The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

The always excellent Velcro City Tourist Board has a very unusual author interview today with Dalian Hansen. What’s so unusual? Well, Dalian isn’t exactly real. Well, when I say not real, I mean there is a real person there but Dalian isn’t real in and of himself. Kind of. Confused? Welcome to the world of a virtual character created by a real person inhabiting the virtual world of Second Life and creating fiction within and about that digital virtuality – a postmodernist’s idea of a self-referential orgy of simulacra that would make Jean Baudrillard’s head explode. As the VC interview points out his is not the first novel in Second Life and it isn’t the first work to deal with the metaverse (and modern virtual reality tales go right back to the – in computer terms – prehistoric days of Bill Gibson’s groundbreaking cyberpunk novels, while virtual worlds are, of course, a much older idea). But Dalian is apparently the first novelist to write in SL, about SL and put the book out in SL.

“I wanted tell a story where Second Life was more than just an environment, it would be like a character. There have been many guide books about Second Life and short stories about virtual avatar adventures. But this is my attempt to bring the idea into mainstream fiction.”

“I took well documented points in Second Life history and combined them with real people and fictional characters to invent a mythical story and secret world. After all, reading a book is still the ultimate virtual reality for the human imagination, and establishing this lets Second Life exist in your mind and not just the computer. So I wanted to offer a fun story connected to Second Life in the spirit of old dimestore pulp fiction novels.” Dalian Hansen speaking to Velcro City.

To coin an old Vulcan phrase, “fascinating.” And I agree wholeheartedly with the idea of the book as an existing form of virtual reality; when you read a good book you go through a looking glass every time. Of course, with some especially brilliant (and twisted) writers you can never be sure when you emerge from the looking glass that you have come back to exactly the right world; sometimes things look the same but just a little different. That’s the power of imagination.