The Author is the Journal of the Society of Authors, the invaluable trade union for writers (since 1884). This piece about The Universal Turing Machine appeared in the Spring 2026 edition.
Ill-served by story
Richard Beard on harnessing new technology using experimental narrative forms
My first encounter with digital fiction, back in 2011, was with an early reading app for iPad called Papercut, developed by the Swedish-British design studio UsTwo. Along with the writers Nadifa Mohammed and Laura Dockrill, I contributed a story to this start-up project that according to the publicity would provide a ‘traditional storytelling experience direct from the author’. Otherwise known as reading. The new part was storytelling ‘via videoclips and augmented by a mixture of interactive sound, animation and text’.
These various components could be activated ‘simply by swiping the screen’, which in 2011 was a thrillingly novel concept. The Apple iPad had been launched the year before, and publishers along with app developers were jostling at the start line of a race they saw finishing at some all-conquering yet previously unimagined method for hooking readers into stories. And, as a happy consequence, for further monetising the work of their authors. In that bright new dawn, books with pages looked like yesterday’s news.
Matt Mills, the founder of UsTwo, said the company’s intention was to ‘question what it meant to be a “book” in the digital age’ and back then the ‘enhanced ebook’ was the future. A vigorous start-up like UsTwo would build the software to customise books onto screens, adding sounds and images. Every major publisher would then rush to license the technology for a stake in this inevitably expanding market.
Reader, this wasn’t the future that happened.
Part of the problem was the reading experience itself. To my relatively straightforward story about the EFL career of James Joyce the software professionals grafted, because they could, animation and music and my voice recording of random paragraphs, additional features that crowded out the text with every touch of the cursor. ‘What happens to a book when you remove the pages?’ asked Jonas Lennermo, Head of Publishing at UsTwo; ‘it becomes something different’. It certainly does: not a book, but not a film either or an audio book or an effective platform for showcasing music (provided by indie hipsters from Stockholm). Cramming in all the arts at once, showing off everything the technology could do, made Papercut less than the sum of its parts.
The second problem was money. Papercut was expensive to make, and didn’t sell many copies. The idea of writing creatively for and with digital technology went into retreat, and to this day the Kindle e-reading experience remains stolidly unenhanced. However warm the light or high resolution the e-ink, Kindle’s dutiful electronic pages (or Kobo or Boox) come nowhere close to Papercut’s once-and-future vision of interactivity and multimodality, of new forms of reading and writing enabled by digital devices that can’t be replicated in print.
Fifteen years later, little of Papercut’s ambition appears to survive. The books in the 2026 iPad chart are just books. The future seems to have stalled, though another reason for this lack of development (along with the distracting screen experience and the money) is the loss of earlier coding and the obsolescence of various bits of hardware. Initiatives like The Electronic Literature Organisation Repository, currently based at the University of Central Florida, have attempted since 1999 to preserve an archive of digital literature projects, but promising experiments still disappear. Papercut, for example, is no longer available online. Digital writers can’t always find the shoulders on which they could usefully stand.
Which is a shame, because a resurgence of interest is overdue in the potential of technology to enhance the impact of written storytelling. A good recent example is Dan Hett’s autobiographical C ya laterrrr, an interactive online text about losing his brother in the Manchester Arena bombing. The reader can choose optional routes through the story, but it will never not end at the same devastating place. The urgency and power of Hett’s approach is provided by his real-life experience, and this too offers a lesson. My own hunch – contrary to the first instincts of Papercut – is that digital literature may have a particular affinity not for fiction but for memoir.
Honest exponents of memoir tend to resist the hygienic story arcs popularised by fiction, and the resulting fragments can feel more faithful to lived experience. Think of Maggie Nelson or Annie Ernaux or any exciting writer from the genre’s recent glorious phase of experimentation. At the other extreme, conventional memoirs – however initially popular – can become casualties of over-used story structures that provide a framework only for whatever turns out not to be true. In memoir this is a problem, and one that needs to be solved: lives rarely (if ever) follow the comfortable narrative patterns so beloved of publishers’ acquisition committees. The worry would be if memoir wasn’t experimental, trying in good faith to capture the unique essence of an individual life. There are as many different ways to tell this story as there are people.
With this thought in mind – a synthesis of memoir and digital literature – I recently devised the online writing project The Universal Turing Machine, named after computer pioneer Alan Turing’s hypothetical machine that would one day compute everything computable. Alan Turing was imagining something like today’s AI, but I had in mind a collective subjective memoir, an accumulation of long-form written experience that might qualify for whatever counts as the opposite of AI.
The first task, learning from Papercut’s sensory overload, was to preserve the basic joy of undistracted reading – words not pictures, words not sounds – while also exploring structural innovations made possible by conceiving work for the screen not the page. Unlike in 2011, I didn’t have to assemble a crack team of expensive Swedish software developers. Writers (and maverick cops) traditionally prefer to work alone, and despite its many limitations AI is great at entry-level coding. Anyone with a laptop and access to an LLM can knock up a prototype digital literary structure in next to no time.
So that’s what I did. I asked the free version of Claude to code an online grid of years, like a chessboard, where every square could be opened to reveal 1000 words of text. No video, no music, just words – a book, but designed specifically for the screen. Each of the thousand-word sections was a passage of memoir describing a year of a life, and instead of turning pages the reader moved around the squares like a knight on a chessboard. The years were therefore read out of order, mirroring the subconscious ‘randomness’ of memory, and of thought itself, shifting back and forth in the constant unpredictable acts of time-travel that make each of us who we are.
Next, like a scientist from the 18th century, I tested my findings by experimenting on myself. I wrote the years of my life in 1000-word sections from 1967 through to 2030. The online structure meant that no two readers would move through these years in the same sequence – instead of beginning, middle and end, my enhanced reading experience saw cause and effect loop this way and that. Questions were raised and questions answered, not always in that order but with surprises that felt true to experience: the meaning of my life became glimpsable outside the illusion that I’d progressed through a recognisable narrative of conflict obstacle resolution. The story of any life, truth be told, is ill-served by ‘story’. Besides, readers are perfectly capable of confecting these connections for themselves, if that’s what they want – it’s part of what literary experiments can free up readers to do.
After my try-out of the structural template I was satisfied it would work for other life-writers. More than that, I heard an echo of the bold ambitions from back when the iPad was young. ‘What happens to a book when you remove the pages?’ If you love and respect the power of words, and keep the bells and whistles to a minimum, you get an online platform open to anyone who still believes in long-form writing. In a publishing context where the volume of physical sales steadily decreases and the number of young people reading daily has halved in the last twenty years, moving online seems a logical next step. Work where the potential readers already are, and where mainstream publishers aren’t required in order to reach them.
As an added benefit, with no limit on size (unlike a printed book) projects like the Universal Turing Machine can revive the original collaborative spirit of the internet, and this process is already well under way. From June 2026 I’ll be tiling together new UTM memoirs to grow my online writing installation readable a thousand words at a time. Stay within a single life, or jump from one life to another: the reader can decide, and unlike those early Papercut dreams everyone is invited to get involved, as reader or writer or both. This time round, the going digital might stick.