Soft Skull Buys Novel off Twitter

It was 1986, in Miss Gilbert’s eighth grade science class. Tim M. was hunched in front of me, his nose in some story by Jules Verne. The sun was relentless, shining off our desktops when—impossibly—Challenger blew up on screen in front of our eyes.

I have no idea the weather a few weeks ago, some 23 years later, when I heard that a writer named Matt Stewart got his fully-twittered 480,000-character debut novel, The French Revolution, picked up by Soft Skull. I was indoors, shades drawn, reading tweets.

The two events—Challenger‘s and Stewart’s explosions—are, strangely, not so distant. NASA technology could not save seven lives that afternoon more than two decades ago. But trial and error led eventually to fixes and new developments that will be used on the next-generation vehicle that will return astronauts to the Moon (and perhaps also take them to Mars). And that same frightening powerful technology that has driven countless people to fail better has trickled down to us earth-bound mortals. (Vern wouldn’t be surprised.) And technology has made the silly-sounding hi-tech communicating we call Twitter possible. It’s made Matt Stewart’s novel possible.

The hops aren’t so large from science fiction to science to fiction.

Reading that original tweet on Matt Stewart’s achievement recalled to me that same sense of free-fall that opened in me all those years ago, the same month I started to menstruate—the awareness of not knowing. The not knowing what’s next, not knowing even if this moment holds the smashing conclusion of one era or the eerie smoking dawn of another.

It doesn’t matter. The result is the same, anyway. The world’s innovations and changes, its crises and possibilities, make us feel different in this instant than they did one instant ago. More is at once possible, surreal, risky.

So I say congratulations to Matt Stewart and his Twittered novel. Bit by bit, word by word, sentence by sentence, tweet by tweet, rocket booster by rocket booster, earth launch by lunar landing, each human step takes time and tenacity. What more is there? What more can we possibly give, or hope for, or struggle for?

“We learned how to design solid rocket boosters … with no further failures,” Michael Griffin of NASA said in 2006. “We got that from the Challenger crew, so that is part of the learning process, I’m afraid.”

We also got highly creative and dependable ways to communicate our old terrors, ecstasies, obsessions.

As Matt Stewart told GalleyCat, “It’s tremendously rewarding to see that publishers are embracing a terrific story–and innovative (and dare I say Dickensian!) ways to connect with readers.”

It’s the same old thing. Just a new, scary, exciting day.

Sign up via email to buy the paperback when it becomes available. (According to Stewart’s website, you might win a free copy.) Or read the novel tweets here. Just be sure that high-tech laptop of yours is fully charged to avoid mishaps.