The Novel is not under threat from technology

Mark Wernham, Novelist, December 14th, 2010
The Literary Platform

When I bought an iPhone a year ago, my first novel, Martin Martin’s On The Other Side, had just been published by Jonathan Cape, and then it was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award. My life had suddenly turned ineffably sci-fi; the iPhone delivered the kind of high-tech future I had been promised by Arthur C Clarke and his exciting film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and here was Arthur himself was considering giving me an award (OK, so he died in March, 2008, but let’s not get hung up on dates and facts).

One of the first things I did with my palm-sized glossy black pebble of the future was to download loads of free books using the app Stanza. I read The Island of Dr Moreau on a flight to Japan. I started reading War And Peace. Again. Then I downloaded an app which was a book by a writer who hadn’t been published conventionally. On his website, he revealed he’d had 14,000 downloads in three months. My eyes nearly fell out. It was the final prod I needed. I was going to make an app. It’s what Arthur would have wanted.

My idea was to expand on a photography exhibition I’d put together in 2009 called Stills From The Unmade Film of a Half-Written Novel. The title says it all. I’d taken 20 short extracts of the novel I was writing, and still am writing, which is about time-travelling air conditioning salesmen trying to save the world in the 1960s, and made 20 images based on them as if they were production stills from a film. It was installed in Norwich Arts Centre for a month
 I knew I’d need a coder. Line after line of utterly baffling computer instructions that makes an iPhone do what you want it to? Witchcraft. I couldn’t even start thinking about an app without having someone on board to do all that for me.
Full piece at The Literary Platform