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1994-10-08
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[IMAGE]
THE SEARCH FOR SOME HYPERTEXT FICTION
Professor Edith Wyschogrod of the Department of Religious Studies here
at Rice is interested in postmodern narrative forms and wants to
examine examples of interactive hypertext fiction on the net.
It took quite a bit of looking before I found very much. There's
plenty of postmodern fiction but it's mostly linear text (nothing
"hyper" about it, even if some of it is delivered via WWW). There's
plenty of hypertext but it's mostly nonfiction. Note that to meet my
criteria for "interactive hypertext fiction", the reader has to be
able to use hyperlinks to find his or her own path through the work --
there can't be a single straightforward path as in the traditional
narrative. (My personal theory: relatively little true hypertext
fiction exists because it's not a very satisfactory form -- people
like the "traditional" narrative.)
Here's what I found and where I looked, including a few false starts.
If you know of anything else, please drop me a line. Thanks.
Prentiss Riddle (riddle@rice.edu)
_________________________________________________________________
About hypertext fiction
* What is Hypertext by Charles Deemer.
* Tree Fiction by Gareth Rees.
I have yet to see an issue, but there must be something interesting in
the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.
_________________________________________________________________
Honest-to-gosh hypertext fiction
Charles Deemer is the author of a number of pieces of hypertext
fiction and drama, as well as an essay called "What is Hypertext?". An
MS-DOS sample of his simultaneous-action play "Chateau de Mort" is
available from the Dramatic Exchange archive.
Stories from Downtown Anywhere is a collaborative hypertext novel.
A WWW demo of a shareware sf novel (the full version runs on
MS-Windows): The Doomsday Brunette by John Zakour.
Some enjoyable hypertext fiction: Somerville Stories
Sometimes I make chocolate-chip cookies by Carl Steadman .
Bordeaux and Prague is a WWW collection of "illustrated fictions of
both an artistic and a theoretical nature", also by Carl Steadman .
Jorn Barger (jorn@mcs.com) says: "Kibo does a hyperfiction every xmas
-- here 's the latest. The rest should be ftp-able from world.std.com
(or ftp.std.com?)"
The Hypertext Hotel MOO is a collaborative creative writing space for
hypertext.
The IMRF Choose Your Own Adventure Story, a reader-written narrative
of many forking paths.
Narciso Jaramillo's de(s)ul(tory), which he describes as "an archive
of things I've written that's randomly annotated with lexical
connections: some words are links to other texts that happen to
contain the same word. Sometimes the connecting word is pregnant with
meaning in the target text; other times it is completely incidental."
Accounting for the Cards: A Mystery looks like linear text until you
discover its secret. From Cyberkind, which also features hypertext
poetry and some interesting linear fiction set in cyberspace.
The Adventures of Matt and Jake, two stick figures from MIT.
_________________________________________________________________
Close but no cigar
A cute experiment in collaborative prose (including hotlinks), but not
exactly what I had in mind: WebLibs Prototype!
Some Adventure-like game environments done up in HTML. They're
certainly hyper, but are they fiction?
* CyberMUD
* Drool
* Addventure!, a reader-written variant on the
twisty-little-passages-all-alike theme.
A promising project, but not off the ground yet: The Continuum Machine
A fine "how I spent my summer vacation" in HTML, but not hyperfiction:
Travels with Samantha.
Depth Probe is a fascinating collection of reviews, journal entries,
and other personal thoughts, but if it contains any fiction, I
couldn't find it.
Not hypertext fiction, but something tells me this is pertinent
anyway: Postmodern Culture . (They also run PMC-MOO, a "text-based
virtual reality environment" ).
Lots of essentially linear fiction which happens to be served out via
WWW:
* A very nice Generation X-inspired litzine: TwentyNothing
* L'Association des bibliophiles Universels (ABU), the French
equivalent of Project Gutenberg, has turned a few classics of
French literature and philosophy into hypertext, including Jules
Verne's De la terre a la lune (344K). However, these texts aren't
very hyper -- basically only the table of contents includes
hotlinks.
* The RICHH WWW Archive , devoted the work of USENET's famed
literary trickster.
* InterText Magazine
* The Morpo Review
* An interesting searchable dream journal: Brian's Dream Log
* An online reading of LOVE Enter by Paul Kafka.
* Miscellaneous stories by Mark-Jason Dominus
_________________________________________________________________
Places I looked
* Nate's Hyperfiction Bookshelf, a promising collection spot for
just the sort of thing I've also been looking for.
* CUI W3 Catalog search for "fiction"
* HyperMedia Zines on the Net
* John Labovitz's e-zine-list
* Need to Know
* Don Perkins (dperkins@tenet.edu) recommends watching these
resources from the CMU English Server:
+ Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life offers a
forum for work in cultural and critical theory discussing
American leftist and progressive politics.
+ CTHEORY is an international, electronic review of books on
theory, technology and culture (reviews are posted monthly of
key books in contemporary discourse as well as theorisations
of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape).
+ Cultronix is an interactive online magazine to be published
on the English Server. The topic for the first issue of
Cultronix is the implications of technology on postmodern
culture.
_________________________________________________________________
Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle@rice.edu
9/6/94