My Name is Scibe is a collaborative hyperfiction: sixty-seven short pieces of writing—lexias—linked into a web, written simultaneously on ARTS WIRE and on The WELL in the second half of 1994. It begins on August 17, 1994, and the last dated posting is November 25 of that year.

It began in a sickbed. Judy Malloy was in Tempe, Arizona, recovering from a serious accident; she could not go out, and sometimes days went by when there was no human contact. On a laptop generously lent by Xerox PARC, she wrote as Scibe—a narrator who had asked for “Scribe” and been given “Scibe” by the Wizards—and she wrote out the pain: the hospital, the waiting rooms, the steel rods in her legs. Her introduction stands on the title page of this edition in her own words, where it has always stood.

The collaboration, in her phrase, was “hoped for but not asked for”. Around her, other writers simply began—Tom Igoe writing from a borrowed apartment in Boston, Chris Abraham from the road, Tim Collins walking Carson Street in Pittsburgh, Anna Couey, Valerie Gardiner crossing the country by car, Joseph Wilson, Doug Cohen—each a contributor posting the details of their own lives into the same two online rooms, “providing windows on the world for ‘scibe’”. The work stayed hers throughout: she is its main artist and its orchestrator—her narrator, her rooms, her design—and the others wrote toward her. The writers appear in the work in the order they arrived, and that order is the byline.

Each lexia keeps the header it was posted under—the conference number, the writer’s name, the date—because the headers are part of the work: they are how a reader in 1994 knew whose window they were looking through. The two strands that open from the first lexia interweave through dreams, hospitals, highways and kitchens, and the sixty-sixth lexia’s choices lead outward and home again.

Scibe belongs to the first moment networked writing became literature in public. It was written live, in two of the era’s defining online communities, in the year the web was young, and it survives essentially as it was written. It is cited in the scholarly record—ELMCIP carries it, and a 2024 Electronic Literature Conference paper lists it among Malloy’s works with its participants named—because works like this are the primary sources of electronic literature: not descriptions of the thing, but the thing itself.

This edition exists for one reason: preservation. It is a maintained clone of the 1994 work—an archive copy, kept complete and readable so that a fragile piece of literary history survives for future readers and scholars. The original lives on a single aging host, in one person’s directory, in the markup of its moment; if that copy goes, the work goes with it. This edition is the spare. How it was made, and what was and was not changed, is set out in the colophon.

A note in good faith: this clone was made to keep the work alive, not to claim it. The work belongs to its eight writers, Judy Malloy first among them. If Judy Malloy, or any co-author or rights holder, objects to any part of this edition, a line to cabraham@gmail.com will bring it down promptly and without argument.