Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Updated ed. [Book review]

Hamlet on the Holodeck was first published in 1997 and was met with both praise and condemnation. Janet H. Murray’s original work was highly speculative and in many respects accurately predicted how storytelling in “cyberspace” would evolve as the twenty-first century dawned. Murray accurately foresaw, for example, that episodic television would migrate to the web and that viewers would be able to “binge watch” on demand entire seasons of their favourite dramas (318). Indeed, Murray is uniquely positioned to offer up such a forecast: she began her professional career as a computer scientist at IBM in the 1970s, later researched at MIT’s Experimental Study Group, and in 1992 began teaching an electronic fiction course to students from both the humanities and the sciences, also at MIT.