I Tried To Write About The Modern Internet Like A Dystopian 1980s Cyberpunk Novel… (Experimental Fiction)

Ok, for context: It’s New Year’s day and I’ve only had four hours of sleep. It’s the kind of aimless tiredness where concentration and focus go out of the window and I end up aimlessly wasting time watching random stuff on the internet. Yet, from sheer daily repetition, I still feel the instinct to prepare a blog article.

Suddenly, my sleep-deprived brain has a “This is a terrible idea, but it could be fun” moment. And I thought that I’d try to write about the modern internet like it would appear in a dystopian 1980s cyberpunk novel, even though it has been more than a decade since I last read one (I read about five or six 1990s cyberpunk novels a few years ago though, and parts are probably closer in style to those…).

Many profuse apologies to William Gibson and others for this dreadful pastiche/parody. In my defence, it seemed like a good idea at the time. And, hey, at least it’s human-generated. So, let’s get started…

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Every video recording on the hub page has a little “thumbnail” picture. A neat grid of them stretches downwards on an infinite scroll. Some people say you can reach the bottom. Logically, it must be true. But no-one ever makes it to the bottom.

Algorithms, watching every decision, shape the page to the viewer – pushing content that is meant to keep you watching for one more video. “One more video” adds up over millions upon millions of visitors. But who wants to leave? This is better than television!

I select a video. An A.I. program out in San Francisco has crunched through the works of a dead singer, measuring the pitch and gaps between each recorded sound. Statistical patterns. Data. From that, it has generated two new thirty-second songs played back-to-back.

The lyrics are mumbled and garbled. Still, it actually sounds like him. Like the sort of bootleg demo recordings that more dedicated fans than me talk about as if they’re more important than the three famous songs everyone still somehow knows.

It’s only a minute long, but I watch it four times. Has to be deliberate. View counts are everything on here. Four one-minute views are better than one four-minute one. Everything is short, time is currency. Below the video, people have left virtual graffiti.

Scholarly discussions about alternate histories where the singer lived and the band kept going. Angry luddite comments about how the new music has “no soul”. Sarcastic comparisons to other bands. The page tolerates the graffiti, encourages it actually. Makes people feel like they’re doing something meaningful. Keeps them looking. Engagement with video content.

The song gets stale after four listens. Back to the thumbnail grid. A few seconds later, I end up watching “memes”. The term was originally meant to describe ideas spreading like a virus. These videos aren’t ideas.

They’re badly-animated narrow-screen recyclings of crudely-edited comedy pictures narrated by a robot voice. Newspaper cartoons without the art. Photos and captions. Graffiti humour. The same cartoon faces – only existing on the net – show up again and again, mixed between out-of-context video clips and screenshots from movies.

Some are actually funny. There have probably been papers written about how they make grand points about the human condition, but who reads more than a few sentences of text these days? Video is everything. Time is currency. Algorithms do our thinking for us.

I notice that I’ve already watched seven collections of “memes”. The background music is jaunty and catchy, but even a full net search reveals no clue as to what it is from. Could it actually be an original piece written for the video? Heresy!

I leave the videos, distracted by another part of the net. A comedy article made out of pictures with facts written on them. Short again. Everything is short. One grabs my attention and I read further. Over in Vancouver, Canada, the streets are bathed in a deep purple glow from the streetlights. Like something from a low-budget pandemic studio concert video or the lights on a high-end gaming machine. It’s beautiful.

Turns out that it’s a malfunction. A defect in the chemical coating for the high-efficiency LED emitters. Purple-blue is their natural colour. I glance away from the net for a second. The LED bulb in my room still glows a warm shade of lightbulb-yellow. Almost like the old filament bulbs. Who remembers those? I return to the net. The city officials want to replace the streetlights with normal ones. There’s no place for creativity these days.

I get distracted by a video clip of some vintage comedy show from ninety-eight. The people almost look modern, but their outfits are just slightly more formal and generic. No-one glances at a smartphone – a tiny slab of silicon and plastic that allows you to take the net with you everywhere. Sometimes their absence is the only way you can tell that something is from the olden days. The jokes in the video are still funny. There’s approving graffiti below it, a rare sight for old stuff these days.

When I look for another video on the grid, I actually bother reading the titles. Most of them are written in “clickbait”. Like a carnival barker mixed with a tabloid headline. Unfinished sentences written to make you curious. People claiming to have done weird things. Designed to grab attention. By this point, its basically a language in its own right. You’re no-one on the net if you don’t know how to speak clickbait.

I select a heavy metal cover version of “Hotel California” with a picture of a zombie on the thumbnail. It seemed appropriate.

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂

How “User-Friendly” Should Experimental Fiction Be?

Well, I thought that I’d talk about experimental fiction today and – more importantly – how “user friendly” it should be. This is something I ended up thinking about whilst reading the next novel that I plan to review (“Mistification” by Kaaron Warren), which is a slightly surreal/experimental literary novel that also doubles up as a cleverly-disguised short story collection too.

In a lot of ways, “Mistification” is a very “user friendly” experimental novel. Not only is it written in a relatively informal style, but the story seems to follow a fairly linear progression and the “short story” segments are both clearly signposted and will often use a fairly similar narrative voice to the novel’s main third-person narration in order to avoid “breaking the flow”.

Yet, whilst all of this makes this novel’s story considerably easier to follow than, say, M. John Harrison’s “Nova Swing” or Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” it also loses a certain something when compared to those novels.

For example, the fact that the narrative voice for many of the “short story” segments is fairly similar might make the story flow better (and make the changes between third-person and first-person narration much less jarring too), but it also reduces the feeling that the main character is listening to lots of different people telling him stories. It just feels like the omniscient third-person narrator is “breaking the fourth wall” more than anything else.

Yet, it this is also the perfect example of the kind of trade-offs that writers have to make when they experiment with the medium. The more an experimental novel focuses on readability, the less room it has to actually experiment. But, the less that an experimental novel focuses on readability, the more likely it is to alienate, confuse, annoy and/or put off a significant proportion of readers (going back to my earlier examples, it took me several attempts to read Harrison’s “Nova Swing” and I was utterly bewildered by Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” at first).

So, writers can’t win here? Right?

Wrong. It all depends on the type of experimental novel that you want to write. Although a writer should only add experimental elements to their story if they are there for a good reason (eg: to make a point about something, to deepen the reader’s immersion in the story, to create a certain atmosphere/tone etc…), I’d still argue that there are two types of experimental novels and they need to be handled differently.

The first are “ordinary” general fiction novels that also use experimental elements to add a little extra uniqueness and personality to the story. A good example of this is probably Edgar Cantero’s “Meddling Kids“, which is a dark comedy/horror novel that occasionally uses a few mildly experimental elements (eg: film script style segments, fourth wall breaks, invented words etc…).

These experimental elements are there to add a bit of flavour, quirkiness and atmosphere to the story and also set it apart from not only other novels but also from things like film, television etc.. too. They give the reader an “enhanced” experience that they won’t find in any other medium and, if you want to do something like this, then adding a few mild “user friendly” experimental elements to your story (if there is a good reason for them) is quite a good way to do this.

The second type of experimental novels are the literary equivalent of a challenging old 1990s First-Person Shooter computer game. If you’ve ever played games like “Blood“, “Duke Nukem 3D” or “Final Doom”, you’ll know what I’m talking about here. These games are fiendishly difficult and they require the player to practice until they are skilled enough to beat each level. Each battle in these games is almost a fast-paced puzzle that requires you to understand the “rules” of the game and use them to your advantage. And it is incredibly satisfying when you do.

Going back to books, experimental novels that don’t focus on “readability” are a bit like this. They are meant to be a puzzle or a challenge. They are meant to be something that the reader has to put effort and thought into – perhaps even requiring a certain level of note-taking, re-reading and/or spending a while actually thinking about what they have just read. Yet because, like games, they follow a logic, a plot and/or a set of “rules” that the reader can understand if they put the effort in, they will often feel incredibly satisfying to read.

After all, as long as the experimental elements are there for a good reason, then an experimental novel that isn’t “user friendly”, will often reward the reader with not only something they won’t find in film or TV, but also won’t find in the vast majority of other novels too. This can be anything from, say, the rich atmosphere and mimicry of human memory found in “Wolf Hall”, to the fact that reading “Nova Swing” really feels like stepping into another world (or, rather, seeing the complex workings of another world). These rewards for skilled readers can also include stuff like ultra-realistic characters, new perspectives on familiar things etc… too.

So, how “user friendly” your experimental story should be depends a lot on what you want to do with it. If you just want to add a little bit of quirkiness, creativity and uniqueness to your novel, then make your experimental elements “user friendly”. If you want your story to be a challenging puzzle that will reward the readers who are willing to actually put the effort into understanding it, then go all-out with the experimental elements.

Just, whatever you do, make sure there is actually a good reason for including experimental elements in your story.

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Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂

Review: “Universal Harvester” By John Darnielle (Novel)

Several weeks earlier, I saw a mention of John Darnielle’s 2017 novel “Universal Harvester” on an online list of recommended horror novels.

The premise of the story intrigued me and it seemed like my kind of thing. So, naturally, I… forgot about it for several weeks before eventually remembering it and tracking down a second-hand copy.

So, let’s take a look at “Universal Harvester”. Needless to say, this review may contain some SPOILERS.

This is the 2017 Scribe (UK) paperback edition of “Universal Harvester” that I read.

The novel begins in the late 1990s in a small town in Iowa called Nevada. Jeremy Heldt works in Video Hut, an independent video rental shop that is gradually losing out to the larger video shop nearby. It is a fairly ordinary winter afternoon and Jeremy passes the time talking to the regular customers. But, when a regular called Stephanie returns a video, she mentions that something has been spliced into the tape.

Curious, Jeremy takes the video home to check it out. Sure enough, there are a few seconds of bizarre gloomy footage in the middle of the film. Not only that, one of the other tapes contains bizarre camcorder footage of a hooded woman in a barn. Although Jeremy is a bit freaked out by this, he gets on with his life and only mentions it to his boss, Sarah Jane, a while later.

Sarah Jane begins to look into the mysterious tapes and becomes more and more curious. So much so that she tracks down the barn from the film. After talking to its current owner, Lisa, Sarah Jane starts spending more and more time there…

One of the first things that I will say about this novel is that it is what would emerge if David Lynch, Jack O’Connell and Alice Hoffman sat down and decided to write a novel together 🙂 In other words, it is an atmospheric and strange story that only just about makes sense, but is so unique, interesting and well-written that you won’t really care. Seriously, if you like weird novels and TV shows from the 1990s, then you’ll love this novel 🙂

Surprisingly though, this wasn’t as much of a horror novel as I’d expected. Yes, there are some ominous, mysterious and chilling moments. Plus, there is a creepily mysterious backstory involving a cult and a theme of death and loss running through the story too. But, it isn’t really a horror story. In a lot of ways, it is like the TV show “Twin Peaks” – in that it contains elements of horror, but isn’t really a horror story.

And, yes, I should probably talk about this novel’s 1990s elements, since they are brilliant 🙂 Not only does this novel almost read like an “alternative” novel from the 1990s (eg: the sort of thing that would have been reprinted by Vintage in the 2000s), but it perfectly captures the warm and wintery rural atmosphere of various American films/TV shows from the decade too.

In addition to this, it is also a novel that includes stuff like video rental shops, lots of VHS tapes, old computers etc… Seriously, if you remember any of this stuff from the late 1990s/early 2000s then the book is wonderfully nostalgic 🙂

Interestingly though, this novel isn’t entirely set in the 1990s. There are a few random time jumps to both the 1950s-1970s and the present day which, although they are a bit unexpected, really help to add a lot of extra depth and atmosphere to the story. Seriously, I cannot praise the atmosphere of this novel highly enough.

One other cool thing about this novel is it’s focus on alternate timelines and parallel universes. Although this is mostly just a stylistic thing where the narrator will talk about what could happen, it really adds a lot to the novel. Not only that, there is at least one scene (where Sarah Jane describes what she saw in the farmhouse) which contradicts the descriptions in previous chapter – implying either an unreliable narrator, a multi-verse or an unreliable character. This really helps to add a lot of atmosphere and mystery to the novel.

In terms of the characters, this novel is really good. We get enough characterisation and detail to really care about the characters, but enough is left unexplained or unsaid to make some of the characters seem intriguingly mysterious. Interestingly, although Jeremy is set up as the main character at the beginning of the novel, the story is more about several of the other characters than him. This reminded me of a very vaguely similar technique used in M.John Harrison’s “Nova Swing” and it really helps to add depth and realism to the story.

Needless to say, all of this makes the novel really compelling. The best way to describe the characters in this book is that they are like a very slightly more understated, mysterious, realistic and/or hardboiled version of the characters you’d see in an Alice Hoffman novel or an episode of “Twin Peaks”.

In terms of the writing, this novel is really brilliant. For starters, the novel is technically narrated from a first person perspective, but it often reads more like a third-person novel until the narrator suddenly drops a dramatic fourth-wall breaking description or intriguing plot spoiler. Likewise, you’ll also spend quite a bit of the novel trying to work out who the narrator actually is until their identity is (sort of) revealed in the final few pages of the story.

The writing style in this novel is really brilliant too. It’s “matter of fact” enough to keep the story moving, but also beautifully descriptive and unique at the same time. It’s a little bit like a mixture between the high-brow hardboiled prose of Jack O’Connell and the vivid, poetic prose of Alice Hoffman.

In terms of length and pacing, this novel is fairly good. At a gloriously efficient 214 pages in length, it never feels like a page is wasted. Likewise, although this isn’t a fast-paced novel, it isn’t a slow-paced novel either. Although the story’s time jumps can take a while to get used to, there is enough atmosphere and mystery to keep the story really compelling 🙂

All in all, whilst this novel probably isn’t for everyone, I really loved it 🙂 It’s this gloriously weird mixture of 1990s nostalgia, ominous mystery, meta-fiction/experimental fiction and atmosphere. If you want a story which explains everything and has a linear plot, read something else. If you want a unique, intriguing and well-written novel, read this one.

If I had to give it a rating out of five, it would get a five.

When Is It Ok To “Break The Rules” In Your Writing?

One of the interesting things that I noticed in the novel that I reviewed yesterday was that it often “breaks the rules” in all sorts of interesting ways (eg: making up new words, breaking the fourth wall, using a film script-like format for dialogue segments etc…) and, surprisingly, this actually works really well.

So, naturally, this made me wonder when it is ok to “break the rules” when writing fiction. And, I would argue that there are three criteria that you must think about before deciding to do something a bit different in your story.

It is ok to “break the rules” when it improves your story, when it emerges organically from the story you are telling and/or when what you are doing is easily understood by your readers. Out of these three things, the first and third are the most important.

If you remember these three things, then you’ll know whether it is ok to do something a bit quirky or uncommon in your story. For example, the film script-like dialogue segments in the novel that I mentioned earlier (“Meddling Kids” by Edgar Cantero) fit into all three of these criteria.

Firstly, the script-like formatting removes a lot of superfluous speech tags and descriptions – which makes the dialogue flow faster. Secondly, it fits in well with the TV show-style theme of the story (and doesn’t seem too out-of-place). Thirdly, most readers have seen scripts before and won’t have too much trouble understanding one.

Likewise, the novel’s made-up words also fit into these criteria too. Firstly, they allow for more unique descriptions. Secondly, they fit in with the slightly eccentric and informal atmosphere of the story. Thirdly, they are often made up from pre-existing words or used in a context where their meaning is obvious. So, the reader can usually understand what Cantero is trying to say.

In short, you need to think about your reader first and foremost. If breaking the rules makes the story more readable or interesting for them, then break the rules. However, if breaking the rules leaves your readers feeling confused or is something that you’re just doing to show off, then think twice about it.

And, yes, although you might understand the reasons for doing something a bit more weird and/or experimental, you need to be sure that your reader does too. In other words, you need to be a reader yourself – since seeing both good and bad examples of this sort of thing in other people’s writing can help you to see your own story from your reader’s perspective.

Another thing to remember is that “the rules” are there to make stories enjoyable and understandable for readers. If you are able to find a way to break the rules that still allows your readers to enjoy and understand your story, then don’t be afraid to do it. But, again, remember to think about things from your reader’s perspective.

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Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂