The Problem with "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather"
Digital worlds in mainstream science fiction are usually unconvincing
In 2021, the sci-fi short story awards were swept by “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” by Sarah Pinsker. The story follows six users of a website called LyricSplainer, which crowdsources song lyric breakdowns. These amateur online researchers try to unravel the mystery of “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”, an eerie English folk ballad that may be connected to an unexplained disappearance. As the story unfolds, the details are revealed through experimental footnotes and web annotations rather than prose.
I read this story after spending lots of time in the trenches of web fiction, so I was already fond of this “fake webpage” genre. (Standouts include existential horror short “cripes does anyone remember Google People” by qntm and superhero forum fic Glow-Worm by wildbow.) But I was excited to see a mainstream take on the genre, since the science fiction world tends to hold writers to a higher literary standard.
There is plenty to like about this story. Each of its characters are given impressive definition in few words, and the song itself (presumably recorded by Pinsker) is both believable as a folk ballad and delightfully creepy. The stolen heart planted in a tree evokes scenes from sci-fi classics like Hyperion and Speaker for the Dead. And there’s just a lot of fun details for the reader to chew on.
But it just doesn’t feel like the Internet. As opposed to its title song, the digital world of “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” doesn’t feel real at all.
The first part of “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” that feels off is the sheer orderliness of it all. With the exception of token troll “BarrowBoy”, every user is a participant in the central fact-finding mission that drives the plot. If bands as famous as Metallica have covered the song in this world, then the lack of noise is difficult to believe. The Internet is weird, chaotic, and messy—even for topics as niche as a folk ballad!
“LyricSplainer” was clearly inspired by Genius.com, so here’s a sample from an actual Genius thread on a similar type of song (“Waltzing Matilda”) just to demonstrate:
boio: relatable
Tom G: My mom used to sing this to me as a kid, I just love it
cheese: yeet
ole iversen: he is god
Georgd: Awesome song for all the Aussies who grew up with it
kid: banjo patterson sucks.
In “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”, this distinctive online color is nowhere to be found. In fact, a surprisingly small amount of the story would require much cultural translation to a reader from the past; take out the usernames and most of it could have been written 30 years ago. This leads to a sort of digital uncanniness: it may not feel like analog fiction; but to a digital native, it doesn’t quite feel like digital fiction either.
Compare this to the aforementioned “cripes does anyone remember Google People” by qntm, which shows that it is possible to include stray commenters flitting in and out without sacrificing narrative clarity. There may not be users spamming “yeet”, but there are still colorful one-off comments like this:
was that the social network with the teeth fetish people
i mean it's gotta be a sex thing there were people just posting hundreds and hundreds of pictures of teeth to each other
—thus spit creepypasta (@thusspit) · 12:37AM · 8 September 2019
This feels unmistakably like the Internet, something that could only have been written in the 2010s. And there are just so many more immersive flourishes, like @mcnx going on a tweetstorm and accidentally tweeting a single closing parenthesis. Obviously the story is still doctored for narrative clarity, but it still feels messy and raw and real.
A good point of reference for “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” is the experimental novel S. by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst, which really understands the potential of the physical medium. Like “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”, it leverages marginalia to tell a story that transcends the core “text”. But S. goes further by taking advantage of every affordance at its disposal: different types of ink, library stamps, and even paper artifacts stashed inside the book.
“Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” lacks this same understanding, stranding it in an awkward space between the digital and physical worlds. Despite its superficial online nature, the story ultimately offers very little that S. is unable to say on a physical page.
But the digital uncanniness problem here runs far deeper than the text itself. Spend some reading a random Genius page for a second. Now take another look at “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”. One of these webpages is functional. The other is ugly.
Despite its best efforts, the story’s digital marginalia is extremely clunky and hard to read. The slick overlays of Genius lose their luster when they are rendered as raw footnotes. Even a slightly more advanced web layout would do wonders for the story’s readability, but it is unclear whether the Uncanny website even has such capabilities.
A key part of the Internet browsing experience is hyperlinks. While “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” is loaded with hyperlink opportunities, the lone hyperlink in the story is the YouTube link to Pinsker’s recording (easily the best part of the story). The lack of a recognizable self-hosted Web for the story to sit inside of is a huge missed opportunity. Even just one “external” page hosted somewhere else on the Uncanny website would have felt so much more immersive. Instead, the world feels empty. The underlined yet unclickable “hyperlinks” just add to the uncanniness of it all.
Many of these shortcomings are not Sarah Pinsker’s fault; they are simply the result of a genre that has not figured out how to tell digital stories. When the bar is so low, why should an individual author spend a bunch of time trying to add bells and whistles? Especially when the restrictions of sci-fi websites themselves place serious limitations on the kinds of expression that are possible.
But even the capabilities that do exist are found wanting. Footnotes 13, 14, 15, and 16 don’t even work because some developer accidentally linked the appropriate <p> tag to #_ftnref13 instead of #_ftn13. The lyric page mentions “95 notes”, but there are only 93. And the lack of dates means that @HolyGreil has to shoehorn in an awkward “It’s been two years since your last post” just to give the reader any sense of time at all.
I know it seems like I’m being pedantic here, but I just want to emphasize how little mainstream sci-fi values the details of its digital worlds. Editors will spend hours laboring over word choice and then not even check to see if all of their hyperlinks are working properly. This does not bode well for the future of the digital medium.
Last week, I wrote about how science fiction has largely failed to harness the artistic potential afforded by technology. Relatedly, I noted that the Hugo Awards lack a designated award for web fiction or adjacent multimedia storytelling. This makes it difficult for web fiction to acquire the visibility that it so desperately needs.
Perhaps this omission is forgivable. The Hugos date back to the 1950s, and its target audience is old enough that a 20-something like me still qualifies for young adult status. No one is expecting the Hugos to be “hip”. But the success of “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” (despite its shortcomings) demonstrates that digital fiction deserves a seat at the table. If the Hugos made this whole new frontier more visible, who knows what kinds of fresh literature might emerge?
Now, none of these omissions preclude people from making digital fiction of their own, and plenty do. Longtime cozy fantasy serial The Wandering Inn has a simple website that is nevertheless aware of its digital potential. Chapter 1.01 C has quiet audio that plays as you open the page, slowly getting louder and louder as you scroll. And Interlude — Foliana features an uneventful main plot that reveals itself if you click on hyperlinks that are cleverly hidden across the page. None of these require special programming, just awareness of the versatility of the World Wide Web.
Similar stories can be easily found on sites like Royal Road and Archive Of Our Own (AO3), and there are even awards for more ambitious interactive fiction (the XYZZYs). Such places are worth checking out for a taste of what a more tuned-in digital sci-fi scene might look like. But these places ultimately lack sci-fi’s central mission: showing us the future to guide us through the present. As long as these niche communities don’t aspire to such ideals, there will always be a vacuum for science fiction proper to fill.
One could certainly argue that pushing the boundaries of digital fiction is simply not the job of a decades-old literary institution, nor should it be. But I would argue that we usually stand to gain from old institutions embracing something new. I appreciate that “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” exists; I want to see cultural exchange between such disparate worlds. I want to see the seriousness of hard science fiction clash with the zaniness of AO3. I want to see 4chan jargon mixed in with the disciplined prose of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
I just want to see digital worlds done well, and done right. And right now, most of them are frustratingly unconvincing.
