Literature for Technophiles

Mega-publisher Penguin books has launched a rather nice six week online project called "We Tell Stories," pairing writers from its stables with new technologies. For Charles Cumming's story, The 21 Steps, the narrative wanders through the landscape London as seen through Google Maps, each turn of the story is a new location on the map.

Hardly Crime and Punishment for the twenty-first century, but it's a far sight better the early wave of hypertext literature where a shiny new toy made of a lot of bad writers temporarily famous for the literary equivalent of being the first kid in class with a calculator. Though we're still working out the kinks on a seamless transition between literature and new technology, both the reader and the technophile in us has taken a shine to this project.

So far Cumming and Toby Litt have stories for you to wander through, and a new one will be posted every week, of which CIA will surely keep you abreast.