Each episode is roughly the same : team leader gets a briefing via tape recorder or cleverly hidden speaker, he chooses a handful of repeating team members, they discuss the plan in quaintly decorated apartment, the plan is then set in motion to be completed with clockwork precision.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  It’s a simple, repeating pattern, and it’s the big difference between writing now and writing fifty years ago.  Mission Impossible, like Perry Mason and Flash Gordon and a thousand other shows, comic books, and serial novels was episodic, but not at all organic.

That isn’t to say I’ve not enjoyed watching my show.  The plots are occasionally quaint ingeneous and it’s entertaining to see how 1960s american solved problems that would take a few minutes on the computer, a rocket engine, or a SWAT team these days.   Still, each episode the characters have a new plot, but the same haircut, same nonexistant backstory, same changeless, ageless history and future.  There is no grand story arc, no characterization, and no link in time between one mission and the next.  Each episode is exactly what modern episodic fiction cannot be.

In my opinion, the last great non-dyanamic television series was Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Since then each new show seems to have a larger, more dynamic story arc culminating with shows like 24 and Lost.  The mini-series format has become the minimum expectation.

It’s no different with writing.  The lone novel remains a venerable and successful format, but within genre fiction (fantasy and science fiction) the trilogy and shared world are by far more popular.  Just as with television the expectation is on changing characters and a plot of ever-expanding scope.  In fact, given that the written word can carry so much more detail than a television show, these demands are exponentially greater.

I say this in relation to my constant pet-project: micro-fiction.  Short writing pieces can’t just tell entertaining vignettes.  There must be a greater story being propogated (I think X-files) and also characters that change and grow (and die) in relation to the demands placed upon them.  The expectations upon a story have just flat changed.  Pure escapism has given way to intellectual exploration.  Readers and watchers who run into brick walls stop paying attention;  the age of Dick Tracy is dead.  Even Batman is no longer the ever-vigilent Dark Knight returning night after night to foil the Joker.  Stories today are more complex, more vibrant…and for all the neat gadgetry and clever plotlines, have the potentially to be a thousand times more exciting.

During the height of the dotcom years the e-book market was predicted to be huge. This article from 2000 quotes an estimated market of 2.3 billion dollars in e-book sales by 2005. However, this article from last year estimates the market to be around 230 million this year…but within five years to get to between 3 and 5 billion.

While it’s true that e-book sales are slowly going up (and the number of books available digitally has increased significantly), it seems to be a running trend to predict billion dollar revenues and see far more modest returns in reality.

This could be somewhat discouraging, but I think that is a niche to be exploited. Text messaging, instant messages, blogs, the iphone/ipod/touch proof that people are comfortable using small portable devices to read and receive entertainment. The failure of this market has been a combination of a market that has not exactly fostered adventurous purchasing. (Especially not right now. The dotcom boom seems a hundred years ago). Also, only now are e-books really available easily. Amazon’s push with the Kindle is definitely a step in the right direction.

Sadly, in my mind, three things really stand in the way. First, these devices are too specialized. The kindle is an e-book reader and not much else. No one really wants to carry around an extra device and if they’re going to, it needs to do more than just e-books. The phone, music player, radio, video player, test messenger, camera, web browser, email is on the way. If it has e-book capability as well, it’ll get used.

Second, these solo devices are too expensive. If they are going to be e-book readers they need be priced realistically. When faced with buying an ipod or a touch or a Blackberry vs. an ebook reader for the same price, the multi-use (and flashier) tool is going to win every time. Considering that buying books will likely outstrip the cost of most data/phone plans, the Kindle turns into a money pit.

Those are both technological concerns. For writers though, there is one thing they have control over. The works themselves. The few people I know who do a lot of reading on portable devices enjoy reading newspapers and blogs. They prefer short works that they can finish in 15 minutes. Right, wrong, or otherwise the market is changing. Micro-fiction and episodic fiction, like the old serial novels, have an exciting future in the world of electronic books. In a way it’s sad that the epic novel is such a niche pleasure, but there’s a great deal of creative potential in shorter, digital fiction that I, personally, look forward to exploring.