Tomorrow Elephant

Kimmo Lehtonen has started publishing the first Finnish CreativeCommons-licensed novel, Lueminut (“README”), in serial form through Babek Nabel. The book will also be available via the print-on-demand shop at Lasipalatsi.This is quite a landmark event: a version of Creative Commons compatible with the Finnish legal system has been around for a while now, but so far there has been no high-profile content released under the license. A CC-licensed novel in Finnish is actually something I’ve been planning to do myself for a while, but it looks like I was too slow…

I hope Lehtonen benefits from this experiment as much as people like Cory Doctorow and Charlie have. In fact, given how difficult it is to make a living as a professional writer in Finland, it makes a lot of sense to take the CC approach. In the long run, micropayments and print-on-demand may make it possible to make some money from CC-licensed books and ebooks, but before that a writer has to find an audience. Being among the first to experiment with new ways of distribution (by essentially throwing your book into the Internet) is a pretty good way to do just that.

So, is Lueminut any good? I’ve read the first four parts so far, and I like it more than Lehtonen’s two previous novels. I have to say it is a little slow-moving in places, and suffers from an overly passive protagonist. Then again, Lehtonen proclaims that the novel is self-consciously Utopian, which might explain these tics. From his promotional material:

LUEMINUT is a multifaceted story about a world where people, ideas and coincidence form an open network — — a forgotten city is breaking away from the bonds of the past, into a more free future where hackers, anarchists and other radical groups challenge the European Union — — Kimmo Lehtonen rejuvenates the tradition of utopic literature of dreams and alternatives created by the imagination, without which there can be no real freedom. LUEMINUT is also a political statement, a call for an open society, inspired by the communities formed by Interent, Linux and open source developers.

Given that it is an exceedingly difficult task to marry a political manifesto seamlessly with fiction (Plato and Thomas More didn’t get it right either) I’m willing to reserve judgment until I’ve read the entire book. One complaint I do have, though: instead of just PDF, it would have been nice to have a variety of file formats (from plain text upwards) available. One of the strengths of the Creative Commons license is that it allows readers to transform the book into different formats to make it easier to pass around, and PDF is a little bit too rigid for that purpose. But that sort of thing can certainly be sorted out once the whole novel is available: the important thing is that you can go and check the book out yourselves.