Julian Novitz

Hi, thanks for having me.

Yes.

Okay.

Well, I was just recently invited to contribute to a special issue of a journal that was looking at video adaptations of other media and video games.

And of course, video games often draw heavily on film for source material and adaptations.

And I just had a couple of video game adaptations or

or games that drawn Hamlet as a source on my radar at that point, so I thought it would be interesting to write an article about that.

And I went back and I found actually from about 1995 onwards about four video games that all adapted or drew upon Hamlet as source material.

And I'm just quite interested in how, as interactive narratives, they actually involve changing or manipulating the text and the structure of the narrative, while also depending on players either having or being influenced

taught about or taught to have an awareness of the original play.

So there's a sense about what's kind of playful or transgressive or enjoyable about changing or transforming the structure of the original narrative.

Well, because I had the great opportunity to review Hilary Mantel's latest novel for the Sydney Review of Books, I took that as an opportunity to reread all of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy from scratch.

So I've been kind of in a Thomas Cromwell bunker for the last month or so, and it's been brilliant to actually look at how

closely interconnected the three novels in that trilogy are wolf hall bring up the bodies and the mirror and the light the extent that i now kind of think of them as one extended almost 2000 page novel as opposed to three semi-independent volumes so that that was absolutely wonderful

I've also, as kind of recreational reading, I've been doing a lot of rereading at the moment, not so much reading new texts.

But I've been dipping in and out of William Gibson's old cyberpunk novels, the Sprawl trilogy, Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, which still hold up wonderfully today.

I'm never –

I don't understand the plots of these novels at all.

I've tried to read them back and forth so many times and never quite figured out what's going on.

But he writes, he has this wonderful speculative imagination at this point in his career where he can just write visually and tactilely about technology with such spectacular invented language that it can't help but feel convincing and real.