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The Terminal Experiment Q6: The Net News Digest
In between chapters, the Net News Digest gave glimpses of how the wider world was responding to the events that took place in the book. Did you find this useful and effective as a technique, or distracting?
Comments
I liked it (though inevitably some specific items were annoying rather than illuminating). He uses a similar technique in Hominids so it's evidently a way he likes for imparting peripheral information to the reader.
Yes, it's a way of getting additional voices into the narrative without trying to head-hop too much in the main narrative.
I liked it as well - reminds me of Vance's footnotes or the little quotes from various sources in Dune. A nice technique!
There's an interesting and vaguely parallel technique used in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell where a lot of this material is provided in footnotes. These range in size from a sentence to over a page, and are typically written from an encyclopaedic point of view rather than a character one, so provide contrasting and sometimes conflicting details. Or of course there's the chapter-start entries from The Encyclopedia Galactica in the Foundation books. They're all variations on a theme, and one which works very well for me.
Distracting, I think mostly because now the future centre of the world is moving away from North America and Europe.
I like it as a short-hand for showing how the world was evolving. I'm not sure it was the best executed part of the book, but I liked the concept.