Interesting-sounding new book coming from Oxford University Press… As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality by Michael Saler. Out in January 2012, but there’s a Kindle edition already available in the USA (published 3rd Dec, not available the UK). Looks very interesting, although OUP have saddled it with an unappealing front cover which has dreadfully bad typography.

Edward Castronova says of the book… “This is the best cultural study of fantasy I have ever read. A powerful, liberating argument, woven together from an impressive array of sources, all treated well and fairly. Saler routs the assumption that enchantment and reason oppose one another”. Here’s some of the offical blurb…

“Many people throughout the world inhabit fantastic imaginary worlds [online, in videogames or in fan communities]. These activities are often dismissed as harmless escapism or bemoaned as pernicious wish-fulfillments that distract from the serious business of life. Saler challenges such claims by excavating the history of imaginary worlds in the West since the late nineteenth century, when the communal and long-term immersion in such worlds first began with Sherlock Holmes. The book contends that imaginary worlds emerged at this time as sites of rational and secular enchantments for the modern age. They continue to represent distinct social practices informing political, social, and spiritual life. Individuals often use imaginary worlds as a playful space to debate serious issues in the real world; they also use them to hone their understandings of the interplay of reason and imagination and the provisional nature of all representations. Saler provides an overview of how imaginary worlds went from being feared by the Victorians to being inhabited by the Edwardians, and discusses in detail the creation and reception of the worlds of A.C. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, among many others. […] Saler’s book contributes the historical back-story of those deeply engaging imaginary universes, highlighting their vital lessons for how we can remain enchanted but not deluded in an age that privileges the imagination as much as reason.”

Of course there were also many other technical precusors of virtual reality in the Victorian and Edwardian eras — such as giant panoramas, fraudulent spiritualist seances, grand Wagnerian ‘immersive’ theater, fairground ‘haunted houses’, etc. A number of history books on these have appeared in recent years. And literature was not without its own technologies that were both individuating and communal at the same time, such as techniques of coded layering such as that found the ‘reserved’ forms used by the likes of Christina Rossetti or the secret codes of queer poetry. One of the interesting changes in genre fiction is that this ‘depth coding’ was no longer available as a literary technology for such writers, since everything had to be “out in the open” in terms of readability. In this respect, what’s interesting about Lovecraft is that his best work finds some potent ways to slip a little ambiguity and ‘difficulty’ back into genre fiction.