Hamlet on the Holodeck

Stories define how we think, the way we play, and the way we understand our lives. And just as Gutenberg made possible the stories that ushered in the Modem Era, so is the computer having a profound effect on the stories of the late 20th century. Today we are confronting the limits of books themselves — anticipating the end of storytelling as we know it — even as we witness the advent of a brave new world of cyberdramas. Computer technology of the late twentieth century is astonishing, thrilling, and strange, and no one is better qualified than Janet Murray to offer a breathtaking tour of how it is reshaping the stories we live by.
Can we imagine a world in which Homer's Iyre and Gutenberg's press have given way to virtual reality environments like the Star Trek® holodeck? Murray sees the harbingers of such a world in the fiction of Borges and Calvino, movies like Groundhog Day, and the videogames and Web sites of the 1990s. Where is our…