Will Google Maps 'Rewrite' 21st-Century SciFi Novels?

Taking urban sci-fi to another level, the British headquarters of Penguin Books recently premiered a new website called - We Tell Stories. The basic idea is that six authors will tell six stories over a period of six weeks.

The first story, The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming, was created integrating using Google Maps as an integral part of the plot structure. In Charles Cumming's story, inspired by John Buchan's famed novel The 39 Steps, we follow a man, watching from above, in an omniscient satellite view.

Like a latter-day Jason Bourne, someone is tracking the heroes movements through London, as well as his trips south and north across the country. At one point, the narrator wakes up on a beach, unsure of where he is or what the date might even be. "A loose piece of newspaper came cartwheeling along the sand and wrapped itself around my legs. I picked it up and looked at the date. Two days had passed since I had arrived in Edinburgh. The newspaper was the Evening News. So I was still in Scotland."

If the story is about a man being tracked and followed, then it is also told in a way that allows us to visually track and follow, clicking onward through Gooogle maps of the man's experience.

The question this experiment begs is will Google Maps and Google Earth become a new plot device for the worlds scifi and suspense novelists. Imagine what fun it would be read an illustrated Bourne Identity with Google Maps.

In reprints of scifi novels such as The Thing, a map of Antarctica could be included, with their mysterious government research labs and their fissures of ice and their weird, terrifying plot lines waiting to happen.

Or maybe some creative Web 2.0 mash-up entepreneur will develop a new overlay for Google Maps and populate it entirely with events from science fiction. Books, films, song lyrics.

For instance, the "unstable" streets that appear and disappear in China Miéville's short story "Reports of Certain Events in London" are suddenly available for mapping; you can follow their speculative routes, and even plan day trips around them, hiking through the nonexistent side streets of the city.

As futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh, author of the Entropist, a sci-fi culture column writes:

"Or you go to Google Maps one day, because you're planning a trip to Japan or to San Francisco, and you click on "Satellite" view - and then on "William Gibson," a new visualization option. It's brought to you by a partnership between Putnam and Google Maps. So you click on "William Gibson" and a whole informational layer of Gibsonian detail appears. Gibson mentioned this street, and this bridge, and this hotel room - and here it is on a map for you to follow. Within six months, you can click on "Alfred Hitchcock," "Ray Bradbury," and "H.P. Lovecraft" to see how their films and stories map out. It's the becoming-literary of Google Maps.The Google Maps Guide to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The Google Maps Guide to the Fiction of J.G. Ballard.

"Now, though, the idea is that we'd key all that stuff into Google Maps, or into Google Earth, or into whatever, and we'd add some more details - and, soon enough, you could find, say, the offshore prison from John Woo's Face/Off, perfectly located right there on the map. Or you can zoom in and follow the future four-part division of England in Rupert Thomson's under-appreciated novel Divided Kingdom. Or, for that matter, you could even map out the house and it surrounding landscape from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

What's next? Google Sky will soon provide the maps for those space-based sci-fi novels of the past and future. As Manaugh sums up: "In other words, let's do for science fiction what those maps do for J.R.R. Tolkien."

Posted by Casey Kazan.

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Comments

This is very very cool, imagine you follow the path of Jack the ripper in London or the footsteps (sky fliing I guess) of Superman.

I remember interactive books (usally adventures type dongeons and dragons) where you could decide what to do by choosing the pages of the book. One page brought you to an encounter or the other page brouth you to an event... Imagine you do that on google map or google earth. That would be revolutionary. Great idea!

S. Lamoureux, Turku, Finland

Posted by: S. Lamoureux | April 01, 2008 at 02:58 AM

http://www.wetellstories.co.uk/

Posted by: Mark Rees-Andersen | April 01, 2008 at 09:18 AM