The New Fiction Technologies

The Internet has fundamentally altered our perceptions of narrative and its core components, including authorship, setting, characterization, reader reception and more. With new trends, tropes and conventions emerging at the speed of cyberspace, digital media like web comics, video games and fan fiction have become narratological laboratories for experimentation on the limits and boundaries of contemporary storytelling.

While web comics, video games and fan fiction have each received scholarly study over the years, this book focuses on the little-discussed common ground they share, and how their processes, motivations and evolution may be more similar than most people believe. These media are all regarded as unique and self-contained genres of digital fiction, and this book aims to bridge the gap between them. Understanding these phenomena as expressions of the same principles could be crucial to understanding the future of narrative storytelling.