Exquisite corpse

By G.F. | SEATTLE

IN THE beginning, the city had a name, Urm, a smell (strong), and scarce anything else. Its outlines have emerged. The process of telling is the process of making. Townspeople fish the river with singing harpoons. The sky and people (as a mating ritual) are bioluminescent. An uncompleted dome towers over the city. If you fail to pay dues to a union that oversees maps, you may simply disappear, along with "buildings, streets; even whole districts".

Urm is a construct arising from many minds, a crowdsourced city being built a few words at a time on top of Twitter with a hash mark serving as mortar between the bricks of the story. Novelist Nick Harkaway laid the first stone. He wrote on Twitter:

From out of the city of Urm, which is imaginary, there arose in that year a great stink. #Urmcollab

In Twitter parlance, "#Urmcollab" is a hashtag, which allows easy following of a single theme as it develops. No one owns a tag, nor is there membership involved. Mr Harkaway has put the hash tag to use in a simple experiment in unconstrained collaborative narrative construction with no intent and no planned end. This approach prevents someone from "trying to grab the narrative and take control of it", too, he says. "If you write three tweets, and you never come back to the story again", that's fine, he says. "There's no obligation inherent in it." (This Babbage was tipped to the project by Yoz Grahame, a community creator irresponsible for the Starship Titanic Employee Forum, discussed here earlier.)

Mr Harkaway's first novel, "The Gone-Away World" (2008), is troubled with an absence of tangible fact, as nations peppered each other with reality bombs that peeled away the information content of matter. The world of the novel sees thoughts turned into reality—a bit akin to Stanisław Lem's Solaris—with a thin strip of sanity running around the planet's middle. His narrator is unreliable and possibly semi-material. Mr Harkaway's construct of Urm has a similarly hazy quality: what is stated becomes real within the story. He likened this quality to Jorge Luis Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"—a favourite of Babbage's—a story in which the discovery of a volume of an encyclopaedia about an Earth with different properties than the familiar one seems to change the world. Keen readers may see an echo, too, in China Miéville's "The City and the City", a tale of two cities that may or may not be invisible to one another.

"Literally, I looked on this: wouldn't it be cool if people wrote 140-characters statements about an imaginary city", Mr Harkaway says from London. He decided to "throw three descriptive tweets into the world with the same hashtag in them; this is here, go play." So far, a handful of people have added a hundred or so tweets, including fellow speculative-fiction writer William Gibson, most recently the author of "Zero History". "People are putting it together into a little string of narrative. If the conventional narrative is a road, this has the potential to turn into a town or city." However, Mr Harkaway has no pretensions about its development. "Not everybody is 100% brilliant at condensing a literary idea into 140 characters," he says, although he adds that it doesn't matter. He has already been taken aback by the beauty of some ideas, such as "some fantastic stuff about fields upon fields upon fields of bladed weapons growing out of the ground".

Mr Harkaway says, "Even if it stops dead right now, it says to me there is a ridiculously cool creative possibility inherent in things like Twitter that I would really never have credited." He says that he has a great interest in collaborative writing, but that the requirements and timing necessary to pull off projects make them difficult to assemble. Mr Harkaway has also been waiting for new forms of story to evolve from new media, such as deep non-linear narratives. "Nobody has yet kind of done the kind of thing where it's native to the web or native to social media", he says. Imagine, he suggests, "You are reading your iPhone and the FaceTime camera tracks where your eye is going, and that tracks your interest and determines what you see on the next page."

The experiment has just begun, however, and Mr Harkaway has no suspicion of how it will end. "At a guess right now, the vast likelihood is that it will tail off, rather than become a big thing." But, he says, "If it's going to survive at all, it's going to survive without me. It doesn't need me to tell them what it is. The great thing about it is that I feel completely out of control."