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Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace Janet H. Murray. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free P, 1997. xii + 324 pp.
The title of this book perhaps looks merely catchy but is cogent to its argument: that compelling narratives from antiquity to the present, whether classical or popular, are perennial, but that the medium of narration changes in time and new narrative opportunities appear with emerging technologies. Fans of Star Trek will recognize the "holodeck" in question as a "universal fantasy machine," allowing a living person to enter into a world of story as if it were 3-D reality. At present the holodeck exists only in fiction, but Janet Murray examines in detail the way narratives produced in digital formats have begun to simulate imaginary worlds in which one can become immersed as an agent who has the power to transform a course of action. The author optimistically predicts that an emerging cyberdrama "need not resemble Huxley 'feelies'," in Brave New World, but can offer "satisfactions continuous with those we receive from established narrative formats," and perhaps the originality we recognize as art. Arguing strongly against the view that newer forms of expression are intrinsically inferior to earlier ones-that film is inferior to drama, for example-she asserts that we have focused inappropriately on the worth of...