Good evening, my name is Gwyneth Jones. I'm your token science fiction writer at this scientific (or at least, technological) conference about fiction – and yes, to define my terms, I'd say that whatever we write, we're imposing form on experience, we're making things up. In the broadest sense, everything we make is fiction, that's what the word means ... Thank you for inviting me. I don't do this often, but I love being a fly on the wall at an academic conference ... I don't know if you know it, but I also write for teenagers. In support of that work, I've cunningly re-invented myself as a creative writing tutor, which gives me license to go into schools and pretend to be a teacher occasionally, so I can get next to the fourteen year olds. Really, it's not a lot different. The same crowds in the corridors, the same alphanumeric coded rooms I have to find; the risk of getting trampled to death when the bell goes for recess. So, let's see if I can entertain you, inform you, or at least keep you reasonably quiet. If no fights break out, and the class is still mostly in the room at the end, I'm winning.

The chicken and the egg
I said I was going to talk about Narrative and Technology. I'm afraid my input might seem a bit superfluous, after you've been doing nothing else for the last few days: so let me explain something about the first clause, the bit before the colon (I love making up those bits.) Most of this conference has been about collaboration – networking, student, teacher, student-student relationships. I want to take you to a different country. Not just to England, and a much slower-paced cyberodyssey, but to the country of the solitary artist. I don't collaborate, not in the obvious sense; and yet, like any writer, I am a collaboration. I am made of lots of different voices, before I even start – to accept feedback, to meet an audience. I'll tell you more about what I think goes into my endogenous collaboration in a while, but first, a few more introductory remarks. Narrative has a special place among the arts. Not only because of the broader sense of the word fiction, but because telling stories, devising and imposing sequence on events, is not something only specialists do. We all do it, all the time. It's the presenting symptom of human consciousness. People pay good money, and spend months in ashrams in the Himalayas, getting the training you need to get off that bus... So, as long as we're not going to achieve satori, narrative is, arguably, what makes us what we are. Everybody loves stories. The vast majority of children and adults of all cultures, (this is excluding severe learning difficulties, and some neurological problems) can understand them, in a highly sophisticated way. Reading and writing, now that's different. That's the technology, and it worries people. A complex sentence can frighten a reasonably competent adult reader, never mind a sixth grader, before there's the slightest hint of a modem, or chatroom protocol getting involved ... So first we get the narrative and then we get the technology, that seems clear. But on the other hand writing in the broadest sense – making signs on the world, that can be read by others- is not a even a specifically human trait. Far from it. All living things communicate, by leaving traces that are in some sense intelligible and purposeful. That's the way our cells communicate, internally and between themselves. Including, of course, the cells in that twisty maze of greyish tissue, that cloud of sparks, where the stories are continually being created. Before you tell yourself the simplest story, the first, immensely satisfying stories little children tell themselves, 'I got out of my bed, my name is Gwyneth, this is a sock...' the flux of experience has to be recorded in memory. The tale has to be written, before you can tell it. I need tools to help me, before I can say 'I'. Narrative and technology have always been entangled. If you want to know which came first, the answer is both; and these are basic features of our humanity. This is why – as we have discovered, slowly and sometimes very reluctantly-, the new world of the IT revolution, computer networking, cyberspace, is not a fresh start, a clean slate.

2001: A cyberodyssey
But I promised you a cyberodyssey ... When I was a child every day was a story that I told myself, a plot leisurely unfolding, full of unexpected twists and unfathomable mysteries. The sky is blue, these are my feet, today is not tomorrow, at night I go to somewhere called sleep ... When I was a little older, my brother and my sisters and I played make-believe games. I remember we had a convention for dealing with points of order, disputes about where the plot was going, discussion of possibly ill-advised use of adult-owned resources like, hm, the furniture, curtains, kitchen implements. 'Out of the game-' someone would say, and we'd drop our characters for a moment, sort the problem: and resume, returning to the other, invisible world... But more about the narrative games later.
           I learned to write. I remember laboriously copying rows of pothooks between the broad lines of an exercise book page (this was a very long time ago). I was clumsy and untidy. When I graduated from pencils to pen and ink, the effect was disastrous on face, hands, school uniform. Handling the technology did not come easily to me. However, I was born into a world in which these tools (pens, ink and paper) had been around for long enough to seem natural features. I first met something I recognized as technology when I was sixteen. I wanted 'to write', so my father sent me for typing lessons (keyboard skills weren't taught at my school); and I became not a good typist, but at least someone who uses ten fingers and doesn't have to think about it. But I didn't like it. Writing out stories by hand was transparent, typewriting was something in the way. For fifteen years, for years after my books started being published, I was a writer totally at odds with 'the technology'. I had to pay to get my scripts re-typed, because they were so awful ... I never found a typewriter I didn't hate. If the keys jammed or the carbon papers misbehaved, I didn't have poetic thoughts about narrative and technology being inextricably entangled, I went in search of a blunt instrument. It made no difference when I progressed from a baby mechanical portable to something sleek and modern. I hated the modern machine worse, because I was afraid to hit it in case it would up and die on me, out of pure spite.
           But we can discuss paranoid anthropomorphism another time. Before I had a printer I had to have a computer, and this is where the story gets interesting. And a little strange. In 1983 I was a published author, but making very little money. I was working as an accounts clerk at American Express by day, and writing science fiction in the evenings. The strange thing is that I liked being an accounts clerk. The typewriter had been my enemy. A keyboard and a monitor screen had a completely different effect. I was one of the IT revolution's great army of footsoldiers, (or finger-soldiers): with my keyboard, and my screen, and the strange sense of a limitless world in there, layer on layer, through which I could journey, seeking for whatever I needed; to which I was linked, along with all these other workers, row on row -a flesh-and-blood peripheral, plugged in by the fingertips, and (a wireless, photonic connection) the optic nerves.
           I knew about computers. I knew about the romance of the Enigma project, and Alan Turing. I had friends who worked on mainframes, and of course I'd met computers in science fiction. Then one day Peter, my husband, brought home a borrowed Commodore Pet. (I'm afraid it wasn't a 2001. I think maybe it was about the next model along). Pet was the right word. We were as fascinated with our Personal Electronic Transactor as if it had been a giraffe or a rhinoceros; or maybe more appropriately, a potato or a tobacco pipe. We couldn't make it do many tricks, but we were thrilled when it did anything at all. (Oh my, look at that, it can do 'two and two makes four', isn't that amazing!) I had to have one of my own, and so we acquired a BBC B. The home computer explosion in the UK had already begun (or so we thought: we had no idea what the real explosion would look like), but we were close enough to the start to feel the excitement of a technology so new that it still has meaning. I saw that BBC as ooh, Stephenson's steam engine, the Wright brothers' aeroplane; or at least one of the first, "rich people's toy" versions of a motor car ... I tried to learn to program. I thought that's what you had to do if you had a computer in the house, like taking a dog for walks. I put myself through a school textbook computer course, and drilled myself in Boolean algebra: there was a time (don't test me now!) when I could easily tell you what a NAND gate does. I almost wish I could have brought my masterpiece of programming here to show you. It was a short sequence in which, executing my instructions, the BBC would draw a simple lunar landscape of volcano cones, and then a little space rocket would take off, and rise, interposing itself over the line of the slope of one of the cones (that was hard), and disappear off the top of the screen. Memory's a funny thing, I've forgotten so much, but I can see that little black and white animation now. I was so proud.
           Actually, I suspect if I'd brought one of those strange, flimsy five and a half inch floppies along here, the conference would have been able to work some miracle, and resurrect my volcanoes. But nah, better not. The shocking loss of data in the rapid turnover of the hardware generations is part of the story. This way you can imagine my little space rocket in your minds, if you feel like it. Undoubtedly I'll benefit from the effect of your personal software on my program.
           I feel I was lucky in my introduction to the IT revolution. The work I was doing at American Express could have been soul-destroying, except that for me the whole experience was positively redeemed by my knowledge that I was part of the kind of phenomenon that people write science fiction about. I loved the feeling of being close to something (mass data processing) that was changing the way the world worked. When I started using the word processor program on the BBC, I felt good about that, too. The typewriter had been an obstacle. When I sat down at the computer keyboard, I knew that there was something going on (I even knew, in some detail, what was going on) between my keystrokes, and the letters that appeared which was ... different, but in some way analogous to the mysterious, invisible working of my own brain. It seemed to me, so near to the start of it all, that I couldn't just use the computer, the way you use a pen, a pencil, a mechanical typewriter. It wasn't an inanimate object ... I felt I had to communicate with it. Whether the machine really was another self was immaterial. I read it as another self, because – I communicate with other selves: it's my nature.
           Well, the excitement wore off. I got a job, proper paying job as a writer, writing TV cartoon scripts about some cute little robots. I became too busy to be interested in my machine. When we switched from the BBC I bought an Atari – and buying an actual computer, not a dedicated word processor, was almost the last spark of my fascination. When the Atari became decrepit, I bought a Dell PC clone, which I used for five years, (ignoring all the hype of the real home-computer explosion, partly for environmental reasons, and partly because of former-pioneer pride. I did not want to own a high-powered machine I had absolutely no use for.) When my 486 died in its sleep one night last September, (very sad. It was getting a bit cranky but I had no idea there was anything seriously wrong. Put the poor thing to bed one night: tried to wake it in the morning, and it was gone.) I just used my husband's machine, went straight to the Dell website and ordered a midrange current model. I'd been meaning to do something different, maybe buy a Mac, escape from the toils of Microsoft: but when it came to it, I was in the middle of a lot of things, and I couldn't take the time. So that's where I've been, over nearly twenty years. I started out thrilled and philosophical, trying to understand the soul of a new machine. I've ended up needing a computer the way I need a refrigerator.
           That's not the whole story. My current modest Dell, in terms of power and versatility, makes that first poor little BBC look about as useful as a bus ticket: but I don't just use it to type. I certainly do have a use for the graphics packages, the photo manipulation, the webwriting software, and of course the modem. But I still value more highly, maybe irrationally, my early experience. Yes, I remember Wordstar. Key-in a string of alphanumeric code, in parentheses, for every sophisticated instruction, (like, italic, or boldface). Key it in again, to switch the effect off. Spend about fifteen minutes (per infraction) trying to spot the error you made, when the machine refuses to obey, or does something completely different ... I don't do html coding, (I live with someone who can do things like that so much faster than I can, it's annoying; but useful–). But I do remember, a little, about how to talk to the machine. How you can take nothing for granted. How it's like talking to someone who's blindfold. How you have to envisage, step by step; and remember, step by step, that you're dealing with something that understands only what it can translate into binary code, yes/no, on/off, zeroes and ones: and the rest of the world just isn't there. Until you make it appear ... I still feel, intuitively, that the thing in the box is something like my mind in my brain. There's a level where that twisty maze of greyish tissue is equally as helpless; and all the world that I perceive is finally constructed (the way even the superb graphics of a modern game have to be) out of yes no, on off: the neuron fired, it didn't.
           When I think about computers, the early days, how it started for me, I see rows of keyboard operators, all of them female (I even remember further back, when a computer operator had to be young and fit, to lug all those heavy tapes and bundles of punched-card around.) I think of binary and hexadecimal codes, buses, bits, logic gates. I don't think about punk kids having urban-cowboy adventures on the mean streets: I don't see any geek-mercenary lone-hero types around. Or sexy-nursemaid street-samurai babes either. Yes, my computer odyssey is distinctly female-coded. I'm aware of that. But I read William Gibson's Neuromancer, and I admired it very much: though I preferred Walt Disney's Tron. I liked the gods and demons and ghosts that William Gibson discovered, in the world behind the screens. That resonated with me. I recognized the feeling of meeting, the feeling of getting in touch with one of the great impersonal forces that makes the world work. But all this was about to be swept away ... the female coded version of the IT revolution, and the male coded: me and my ant-hive rows of low paid key-processors, William Gibson's lonely nerd-outlaw locked in his bedroom. Neuromancer, though universally accepted as a myth of origin, doesn't really describe the internet. The man who invented cyberspace envisaged it from the point of view of a historical situation that was passing away even as he wrote, and though he thought of it as a place of mind, he didn't think of that mind as human. The humans are shown becoming shadows, cyphers, denatured copies of themselves, under the inescapable rule of Mr. Big. It's a point of view. Especially if you ditch the Wintermute/Neuromancer mask, and see that 'Mr Big' as a metaphor for The Sex and Shopping Monster In Us All. Later cyberspace writers like Pat Cadigan, Melissa Scott, would populate the online world on a less mythic scale; and give it fuzzier boundaries: moving into a vision where the human world is penetrated by digital technology in many different forms. But the real internet is something else again: for better or for worse a much more democratic, but much less romantic institution. Henry Case would be amazed. Horrified, even ... What's this shopping mall, doing, planted in the middle of my spooky outlaw frontier? What are these holiday brochures? Not to mention the dancing hamsters ... Modems and the mass-market: now that's a really bizarre fusion of the human and the machine. And yet, once you see it, it looks so natural.

A cyberodyssey, episode 2: The Internet and Me
This will be a shorter episode. The Internet isn't a machine, it's a social institution mediated by technology. I want to talk about networking, and my brush with virtual environments, in another context. But first, a brief account of my interaction with the institution. I had a resistance to the Internet. I thought I ought to get on the bus, but I was comfortable with my glorified typewriter and didn't feel excited about networking. (This is still true. I spend quite enough time sitting in front of a screen as it is. I use my modem for correspondence, I don't use it to socialize. Or shop. When I'm researching, I often prefer to read a book.) But I liked cyberspace fiction. I was intrigued by the idea of the world behind the screens, which seemed so like the other imaginary realms, and alien planets, of science fiction and fantasy ... Not least, in that these imaginary worlds, just like the ones in the books, were constructed entirely out of printed words. In 1994 there was a conference on Virtual Futures planned at my local university. I decided I wanted to submit a paper. I wanted to tell these digerati dudes about other cyberspace fiction writers, besides William Gibson: and I also wanted to tell them that this imaginary space of theirs was not, logically it couldn't be, a separate, new and better world ... I realized I'd have to go and look at the imaginary space, so as to be able to defend my prejudices with conviction: so we bought a modem. We had fun wiring it into my study (where I'd never had a landline phone). We had to take up floorboards, and use our cat. I fastened the phoneline to her collar and stuck her down one hole. Peter called her, over at the other hole, and she went trotting under the boards, dragging the line behind her. A revolutionary bio-tech fusion solution that worked like a charm ... I went to the conference, and a couple of other conferences (being a fly on the wall, just the way I'm here now). I sat up late at night printing out reams of useless Compuserve instructions, feeling very puzzled by all these usegroups, usenets, these banal typed conversations that I didn't want to join. Then (just in time to revive my interest) along came the World Wide Web, Mosaic, Hypertext, and a local supplier to take the place of the incomprehensible Compuserve.
           As a science fiction writer, I was slow in getting online. As a British woman, it turned out I was still one of the few. It was surprisingly easy to sneak myself into the conferences. At one point I found myself on national television, having opinions about the wired-up future of the UK I viewed the tv appearance as a chat show invite: I did it hoping that people would buy my books, if they'd seen me on television for whatever reason. Putting up one of the first feminist websites in the UK (Maybe the first, I've never bothered to find out), on the other hand, was a labour of love.
           I was asked to do this by our local Internet supplier. I would work for free, of course. They would provide the space, support and maintenance. There were three of us: me, graphic designer Rachael Adams, and our programmer Katie Herson. We were very idealistic. None of us were taken in by the hype, we didn't want to jump on the bandwagon, we definitely did not see the internet as a hip, cool, post-gendered playground. We tried to do something that truly reflected the multifaceted, contradictory, difficult experience of being a woman in the nineties. We had academic papers on the linguistics of internet gender-identity; spirituality from a Tarot expert; photo montage on domestic violence; lots of graphics; a MOO-users starter kit. I was working on Amnesty International's Women's Action Committee at the time, so we had human rights issues, too ... and to make the point, we stitched the whole thing together with rings of hyperlinks, so you'd be reading about the tedium of housework as a career option, and you'd be prompted jump from there to an eye-opener about real female slavery, and from there to an inspirational reading of the sixteenth arcanum of the Tarot. (Which is called the Star). Well, I'm not claiming it worked, on any level. (The graphics took FOREVER to download). It was colourful, and maybe thought-provoking, if you had a lot of patience Maybe it was art. It certainly wasn't a cozy, welcoming, women-centred magazine and clubroom. But it was an experiment, and certainly an experience, and at the time we were very impressed with ourselves.
           Again, I'm sorry, but you'll have to use your imaginations. The STAR survived (still looking more or less as I'd left it) until a few months ago. Then Pavilion Internet passed into new hands, and I'm afraid the site finally got axed. It's not there now, anyway. I do have a copy of the 1996 build, but I plan to let it rest in peace.
           To an extent, this odyssey of mine has been a revolving door. I went around it once with the computers, once with the modems, and both times came out the way I went in: a science fiction writer, and occasional creative writing teacher, locked-in to my core activities. Basically, I had a great opportunity to get close to a science fiction 'future' in the act of becoming present reality, for a good deal less than the price of a trip to the International Space Station. I think I got value for my money, and maybe even for my time; and at least I know enough to be properly impressed, at the difference between now and then. But I have to confess, I don't often think about that difference.
           Technology is like language, and like consciousness itself. The forward edge, the growing point, is constantly being overwhelmed, becoming matrix. New technology makes us theorize. Think of Galileo and the telescope. Once we're through the phase-transition phase, a new technology vanishes. Just as metaphors become words, with meaning that seems arbitrary, the connection with the world of the senses lost, tools that were once alive, resistant, significant, even numinous, become inanimate objects. They die, and the empty shells sink down; and turn into our bedrock.

The Tools and the Trade
But how did all of this affect my science fiction? To talk about that, I have to go back to those make-believe games of childhood, and another side of the IT revolution. By the time computer fantasy games existed, I was already happy with the kind of sublimated private fantasy that leads to novel writing, and I took no interest. But I did play games on my computer, right from the start. I've spent my hours, late at night, obsessively munching up little dots, fleeing ghosts and thrilling to the capture of a slice of virtual watermelon. But what really intrigued me about the games (it still does) was the fact that they work on someone like me. My hand-eye coordination is abysmal. I'm not talking girl-bad. I mean unusually bad for a human being. (As anyone who's ever been bowling with me can attest). And yet I will sit there, trying to blast the asteroids, down the dinosaurs; trying to get Lara Croft (that's Lara Croft of Tomb Raider, a game that was very big with us in the UK a couple of years ago) up the wall, through the maze and into the fortress ... Puzzle games bore me, even though I should be better at those: but something in me wants to hit those targets. So what is it that works? It isn't the gore. My blood lust quotient is fairly low, I do believe. I've been wondering about this phenomenon, and investigating it through my novels, for quite a long time. Let me lead you into this–
           Embodiment is a problem for the new world of cyberspace, a problem that's better understood now -through the results, or rather the failures, of Artificial Intelligence research, and through major advances in endocrinology and neuroscience- than it was at the start of our cyberodyssey. Today, any self-help book will tell you that most of what we communicate when we talk face to face is non-verbal. We all have some experience of the online problems this can cause ... Over the last decade I've published a trilogy about some aliens, (They call themselves the Aleutians, because they landed in Alaska) who arrive on earth by accident and take over because they are very, very good at bio-technology. My Aleutians are just like human beings really (of course they are: I don't know any extraterrestrials): but they control their non-verbal communication, consciously, skillfully, and generally use it in preference to the spoken word. Their social convention, however, is that as long as you stick to the Common Tongue, (communicating by inference, gesture; the transference of chemical molecules through the air) you're being tactful and you cannot not give offence ... If you speak aloud, that's different. I think of my Aleutians often, when I see the snarl-ups people, including me, get into over a misplaced or ill-considered e-mail: how quickly the emotional temperature can rise. In Aleutian terms it's as if, in cyberspace, we are putting the Common Tongue into words. We have to articulate all the things that are 'best left unsaid'; or expressed discreetly by pheromones or through eye-contact, and, just as in Aleutian society, when you put something into words, you immediately up the ante. It's a statement ... so to speak. Maybe we have no choice. Maybe it's the way people have to behave, when meeting, for recreation or for business or learning, in a world made entirely of words.
           Back in the eighties, cyberspace fiction writers had no time for the physical body. You just jack-in and there you are, as if by magic, and so is everyone else. Later fictional developments have become more detailed and concrete about how this 'other world' might be mediated, but the body is still treated as though it isn't involved. You leave it like a coat on a hook at the door. But it is involved. As the other cyberpunk prophet, Bruce Sterling, has said: there you are, frolicking around in cyberspace, disguised as the Easter Bunny, (I paraphrase) and someone comes along to your house, breaks in and takes a baseball bat to the 'meat' you left behind. Then what are you going to do? The point he's making is not about getting better locks. The point is, we need bodies. We are bodies. Even people so severely disabled they have every excuse to feel that the body is just a tiresome burden, have minds that were built by embodiment, and for embodiment.
           When I first wrote about computer gaming, in a book called Escape Plans, back in the eighties, I treated it conventionally. People play shoot-em-ups over a computer network; or they jack into a recorded game, and have a dreamland, wonderland experience. But I also had people getting wired-up to share the physical experience of virtual masters – sports stars, athletes, artists. You go to the races or you go to the ball game (of course you don't have to go to the stadium. If you're middle class you can get wired up at home: but people in my books tend to like to get out). You choose your jockey, your ball player, your dancer; and you share their game. The sweat, the adrenaline, the elation, muscle control, skills, the whole thing. In my Aleutian trilogy, I took this idea further. You can still do tvc, the tele-visual-cortical games, but serious gamers (and in my futures, games are always very important) go to an arena, choose a game and take it like a drug, in the form of eye-drops that deliver the data-built fantasy environment straight to the visual cortex. You don't leave your body behind, when you go into the world behind the screens. You take the computer-generated, software package world into your mind, and you and your friends (sharing the data by infra-red wireless connection, or some improvement on that) run and jump and play out your intensely satisfying roles, like children playing make-believe on a street corner, before the IT revolution was born.
           I'm not saying it would work. I'm not saying having people run around in an arena, immersed in an imaginary world of pirates or demons, makes any sense. (Though, the real world version of that is good fun) It's just my way of saying that the real cyberspace, the cyberspace that hasn't been invented yet, will have to make terms with the physical, in some way that will be very startling when it first works. In the science fiction that I'm writing now, I'm stepping back, I'm trying to envisage how those gaming environments might be delivered ... and it's something to do with the way people respond to today's games, not on a conscious level but deeper than that. The way games unlock the secret characters in our minds. When I first tried Snowboard Supercross (It's a fantasy snowboarding game, totally unrealistic) I could taste the snow. The cold, the particular scent of snowladen night air assaulted me – like a technologically mediated Proustian memory ... I think of experiences of that kind, I think of how eager the brain is to be fooled, and I see the future of narrative technology there: no longer in words but in immediate apprehension – people connected to the world behind the screens through nerves and muscles with memories millions of years' old, our future and our ancient past, moving into convergence ... I think that's the way to go.
           And finally, a few remarks about Kairos. It's a wonderful word, isn't it. I once wrote a book called Kairos... Opportunity, due time, the moment of change. I didn't notice on the Kairos website any mention of the other sense of the Greek word. My brother told me, he's a Classicist – it's something to do with weaving, and the kairossen are the loops that hold the woven web to the framework of the loom. Isn't that nice ... In my book, the kairos at first seems like a drug, that is affecting people's perception of reality: then it turns out to be an event, an event on a cosmic scale, that's affecting percieved reality because as well as happening on a cosmic scale, it's happening to human brains, because they're made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe and at this Kairos everything changes. The world is being turned inside out, folding back on itself like an orange unpeeling, mind and matter changing places (this was a reference to a Stephen Hawking idea about what might happen at the Big Crunch, when the universe stops expanding, time and space start going backwards, and all the rules are broken ... ) So, in my book, Kairos meant that the world was becoming imaginary. It was becoming something made of mind, made of the logos, the word. There were no web-based environments in the book, (I was writing in the nineteen eighties) but does that sound familiar ...?
           Maybe the strangest thing in my cyberodyssey is the way my business, the business of writing fiction has been – not developed, exactly, but deconstructed, by multi-user networks, and by people who think about them. You know, it worries me sometimes. I'm used to having secret characters in my head. My mind has been filled for years with layers on layers of constructed worlds, and imaginary people who seem to me like coherent and satisfying separate selves, even though I have no way of knowing where they 'really' come from, (short of getting myself psychoanalyzed); and I can never arrange to meet them out here, under the clock, wearing a red rose. Or in the airport concourse, wearing a yellow tee-shirt ... I think I can handle my multiple selves, and keep hold of my reality principle. It's my trade. But what about all these amateurs, taking risks they don't understand? Making up elaborate fantasy worlds used to be a professional artform, or a secret, esoteric hobby. Now it's all over cyberspace. What's going on?
          Maybe what's going on is a learning process. When I invent my fictional characters, these independent facets of my self, clothed in edited and enhanced versions of my life experience, and let them loose into the basic architecture of the plot, I know what I'm doing. I'm making explicit what happens in my mind all the time. I know, because modern neuroscience tells me so – and also because I feel it – that I'm not one self. I am many, and some of the versions of me are very, very old: but still alive, still demanding to have their needs satisfied in quite unexpected ways (as I discovered when I started playing computer games.) Arguably, storytellers have always had to know how people's minds work. We have theorized about it less, in different cultures or in different times, but intuitively nothing changes there. What seems to me new, is the way I've been joined by much a larger group of people who now understand about the multiple selves, and how that aspect of storytelling works. Is this a final development? Are we leaving stories behind, and heading for some kind Platonic republic, where no one needs art, because everybody can do that for themselves? I don't know. But reading and writing used to be privileged, hermetic activities, regarded as unnatural powers, otherwise known as magic. You have to be able to spell, to cast a spell. In our time we believe (in principle at least) that everybody should learn to read and write. Maybe knowing how to build and manipulate constructed worlds, deconstructed selves, is the next step, and will come to seem, in the future, equally a basic right, a basic human skill.
           As the Internet becomes more and more like television, full of sound and vision, we lose the strange, stripped-down immediacy of a world made of words. And paradoxically, inevitably, as the applications of computer technology get more and more sophisticated, agency slips out of our hands. As one of the characters in my computer novel Escape Plans puts it, 'Power is not when the machine understands you. Power is when you understand the machine.' I'm a long way from any chance of that now. And meanwhile, the woods are burning. That's becoming obvious, a lot more obvious than it was twenty years ago, even in your great country, where the smoke had so much more space to disperse. But even here, in the poisoned world, I'm confident, because of what I've seen in my life so far, that there will be a new cutting-edge, a new growing-point where agency will be restored. Narrative and technology will continue to be entangled, whatever forms they take. Books might disappear, writing won't. When live-action fictional experience can be delivered straight to the brain, when the printed words of the story have been entirely subsumed, buried deep as Boolean algebra (if that time should ever come), we'll still be making our marks on the world, and still trying to understand ourselves, and each other, through all these things we make up; the stories we tell.

--gwyneth jones, http://www2.prestel.co.uk/dreamer

vol. 6 Iss. 2 Fall 2001