The Mongoliad

I'm a big Neal Stephenson fan. To read some of his books, being a big fan is almost a requirement, because many of them are really big books. (There's a rather tall pile of one of his typescripts at Seattle's Science Fiction Museum, if you don't believe me.) Now he's trying something new, a serialized, online project. I'm curious. 'The Mongoliad is a modern iteration of the subscription serial novel, an idea that is time tested -– after all, as is commonly pointed out, Charles Dickens and many other nineteenth century writers wrote episodically for serial publication, something that’s not a million miles from the contemporary soap opera. And while The Mongoliad is in that tradition, it has fully updated it for the Internet era. The creators understand that you cannot simply chop up a pre-existing novel for subscription, but have re-imagined the creative process altogether.' More...