... some of us are writers, 
  programmers, artists, .... Among our writers are two guys 
  whom you may have heard of: Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear.

http://www.mongoliad.com/faq

So it sounds like they are a whole bunch of people and Neil Stephenson is just one of many contributors.

Not sure whether there is a market for "buy one chapter per week for a year" books - Stephen King tried that a few years back, but gave it up due to lack of interest.

Still, it's an interesting (and natural) experiment. I don't think this particular implementation has much chance for success, but if they keep it up they may find some variation that does.

Estragon• 16 years ago

I read the preview chapter, and wasn't excited by it. But it's always taken me a while to get into Stephenson's novels.

ZeroGravitas• 16 years ago

The "Getting medieval on your apps!" line didn't really seem his style either.

Not the reference to Pulp Fiction, not the apps/ass pun, nor the exclamation mark. I don't really like the font either. Maybe that's not an official image, if it is it's very off-putting.

gaius• 16 years ago

No-one has enough bandwidth or storage to download Stephenson's latest if his last trilogy is anything to go by :-)

sesqu• 16 years ago

Interesting. When I noticed how all the mmorpgs have periodical content creation to go with the subscription, and how many creators seem to really like evolving the backstory, I wondered if anyone would ever try and sell just the story. In the end, I dismissed the idea - seems someone else didn't.

There are also social features that allow readers to create their own profiles, earn badges for activity on the site or in the application, and interact with other readers.

I am a little worried about this bit. Some form of socialization is a good idea - like message forums and maybe a chat, though I would hesitate with any built-in chat. Badges sounds like a very bad idea.

sbierwagen• 16 years ago

    It’s spring of 1241, and the West is shitting its pants 
    (that’s “bewraying its kecks” for you medieval time-travelers).

Euyagh, he's doing another Baroque Cycle? I just re-read that, and while it's not awful, he really is at his best when he's writing about tech.

Snow Crash was good. Interface was good. Diamond Age was okay. The Baroque Cycle was a slog, and Anathem was a blight, a cinderblock of a book full of made-up words and pointless obfuscation.

I am not optimistic about this latest venture, especially considering the buzzword-density on the front page of their site.

maw• 16 years ago

Do you realize that most of those "made-up words" in Anathem were just lightly mangled Latin?

I'm due for a reread of the Baroque Cycle before too long, so I won't pass judgement on it here, but I'd happily welcome another Anathem.

oihuyjfrgtdfghj• 16 years ago

So not even original made-up words!

gwern2• 16 years ago

> Do you realize that most of those "made-up words" in Anathem were just lightly mangled Latin?

It still felt cheap. Give me another book like Gene Wolfe's _Book of the New Sun_ where all the made-up words were English words! (And obviously often Latin-derived.)

Qz• 16 years ago

The traditional model of paying for content may not hold up when the content “be canned and sent around to your friends for free,”

How laughably ridiculous. It's probably still easier to give someone an actual book you bought than it is to share even a DRM-free e-book.

wccrawford• 16 years ago

While I think the project itself seems interesting, I can't help but wish he'd done something SciFi instead.

gecko• 16 years ago

Neal Stephenson's merged historical fiction with science fiction before, quite successfully (e.g., the entire Baroque Cycle, including the Cryptonomicon). I'd be surprised if there weren't some fairly heavy sci-fi motifs.

euroclydon• 16 years ago

There are also social features that allow readers to create their own profiles, earn badges for activity on the site or in the application, and interact with other readers.

If characters in Snow Crash or Diamond Age were "earning badges" or tweeting, I'm pretty sure I would have put the book down. Why can't the "social" interactions take on a more mission-critical function?

Taler• 16 years ago

So this is basically another take on http://visualnoveldai.com/

timdellinger• 16 years ago

Neal Stephenson has been thinking about similar things for a while... as a matter of fact he launched a wiki for the Baroque Cycle that sort of went nowhere.

Like one of the earlier commentors, I'm not much for anything involving tweets and earning badges, but I think Neal is experimenting around in important unmet need:

Fans want to interact with their favorite authors. For a variety of reasons (eats up all your time, fan are boring and repetitive, authors are sometimes solitary introverts, etc.), authors don't have a (profitable, enjoyable) model of how to have these interactions. Fans create their own fan sites (including fanfic), but the interaction with the author and the monetization aren't there. So a new model is called for. This is an experiment toward finding this new model.

(Chuck Palahniuk is also experimenting in this direction in interesting ways with writing workshops.)

Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mongoliad

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