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Ergodic Literature

weirdnovels.com

1–10 of 12 posts

Re: Ergodic Literature

#2
I got a few sentences into the article before I thought of "House of Leaves". Lo and behold, it's the first example!

The other example that comes to mind is "Feersum Endjinn" by Iain M. Banks, which has large sections written in this wild phonetic Cockney-esque dialect. G.E.B also kinda fits the bill.

I'm a big fan of these types of books (even though I hadn't heard the term before), definitely tickles a different part of the brain when reading them.

Re: Ergodic Literature

#3
I read House of Leaves last year and it was interesting. It was a good story and I enjoyed following footnotes to footnotes and tracing them back and turning the book and figuring out the hidden message.

I have S. I'm waiting to read it since there isn't a whole lot of ergodic stuff. I'm excited.

I should have bought The Unfortunates when it was available on Amazon, but it hasn't been available for some time. $50 for a used copy on Ebay seems a bit much.

Infinite Jest was basically ergodic with all the end notes flipping back and forth, plus the vocabulary.

Something Happened also requires a bit of traversal with long and sometimes nested parentheticals. I remember coming to an closing parentheses one day when I had read the opening parenthesis the previous day. I spent 10 minutes scanning backwards to find the matching parentheses to figure out the beginning of the sentence was that the parenthetical was in.

Re: Ergodic Literature

#4
In the digital realm, MS Paint Adventures [1] and 17776 [2] spring to mind as modern ergodic literature. The old Homestar Runner [3] had a few really memorable moments that spring to mind, like a couple of gimmicks for SB Email #100 (a fake 404 page with an animation rewarding impatient fans who tried the /100.html URI before the update went up as well as the perfectly executed smooth aspect ratio change mid-animation.)

  1. https://www.mspaintadventures.com
  2. https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
  3. https://www.homestarrunner.com

Re: Ergodic Literature

#5
post #2

I got a few sentences into the article before I thought of "House of Leaves". Lo and behold, it's the first example! The other example that comes to mind is "Feersum Endjinn" by Iain M. Banks, which has large sections written in this wild phonetic Cockney-esque dialect. G.E.B also kinda fits the bill. I'm a big fan of these types of books (even though I hadn't heard the term before), definitely tickles a different pa…

I also thought of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series, which I thought it odd to omit but eventually found it in the margin notes.

Re: Ergodic Literature

#6
post #2

I got a few sentences into the article before I thought of "House of Leaves". Lo and behold, it's the first example! The other example that comes to mind is "Feersum Endjinn" by Iain M. Banks, which has large sections written in this wild phonetic Cockney-esque dialect. G.E.B also kinda fits the bill. I'm a big fan of these types of books (even though I hadn't heard the term before), definitely tickles a different pa…

You might enjoy Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, which is a post apocalyptic novel set in Kent. It's doesn't fit the definition of Ergodic but it's a cracking read anyway.

Re: Ergodic Literature

#10
I'm currently reading theMystery.doc by Matthew McIntosh [1] which also fits this category. It's full of transcripts of calls, frames of film, email threads, redacted pages, news articles. Highly recommend it, it's so nice to be surprised by what you find every other page-turn.

I follow a guy Wildbow who writes webserials who also occasionally dives into this, like for example this part of his story Pact [2] where...

mild spoilers ahead

Someone uses time magic to disadvantage the protagonist and the chapter jumps from 6.10 to 6.12, the missing chapter representing the missing time.

1: https://www.themysterybook.com/

2: https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/subordination...

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