I saw someone ask Hugh Howey the other day, in the wake of his BEACON 23 series of short stories, if he thought we were entering a new golden age of literary serialisation. Because everything has to have its new golden age these days, and, you know, comics don’ t exist. Oh dear, I’m being sarcastic already. Clearly it’s going to be one of those days. Anyway. My original point, before I started being a dick, was that ebooks always had that potential. I personally love having new parts of a serial automatically delivered to my Kindle.

Some years back, a group of sf writers started producing a thing called SHADOW UNIT, which intended to replicate the structure and systems of a tv series in prose. Which, as a concept, I thought was awfully interesting. And today there is a thing called Serial Box, which intends to operate as a network for such projects. Cleverly, their serials appear to come in four different reading formats and audio.

The thing I find curious and perhaps a little saddening about the enterprise is that it attempts to replicate the American tv model - a collaborative writer’s room with a showrunner. Which is certainly an interesting and worthy experiment. But my cultural background is from a different televisual tradition, where the gold standard is/was a single writer’s voice, and the writers I’ve known who worked in writer’s rooms almost all asked me, at some point, what it was like to have just my name on my work, in the full knowledge that all the work was mine and spoke only in my voice.

(I, on the other hand, ask them what it’s like to know they’re not going to die poor. So, you know. Swings and roundabouts.)

 

READING: POSTCAPITALISM, Paul Mason (UK) (US)