

Writer Neal Stephenson unveils his digital novel The Mongoliad - Tichy
http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/31/writer-neal-stephenson-unveils-his-digital-novel-the-mongoliad/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter-publisher-main&utm_campaign=twitter

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euroclydon
_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?

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mkramlich
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?"

~~~
listic
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.

~~~
mkramlich
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.

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sbierwagen

        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.

~~~
maw
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.

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

~~~
gwern
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.

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timdellinger
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.)

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

~~~
gecko
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.

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throw_away
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...

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sesqu
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.

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stefs
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.

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Qz
_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.

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microcentury
'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
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.

~~~
j-g-faustus
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.

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

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

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

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zavulon
> 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.

~~~
masklinn
> 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
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."

~~~
jacobolus
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. :-)

