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Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mongoliad
- throw_away 16y agofrom 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...
- zavulon 16y 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.
- jamesbritt 16y agoHave you read either book?
- jacquesm 16y agoDid you read his comment ? > I thought "Anathem" was Stephenson's best since Snowcrash. Apparently that's a 'yes', since he has read Snowcrash.
- jamesbritt 16y agoI read it and commented before it was edited to include that bit about Anathem. The original post made no mention of reading any book.
- jacquesm 16y agoAh ok... I can't stand those 'silent edits' that make you look like a fool.
- jamesbritt 16y agoYeah, it's bad form to alter a post in reaction to a critical comment, and not indicate there has been a change.
- masklinn 16y 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 16y agoSnow 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."
- jacobolus 16y agoRaven, 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. :-)
- zavulon 16y agoYeah I guess I missed the "virtual worlds" part and focused on "startups" part
- mkramlich 16y agoSnow 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.
- stefs 16y agoah, that smells of a first step in the direction of the diamond age ai books. way to go, but one has to start somewhere.
- mkramlich 16y agoI 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?"
- davidw 16y agoYeah, 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 16y agoCould you sit down with one of his books and read it on an iPad or kindle?
- davidw 16y agoI'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.
- doron 16y agoI was a late reader of his work, read them all on the Kindle. wouldn't be able to do so on th Ipad though.
- microcentury 16y 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 16y agoSomehow 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 16y agoFrom 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 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.
- Symmetry 16y agoIt might work better than King's experiment, I would guess that Stephenson's natural audience is more willing to read things online.
- Estragon 16y agoI 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 16y agoThe "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 16y agoNo-one has enough bandwidth or storage to download Stephenson's latest if his last trilogy is anything to go by :-)
- sesqu 16y agoInteresting. 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 16y agoIt’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 16y agoDo 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 16y agoSo not even original made-up words!
- gwern 16y 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.)
- aaronbrethorst 16y agoIt had a purpose in the context of the novel. Why did it strike you as being cheap?
- gwern 16y agoMost 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.
- Qz 16y agoThe 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 16y agoWhile I think the project itself seems interesting, I can't help but wish he'd done something SciFi instead.
- gecko 16y agoNeal 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 16y agoThere 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 16y agoSo this is basically another take on http://visualnoveldai.com/ http://visualnoveldai.com/
- timdellinger 16y agoNeal 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.)