I started writing Statisticity at the end of 2010, when I was still living in China. At the time, it seemed like traditional publishing was in its death throes. Meanwhile, technology and social media were enabling innovative and exciting new forms of storytelling.

With these changes in the air, I decided that Statisticity would be something of an experiment. Instead of a traditional novel, I would try to produce an e-book that provided something similar to a traditional reading experience, but with a host of features aimed at deepening the experience and creating a self-contained universe for those readers who wanted to explore.

Statisticity seemed like the perfect vehicle for this treatment. The enhanced e-book format would allow me to push much of the world-building and exposition that make traditional science fiction novels clunky into the supplementary features, leaving a sleek and streamlined core text. At the same time, these features would let me flesh out the novel’s setting: post-climate change Shanghai.

I started exploring the enhanced e-book space (I’ll review some of the early entrants in a future post), selected features and formats I believed would improve the reading experience, and wrote the novel with these features in mind.

That’s when things got experimental. You see, I suffer from severely underdeveloped tech and visual arts skills, so I knew I would need help to bring this project to life. Since I couldn’t find any collaborators willing to work for free, I decided to run a Kickstarter to raise the funds I would need for this work.

To build momentum for the Kickstarter, I created @statisticity, a social media campaign on Facebook and Twitter that built a bridge from the present to my dystopian vision in Statisticity with headlines from the future that linked to articles from today discussing trends in science, technology, and geopolitics.

Since the Kickstarter funded in November 2013, I’ve been working to produce the enhanced e-book of Statisticity. More on that in later posts…