A Book at Lunchtime discussion of Iain Pears' interactive novel Arcadia
“The Arcadia App is one of the most substantial and interesting works of interactive fiction released last year” begins Emily Short. In this Book at Lunchtime event for the TORCH Humanities in the Digital Age series, the writer Iain Pears, with the academic Sophie Ratcliffe and cross-media authors Alex Butterworth, Emily Short and Richard Beard, discussed his new novel, Arcadia, which takes the form of a print book and an interactive app: offering a range of ways into an adventure story set in 1960s Oxford and the fantasy Anterworld.
In this video, the panel talks about the book’s place within a growing corpus of hypertext and digital forms of fiction which are allowing writers to experiment with narrative and narrators, ideas of time, world-building, the experience of reading, and the role of the reader.