{"id":103,"date":"2006-03-27T22:40:04","date_gmt":"2006-03-28T06:40:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/wordpress\/?p=103"},"modified":"2006-03-27T22:40:04","modified_gmt":"2006-03-28T06:40:04","slug":"varieties-of-metanovel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/27\/varieties-of-metanovel\/","title":{"rendered":"Varieties of Metanovel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note the two corrections to my notes on the GDC, I misspelled Pekko Koskinen’s last name, and I mistakenly said the Strange Attractors team at Ominous Development Studios were students. I’ve been playing that game by the way, it’s soothing.<\/p>\n

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After I used iTunes for a few days it broke my install of Windows XP because I *gasp* dared to take out the iPod before the sluggish and vengeful Apple-ware gave me permission, and now my machine’s at the shop getting the operating system rebuilt. [Though maybe the machine probs are unrelated to iTunes, you never really do find out these things.] Anyway I do love my iPod. I’ll write more on it later. Changing my worldview. Since I’m machine weak, I’ll just recycle old pix today.<\/p>\n

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I'm wrestling with the question of what kind of novel people would write if they had postsingularity style mind amplification, helper agents, planetary ultra-wideband access for all, etc. Store it as a waking dream, as a VR, as a game? I call this a metanovel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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I’d like to get all Borgesian and Stan Lem-ish on this problem's ass. Think of a variety of oddball new ways to write a novel. (I consulted my Collected Stories<\/i> by Borges already, but need to get hold of a copy of Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum<\/i> (reviews of nonexistent books) for more inspiration.]<\/p>\n

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Metanovel design patterns:<\/p>\n

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Lifebox<\/i>. A metanovel that feels like a person’s whole remembered life. The art of a lifebox novel is to tweak it so that the life is a bit more interesting than your own. A lifebox novel will normally be a temporal interval of a life, possibly the whole thing. You could artificially limit yourself to hovering near the main character (third person objective) instead of inhabiting them (first person), but the third person option doesn’t make that much sense.<\/p>\n

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Inventory<\/i>. This is a way of organizing a Lifebox novel. Think of Charles Simmons’s book where he goes over his experiences with various ordinary kinds of things, like a water chapter, a frying-pan chapter, a vagina chapter, a freckles chapter. hats, tongues, bicycles, dogs, trees, drugs, food, cars, clothes, teaching, voice, fish, shit, wind, kites, airplanes…. Or instead of themes, you could organize the Lifebox around locations, like by telling everything that happened in each important location in your life.<\/p>\n

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Multithread<\/i>. A metanovel that’s like a movie, but with complete mental records of everyone in it. Possibly have it really be like a movie, and have the offscreen records as well. Fake a lot of the internals on a need-to-know basis, like the way you could make an infinite VR by having the landscape be created on the fly.<\/p>\n

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Forker<\/i>. A metanovel that includes all N to the Nth possible options. Jorge-Luis Borges hints at this notion in his story, “The Garden of Forking Paths.”<\/p>\n

Reverse Forker<\/i>. Jorge-Luis Borges discusses this story pattern in his tale, “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain,” describing an (imagined) book called April March <\/i>by Quain. April March <\/i>begins with a somewhat ambiguous scene of a man and a woman talking, and is followed by three versions of what happened to the man and woman the day before, each of which is followed by three versions of what happened the day before that<\/i>.<\/p>\n

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Mirror<\/i>. A factual account of a scene followed by a metanovel version of the scene, possibly followed by a further transformed version of the scene, possibly including the metanovelist imagining the metanovel version…<\/p>\n

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Props<\/i>. A metanovel from the point of view of object or objects that are passed around; one thinks, in a melodramatic vein, of a gun or a treasure. Alain Robbe-Grillet got into this zone.<\/p>\n

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Hive<\/i>. A metanovel in which the “characters” are groups of people.<\/p>\n

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Animal<\/i>. P.O.V. of an animal. Doesn’t need to be meta, strictly speaking, I mean look at Call of the Wild<\/i>. But having the orphidnet and the possible brain access could let you really get into an animal’s p.o.v. I’d love to fly or swim.<\/p>\n

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Timeslice<\/i>. An exhaustive description of everything happening in a city or a smaller zone, the description limited to one instant of time.<\/p>\n

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Reveal<\/i>. A metanovel detective story that proposes the wrong solution to the crime, but with loose ends that allow the user to in fact winkle out the correct answer. This is a Borges idea. Doesn’t really need to be a metanovel, but the meta might make it possible to make this work better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note the two corrections to my notes on the GDC, I misspelled Pekko Koskinen’s last name, and I mistakenly said the Strange Attractors team at Ominous Development Studios were students. I’ve been playing that game by the way, it’s soothing. After I used iTunes for a few days it broke my install of Windows XP […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}