Coded networks: literature and the information technology revolution

McFarlane, A. (2018) Coded networks: literature and the information technology revolution. In: Pollard, E. and Schoene, B. (eds.) British Literature in Transition, 1980-2000: Accelerated Times. Series: British literature in transition series. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 293-308. ISBN 9781107121423 (doi: 10.1017/9781316344071.023)

Abstract

On the cusp of the 1980s personal computers became affordable for the first time. Apple and IBM in the USA and Sinclair in the UK released computers that allowed users access to computerised word processing for the first time on a grand scale, and computers began to replace typewriters as the tool of choice for authors. The computer revolution quickly entered British schools, with Acorn BBC Microcomputers available to the majority of students from 1982. These developments had a major impact on British culture; for adults, the speed of technological change was palpable as computers that would only recently have cost the same as a house came within their financial reach. For children, computers became a staple of the everyday environment and affected the way they learned and the way they thought. The World Wide Web followed quickly on the heels of personal computers and emails could be sent by private individuals from the mid-90s. As well as changing the face of writing with the option to ‘cut and paste’, computing brought the science of chaos theory to life, feeding chaotic data into computer visualisations which captured the imagination of the public and led to the popularisation of chaos theory, as described in James Gleick’s bestselling science book, Chaos (1987). This technological progress changed the musical landscape as well, as portable synthesizers and sound systems encouraged dance music and rave culture to take off around 1990. For British literature these changes had an impact, particularly as children who had grown up with computers began to come of age. While Margaret Thatcher claimed that there was ‘no such thing as society’, British writers were influenced by an increasingly interconnected world that privileged chaos, a science of patterns and relationality, above linear, Newtonian models of cause and effect; they came to experience the world as interconnected through the World Wide Web and the internet. A faction of British writing from 1980 to 2000 distilled the new technology, and the attitudes it encouraged, into a literature of the remix. This chapter traces the influence of machine code on literary experimentation in novels such as Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon (1984) and Xorandor (1986) before showing how the ethos of the computing revolution and the illegal rave scene quickly bled into novels such as China Miéville’s début, King Rat (1998) and Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993) where the remixing of music in a rave acts as a metaphor for the remixing of lifeforms; human, animal, and vegetable. Geoff Ryman used the new technology of the internet to create 253 (1996, 1998), an online novel (later published in a print version as well) using hyperlinks to disturb the linear, cause-and-effect structure of the written word into a chaotic relationship that allowed time to be slowed down and the relationships between strangers to take centre stage. This chapter traces these reactions to new technology and finds in this confrontation the origins of the New Boom of British science fiction that was only identified on the cusp of the new millennium, but which had its roots in the new technologies that offered writers new ways to remix old genres.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Keywords: Christine Brooke-Rose, China Mieville, Jeff Noon, internet, world wide web, Geoff Ryman, science fiction, networks, chaos theory.
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Mcfarlane, Dr Anna
• Authors: McFarlane, A.
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General); P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0441 Literary History; P Language and Literature > PR English literature
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• ISBN: 9781107121423

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