Hyperfiction: And Hypertext Is Only the Beginning

HYPERFICTION: And Hypertext Is Only the Beginning. Watch Out!

Date: August 29, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Byline: By Robert Coover

HYPERFICTION is a new narrative art form, readable only on the computer, and made possible

by the developing technology of hypertext and hyper media. Not all adults have familiarized

themselves with hypertext, but most children have, for it is the basis of many of their computer

games and is fast becoming the dominant pedagogical tool of our digitalized times. It is also a

hands-on learning tool: there are classes nowadays around the country, from grade school through

university, actually creating from scratch sophisticated collaborative hypertexts on subjects of their

own choosing.

Hypertext is an elaboration of electronic text, which, in its simplest and commonest form, is much

the same as printed text, except that you read one on a computer screen and the other on paper.

Most electronic publishing nowadays is little more than the digitalization of printed books (putting

books on disks) for electronic or computer presentation, retaining the traditional typographical and

page-turning habits of print, at best offering a few electronic footnotes and asides or some fancy

add-on graphics. The most obvious practical reason for doing this is that you can now carry an

entire library around with you that takes up less space and weighs less than a single book.

Another advantage, one exploited by the publishers of electronic dictionaries, encyclopedias and

other reference books (all of which are being gradually subsumed into the larger category of "data

bases"), is that the computer offers the reader a variety of very rapid search devices for finding

specific information, devices that are much more efficient than those of book culture. This ability to

bounce around freely inside a large composite text points in the direction of hypertext, though it is

not yet hypertext.

Hypertext, in effect, introduces "purpose" or "design" into the scatter of electronic writing, and its

principal tool for doing this is its linking mechanism: in place of print's linear, page-turning route it

offers a network of alternate paths through a set of text spaces by way of designated links.

There are "links" in book culture as well, of course, but they are mostly unidirectional, from left to

right, from the top of the page to the bottom, and from one page to the next. A period at the end of

a sentence and a capital letter beginning the next one amount to a kind of link (one largely invented

and developed by book technology). A paragraph, identified by, say, an indented first word,

becomes a kind of "text space," and it is linked to the next paragraph principally by shape and

juxtaposition, as, in turn, are chapters, which might be thought of as larger composite, or nested,

spaces, lined up like boxcars on a track and often numbered (as are, with similar effect, the pages)

to emphasize the predetermined one-way route the reader is instructed to take.

In hypertext, too, there are text spaces, which may be as short as a letter or a word and as long as a

book or longer (though, typically, they are short), but here on the computer screen there are no

bound pages (there is no "thing," just light) and so no obligation to go from one text space to another

in any one particular order. Any one text space may be linked to any number of other text spaces, the

range of choices being created by the author, with the choice of which link to take being

generally left up to the reader.

Almost all hypertexts, fiction or nonfiction, are written in one of the two principal "windows" formats

(Macintosh or Windows), simply because the linking mechanisms between text spaces are more easily

visualized there. When creating a hypertext, one can have several text spaces, or windows, showing on

the screen at once and literally draw lines between them. These lines may be from space

to space, or from some isolated portion of a space (a word, a phrase, an implanted icon) to another

space or portion of it, and so forth. Schematic overviews permit the author to see the entire

webwork of established links, allowing for vast structural changes to be made with a few clicks of

the mouse or trackball.

Readers of hypertexts may or may not be granted these overviews and screens of multiple

windows. Often the webs are concealed and the text spaces replace one another, one at a time,

somewhat as a page is turned, though the experience is of the page standing still while the text is

displaced by another text. This happens so instantaneously that many writers have used the

mechanism to create the illusion of a single metamorphosing text, changing gradually before your

eyes on the unmoving "page" as you click away.

But even when there is only one screen visible at a time and no web overviews, the reader is usually

given a set of clearly defined and easily understood options as to where to go next. Some words

may be highlighted to indicate that there are links from them. Or icons (the little symbolic pictures,

common to most computer applications in "windows" formats, that stand for something that is either

self-evident or defined at the beginning of the reading) may be placed in the margins or within the text

to indicate a certain kind of link. Or the reader may be able to open up a "path map" or "road map" that

serves as an overview, or that at least displays the various text spaces accessible from this

particular one. Or the links may be multiple but hidden, allowing the reader a variety of routes

without all the surface mechanics. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination of the authors.

In the rapidly evolving technology of the computer, these text spaces can now hold things besides

text, "hypertext" thus giving way to "hypermedia." Graphics, photographs, sound, music, animation

and film, for example, may now occupy these linked spaces, so that the reader, clicking on text,

may call up a film segment or a piece of music; or a text may be enhanced or explicated by sound

effects or illustrations, or vice versa: a film can be studied scene by scene, or even frame by frame,

with links to a variety of texts, including scripts, criticism and interpretations, historical information,

bibliographical and biographical data, or comparative fragments from other films.

In terms of computer space consumed, text is "cheap" compared with the hotter media, which

means that while most pure hypertexts can be run on ordinary home or school computers,

hypermedia projects tend to be published on CD-ROM, an add-on that computer users are now

having to think about. It is the only way, for example, to explore Yale University Press's massive

"Perseus," the encyclopedic hypertextual library of the art and literature of ancient Greece (also

distributed by Eastgate Systems), or to read and listen to Robert Winter's elegant "CD

Companions" to Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 and to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," published by

the Voyager Company. These last two allow the reader to follow the score while listening to a

performance of the music, and to break some phrases down into single instruments. These scholarly

and educational hypertext-hypermedia works are proliferating and will no doubt constitute one day

our common notion of a "library."

It is this irresistible instructional power of hypertext that most convinces me of its inevitability as a

medium for art, narrative and otherwise, for hyperfiction itself is off to a somewhat more hesitant

start. For the narrative artist, hyperspace has all the charm of a starry sky in August: the weather's

comfortable, the twinkle's alluring, but the vista's intimidating and there are no reliable star charts. It

is pretty empty out there, too. Where are the readers? Fun as it is to talk about multidirectionality"

and "interactivity," the simple linear trajectories of the earthbound, once thought confining and

inflexible, are seen to have a certain reassuring structure, an "A" and a "B" between which narrative,

ever on the go, might safely move, feet on the ground.

Consequently, the notion is still rare enough that, this summer at least, one might read and review

the entire production of original hypertext fiction so far published and commercially available, something

unimaginable in the printed book technology since some time in the 1450's.

The problem, of course, is finding and identifying them all. This was probably a problem in the

1450's too. There is often a very fine line between true serious hyperfictions and (1)

hypermedia-enhanced or "expanded" books (as the Voyager Company calls its electronically

footnoted reproductions of printed texts); (2) hypertext information packages, which, though

fictional, are often highly creative (see, for example, Brian Thomas's meditative "If Monks Had

Macs," originally published in the author's own Rivertext collection and now distributed by

Eastgate Systems); (3) children's reading games on the model of Bantam's "Choose Your Own Adventure"

series; and (4) such adult interactive computer games as Millennium's new role-playing game, "Daughter

of Serpents," created by Chris Elliott and Richard Edwards, and based on a story by H. P. Lovecraft.

As for finding the real thing, though hyperfiction certainly has come of age, it remains far from the

center of mainstream publishing, largely uncatalogued and with distribution systems often as

mysterious and as private as samizdat. There may well be dozens of small companies like some of

those mentioned in the box ("Where to Find Hyperfiction") with my reviews of the available

stories.

MOREOVER, many authors produce and distribute their own work free, as did Michael Joyce

with his first speculative version of "Afternoon" in 1987 and Stuart Moulthrop with his earlier

Borgesian experiment, "The Garden of Forking Paths." And some ask recipients for voluntary

contributions on a "send me what you think it's worth" basis, as did Adam Engst, a former Cornell

student, author of the privately distributed (and playfully designed) hyperfiction "Descent Into the

Maelstrom."

There is also a lot of self-published fiction on the Internet, that so-called information highway on

which millions of computer users around the world are now networked and communicating with one

another, though the only true hyperfiction I know of out there is in the first on-line "hyperzine,"

called LSD-50, which appeared on April 16 of this year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the

discovery of that notorious hallucinogen. Along with many other magazine features, LSD-50

contains original hypertext fiction by the hyperzine's creator and editor, Robert (Internet pen name

Bobby Rabyd) Arellano.

Thus my compendium of reviews, which includes all the published full-length hyperfictions that I

know about (and, even as I compose this paragraph, an unlabeled disk arrives from "Kaos-Action

Poetique" in France with a set of animated "hyperpoems"), will no doubt serve primarily to provoke

the revelation of a much larger one.

As will be evident from this list, the primary source for serious hypertext fictions today is Eastgate

Systems, the New Directions of electronic publishing and the supplier of the popular Storyspace

software in which most of the hypertext authors I know about have written. Eastgate is directed by

Mark Bernstein, its chief scientist, reader, theorist, pitchman and indefatigable enthusiast. The

company also publishes a distinguished list of scholarly nonfiction in hypertext format, and it

distributes some of the more interesting works of smaller publishers. "The Perfect Couple," for

example, was originally published by Fait Divers. "Its Name Was Penelope" is also available from

Narrabase Press and on the Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) on the WELL (Whole Earth

'Lectronic Link). And Hypertext Is Only the Beginning. Watch Out!