Hypertext Fiction

Introduction
Hypertext fiction is a genre within electronic literature relying mainly on hyperlinks to tell a narrative. Hypertext fiction, unlike other kinds of electronic literature, is heavily relied on hyperlinks, images and most especially navigational tools in order to achieve what the author intended the reader to get from the story. Just like stories with pictures, this allows a different dimension of interactive literature. The hyperlinks allow for the connections of ideas and in a way breaks up the story based on the reader’s interests, beliefs, and interactions with the links.

A key point of hypertext fiction is that the reader is as involved with the story telling as the author and in some case the author allows for edits by the reader so that they can add their own insight and change the plot. Hypertext fiction goes against the typical linear notion as laid out by Aristotle, where all stories have a beginning, middle, and end. Instead it is more like a maze, because at various points throughout the story the reader decides where the story goes next. This in turn makes the reader feel like a co-author, because they are individualizing the story, and restructuring the events of story, instead of a traditional book where everything is already permanent and set in stone.

Links can range from simply exploring the definition of a certain phrase to expanding on an idea previously stated, through opinions, ideas, and emotions of the writer. By clicking on any hypertext you chose to, and in any particular order that you desire, you are in turn creating your own unique story, allowing each reader to have a different reading experience. This allots the reader the utmost freedom in the development of the story. Since this is an entirely different reading experience, and the story doesn’t fully ascertain value until time passes by, and you click on each link, it is in a sense similar to your life timeline, which you do not begin to understand until you go through certain events and time passes. As a result, the story will never read exactly the same twice, allowing the reader a fresh and new reading experience each time.

Hypertext fiction existed before the Internet. The first work of hypertext fiction is believed to be Afternoon, A Story by Micheal Joyce in 1987 and published four years later in 1991 by Eastgate Systems. This work paved the way for a group of works published by Eastgate Systems. In 1994 the first work was made for the Internet, and in 1996 the first interactive story was published, Sunshine 69 by Robert Arello. With the growing popularity of these works, the Electronic Literature Organization or ELO was established in 1999 which promoted all types of digital or electronic writing.

Group Members
Bunty Bhatia

Dan Gugger

Lauren Flores

Kris Bowers

Tim Rogers

Henro (Bunty Bhatia)
Henro is a great example of hypertext fiction since it has many of the elements that make the genre unique. The story revolves around a woman’s Buddhist pilgrimage and experiences while going through it. I feel that hypertext fiction was and exceptional medium for this author to use in telling his story since the entire time through I felt as if I were going on the journey with her.

When I began I immediately noticed the use of ambient color, pictures, and different font sizes that set the mood. Every page had a single black and white picture near the top along with a title. The words were written in teal and there was a mellow pattern in the background of every page. After the immersion into the story had been complete I had a choice of clicking one of three hyperlinks to proceed. The use of hyperlinks in order to proceed with the story was a clear indication of this being a work of hypertext fiction.

In many hypertext fictions the author gives you a choice between two paths and when one is chosen another is closed. This story uses hyperlink choices in a different way. After the first page there were three links and all of them had to be picked before the reader could go on to the next sequence of events. The order of the pages was left up to the reader. The hyperlinks themselves were descriptions of what the next part of the story was going to be about. I realized by the third set of links that the order one picked the hyperlinks did not matter too much. Each part of the story gave a little bit more information of the woman’s pilgrimage until the end the reader had a complete story. There is a clear artistic quality to the way this story is told and if it were in a book it would not be the same. Every time this story is read it can be experienced in a different way based on the selections made. Also with certain aspects of the story known and unknown the readers will always have a different experience.

Throughout the pilgrim’s journey she encounters a lot of people and who give her things because they can all tell that she is on her pilgrimage. Most of the people give her money and food others give her shelter and direction. Many people are interested in her pilgrimage and also join her later on in the story. It seems that there are different reasons for the people she encounters to go on such a trip. The experiences she has with all of the people plays into the storytelling aspects for this hypertext fiction. Each has their own story and background and sometimes these minor characters are explained more than even the main character.

The story itself was very vague and the hyperlinks, when put together, gave you a more information. At first I did not realize that the person I was following was female until one of the links spoke of how she was a woman and that the priests at the temple would never let a woman sleep on the streets. Also I could not exactly tell where the person was in relation to the world, but then after a few more hyperlinks I found out she was in Japan heading north. This vagueness again plays into the storytelling aspect of this work. A Buddhist monk will go on a pilgrimage in order to gain some deep insightful knowledge about the world that they were lacking, and the farther they are in that journey the more knowledge is ascertained. In the same way the reader is guided through this maze of seemly random choices until enough is revealed to them that the story actually starts to make sense.

By the end of the story there is only one choice and then you find out that the woman ended exactly where she started, her home. In the same way the only choice the reader is given after the last page is the home page which starts the story all over again.

24 Hours with Someone you Know (Dan Gugger)
Typically when one reads a story they expect to be turning pages or scrolling through monotonous text on a screen for hours on end. Usually there is a set order of events that the reader has no control over and is just along for the ride. Hypertext fiction, however, is different. It engages the reader and gives the reader control over the events of the story. One story in particular is a great example of this, 24 Hours with Someone you Know .

The story starts off with you looking for your cousin, Jess, at her old apartment. It differs from a normal story here, you meet some strangers and are invited in but have the option of leaving or going inside. Immediately this made me feel as if I was part of the story. As the story continues the reader is further engaged and becomes the main character. The decisions being made feel like you are actually there and making them. There is a point where if you do enter the house you have a choice of having lunch or going for a walk with a girl you just met. This is where some of the choice ends. If you have lunch, you are forced to click on a link that makes you go for a walk and then home. If you just walk you wind up having to click on the home link as well. This type of choice lasts the course of the story. However, there is at least one part of the story where I managed to get caught in a loop, voluntarily. I was able to infinitely go from the house to the pool and vice versa if I chose so. A small problem but it doesn’t take away from the story.

The plot of this story is basically that you, the reader, are looking for your cousin but there is some mystery surrounding her and what has happened to her. You are almost forced follow this girl Polly to various destinations in the city, you go to a rally. You then meet one of her hippie friends who seems to know more about your cousin than everybody else but quickly changes the topic when it is brought up. Each character adds a little bit to your ultimate goal to find out where Jess is. You then follow them to a pub and then back to their house to pass out and the story ends.

However there is a slightly alternate storyline. The author of this story makes it so it can be read and explored many times before repeating the same plot twice. Where you go inside the house in the beginning instead of going to the rally you stay back with a drunk and swim instead. You find out more about your cousin, there are then more options about where to go and what to do. It is revealed to you at a diner that Jess is a deadbeat and may have skipped town to avoid debt. Nobody knows what happened to her, all that is revealed is that everyone knows her but nobody knows much. Every story ends the same way, you going to sleep and still having no idea what happened to your cousin.

Besides trying to find out where you cousin is, which you never do, there is no point to the story. The point of the story is to tell a story and to just live. That is what is great about it, the story connects you with the strangers. I don’t want to give too much of it away but the interactions between the reader and the strangers and how bonds seem to form is what makes the story great. It is exactly as the title states, 24 hours with someone you know. The someone you know is the random people you meet throughout the day. I believe what is trying to be said through the story is to go out and live life, explore places you normally wouldn’t explore. Be different.

This story follows the same basic format as other works of hypertext fiction, some have more choices, some have less. But it gives a great idea about how to interact with this genre.

Reagan Library (Lauren Flores)
Stuart Moulthrop describes Reagan Library as “an odd mixture of stories and images, voices and places, crimes and punishments, connections and disruptions, signals on, noises off, failures of memory, and acts of reconstruction. It goes into some places not customary for "writing." I think of it as a space probe. I have no idea what you'll think.” It is also described as “A circular exploration of time, space, and (imperfect) memory.” In the Introduction, the author gives background details to help understand his hypertext fiction. Readers may ask whether this is “fiction” or a “game”, and the author leaves it up to his audience to experience the work for themselves.

Each page contains a QuickTimeVR panorama image and some text. The image can be dragged and used as a virtual camera to look around your surroundings in that particular place. There are four worlds and four states of the worlds differentiated by blue, green, red and black. The idea of the four worlds confused me a bit. There are many different places that can exist in the four states of blue, green, red, and black. The texts that accompany the images are multiform, and as I later found out, the small squares at the end of each passage increase each time you revisit a particular place. The text changes every time you visit a page, and much of what you read on your first visit may seem like nonsense, as it is “generated by a set of random-assembly programs” and “should become more coherent on repeated visits.” The links on every page have a specified destination “and thus perhaps a greater claim to coherence.” I found that the stories on each page reach their end at four squares. By visiting all the places four times, the text comes to a final form, meaning that there is an end.

Stuart Moulthrop explains that the secret of random text is that it assembles random things and can lead to possibilities for the text. He states that the most important thing is that this text is a terminable hypertext and that there is an end of this “and it’ll be over but not yet.” N. Katherine Hayles points out, “as if to emphasize that noise is not merely interference but itself a form of information, Moulthrop has designed the piece so that one level of the text moves in the opposite direction from this trajectory.”

I first clicked 'Begin' on the main page and started out my journey in the pavilion. “Good morning, Dr. Chandra.” I was then told to trust the narrator, and that the “center” is the place with the pillars. It stated “That was the real text. This is not a game. Do not attempt to reconfigure your browser.” I clicked the option to reconfigure my browser and ended up at the main page. I clicked begin once more, and found myself at the pavilion, where there were now two dots at the end of the text instead of one.

I followed a hyperlink that brought me back to where I was, but it changed from green text in daytime to black in

nighttime. From here and the next page both at Obelisk, only two links could be clicked, ‘devil tower’ in the first place and ‘prisoner’ in the second. It seemed kind of scary to me. I found myself at the white cone for the first time, and the text didn’t make sense at all. After the next link I fond myself at the Obelisk again, brought myself to the Marble House in blue state at daylight, and ended up at my first red state.

This red states first lines read “LAVA LAMP OF THE APOCALYPSE/Viscous flows deep within the mantle number all our days.” I observed that the red pages were the most important, and didn’t quite follow a story line but seemed to give more advice, saying things like: “The die is cast….repeatedly.” “Do you have a problem with noise?” “Things will become clearer as you go.” “Some objects occur in more than one world-state.” “If you can read this, you too are close.” “You can end this.” The other red states As I went further in the story, the hints kept getting deeper and deeper: “Repetition in hypertext is not necessarily a vice.” “Path is pattern.” “Emily St. Cloud is dead.” The next couple of red states said “See what you see as you’re seeing.” “Some of the language is randomly generated.” “Consider the color of the sky.” The story only made sense to me at the end of each page.

This particular hypertext form presents characters, plot, and setting in a random order decided upon which particular page you enter and at how many times you have visited it. I feel as if the reader is the main character in the story, trying to figure out what the author wants them to know or discover. For example, at the ruins, you are told “The whole of the law is to keep your story straight…? Did you actually read this? You can't take this to bed.” In blimp, “Let this stand. I'm afraid it's serious hypertext. There is no simple way to say 'this.' You won't get it. Do you really want to know?” In geode, “This text contains 153 percent recycled content” is in italics. At the end of geode, the page says “The library is not what you expected. It never is. You were expecting maybe some cozy little labyrinth…Sorry to disappoint. We supply no end of questions....” Spaces I encountered were the Pavillion, Obelisk, White Cone, Marble House, Black Cone, Bronze Lamp, Ruins, Floaters, Furnace, Colonmade, Sphere, Blimp, Beautiful Balloon, Gold Rock, The Egg Stone, Geode, The Jade Pavilion, and the TV House. There are stories at each place and there were particular spaces such as blimp, colonmade and furnace that I did not reach until much later in my journey.

In Reagan Library, hypertext is a useful way of storytelling because it allows readers to navigate their own way through the story. When choosing what hyperlinks to click, I felt as if I was controlling what direction I was headed in even if I didn’t know exactly where I was going. This experience is similar to a book as the author ultimately has some control over the story because they designed each specific hyperlink to go to only one place. The thought that the author was in control never occurred to me until I reached certain pages that had only one link to click on. There was only one link available on the pages where I had already reached the “end”, or visited the page four times so that its text no longer changed.

When I read the story again I saw that no one reader has the same experience, and hypertext allows for an engagement in which the reader has to actively think about what the text is saying. Additionally, I feel that this story may not have a sense of closure because while each page “ends”, there are still hyperlinks that connect them all together, so the reader has to choose specifically where they want to end. I feel that there is no sure middle or end in Reagan Library. Whenever I thought I was getting close to the end, I would end up in more places that I had never visited.

If someone were to read Reagan Library or another hypertext fiction, I would recommend that they read the introduction first and later look up how to interpret the work of literature. All in all, reading Reagan Library was an enjoyable, thought-provoking experience.

These Waves Of Girls (Kris Bowers)
Caitlin Fisher’s “These Waves of Girls” fully personifies the genre of hypertext fiction, and even won the Electronic Literature Award for fiction in 2001. Just like a traditional hypertext fiction piece the story gives you a multitude of starting points, and as you scroll over each option it gives the reader a passage and a picture from that part of the story. Then as you begin the story, from whichever starting point you choose, you are immediately exposed to many different stories from multiple ages in a girl’s childhood, all of which seem to centered around the themes of “exploring memory, girlhoods, cruelty, childhood play and sexuality”. Each of these pages has bright and colorful pictures, helping to accompany each part of her story, as well as multiple links, so the reader always has a multitude of options in how to continue reading this girl’s autobiography.

Even though many people praise hypertext fiction for the ability it gives to the reader to interact with the text and make their own story, on the other hand it allows for a lot of confusion and room for the reader to get lost. So to combat this flaw “These Waves of Girls” gives an option where you can follow a directed path, so the reader if they wish can follow the story in sequential order. This is very beneficial because many people, including Coover, argue that hypertext fiction endangers key values of literature such as “unity, integrity, coherence, vision, voice”. This text even gives the option for sound to be incorporated, as certain parts of the story can be listened to, once again adding a non-traditional element that books do not have, as well as allowing the reader to follow the story more smoothly. So, all of these options are allowing the reader to get a more vivid reading experience, in which they can engage the text more deeply, and are in a sense co-authoring the story.

As the reader, or co-author, progresses through the story they begin to see that the pages range from a different age in the girl’s life, and gets to learn about this girl’s sexuality at various points. A lot of the pictures are a bit obscure, and this is said to exemplify the idea of “as though being filtered through a hazy memory”. Still though, these pictures make the story more lively as some are interactive, when you scroll over them they change around, and some even have sound. The main picture for this manipulation is that of a female’s breast, and when you scroll over it, it acts as if you were grabbing it. Even with a somewhat clouded and unreliable memory the overarching theme of “a girl coming to terms with her lesbian identity” becomes apparent. This sexual intensity can be most directly seen in the vertical pages of the story where the reader must use the scroll bar to read that whole page. As the reader scrolls down the intensity of the sexual story increases. The pictures that accompany most of these stories seem to be mainly photographs of which could be from the family picture album or the girl’s diary. Another explanation of why these photos are distorted is that the girl telling the story wants you the reader to feel like her, in that she is different, a lesbian. She engages in activities that others would not see as normal, like having homosexual feelings, and because of this it distorts the innocent pictures from her childhood. Some of the sounds in the story also work in unison with these distorted images, especially the girls’ laughter. It is thought that the laugher is not a mocking juvenile girl laugh, but is a coping mechanism in which the young girl is crying to conceal her tears. Childhood can be a very rough time for a kid, especially when they are different and do not fit in with everyone. This same idea of being different and not fitting in can be seen through Shelley Jackson’s interactive fiction piece “Patchwork Girl”.



Still though, there is a continual question of how truthful the narrator is being throughout the story. Even though it is fiction the question remains of if the supposed narrator actually experienced these events, or if she is simply making them up. One specific instance is where she says, “ I write, but it doesn’t need to be my life, exactly. It lets me fill in the parts I forget. One name. One moment. A hand on my thigh that reminds me of all the other hands. Of yours.” This once again goes back to the fuzzy images, and whether it is just that she cannot fully recount the events, or if she’s telling us how she wanted the events to happen. This is a problem with a subjective narrator; the reader never knows how truthful they are being. So the reader must decide if the story teller is trying to recall the events of her past as well as she can, or if she is just making up a farfetched story for attention. Either way this is calling for more involvement with the text, whereas a reader may not get this same engagement in a different form of text.

Overall, the hypertext aspect really allows this story to be told in a unique way that a traditional book could not. The links allow the reader to constantly transport back and forth from seeing the girl at a young age, and then seeing her more grown up. This allows the reader to see the girl’s memories first hand, as well as her thoughts about herself, and then to at any point jump to a time where she is much more mature and has used these past experiences to shape who she is now. And the other aspect that the hypertext links really brings out is as “a means to reproduce the feeling of secrecy, whispered gossips, and ever circulating rumors playing an important role in school girls lives”. As the reader clicks on a various link they are exposed to a certain story, and then from clicking on a certain word or phrase from that story they get to see another passage that somehow relates to the original link clicked. And this in turn is like a circle and you get to see how certain things are started or how they are spread. By seeing all of these stories swirl around they are letting the reader see the girl coming of age, and how she got to be the person she became.

Hegirascope (Tim Rogers)
Some may argue that the beauty of a film is the ability to control the pace of a story’s progression. This keeps the viewer on track as the author or director intends. As explored above, hypertext fiction clearly does not respect an author’s wish to portray one single story. Stuart Moultrop’s Hegirascope  is a hypertext fiction that advances at set intervals of thirty seconds per page. Moultrop walks the line in controlling his fiction with these intervals. However, it is up to the reader to determine their own interpretation of the story. Clicking hyperlinks allows the story to move in completely different directions. Yet, the thirty second timer remains on each page to keep with the flow, never quite relinquishing total control to the reader.

The Hegirascope was released in 1995 and updated in 1997 by Moultrop. Keeping with his tendency to hold on to some control, Moultrop litters over 700 links in his work that are often hidden and difficult to follow. When the reader is lucky enough to reach a page with controls, options are presented to progress in the story. To me, this closely resembled a digital version of a choose-your-own-adventure book with many possibilities. A reader’s individual path through Hegirascope is very difficult to recreate, allowing for a unique experience every time. Hegirascope lacks images or other supplements but changes the page background and text colors, reminding the reader of the automatic page change. Moultrop places all the links on the sides of the page's content, which I found easier to navigate and involving less guesswork.

As a piece of literature or work of art, the Hegirascope stands on its own as a pivotal work in the genre of Hypertext Fiction. The work won the Eastgate Systems HYSTRUCT Award and has received much acclaim and criticism over the years. Hegirascope serves to be a mockery of both popular culture and hypertext fiction itself. It uses popular expressions throughout the work to represent hectic day-to-day life, and it starts to give the user control but rescinds that control with the automatic page timer, jeering at the open nature of Hypertext Fiction. Some pages, such as "Two," cobble together common expressions and lines from popular culture, such as "Two may keep a secret if one of them is dead / Two lefts do not make a right." This continues on other pages to give a sense of bombardment, both by the story itself moving so quickly and the content representing society's information overload. Every turn leads to more information overload, with no escape.



Just as other works of Hypertext Fiction seem to lack a unified purpose, Hegirascope can be confusing and appear to have no central plot or theme. There is no sense of closure as one may find in traditional forms of literature. As the user clicks through the story, he creates his own beginning, middle, and end. I had trouble reading through Hegirascope because the pages automatically change a little too fast. However, since there is no aspect of needing to read every word, this kept me moving and from trying to overanalyze each page's content. I felt more connected to the idea of the Hegirascope than to its actual content as I was briskly thrown from page to page.