Medium Difference
9:26 PM, Thursday evening. This is the first year that I’ve noticed a large amount of emailed fiction flickering to my desktop at Nebula Awards time.
We had some sleetish-snow here last night and things are cold and wet right now. Depeche Mode is playing on the CD player while I’m typing. I’m in the mood to go out, so I hope the weather doesn’t get too bad over the weekend...
Ever since I became eligible to vote on the Nebula Awards (presented annually by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) I’ve had the pleasure of receiving free copies of many eligible works, starting around this time of year. This is the first time that a lot of the stories have come via email.
As a writer of science fiction I find this to be pretty cool -- new technology, new ways to exchange information, experience art, communicate. I can also understand how mailing out photocopies, magazines, and whole books can get extremely expensive. As a reader, however, I’m less-than-captivated.
I do almost all of my writing on a computer, work on my website endlessly, and roam the ‘Net for hours at a time; but I have to say, a monitor is an imperfect medium for delivering the written word. (I know that I could print out the fiction that comes my way -- but that isn’t the same, either. And, quite frankly, the print quality of my ink jet has gotten downright sucky as of late.)
Print, as in books and magazines, is still my favorite way to experience fiction (or non-fiction, for that matter). I’m not complaining about the emailed stories, though. It is nice to read something I probably would have missed -- even if it does come as an attached file in an email message.
I wonder if not being able to enjoy "electronic" based fiction as much as print fiction is a failure of imagination on my part. Perhaps I’m simply too used to reading paper books and magazines. Maybe I just haven’t given my good old monitor enough of a chance to entertain me in this fashion. Sitting back with a book seems so much more real and intimate an experience than staring at a screen. I’m not sure, however, whether that difference relates more to the medium or to the reader.
The irony is not lost on me that I am confessing my predilection for print in an online journal, and that two-thirds of my upcoming fiction is due to be published in an electronic magazine. But, hey, I never said that I made sense.
On another, slightly different, track: I’ve been reading about the progress of speech recognition software. I find it fascinating and oddly-spooky that I will someday be able to "write" a story by talking to my word processor. Will that method be better or worse? I don’t know -- but I’d certainly like to try it.
Right now I’m going to get back to reading (via Word 7.0) John Kessel’s novelette, "The Miracle of Ivar Avenue" -- an excellent story, no matter how it is presented...
--- JWR, 2/5/98