Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mongoliad | Hacker News Reader

Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mongoliad

venturebeat.com

74 pointsTichy51 comments

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?

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm not sure, I've never had a kindle (and don't do Apple products). I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy a real book more though. I'm getting the kindle because it would make importing English language books here in Italy a lot faster and cheaper.

I was a late reader of his work, read them all on the Kindle. wouldn't be able to do so on th Ipad though.

> Wouldn't be able to do so on th Ipad though.

Why's that?

I can't deal with the glare for the length of a book read, just doesn't feel as comfortable.

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)

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

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

Even more to the point: Cryptonimicon is about how the freaking internet works. (Ok not really, but it is a major sub plot)

    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.

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.

> 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.)

It had a purpose in the context of the novel. Why did it strike you as being cheap?

Most of them struck me as being poor riddles; 'here's this strange quasi-English quasi-Latin word which is usually a portmanteau; try to figure out from context what it means and how I derived it!' They wound up irritating me like the meaningless religious allusions and terms in _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ (and many other anime) irritate me.

Maybe there was a purpose in the novel's context beyond being a strange bit of parallel-worlds gimcrackery. I must've missed it.

So not even original made-up words!

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.)

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

It might work better than King's experiment, I would guess that Stephenson's natural audience is more willing to read things online.

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.

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.

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

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

> 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.

> 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.

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."

Raven, the guy who is his own personal sovereign might also be considered a startup of sorts. At least, he created a rather unique business model single handed. :-)

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

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.

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

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

Have you read either book?

Did you read his comment ?

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

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

I read it and commented before it was edited to include that bit about Anathem. The original post made no mention of reading any book.

Ah ok... I can't stand those 'silent edits' that make you look like a fool.

Yeah, it's bad form to alter a post in reaction to a critical comment, and not indicate there has been a change.

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