The Future of the Novel or The Dangerous Precipice of Prognostication -- By Michael A. Black

I was perusing through some old Popular Science magazines the other day while cleaning out my dad’s house. One of them, from the 1950s, boldly predicted that man would “land on the moon by the year 2000.” The article detailed how this would take place, decade by decade, starting with a rocket-propelled atomic bomb sent to the moon and detonated to send samples of the moon plunging to earth for analysis. With each passing decade, the author predicted, mankind would get closer and closer to its ultimate goal: landing a man on the moon by the turn of the century.

Well, I thought, as they say, been there. Done that.

Yeah, I must admit getting a chuckle of people’s efforts to predict the future. A movie from the late 1960s, Wild in the Streets, predicted that once eighteen-year-olds got the power to vote, they’d be a significant enough block to change the Constitution so a younger person could be elected president. In the film a rock star (played by now long-forgotten actor Christopher Jones) ascends to the White House and promptly takes over, rounding up everyone over a certain age (I think it was thirty-something) and carting them off to special concentration camps where they’re fed daily doses of LSD while he broadcasts rock music from the oval office.

The theme song of the movie, which Jones actually recorded, was released and became a hit single. It was called, “The Shape of Things to Come.” Let me guess . . . you don’t remember that one either, right? The sad thing was that the film made a lot of people nervous. There was speculation that this could really happen and many alarmists began to slide off the dangerous precise of prognostication. In the end, this laughable movie was no more an accurate prediction than the old Popular Science article. So let’s face it, when it comes to predicting the future, regardless of the topic, we’ve got a pretty poor batting average.

I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to forecasting how things will turn out, I’m far from an expert. There’s been much speculation lately as to the future shape of the novel. People are saying that the novel, and more generally, “printed books,” are on their last legs. Others are saying that these soothsayers are full of bull-you-know-what. Quite frankly, I’ve got no idea who’s right on this one. But perhaps if we take a look into the past we might get an idea about the future.

Let’s start by examining a few other mediums of the arts. Back in the 1930s and 40s radio was the king of home entertainment. People would tune in to the adventures of The Shadow, The Green Hornet, and The Lone Ranger each week, and let their imagination take them on a stupendous ride as they listened. In the early 1950s television was introduced on a large scale to American households and right away the prognosticators proclaimed that “radio was dead.” (Actually, this era did spell the end of those wonderful old radio programs, leaving the actors and comedians of the golden voice of radio to either make the transition into television or obscurity. Some, like Jack Benny and Bob Hope were successful. Others, like J. Scott Smart, who played the title role on “The Fat Man,” did not fare as well.)

And so it went . . .

But radio was far from dead. It morphed into a more musical oriented form of entertainment and experienced a reincarnation of sorts when rock and roll came into prominence. (We can thank Elvis and few others for that.) In any case, those who predicted that radio was finished were way off base.

At the time, the same thing was actually being said about the movies. Why would people continue to go to theaters to shell out money when they could get the same entertainment value at home on their TVs? The big studios were worried, so movies changed a bit too, emphasizing new developments like Cinemascope and 3-D (sound familiar) that were “too big to be shown on mere television.” Most of these movies flopped, but eventually things settled back to normal.  Movies continued to be made as they always were, with steady advances in technology improving them along the way. Thus, movies are still with us today and remain a viable form of entertainment.

During this same period essayist and self-proclaimed expert historian, Gore Vidal, wrote a piece proclaiming the “death of the novel.” The novel, according to him, was no longer relevant and was finished as both a viable art form and a source of entertainment. Then mass market paperback came into vogue after World War II and those entertaining bestsellers keep right on coming. Old Gore even wrote a few of them. To his credit, Vidal admitted his misjudgment in another essay about twenty years later.

Now we’re hearing similar things about the death of “dead tree books,” as some of the younger people are calling the paperbound books we all love to hold. “The age of the e-book has arrived,” they say. Pretty soon they’ll be “no more book-books to clutter things up. Just carry around your library in your Kindle.” (I will admit here that I’ve got a Kindle and love taking it with me on trips. The convenience of having several books at my fingertips, and not cluttering up my luggage, is fantastic. It reminds me of the old transistor radios when they first came out. Weren’t they the cat’s meow? But where are they now? Gone to iPODs, everyone.) But am I ready to forsake the printed page for that of the liquid crystal displayed one? Hardly.

I’ll agree that the popularity of e-books is certainly warranted, and the convenience, as I said, is wonderful. E-books are also injecting new life into our backlists, which is also good news. But they’ve also opened the door to a lot of people going the self-publishing route, and the professional quality of some of these efforts is sometimes lacking. Plus, I’ve got a hunch that once the current e-book craze has peaked, once the excitement dies down and the chaff has been separated from the wheat, the prices will inevitably go up, up, up. (There was already an outcry a few months back when a popular author’s e-book was offered for virtually the same price as a trade paperback. “Where’s the product?” outraged readers asked. “Why the high price for something with virtually no production costs?”)

So I’m not ready to mournfully sing, to the tune of that old protest song, “Where have all the book-books gone.” There’s no doubt the popularity of e-books is causing a lot of consternation in the publishing industry at the moment, but my gut is telling me that this, too, shall pass. Keep in mind that although the Y2K generation has grown up reading things off a computer screen, there are still plenty of us around who like the tactile pleasure of holding a book in our hands. Some younger people may be slow in discovering this, but I think they will. Magazines, which are another format that the doomsters are saying are on the way out, haven’t disappeared yet by any stretch of the imagination. Neither will books. And when I say “books,” I’m talking about those wonderful things made from tree pulp and recycled paper products. Plus, when’s the last time you brought your Kindle to an author’s book signing for an autographed copy of his or her latest book? Maybe they’ll come up with a special autograph page you can keep on file.

Is this the shape of things to come? <Grin>

Whoa! Let’s bring these runaway horses to halt, okay? We’re heading toward that dangerous precipice of prognostication.

I guess what I’m saying is that tastes might differ, formats might change, mediums might evolve, and the novel might morph into another incarnation, but the basic need for telling a good story will always be around. And people will always want to be entertained by it. Does it matter so much if we read our novels on a LCD screen or between two covers? The basic ingredient is storytelling. Regardless of whether you prefer to read your novel on your Kindle or on the printed page, one thing is clear: more people than ever are reading for pleasure, and that’s a good thing.

So, all things considered, I’d say the future shape of the novel is pretty darn good.

Comments

[H.L. Banks]

Bravo for not jumping on the bandwagon. Loved the backward glimpse of history and dire predictions.

[Susan C Shea]

Just heard a speaker say library usage is up 30% this year...but a lot of it is jobless people w/o home computers doing searches and submitting resumes. The library person said they're going to have to find ways to help people download books for free in the future (to parallel free borrowing) once the industry settles down a bit.

We think like Michael, but there are a whole lot of people who live their kindles and see them as replacements for paper books. My prognostications here tomorrow......

[Mysti]

Michael, great post! I teach adults how to write technical documentation (or anything, really) using a program called FrameMaker. One of my students was reduced to tears, trying to follow the instructions in her textbook from a Kindle, poor thing. She's ordered the paper copy.

As my husband is fond of saying, just one EMP (electromagnetic pulse) and those of us with paper books will be kings :)

The form has existed since printing was an arduous (sp?) task--hard to believe it'll go extinct entirely. Not that I'm prognosticating...