I write the kind of fiction I do—psychological novels–because a man owned a printing press.

Around 1720, the first ripples of the Industrial Revolution hit Britain. Printing presses became cheaper and easier to use. More people learned to read, and some of them began to read for entertainment and pleasure.

One of these new readers was a young Londoner named Samuel Richardson. Too poor to afford a formal education, he apprenticed to a printer to “gratify my Thirst after Reading.” By 1740, he was a prosperous middle-aged man, printing volumes of the Proceedings of the House of Commons. Between volumes, he used his own printing press to run off some of his own work, which he sold through bookselling friends.

And that’s how we got the first psychological novel, Clarissa.

Richardson couldn’t have done it without owning a printing press. But, because he had the technology, he could do it.

Technological advances change the stories we can tell, the art we can make.

Generally there’s a lag time of about twenty years between the technological advance and the new art. Edison invented film stock in 1888. By the early 1900s, the illusionist Georges Méliès and other filmmakers like Ferdinand Zecca were creating the special effects film. By 1915, creative artists owned or were associated with studios and distribution, the basic language of filmmaking was established, and the technology was producing masterpieces.

Sound familiar? It’s happening again now.

I also write another kind of fiction, hypertext: works meant to be read online or on a computer; works that involve programming, text, images, animation, motion. I started writing hypertext just before 1990, about the time I got my first personal computer. (Two friends and I, all working for the same company, bought three of the first 5 PCs sold in Boston.)

I can do hypertext because: Edison, Tesla, and others commercialized electricity; DARPA decided it needed some way to communicate, and created the ancestor of the Internet; hundreds of researchers created the commercially available individual computer. When I started writing hypertexts, the programmer/publisher and I collaborated by meeting personally and the final version was distributed on floppy disks. When it was re-programmed and adapted for the Web this spring, we met by Zoom and distributed over the Internet. (Thanks for the beautiful new version to Prof. Dene Grigar and the senior students of the Creative Media and Digital Culture program at the University of Washington, Vancouver. Enjoy their work free at www.kingofspace.org, and don’t miss the movie trailer!)

This is the Renaissance, right here, right now. Computers and the Internet have created not just a single new art form, but galaxies of them. Three of my favorites:

• Peter Jackson has been using CGI for poetic restoration. In They Shall Not Grow Old and Get Back, he uses CGI to transform 100-year-old black-and-white silent film and damaged 60-year-old home movies into modern full-color sound documentaries. It’s time-travel realism, based on anything but realistic techniques.
• Jem Finer’s Longplayer is a one-thousand-year-long musical composition created by applying computational rules to short pieces of music. To quote from the longplayer.org Web site, Longplayer “chooses and combines sections from this music so that no combination is repeated until exactly 1000 years has passed.” You can listen to it in real time from London, as I’m doing while I write this.
• It hardly needs mentioning that publishing has been transformed. Anyone with a computer has, like Samuel Richardson, their own printing press. Anyone with access to the Internet can be a bookseller. Much more: Anyone can collaborate with anyone. Authors share works in progress; authors write together; volunteers create huge works in multiple languages across cultures, contributing text, images, videos, sound. These are not fringe ideas; they’re Wikipedia.

As a creator, I’ve got myself used to asking what I can do with any technological advance. Scrivener? I keep notes, comments, alternate versions of the story as I work. Other technologies tug me toward writing with my friends and toward interactive fiction. Wouldn’t it be great to have a multi-author version of Scrivener? (Keith Blount, are you listening?) Can we have multiauthor Twine or Inform, Inkle or Ren’Py? It works the other way as well; discovering great new tech for image editing, publishing design, and video leads me to exploring what I can do with them; getting an idea puts me on the hunt for the technology that supports it.

What new work can you make with the technology you have?

What new technology do you need?

Sarah Smith’s international bestsellers have been named NY Times Notable Books twice and have won other awards including the Massachusetts Book Award and the Agatha. She has worked on hypertexts and games including King of Space and the reconstruction of Thomas Disch’sAmnesia, for which she edited and published the scholarly version of the text and programming notes, Total Amnesia. Her most recent novel is Crimes and Survivors, a multicultural version of the Titanic story. Visit her at www.sarahsmith.com and on Facebook and Twitter as sarahwriter.