Refines, critiques, and expands unnatural, cognitive, and transmedial narratology by looking at digital-born fictions.

Reading Digital Fiction offers the first comprehensive and systematic theoretical, methodological, and analytical examination of digital fiction from a cognitive and empirical perspective. Proposing the new concept of “medial reading”, it argues for the centrality of an audience’s interest in, awareness of and/or attention to the medium in which a text is produced and received, and which we argue should be applied to reader data across media. The book analyses and theorises five generations of digital fiction and their reading including hypertext fiction, hypermedia fiction, narrative video games, app fiction, and virtual reality. It showcases medium- and platform-specific methods of qualitative reader response research across a variety of contexts and settings from screen-based and embodied interaction to gallery installation, and from reading group and individual interview to think-aloud methodologies. The book thus addresses the unique affordances of digital fiction reading by designing and reporting on new empirical studies focusing on hypertextuality, interactivity, immersion, as well as medium-specific forms of textual “you”, ontological ambiguity, reader orientation and empathy. In so doing, the book refines, critiques, and expands cognitive, transmedial, and empirical narratology and stylistics by placing the reader of these new narratives front and centre.

Written for and read on a computer screen, digital fiction pursues its verbal, discursive and conceptual complexity through the digital medium. It is fiction whose structure, form and meaning are dictated by the digital context in which it is produced and requires analytical approaches that are sensitive to its status as a digital artifact. Analyzing Digital Fiction offers a collection of pioneering analyses based on replicable methodological frameworks. Chapters include analyses of hypertext fiction, Flash fiction, Twitter fiction and videogames with approaches taken from narratology, stylistics, semiotics and ludology. Essays propose ways in which digital environments can expand, challenge and test the limits of literary theories which have, until recently, predominantly been based on models and analyses of print texts.

In recent years, the study of unnatural narratives has become an exciting new but still disparate research program in narrative theory. For the first time, this collection of essays presents and discusses the new analytical tools that have so far been developed on the basis of unnatural novels, short stories, and plays and extends these findings through analyses of testimonies, comics, graphic novels, films, and oral narratives. Many narratives do not only mimetically reproduce the world as we know it but confront us with strange narrative worlds which rely on principles that have very little to do with the actual world around us. The essays in this collection develop new narratological tools and modeling systems which are designed to capture the strangeness and extravagance of such anti-realist narratives. Taken together, the essays offer a systematic investigation of anti-mimetic techniques and strategies that relate to different narrative parameters, different media, and different periods within literary history.

Murderbot meets To Kill a Mockingbird in Erin K. Wagner's An Unnatural Life, an interplanetary tale of identity and responsibility. The cybernetic organism known as 812-3 is in prison, convicted of murdering a human worker but he claims that he did not do it. With the evidence stacked against him, his lawyer, Aiya Ritsehrer, must determine grounds for an appeal and uncover the true facts of the case. But with artificial life-forms having only recently been awarded legal rights on Earth, the military complex on Europa is resistant to the implementation of these same rights on the Jovian moon. Aiya must battle against her own prejudices and that of her new paymasters, to secure a fair trial for her charge, while navigating her own interpersonal drama, before it's too late. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

This time it's personal... Blackmail and jealousy threaten Oz Blackstone and his family in Unnatural Justice, Quintin Jardine's thrilling seventh novel in the crime series. Perfect for fans of Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. 'Meticulously plotted with every event contributing to a shocking triple-whammy finale' - Scotsman Oz Blackstone is enjoying the success of his latest smash hit movie. He's moving into a big country house near Loch Lomond with his gorgeous wife, Susie Gantry, and together they have the lifestyle of everyone's dreams. But when blackmailers threaten Oz's father with a particularly sleazy scam, the dream begins to turn into a nightmare. Oz gets paint thrown at him during the premiere of his movie and then an incendiary bomb is sent to his wife's offices. Some very nasty people will resort to murder to get what they want, but Oz has never ducked out of confrontation. As he prepares to fight back, he knows he's being sucked into a vortex of evil... What readers are saying about Unnatural Justice: 'As always with Quintin Jardine, the story starts quickly and dramatically and just gets better and better. A great read' 'Another great Oz Blackstone mystery full of twists and turns' 'Great writing - love the tension and story line is superb. I feel am walking the streets with the characters'