My father told me a good book is a dream for the reader. I have spent time in the dreamworlds built by the phrases of my favorite authors. The best books do not have misplaced words or strange sentences that wake them or distract from the images that guide their imaginations.
This book is three dreams in one – the protagonist’s dream, my dream, and the reader’s dream.
But this book is also a risk.
It is built on something beyond the printed ink on a page or text on a tablet, which risks waking the reader from the dream.
This book is based on a music playlist.
I promise that this is not a gimmick or a contrivance. Over the course of years, I built a playlist on my computer. It was a blend of intense electronic music, deep house, psychedelic alt-rock, and trip-hop. As I listened to the lyrics of the edgy tunes that I had compiled, a story began to form in my head, and I started to envision Jayson’s dreams of the compass rose tattoo, Rose dead on the divan, and the Pyramid Club.
Jayson’s dream is my dream.
It is a dream about New York City, an estuary of time where the past and the future mix. Near-future New York City is simultaneously stuck in the past and on the cutting edge of the future. It is a City of opposites and circumstantial relativity. People go there for opportunity, or to ditch their pasts, or to chase their dreams, alone, alongside of millions of others. It is an oxymoronic place of social openness and cliquish exclusivity. It is built upon concrete, metal, and fiber optics. It is an eddy of American and global subcultures that flow around each other. It is the ultra-rich and the destitute mingling on the busy sidewalks or subways. It is the beating heart of America that pumps commerce, cars, and people instead of blood.
Near-future New York City is a place where language has evolved to efficiently accommodate gender neutrality (“hizzer” is the word for “his or hers” and the un-gendered honorific “M.” is used instead of “Mr.” or “Ms.”); technology has crept into all facets of life; sexual fluidity is normalized; and self-driving cars have replaced human-driven taxicabs. For the most part, the main characters are race/color/creed agnostic, making them blank slates upon which all readers can impute their imaginations.
The common thread of this hopeful yet dystopian near-future is music. Inscribing music onto the pages of a book proved challenging for me, but I think I found a way to weave the playlist that inspired the story into the book’s pages. The foundational songs are included in a tracklist in the inside front cover. Importantly, each chapter is the title of a song on that playlist that helps carry the narrative. In essence, the table of contents provides a soundtrack for the reader to follow and listen to a parallel story told in music.
My grandiose vision is that this story can be more than words on a page – it could transcend the paper and string and glue of a book; it could live intangibly in the digital world, decentralized in shards across servers and systems around the world, just like the enigmatic Artificial Intelligence character of the book, Song.
I imagine input from each reader making the story into its own meta-world. Picture this cyclical symbiosis: Readers could provide open-sourced illustrations or non-fungible tokens depicting salient moments like the compass rose tattoo or the Pyramid Club symbol and attach those images to a hashtag used throughout the story. As the reader comes across such tags, those images would flash into existence for the reader to examine. Each reader could choose the visual experience that best coincides with hizzer stylistic preferences – like Steampunk Rose, Hipster Jayson, or Grunge Mac. People could purchase the book with cryptocurrency or even pay for artistic content embedded in the story by contributing artists, creating a flowing ecosystem of value for visuals.
It could be the first book offered on a cross-media device with a multi-media platform that you hold in your hand to access features like visual art, accompanying music, or even virtual reality with functionality much like the Song Program. The playlist that inspired the story could be imported into the device and play in the ears of the reader right from the page as he or she uses augmented reality glasses or headsets – like the “Vizzies” in the story – to feel senses like smell and touch that have been assigned to scenes in the book, like the smell of saltwater and the feeling of chilly wind from the Atlantic, blowing across Rose’s cheek as she walks down Fort Tilden beach. Readers could overlay their commentary and interpretations over the words on the page to create offshoots of the story’s plot. Someday, when we achieve the immediacy of media with a device like Branch, the device could empower someone to literally experience the story from the perspective of Rose, Jayson, or for the more edgy individual, Esri.
But if all those crazy technological ideas make no sense to you, you can still immerse yourself in this dream without them, because at its core, it’s a book.
