(2002-04-22) d

Mark Bernstein pointed to a Jeff Noon manifesto (Jan'01) for the Post Future Novel. By dismissing the textual adventures of James Joyce, British writers stayed true to the old pleasures of straightforward Story Telling. This leads to our current situation, where the vast majority of novelists are still intent on drawing a single narrative thread through a complex world. Yet we live daily in a web of connections, all of us becoming adept at riding the multiple layers of information. This is the fluid society. Tracing pathways through this intricate landscape needs a different kind of narrative art. It is in this spirit of adventure that I envisage the post-future novel... House, Hip-Hop and garage recordings contain elements of remixing, scratching and sampling. We can also look at the branching Narrative-s of Computer Game-s, at the strange connections that HyperText links reveal on the internet, at the games played with image and text in a Graphic Novel. All of these are fluid mediums, for a fluid society... It will be Raymond Chandler writing Ulysses, James Joyce writing The Big Sleep. It will move away from lazy cynicism and nihilism. Post-futurism reveres the narrative imagination.