http://www.duke.edu/~mshumate/hyperfic.html

The search for some hypertext fiction

It took quite a bit of looking before I found very much. There is plenty of postmodern fiction on the net but it's mostly linear text (nothing "hyper" about it, even if some of it is delivered via the World Wide Web). There is plenty of hypertext around 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. Nevertheless, in order to qualify as "fiction" a work must contain some form of narrative (i.e., a sequence of events in time) and characterization, however fragmented and polymorphous they may be. (My personal theory: relatively little true hypertext fiction exists because it's rarely a very satisfactory form -- people like the "traditional narrative.")

Here is what I found and where I looked, including a few false starts.

Sections of this page

• About hypertext fiction
• Honest-to-gosh hypertext fiction
• Close but no cigar
• Places to look
• Other voices of doubt

• "Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain" (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges. In Ficciones (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1956). (Borges was there long before the rest of us.)
• Essays on hypertext and literary theory collection by Kia Mennie.
• ht_lit, the hypertext and literary theory mailing list.
• The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. (I have yet to see an issue, but there must be something interesting here.)
• Lit 180c (Postmodern Literature): Hypertext Presentation by Kurt Revis. (A hypertext essay about Michael Joyce's hypertext fiction "Afternoon, a story.")
• Notes Toward an Unwritten Non-Linear Electronic Text, "The End of Print Culture" by Michael Joyce.
• Tree Fiction by Gareth Rees.
• What is Hypertext? by Charles Deemer.
• Poles in Your Face: The Promises and Pitfalls of Hypertext Fiction by Jurgen Fauth.
• "Reading/Writing Hyperfictions: The Psychodrama of Interactivity" by Christiane Paul. In Leonardo, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 265-272.
• The Electronic Labyrinth by Keep, McLaughlin and Robin. The preferred format is the WinHelp version, because it preserves the hypertext structure of the work. A book-length study available in WinHelp and other formats.

• Adventures In The Great OutThere(TM). (Cybercorporate paranoia from Flightless HUmmingbird, a "pseudo-periodical".)
• The Adventures of Matt and Jake. (Two stick figures from MIT.)
• The Book of Endings by Noah Wardrip-Fruin. (A "network fiction piece" created with both WWW and the Pad zoomable interface in mind.)
• Bordeaux and Prague by Carl Steadman. (A WWW collection of "illustrated fictions of both an artistic and a theoretical nature.")
• Chateau de Mort by Charles Deemer. (An MS-DOS sample of Deemer's simultaneous-action play, available from the Dramatic Exchange archive. Deemer is the author of a number of pieces of hypertext fiction and drama as well as the essay What is Hypertext?.)
• Christmas 2000, Spot's Third First Christmas by James "Kibo" Parry. (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?)")
• Delirium by Douglas Cooper. (A novel being non-serially serialized on the web.)
• de(s)ul(tory) by Narciso Jaramillo. ("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.")
• The Doomsday Brunette by John Zakour. (WWW demo of a shareware sf novel -- the full version runs under MS-Windows.)
• The E-Ville Dialogues by Shana Fisher. (A set of non-linear philosophical conversations in a fictional setting.)
• Giovanni Bottesini: A Life by Jeff Brooks. (Something different: historical/biographical fiction. "At last I shall know where to place my fingers.")
• Girl Birth Water Death by Martha Conway.
• Hegirascope by Stuart Moulthrop. (Hyperfiction built on the latest in Netscapeisms.)
• Hyperfiction on the Mall. (Student projects from CS 721 at the GWU School of Engineering and Applied Science.)
• The Hyper-Meta-Myth: Eros and Psyche. (In this case, hypertext is used not to jump out of the linear narrative but rather into it, as mythemes from the familiar story of Eros and Psyche are used as access points into eight retellings of the myth.)
• The Hypertext Hotel is a collaborative creative writing space for hypertext. Its projects include:
  • Hypertext Hotel MOO.
  • Hi Pitched Voices.
  • Rhetnet Muse-ings ("The beginnings of a net-published journal, devoted to discussions of Rhetoric and Cyberspace.")
  • WAX or the discovery of television among the bees by David Blair. (Film turned to hyperfiction-cum-MOO.)
• The IMRF Choose Your Own Adventure Story. (A reader-written narrative of many forking paths.)
• INTERFACE by Michael Eichler.
• John McHale's personal home page. (Lots of hyperfiction authors hang their work off their home pages, but this guy's personal home page is hyperfiction.)
• Legends of the Holy Grail: Arthurian Legends. (A set of interlocking projects for one of several classes taught by Richard Smyth of Hamline University.)
• Lies by Rick "Rat vs. Snake" Pryll. (A hyperfiction short story whose subtlety belies its simple structure. One of my personal favorites.)
• l0ve0ne by Judy Malloy. (A selection in the Eastgate Web Workshop, "a new hypertext space for accomplished hypertext writers who wish to work directly on the web.")
• The Low Road by J. Will Pierce.
• Ludibrium by Michael Meyer. (A complex hypertext fiction based on the Polimnia concept. In German.)
• Marble Springs by Deena Larsen. (An excerpt of an Eastgate Systems product.)
• Mercury by Mike Benedetti. (A short story.)
• My Name is Scibe by Judy Malloy et al. (A collaborative hyperfiction written simultaneously on Arts Wire and the Well.)
• Netsam and Click Me by Jim Clarage. (A collection of hyperfiction. See especially Rocco Rides Again, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Surfer and Bill and Hillary Get PressConference'd.)
• No Bird but an Invisible Thing by Christian Crumlish. ("More a matter of 5 or 6 or 7 storylines woven together than a branching story with different `choices' in it (beyond the choice of what to read when).")
• No Dead Trees: The Interactive Novel ("Critics say it's impossible, we say it's not.")
• Notes of a Dirty Old Woman by Vera Rabyd and the Rabyd Bunch. (A weekly column that accepts unsolicited submissions.)
• NowTV. (You-pick-the-dialogue stories.)
• Pathetic by David Fox. ("A story of greed, sex, corruption, lunacy, depression, betrayal, nonsense, and other daily fun.")
• Rosemont by Richard Rust. (Looks like a twisty paths adventure, tastes like a piece of fiction. You decide.)
• Somerville Stories by Thomas Colthurst. (Enjoyable hypertext fiction.)
• Space Pirates! by David Lerner. (A space opera serial which will cost a dollar a chapter to read (the first one's free).)
• The Spot. (Sort of like MTV's Real Life, but on the web. This looks like fiction, but maybe it's the unvarnished truth. You tell me.)
• Sometimes I make chocolate-chip cookies by Carl Steadman.
• Stories from Downtown Anywhere . (A collaborative hypertext novel.)
• A Story as You Like It by Raymond Queneau. (Online rendering of a historic hyperfiction from Florian "Monty Cantsin" Cramer's Seven by Nine Squares: Meanderings in Text.)
• Tristessa by Marco Antonio Pajola. (A serialized hyperfiction novel in Portuguese.)
• True Crimes: An Interactive Text Collage by William Poundstone. (Newspaper clippings turned into hyperfiction. This is listed in the contents of Poundstone's Insect Paranoia and Other Stories -- I wonder how he adapted it for print.)
• Under The Ashes by Gavin Inglis. (A work in progress.)
• Victory Garden by Stuart Moulthrop. (An excerpt of an Eastgate Systems product.)
• Wandering About Lost by Michael Eichler.
• Where Am I? by Shawn Aeria. (A choose-your-own-adventure in progress. Be careful for the "This Way to the Egress" trick.)
• World 3, curated by Nick Routledge. (Much stuff here, including pieces by Big Names. The curator particularly recommends The Mola Project and The Phone for readers of this page.)

• Adventure-like game environments done up in HTML. They're certainly hyper, but are they fiction?
  • Addventure! (A reader-written variant on the twisty-little-passages-all-alike theme.)
  • CyberMUD
  • Drool
• Lots of essentially linear fiction which happens to be served out via WWW:
  • Accounting for the Cards: A Mystery. (I used to think this had a link buried within it to an alternate version, qualifying it as nonlinear hyperfiction -- but now I think I just imagined it. If you discover a trap door within this text, let me know. From Cyberkind, which also features hypertext poetry and some interesting linear fiction set in cyberspace.)
  • 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 Interactive Science Fiction Project still looks pretty linear to me, but maybe it hasn't had time to get hyper yet.
  • InterText Magazine.
  • LOVE Enter by Paul Kafka. (An "online reading.")
  • The Morpo Review.
  • Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. (Highly cross-indexed using hypertext, but still not hyperfiction.)
  • Queensboro Ballads by Levi Asher. (Not quite hyperfiction in the sense of this page, but still interesting: stories arranged in the metaphor of a concept album. Also well worth checking out is Asher's page devoted to the Beats, Literary Kicks.)
  • The RICHH WWW Archive. (Devoted the work of USENET's famed literary trickster.)
  • TwentyNothing. (A very nice Generation X-inspired litzine.)
  • The World Wide Stage. (Online fiction, poetry and dramatic works.)
• Hypertext poetry:
  • Elements: A Poem by Carter Butts.
• The Adventures of Mr. Bite Me. (A scurrilous digital cartoon.)
• Brian's Dream Log (An interesting searchable dream journal.)
• Brink. (An e-journal of (in part) hyper-poetry and (so far) linear fiction.)
• Depth Probe. (A fascinating collection of reviews, journal entries, and other personal thoughts, but if it contains any fiction, I couldn't find it.)
• The Fiction Therapy Group page. (Collaborative, but linear, fiction.)
• HyperManifesto. ("It's hyper-something, and it's clearly not NON-fiction." Maybe. Aphorisms with some possibly fictional fragments in the hyperstew.)
• Murder in the Continuum by Redmon Barbry. (A tale of intrigue, not exactly linear, but -- well, check it out and you'll see.)
• New World Headquarters (NWHQ). (A beautifully designed online litzine, very hyper in its overall arrangement, but I haven't yet found what I would call hyperfiction among its component pieces. The editor disagrees, and suggests in particular the work of Tim McLaughlin.)
• Postmodern Culture. (Not hypertext fiction, but something tells me this is pertinent anyway. They also run PMC-MOO, a "text-based virtual reality environment").
• Seeraen Light Universal Abiqua Dragon Cult. (The compiler of these pages insists that they qualify as hypertext fiction, but the fiction pieces among them look pretty linear to me.)
• Travels with Samantha. (A fine "how I spent my summer vacation" in HTML, but not hyperfiction.)
• WebLibs Prototype! (A cute experiment in collaborative prose, including hotlinks, but not exactly what I had in mind.)

• Hyperizons: the Hypertext Fiction Homepage by Michael Shumate.
• Hypertext fiction - no theory here! by Kia Mennie.
• Hypertext resources on the web recommended by Eastgate Systems.

• Alex: A Catalogue of Electronic Texts on the Internet.
• Camenalis Editore, an Italian hypertext publisher. Their web pages feature theoretical articles in English and Italian.
• The CMU English Server:
  • Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life. (A forum for work in cultural and critical theory discussing American leftist and progressive politics.)
  • CTHEORY. (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. (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.)
• CUI W3 Catalog search for "fiction"
• Eastgate Systems. (A commercial publisher of (usually non-networked) hypertext fiction.)
• Enterzone. (An online litzine committed to publishing hyperfiction.)
• HyperMedia Zines on the Net.
• HyperLiterature/HyperTheory. (A graduate-level English course at Virginia Tech.)
• Hypertext Fiction at Caltech.
• John Labovitz's e-zine-list.
• Need to Know.
• The Oz Project at CMU, which is working on interactive drama based on autonomous agent characters.
• The Related Readings List of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at UVa-Charlottesville.
• Yahoo index: Literature and its sub-category Electronic Literature

WILL INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY CHANGE NOVEL-WRITING?
Olaf Olafsson, President of Sony Electronic Publishing as well as a novelist and playwright, doubts it. "Some people might write in a different way in the future for electronic publication, but how that's going to play out I don't know. I know I won't do it myself. I think the form novels are in today is absolutely fine. But it's different with reference works, when you're not reading them start to finish. Then the technology has all the advantages in the world." (New York Times 3/5/95 Sec.3, p.10)

From Edupage 6/4/95:

HYPERTEXT YES, LITERATURE NO
Yale computer scientist and author David Gelernter says that "in a hypertext system, the computer allows you to assemble fragments of text and read them off the screen in any sequence that appeals to you, without guidance from the author, as if you were a bird gaily weaving your nest out of random bits of trash. But if you sacrific literarary architecture, the logical unfolding of an argument or a plot, you sacrific literature." Gelernter says that "hypertext literature isn't merely bad, it's silly. Rotten education is a grave evil; hypertext-as-literature is a bit of nonsense that will blow away as soon as the next good fad kicks up." (National Review 6/12/95 p.65)