The New Internet Experience of Science Fiction

[nemorathwald]

I just purchased Charles Stross' Hugo-and-Nebula nominated story "Lobsters" from Fictionwise.com. While reading about the protagonist getting slashdotted, I'm wondering how the internet is changing not just the content of science fiction, but how we read it. Back in the good old days, as Eric S. Raymond describes in this essay, SF readers had to educate themselves in SF tropes to fully appreciate what they were reading. Reading SF is not a passive experience; the reader participates in figuring out jargon in the context of an unfamiliar world. Today, not only did I obtain the story I'm reading instantly, while reading it I googled Wikipedia to instantly research some of the SF tropes and political/business/religious/ideological/historical references used in it. The process Raymond describes is streamlined. And here I am blogging about reading it while I'm reading it, bringing the interaction full circle.

Comments

[wolfger.livejournal.com]

The interaction gets even better. With the Firefox extension SuperDragAndGo, you can simply highlight an unfamiliar term (or phrase), then drag and drop it anywhere on the page to open a Google search for that term/phrase in a new tab. It's a beautiful thing. All the more reason to read novels online.

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

Fictionwise doesn't allow HTML downloads, but that would be great.