A speculative review of Sorcery! - The Shamutanti Hills

I've been reading -- if that's the right word, because you could also say 'playing' -- Inkle Studio's impressive e-book version of Steve Jackson's classic gamebook The Shamutanti Hills, the first volume of the Sorcery! series. The Shamutanti Hills is a game, a map, and a story: an interactive fiction in which the reader exerts choice over the path he or she takes to the end of the book.

Now, all fictions are interactive in that they involve engagement, the creation of a world between the reader and the text, and the play of speculation and imagination: guesses, expectations, and reversals. But interactive fiction enhances the possibility of interplay by giving the reader choice over the path of the narrative at key points. The most popular of these, and the ones that have interested me for some time, are those based on games and quests. The idea of a path is not incidental: the gamebook often resembles a map or chart, or even a labyrinth, where the ideal play is to find the optimal path through.

The Shamutanti Hills does a fine job at this. What I most admire about it is the sense that the hills constitute a real, if fantastic, terrain: a landscape of mines, villages, hills, woods and ruins, inhabited by goblins, giants, witches, elves and wizards, villagers and monsters, that one can pass through and explore, rather than a simple series of challenges. One feels that the stories of the hills intersect and carry on their own life, and this is enhanced by the game aspect of surviving and mastering the various challenges that the hills represent. The Shamutanti Hills rewards play because each play-through reveals something new about them.

Although the fantasy quest provides a way of structuring the forking narrative of the gamebook, I speculate that the form could also be applied to the mystery. Imagine a mystery in which the reader takes up the role of investigator, choosing clues, hunting leads, suspects, uncovering the plot (or not), building the case on the basis of decisions made in reading.

E-book Deal on The Raven's Seal

Although I can't say too often how impressed I am with the print production of The Raven's Seal, right now the e-book is on sale until Wednesday, April 24 for 0.99$ US.

You can find this deal on Amazon, iTunes for iBooks, Google and Kobo.

Even better, the deal has fired The Raven's Seal up to number 190 on the Kindle bestseller lists, and a brilliant #2 on the historical mysteries bestsellers list and the historical fiction list overall.

On the future of writing

A piece worthy of comment in the The New Yorker, looking forward to the future of writing in the US in the context of Philip Roth's retirement:

The future of writing in America—or, at least, the future of making a living by writing—seems in doubt as rarely before. Thanks to the Internet, the disproportion between writerly supply and demand, always tricky, has tipped: anyone can write, and everyone does, and beginners are expected to be the last pure philanthropists, giving it all away for the naches. It has never been easier to be a writer; and it has never been harder to be a professional writer. The strange anatomy of the new literary manners has yet to be anatomized: the vast schools of tweets feeding on the giant whales of a few big books, the literary ecology of the very big, the very small, and the sudden vertiginous whoosh; the blog that becomes a book; the writer torn to pieces by his former Internet fans, which makes one the other.

It is certainly true, though perhaps not absolutely news, that writing has become a profession with very little renumeration. Few writers of literature make a living thereby: some make their living in communication, editing, or professional and technical writing, or as teachers of creative writing, but this always feels like a kind of hack-work, selling skill at loss of the creative output that is a writer's true mission and satisfaction. It seems that technology has multiplied the channels for writing (although there are never enough good publishers) and yet diluted thereby the commercial value of writing.

By the same token, the article notes, 'it is a matchless time to be a reader. The same forces that have hampered writing as a profession have empowered reading as a pastime: everything ever written, it seems, is now easily available to be read, and everything is.' I argued something of this availability of works from all periods in my post on E-books and the classics. Bookstores, online and offline, libraries, digital and otherwise, offer an ever growing archive for readers. And yet, in the flood of new and old works, where are those books that really change, thrill or divert us? Are they easier or harder to find?

There are no clear answers to these questions, not while we are in the middle of the revolution that spurs them. Like most writers, it's paradigmatic that I write and publish where I can, but in my career I've never heard from anyone that this business is getting easier. As a reader, I'm only looking for more time to discover and relish the books that are out there. But as Philip Roth departs the stage, maybe the idea of one great book or one great author to definitively witness our era is also, necessarily, about to fade.

ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Finalist

I'm delighted to learn that The Raven's Seal is a finalist for the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year in the Historical (Adult Fiction) category. It's also a tribute, I think, to Top Five Books' book design.

Another reason, if I may, for readers to check out a copy, particularly the e-book edition if the print copy is out of reach.

The Author's e-Book

I've had a chance to look through the e-book (preview copy only) of The Raven's Seal. It's a wonderful, strange thing for the author to hold his or her own book in electronic form. It's a file, no more or less than the words you wrote. It's ephemeral, but then, aren't the words what really counts?

The e-book version looks great, like all of Top Five Books' work. The font is elegant, with a slightly old-fashioned feel, and the page looks wonderful, especially in portrait. Of course, I think the print copies will feel even better, and there is something about the materiality of the printed page that still holds us, through memory or association.

Yet, I'm reminded of the light, almost onion-skin paper of the compact editions of Dickens I first read at home, and how the electronic page in iBooks (or Kindle) almost duplicates that lightness, and comes closer to the book that Borges speculated about: infinite pages of infinite thinness.

E-books and the classics

One of the odd convergences of technology and content around e-books is the availability of many classic authors as free texts through Project Gutenberg, and even the commercial e-publishers themselves. Being free and easy to download, there’s a certain attraction to these works over contemporary (paid) titles.
Will this lead readers back to the pre-modern and early modern classics in the most high-tech context?
To be sure, the typography and text flow of Gutenburg texts leaves a lot to be desired. But then, the conventions of modern pages, such as spacing and the punctuation of speech, are also forms that developed over a considerable period, and were once much looser.
But, more importantly, what happens when readers rediscover writers like Dickens, Wilkie Collins, H.G. Wells, Conrad or Robert Louis Stevenson, in a perfectly cheap and accessible form? Stevenson, for example, in the short stories collected in New Arabian Nights, creates deft literary adventure stories. There’s no sense with Stevenson that adventure and entertainment are at odds with literary sensibility, or that narrative momentum is incompatible with compelling characterisation. Are these the stories the e-book could bring us back to, or invigorate for the future?