Tony White reading his novel Shackleton's Man Goes South, which is being published by the Science Museum.Tony White's last "traditional" novel was published by Faber in 2003 – that is, traditional in its form and distribution. Michael Moorcock, writing in the Guardian, said that Foxy-T, a story about call shops and kids in the East End of London, proved that the contemporary novel "has never been more alive". Its riot of street slang and Bengali-cockney idiom expressed the hybrid modernity of the contemporary city. But White's work since has been anything but traditional, and even more contemporary.
In 2012, White was invited by art producers Situations and Bristol city council to create "Missorts", an audiobook app for the centre of the city. It's triggered by GPS as the listener moves through the Temple Meads and Redcliffe areas. White collaborated not only with the council, but app developers, a composer, other writers, local libraries and a local church. It's a permanent public artwork, telling a story about the area, and was accompanied by a novella, Missorts Volume II, available as a paperback or free ebook.
Now the Science Museum has published a new book, and its first novel: Shackleton's Man Goes South. At heart a book about climate change, it's also, says White, "a kind of alternative history of publishing in extremis, examples of the apparent human necessity of finding new ways to tell and share stories, and how the future of writing, publishing and reading might need to be as much in the low-tech past as the hi-tech present".
Visitors to the museum's Atmosphere gallery can download the novel for free – as can anyone from its website. (Physical copies can be bought from the museum's shop too.) For White, these collaborations allow him to explore the possibilities of writing further, and see their effects more directly: "As the physical square footage of the traditional book trade diminishes, these commissions have given me the chance to engage directly with readers and to learn from them."
