hyperfiction

[Timothy C. May]

RADLEY-FASCIONE M D writes:

> excuse my ignorance, but could someone please explain to me what 
> hyperfiction is? also, what is TADS?
> is this some sort of interactive literature. It sounds great

Hyperfiction is based on hypertext, the "nonlinear" system of writing
espoused by folks like Ted Nelson (author of the seminal "Computer
Lib," the second most important book of 1973) and represented by
products like Apple's "HyperCard" (a crude version), Xerox's
"Notecards," Brown University's "Intermdedia," and Eastgate System's
"Storyspace." And the recent excitement on the Internet about the
World Wide Web (WWW) and Mosaic, both tools for using hypertext and
hypermedia, indicates where things are going.

Chunks of text, called nodes, are linked to other chunks in nameed
pathways, resembling a giant labyrinth or interconnected web. (The
"hyper" is as in "hyperspace," and extra-dimensional connectivity.)

Hypertext can be used in several basic ways:

1. To allow readers to "click on" unfamiliar words, for definitions
and short articles, and to explore some subject in much more detail.

2. To gain access to footnotes, critiques, reviews, and glosses on the
basic text. In principal, every commentary on GR, for example, could
be linked, cross-linked, and available to readers. Sort of a super
version of Weisenberger's "Companion."

(The advantages for scientific research, let alone other types of
research, should be clear.)

3. Alternate routes through a fiction can be followed, with the scenes
no longer constrained to be laid out in a linear order. Borges and
Cortazar are often cited as authors already writing in this style (and
some say the "cut and paste" writings of Burroughs fit this, but I
have my doubts).

Some literary experimentalists are much enamored of this technique and
are playing with it today. Brown U. had a major effort in their
"Intermedia" project, with Robert Coover teaching classes using
it. (Intermdedia stopped running when the Macintosh operating system
was upgraded, and Brown stopped supporting it. Coover has recently
been using "Storyspace.")

A product I use, as do many other writers (ha!), is "Storyspace." It
allows chunks/nodes to be linked arbitrarily with named paths, i.e.,
any scene or chunk may have as many paths emanating from it as the
author wishes, each with some name (such as "basic plot" or "dream
state").

Some authors have distributed the results as hypertexts, with mixed
results. I have several of these, available from Eastgate, and find
them too hard to read---the author is not making the plot choices, so
the reader has to construct a consistent reality from "hints." In
engineering terms, we would call this "underconstrained."

I expect the first major uses will be in education, with multimedia
(graphics, video clips, sound, etc.) attached to texts to help
explicate them for students. And literary criticism (there's an active
community of such folks, including Stuart Moulthrop, David Bolter,
Robert Coover, and others).

The "holy grail" for hyperfiction folks has, not surprisingly to you
folks, been putting GR into such a form. I've heard many folks in the
hypertext community speculate on this over the years.

I hope this helps.

--Tim May


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