How do we construct narratives about the digital age? And what themes and ideas will characterise ‘dot com fiction’?

“Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four Hour Bookstore” is a cracking work of short fiction written by Robin Sloan, one of the three people behind what is probably my favourite blog, Snarkmarket. Characterised by Sloan as “a short story about recession, attraction and data visualisation”, the piece is part fantasy, part sci-fi – and all good. It’s also possibly one of the few pieces that would fit Margaret Atwood’s otherwise condescending term ‘speculative fiction’.

For good reason, much of the reaction from the ‘sphere has been glowing praise. So far, however, I haven’t seen much in the way of a literary or analytic response. And while there are many people who argue that ‘analysing’ literature is to deny the pleasure of reading, I’ve never found it to be the case. The more I love a work of fiction – the more it works that strange, inarticulable magic on me – the more I enjoy diving into it and expressing all of the things it made me think.

So what follows are some of my scattered thoughts about the story. It will spoil the story if you haven’t read it, so you might want to do that first; it’s both very quick and well worth the half-an-hour of your time. And for those of you who, like me, have real problems with your attention spans, there’s a great audio version on Escape Pod that makes a bus ride so much better.

So:

• The paragraphs are short. Like a good blog post, the story is full of quick, punchy graphs. The prose too is very clear, but in 1st person. I don’t think this is a story that would have made sense with long paragraphs of description written in 3rd person omniscient. I think there’s a reason for that.
• The conceit of the story is, of course, that books and their readers are hiding a secret and that the protagonist teases it out using computers. Put another way: the aggregation of information in books by computers reveals a piece of information (or, content) that ‘supersedes’ its forms.
• This happens via a three-dimensional visualisation of ostensibly ‘two-dimensional’ texts. The clear implication is that, though Penumbra intends his face to be found, it can only happen through print’s ‘successor’.
• No. Wait, that’s wrong. It’s not that the information can only be found using computers; it’s that it can only happen so quickly using computers. That it has happened so fast means a change has been initiated. It’s not that print has been rendered obsolete; rather, it’s function and position in society has changed.
• The description of the Google campus and the book scanner seem to reinforce this idea; “Mr. Penumbra’s shelves don’t seem so tall anymore”.
• Yet, the text goes to great lengths to neither celebrate nor prioritise computerization over print; in fact, there is a suggestion that while computers are great at giving answers they, like all other forms of technology, aren’t so great at asking questions.
• Another way of framing that idea might be: digital information can be organised in non-linear, constantly shifting ways; but in order for that information to remain relevant to people, those networked systems of thinking have to simultaneously become textual (i.e. ‘a text’ is an ordering of signs meant to render something comprehensible). For information to have meaning, there must be a constant blurring print and screen, narrative and database.
• I can’t tell if it was deliberate, but there are a couple of points at which the main character seems to be saying something, but there are no quotation marks. Collapse of print and speech? A textual gesture to a new post-textual mode in which writing becomes performative? (Am I just getting silly now?)
• Of course, the way the text ends is neither a celebration nor a condemnation of print or digital; it’s something else. On the one hand, the immense power of digital is on display; on the other, its fleetingness, its tendency to evaporate the moment it has been created is all too clear as well. But Penumbra also suggests that longevity – to make something that lasts – isn’t the sole domain of the book. So we’re left with the contrast of a particular set of values and investments and their technological predications.
• So it’s interesting that the text rests on ideas about the author: on one hand, the Google Book Scanner peels information off the page and turns it into impersonal data, a fitting digital metahpor for the death of the author (neat point: the death happens for the same reason as it did ‘in Barthes’: language/information operate independently of their author); on the other is the idea that an author speaks, and lives through speaking. After all, the main character tries to understand Penumbra by ‘piecing together’ the information he finds about him. The fellowship is about sustaining life through passing yourself on through books. Is the author dead? Or does something about the endlessly iterative nature of digital texts do something to the now clichéd post-structuralist idea? (though it’s worth pointing out that Foucault’s idea of the author function is still at work here – and I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing)
• At the end of the text, the protagonist wonders how he will make himself last and, half-jokingly, mentions “Super Book Store Bros.”. What’s interesting about that, is that the video game is (to me, anyway) the next phase of narrative. Maybe that’s exactly the thing that will last (assuming, of course, that narrative doesn’t become less and less relevant).
• The piece is a story about historical transition, a moment in time between two epochs (in Western societies, anyway). It seems hopeful. This pleases me.

There’s more to be said, of course. But even I get tired of my own overly-simplistic wankery sometimes. If you wanna’ chat about this in the comments, I’d be totally up for it.

More notes. If you somehow don’t know, Robin used this story as a springboard to write a whole book. You can find out about it – and possibly contribute? – here. As part of the project, Robin, almost on a dare, also wrote a story on his flight from SF to NYC. As someone who has had a couple of unfinished stories kicking around for 3 or 4 years now, this makes me feel totally at ease with myself…