Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The Concept of the Radical in Writing
- 2 The Radical in the 20th Century
- 3 Radical Experiments 1: Words
- 4 Radical Experiments 2: The Page, the Book
- 5 Radical Experiments 3: Narrative, Visuals, Sound
- 6 Experiments in Writing for Children
- 7 Fiction and the Future
- 8 Teaching and Learning the New Creative Writing
- References
- Index
7 - Fiction and the Future
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 October 2026
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The Concept of the Radical in Writing
- 2 The Radical in the 20th Century
- 3 Radical Experiments 1: Words
- 4 Radical Experiments 2: The Page, the Book
- 5 Radical Experiments 3: Narrative, Visuals, Sound
- 6 Experiments in Writing for Children
- 7 Fiction and the Future
- 8 Teaching and Learning the New Creative Writing
- References
- Index
Summary
Fiction and New Technologies
In 1990 John Barth spoke at an international symposium on The Novel in the Next Century hosted by Harvard University. In his remarks, he outlined his vision of the literary future:
... Excessive televiewing comes to be regarded, and not only by the elite, as on a par with excessive alcohol consumption and single-crop agriculture. Billboards and signs on city buses extol the hygienic pleasures of reading. ... Reading rooms spring up in our teleportation terminals, furnished nostalgically with period chipboard bookshelves from the twentieth century; special no-viewing, no-listening seats are available on whatever passes for public vehicles. Even the irresistible virtual worlds of interactive whole-body computer simulation come to include virtual armchairs in which one can virtually read virtual novels, non-interactive except in the wonderful way that readers and writers have traditionally interacted. (Barth, 1995: 365–366)
Barth painted a perceptive picture of a sci-fi century but, in spite of his eminence as a radical writer, he was conservatively cautious about where his generation's experiments were leading. He did not see a positive connection between the video screen and the novel:
[I]t seems to me to be better mental exercise, civically healthier exercise, to be reading for pleasure – great fiction, junk fiction, nonfiction, anything – than to sit hypnotized by that 'satanic glass screen,' as the writer Mark Helprin calls it. No doubt I am being both biased and superstitious, but ... I think of the novel (and, by extension, of general literacy) as a canary in the coal mines of democratic civil society. I have read, and I believe it, that people are more manipulable by the visual media than by print (I know that I am). (Barth, 1995: 362)
Apart from the fact that Barth did not foresee the possibility that visual media and literary print might eventually converge – that the novel might indeed appear on the ‘satanic’ screen – he demonstrated 20th-century prejudices which continued to plague developments in the new century.
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- Creative Writing and the RadicalTeaching and Learning the Fiction of the Future, pp. 161 - 184Publisher: Multilingual MattersFirst published in: 2026
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