Toc: A New Media Novel

by Steve Tomasula, Stephen Farrell (Artist), Matthew Lavoy (Artist)

You've never experienced a novel like this.  TOC is a multimedia epic about time—the invention of the second, the beating of a heart, the story of humans connecting through time to each other and to the world.  An evocative fairy tale with a steampunk heart, TOC is a breath-taking visual novel, an assemblage of text, film, music, photography, the spoken word, animation, and painting. It is the story of a man who digs a hole so deep he can hear the past, a woman who climbs a ladder so high she can see the future, as well as others trapped in the clockless, timeless time of a surgery waiting room: God's time.  Theirs is an imagined history of people who are fixed in the past, those who have no word for the future, and those who live out their days oblivious to either. 
 
A new media hybrid, TOC re-imagines what the book is, and can be. Produced as a DVD for playback on personal computers (both Macs and PCs), TOC retains the intimate, one-on-one experience that a reader can have with a book even as it draws on the power of other art forms to immerse readers in an altogether new multimedia story.

DVD-ROM

First published March 1, 2009

About the author

Steve Tomasula is the author of the novels The Book of Portraiture (FC2); VAS: An Opera in Flatland (University of Chicago Press), an acclaimed novel of the biotech revolution; TOC: A New-Media Novel (FC2/University of Alabama Press, and also as an multimedia app for iPad); and IN & OZ (University of Chicago Press). He is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Once Human: Stories. He most recently edited Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art, an anthology that brings together a wide variety of written works that stand in relation to traditional literature as conceptual visual art stands to traditional art. Ascension: A Novel, a novel about the end of Nature, is forthcoming this summer.

Incorporating narrative forms of all kinds—from comic books, travelogues, journalism or code to Hong Kong action movies or science reports—Tomasula’s writing has been called a ‘reinvention of the novel.' He lives in Chicago, and can be found at www.stevetomasula.com

Reviews

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

very cool presentation. theme is one as old as... time.

[Steve Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone buy now.