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Hugo's New Home Brew
By Mark A. Rayner
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This article first appeared on the Made in
Canada Web site.
In the early part
of the 20th century, the hot new wireless app was radio.
Visionaries and idealists
hailed radio as the great participatory medium. There were going to be as many
transmitters as there were receivers, and the world was on the threshold of a cultural and
democratic renaissance. Enthusiasts built their own crystal sets and
talked about "fishing the ether" the way you might have talked about
"surfing the web" in the 90s.
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Hugo Gernsback |
One of radio's great
boosters (sorry, couldn't resist), was the godfather of science fiction, Hugo
Gernsback. He played a major role in fostering amateur radio by helping people
"home brew" their own sets, and he told beautiful stories about a
world transformed by better communications.
From 1906 to 1919 amateurs
dominated the medium and the airwaves were clogged with their signals. But by
1920, companies were selling pre-made sets, governments were busy assigning
frequencies and licenses, and the first stations started regular broadcasts.
The forces of commercialization soon took over and the promised utopia slipped
through the fingers of the people.
Sound familiar?
There are a lot of
similarities between the early days of radio and the early days of the web.
Think of those "home brewers" as the analog of today's independent web
publishers. But there is still hope for the latest "new media", particularly if
you're interested in science fiction.
I was first confronted by
the word, "interstitial" in William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties. Like other
great authors, he sent me running to my dictionary: "Interstitial: of, forming
or occupying interstices." It's a wonderful metaphor. His characters all live
between worlds (some of them even live on a bridge), but the metaphor applies
to all of us too.
In terms of
communications, we're all living in Gibson's interstitial world. Except the
interstices are not in space, they're in time.
Who knows how the web is
going to develop? Luckily, I don't have to know to be a SF writer. The strength
of science fiction is not in the accuracy of its predictions, but in the
questions it asks. The warnings it sounds.
But I'll try some
predictions anyway.
If history is any
yardstick, we can be pretty certain that all the older forms of communication
are not going to disappear. Text survived radio, radio survived television, and
television has so far survived the web. Of all of them, TV is most affected by
the web. This is also part of the historic pattern; the new medium attacks its
immediate predecessor. Convergence will probably affect this paradigm, in ways
that will be both good and bad.
But for writers, I see
great hope for the web and for digital publishing in general. So far, we
haven't discovered a new, successful way of storytelling to go with these new
media, as we did with both radio and television. But it's early days yet.
Who knows what new
storyform will evolve? My hope is that writers will be at the heart of it. Even
though the reader has so much more control on the web, we still need writers to
provide content, to generate ideas, to inspire.
Fiction has always been
interactive. Anything that engages the imagination is. But now we have the
possibility of a tangible interactivity. Readers will be able to get right in
there, for good or ill, and influence the story.
At first blush, writers
may find this a scary prospect. So many of us toil away in our lonely garrets,
romantic unshaved figures in wrinkled pajamas, writing brilliant prose. How can
there be room for others in this solitary process? But we have always relied on
collaborators, one more important than everyone else: the reader and her
imagination.
I don't think it's any
coincidence that the SF community took to the web so early, and so
wholeheartedly. SF writers and fans have vision. Made in Canada is a great
example of a new kind of storytelling; in this case, it's not a fictional
story, but a meta-story, the story of a culture. It's also largely
collaborative, and though we would all agree that it's Don's baby, we probably
all feel like we belong to it.
So, unlike radio, the
early promise of the web hasn't been submerged under the tsunami of
commercialism. Islands - interstitial zones - survive, where netizens use the
medium for their own ends. Perhaps on one of these islands we'll invent a new
form of literature.
Hugo would be proud.
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