Progress is Explosive

Last night I watched a Holiday film on Netflix. The main character is an author who is treated by the public like a rock star. That is pure fantasy. It doesn’t happen in real life. Even someone like Amy Tan who currently has a documentary on Netflix did not experience that kind of stardom. It got me thinking about the future of books. Every time there is a seismic shift in taste or technology, experts say the novel is dead.

And no one really knows when the novel will come to an end, despite it having been killed many times over in the past.

Does anyone recall that Amazon began as a book retailer? It’s still around and getting bigger by the day.

Back in the 1990s with the Internet going public, I heard “Everyone will read content for free online,” they said, “Why pay for a book?”

The Internet also gave birth to the e-book that supplements the paper book and has grown the market, not shrinking it. It spawned websites that authors and publishers used to create a more dynamic and immediate presence than just on the dustjackets of books.

Then the Internet dawned in the early 2000s, and this didn’t kill the novel either. In fact, books got a further boost when social media came into being. Authors became self-promoters, opening up Linked-in, Facebook, and Twitter pages, and YouTube channels, creating one-to-one relationships with their audiences instead of through traditional intermediaries. Hence, the book continued to reign supreme.

Now, we are entering another era of the Internet, the Metaverse, and the uncertainty jitters are mounting again – how will a one-dimensional novel, which has only words and relies on the reader’s imagination to give it life, be able to function in this artificial universe, where the reader now has to inhabit the story and talk to its characters, alter its plot if desired, and immerse themselves in this creation? How do authors enter this world when they only know how to sprinkle words on a page that draw pictures in the imagination? Will movie or video versions have to be necessary accessories to the printed book in this brave new world? This translates into astronomical costs, affordable only by a few big-name publishers, and only for their headline titles. Or will Artificial Intelligence come to the rescue as it did with text-to-voice, and create text-to-video to automatically take the printed novel and create a visual equivalent in the Metaverse that we could enter through our avatars?

The Metaverse will make the novel flourish and create even more engagement, the techies, who are driving us to zombie hood, point out.

Engagement will be via avatar or another proxy, like playing in a video game, so there will be an element of mental stimulation, even if it’s reflexive, they insist.

The techies themselves don’t know much about this monster that is under development, because the monster could use its own growing intelligence to develop how it sees fit after it has learned to crawl.

As for the novel, the further we drift away from the original, I’m hoping that a strident call will rise out across the world, from those who remember and care, for a return to basics, to a time when the writer merely prompted with words on the page and the reader did the rest in their head to conjure up the story; a return to a time when we exercised our brains.

One thing I am certain of, however, Metaverse or not: as long as people want to escape from this dreary world even for brief periods if only to make that world more livable and as long as writers can continue to engage, entertain, educate and enlighten, the novel will continue to fulfill a need in whichever way it is presented.

I’ve chosen a sexy and sophisticated tune that is instrumentally perfect and speak to the imagination. Now use yours.