***

Node Magazine: (hypertextual) future of literature

A new trend is emerging on the horizon of writing and could bring a radical change in publishing dynamics, a sharper change than e-book coming. The artificers are a group of fans inspired by the most revolutionary among the writers in circulation: William Gibson.

William Gibson’s long expected latest novel publication has come with a very particular launch. When the book was still away from the circuit of USA and UK bookstores, after receiving an advanced reading copy of Spook Country, a bunch of fierce fans had already started the arrangement of an unconventional promoting network. The novel’s narrative material had been made object of a deep and methodical examination which produced a web-magazine, whose name was inspired by the review conceived by Gibson himself in his own story. While Spook Country’s Node Magazine is an outbound heading dedicated to the latest frontiers in interactive art (exploring the network of relationships among people, things and geographical places), in our world the Node Magazine (www.nodemagazine.com/) has become a challenging project with the aim of tabulating the whole knowledge touched or even just grazed by the novel and its author. It is not a case if the academic literary critic John Sutherland has claimed that the project threatened “to completely overhaul the way literary criticism is conducted”.

Everything was initiated when the still anonymous project promoter laid a hand on a reading copy of the novel and decided to mobilize “an army of volunteers” to track the references and to shape the cloud of data surrounding the book, considering every element of the work searchable on internet resources such as Google and Wikipedia. The pseudonymous author, under the nickname patternBoy, conceived the Node project as “a multi-author blog of fictional news stories in the Spook Country universe”, but at that moment he did not anticipate it would become the focus of media attention. The idea to begin from a text to get a more exhaustive description of the narrative world built by that work had a precedent: again in the hypertextual context, an analogous operation had involved Gibson’s previous novel Pattern Recognition, at the hands of another fan hidden behind a nom de plum. At the time the work had started after the publication of the novel and taken a couple of years to gain its final structure, whereas the Node, started last February 7th (please note: 2007), was complete before the novel was even published and so it supported step by step its diffusion, earning attention from Gibson himself.

As pointed out by Sutherland, this operation could pave the way to a new critical fruition of texts. Multimedia potentialities offered by the platform of a blog mirror the complexity of cross-references and reading levels of a work as Spook Country and allow to dissect the plot through the incremental cognitive mechanism at the base of an hypertext. A metaliterary project and even a support to mythopoeia, useful to the comprehension of the text and to the definition of the iconography. As demonstrated by the similar experience arranged for the latest Thomas Pynchon’s, with a wiki entirely dedicated to the monumental Against the Day (http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page), we can say it is more than just a promising strategy.

***

By the way, great job!
C’ya in cyberspace,
X

7di9