Hi, PSYARTers! I'm taking the liberty of posting this jacket copy,
TOC, and blurbs for a book I greatly admire. It should be of interest
who love literature and who use computers as, evidement!, you all do.
--Best, Norm
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Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace
Janet H. Murray
Stories define how we think , the way we play, and the way we understand
our lives. And just as Gutenberg made possible the stories that ushered in
the Modern Era, so is the computer having a profound effect on the stories
of the late 20th century. today we are confronting the limits of books
themselves--anticipating the end of storytelling as we know it--even as we
witness the advent of a brave new world of cyberdramas. Computer
technology of the late twentieth century is astonishing, thrilling, and
strange, and no one is better qualified than Janet Murray to offer a
breathtaking tour of how it is reshaping the stories we live by.
Can we imagine a world in which Homer's lyre and Gutenberg's press have
given way to virtual reality environments like the Star Trek holodeck?
Murray sees the harbingers of such a world in the fiction of Borges and
Calvino, movies like Groundhog Day, and the videogames and Web sites of
the 1990s. Where is our map for this new frontier, and what can we hope to
find in it? What will it be like to step into our own stories for the
first time, to change our vantage point at will, to construct our own
worlds or change the outcome of a compelling adventure, be it a murder
mystery or a torrid romance? Taking up where Marshall McLuhan left off,
Murray offers profound and provocative answers to these and other
questions.
She discusses the unique properties an pleasures of digital environments
and connects them with the traditional satisfactions of narrative. She
analyzes the state of "immersion," of participating in a text to such an
extent that you literally get lost in a story and obliterate the outside
world from your awareness. She dissects the titillating effect of
cybernarratives in which stories never climax and never end, because
everything is morphable, and there are always infinite possibilities for
the next scene. And she introduces us to enchanted landscapes populated by
witty automated characters and inventive, role-playing interactors, who
together make up a new kind of commedia dell'arte. Equal parts daydream
and how-to, Hamlet on the Holodeck is a brilliant blend of imagination and
techno-wizardry that will provoke readers and guide writers for years to
come.
>From the introduction:
"Those of us who have spent our lives in love with books may always
approach the computer with something of my grandmother's terror before the
crystal radio, but our children are already at home with the joystick,
mouse, and keyboard. They take the powerful sensory presence and
participatory formats of digital media for granted. They are impatient to
see what is next. The is book is an attempt to imagine a future digital
medium, shaped by the hacker's spirit and the enduring power of the
imagination, and worthy of the rapture our children are bringing to it."
Blurbs:
"Janet Murray combines a grasp of great literature with remarkable insights
into the possibilities of online communication. With erudition and wit,
she explains how computers can become the next great medium for
storytelling. Aristotle with a PC couldn't have made a more compelling
case. Murray has written a Poetics for cyberspace." Peter Petre, FORTUNE
MAGAZINE
"Inspiring....Janet Murray brings us a palpable vision of the future of
interactive cinematic narrative." Glorianna Davenport, Director of the
Interactive Cinema Group, MIT MEDIA LAB
"In this witty, readable book, jam-packed with computer know-how, Janet
Murray offers a hopeful vision of our new literary art. She shows how the
computer's complex patterns, immense capacity, and skips in time and space
create literary possibilities for a new Dickens, Shakespeare, or Faulkner.
Murray takes us beyond the clever games and gimmicks of current
cyberfiction virtuosi, toward a literature that once more probes the gut
questions of human life. Norman H. Holland, Marston-Milbauer Eminent
Scholar in English, University of Florida, Author of "THE I"
****
Janet H. Murray is Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Educational
Computing Initiatives at MIT. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Harvard and
teaches interactive fiction writing in MIT's Film and Media Studies
Program. A pioneering figure in humanities computing, she has won several
awards including a Gold CINDY and an Educom Special Recognition award for
interactive design. She has taught humanities at MIT since 1971, and she
served from 1992 to 1996 as the founding director of the Laboratory for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities. She lives with her husband and two
children in a suburb of Boston.
***
Table of Contents {with annotations}
Introduction: A Book-Lover Longs for Cyberdrama
Part I. A New Medium for Storytelling
1. Lord Burleigh's Kiss {the Star Trek holodeck vs. Huxley's feely}
2. Harbingers of the Holodeck
3. From Additive to Expressive Form
Part II. The Aesthetics of the Medium
4. Immersion
5. Agency
6. Transformation
Part III: Procedural Authorship
7. The Cyberbard and the Multiform Plot
8. Eliza's Daughters {electronic characters}
Part IV: New Beauty, New Truth
9. Digital TV and the Emerging Forms of Cyberdrama
10. Hamlet on the Holodeck? {Can there be great narrative art in this medium?}
___________________________
Janet H. Murray, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist
Center for Educational Computing Initiatives
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Mass. Avenue Room 9-321
Cambridge, MA 02139
phone and voice mail: 617-253-2094
Fax: 617-253-8632
http://web.mit.edu/jhmurray/www/