Stanley Scism

UK: Novelist Charles Cumming is writing The 21 Steps, a web version of John Buchan’s World War I spy novel The 39 Steps, told through Google Maps. People read text, click pointer bubbles marking each scene, and follow the hero’s race from London’s St Pancras train station to Heathrow airport to Edinburgh, so see real-world places in context. Penguin Books collaborates with media company Six to Start to tell stories on web. Instead of reading novels adapted to online use, they want to create stories designed for the Internet.

In 2006, online magazine Slate serialized Walter Kirn’s novel to hyperlink and merge media. Cell-phone novels were Japan’s top three best-sellers last year.

In 2007, Penguin’s Ettinghausen tried a wikinovel—a book-length story written by everyone, with predictably atrocious results. Cumming says, ‘ can’t imagine War and Peace told in the style of a Google mash-up.’ Barrett Sheridan in Newsweek (‘New Ways of Telling Tales’, p10, 2008/5/12), says that to Ettinghausen, ‘that might sound less like a statement of fact and more like a challenge.’ Apparently, neither Cumming nor Sheridan ‘get it’—Ettinghausen doesn’t want to rewrite either 39 Steps or War and Peace, but create something new.