TOC: A New-Media Novel
By Steve Tomasula with Direction and Design by Stephen Farrell and Steve Tomasula, Animations by Matt Lavoy and Chris Jara, Programming and Sound Engineering by Chris Jara.
You've never experienced a novel like this. TOC is a multimedia epic about time: the invention of the second, the beating of a heart, the story of humans connecting through time to each other and to the world. An evocative fairy tale with a steampunk heart, TOC is a breath-taking visual novel, an assemblage of text, film, music, photography, the spoken word, animation, and painting. It is the story of a man who digs a hole so deep he can hear the past, a woman who climbs a ladder so high she can see the future, as well as others trapped in the clockless, timeless time of a surgery waiting room: God's time. Theirs is an imagined history of people who are fixed in the past, those who have no word for the future, and those who live out their days oblivious to both.
Note: TOC Web (3rd Edition) published by The New River. Also online HERE.
Note: TOC iPad (2nd Edition) out of print.
NOTE: The DVD Edition (1st Edition) of TOC now requires WinXP or a Virtual WinXP running on a newer PC. It will also run on a MAC with a Virtual Operating System, such as VMware Fusion. < https://vmware-fusion.en.softonic.com/mac>
Visit the TOC DVD (1st Edition) Website for excerpts, gallery, and more information.
NOTE: The DVD website is best viewed with the RUFFLE Extension added to your browser. Click here for Chrome (recommended). Click here for Firefox (beta)
“Nothing short of brilliant.”
-Lance Olsen
As the excellence of his writing makes clear, even with the addition of other media, for Tomasula, text is not an incidental conveyance for narrative, but its essential life force. …. TOC reminds us how, faced with the unfathomable multiplicity of the universe, we can still use language and storytelling to orient ourselves, and it points out how we might use technology to expand and alter not only how we tell stories, but the stories we tell ourselves.
-Illya Szilak, The Huffington Post
Gold Medal Winner: Best Book of 2010
(awarded by eLit Awards)
The Mary Shelly Award for Outstanding Fictional Work
(awarded by the Media Ecology Association)
TOC has been exhibited in museums, galleries, and stage venues throughout the U.S. and Europe, including the U.S. Library of Congress, and Les Archives nationales / Bibliothèque nationale de France.
TOC is an entrancing digital novel that explores temporality's elusiveness and how, ultimately, the more we think about time, the less we really know about it. Reminiscent of Borges, Calvino, and Ballard, TOC functions less through plot than thesis, less through character than idea. Nothing short of brilliant.
-Lance Olsen
With stunning visuals, a compelling and complex narrative, a gripping soundtrack, and a user-friendly but satisfyingly sophisticated interface, TOC is one of the few pieces of digital media that feels fully integrated and profoundly literate. It brings us to the trailhead of the genre's future, and then takes us a good way down the path.
-Brian Evenson
…an elegant meditation on the nature of time.... A fascinating look at some of thepossibilities of narrative in the multi-media...age....
-Ed Falco, American Book Review
...cutting-edge [but] surprisingly easy to navigate...a hard-hitting (and visually and aurally magnificent) rendition of one of the world’s most ancient moral lessons.
-Virginia Konchan, ForeWord Reviews
Marked by aesthetic ruptures, discontinuous narratives and diverse modalities including video, textual fragments, animated graphics and sound, TOC creates a rich assemblage in which the conflicts between measured and experienced time are related to the invention, development and domination of the Influencing Engine, a metaphoric allusion to computational technologies. … TOC explores its conditions of possibility in ways that perform as well as demonstrate the interpenetration of living and technical beings, processes in which complex temporalities play central roles.
-N. Kathyrn Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Tecnogenesis.
TOC is an evocative, steampunk fairytale. It also represents a new literary genre: a marriage of conventional narrative and image use with the possibilities for fiction that are opened up by the computer.
-Yuriy Tarnawsky, Rain Taxi Review of Books.
Exploring untrodden paths out of the groove of language, TOC releases us to a different approach to temporality that may also provide a cure for…chronology.
-Jean-Yves Pellegrin, Études anglaises: revue du monde Anglophone (Paris).
…a sort of Myst for historians and philosophers…a fantastic work that gives unique insights into the collaborative opportunites for the novel that new media has made possible.
-Scott Rettberg, Vagant (Norway)
TOC explores the elusiveness of time. It opens with the quote from St. Augustine: "What is time? If no one asks me, I know if I want to explain who I ask, do not know." It is the story of a man who digs a hole so deep you can hear the past, a woman who climbs a mountain so high that you can see the future as well as people who are trapped in the present time, everyday, not see anything.
-Juan José Díez, Literature electrónica (Spain)