scibe> faq — plain questions, plain answers

The plain questions, answered plainly. Everything here rests on the record the edition already stands on—the about page, the colophon, and the wiki—and links to it rather than repeating it at length. For the words, the glossary; for who and what occurs where, the index.

WTF is this?

This is My Name is Scibe, a collaborative hyperfiction written in 1994—sixty-seven short pieces, called lexias, posted live between August 17 and November 25, 1994, in two online rooms, ARTS WIRE and The WELL. It began with one writer in a bad way: Judy Malloy had been seriously hurt that July, and from her bed in Tempe, Arizona—steel rods in her legs, a laptop borrowed from Xerox PARC—she wrote out the pain under a misspelled name and asked the people in her rooms for the one thing a sickroom can’t give you: windows on the world. They answered. Seven other writers began posting pieces of their own lives toward her—hospital wards, highways, kitchens, conferences—and the exchange became this.

This site is its preservation edition, made in October 2026: the 1994 text and links exactly as written, in a new frame, with a reading of every page. The about page tells the story properly; the colophon says how the edition was made.

Who wrote it?

Eight writers. Judy Malloy first—she began it, named it, and orchestrated it as it grew—and then, in the order of the 1994 copyright line: Tom Igoe, Chris Abraham, Tim Collins, Anna Couey, Valerie Gardiner, Joseph Wilson, and Doug Cohen. Their pieces are signed in the headers each lexia still wears; the who page lists them, and the wiki has what is known of each.

What is hyperfiction?

Fiction built out of links. Instead of one text in one order, a hyperfiction is a pool of passages—lexias—joined by links, and the reader’s choices among the links compose the story that actually gets read. There is no single correct order and no hidden right path; the work is the pool and the paths together.

Scibe is an early instance of the form, and a strange one: the better-known hyperfictions of the period were single authors building labyrinths in special software. Scibe’s branching happened because eight people were writing into the same work at the same time, from two different systems, over one autumn. More in the wiki.

What is collaborative writing? Did they plan this?

Collaborative writing is several writers making one work together, in a shared place, answering each other’s pieces as they appear—as opposed to one writer alone, or writers passing a manuscript back and forth in private.

Scibe was not planned. Malloy’s own words, on the title page, are that the collaboration was “hoped for but not asked for”: she asked her rooms for windows on the world, and the rooms answered with their lives. The other seven were not commissioned and did not coordinate; the work’s shape—its two strands, its refrains passing from writer to writer—is the shape of the exchange itself. The glossary has the short version; the wiki has the writers.

What’s a lexia, and how do I read a work with no beginning-to-end order?

A lexia is one piece of the work—one posting, under the header it was posted with in 1994: conference and topic number, the writer’s name, the date. Scibe has sixty-seven.

Reading it is simple, and there is no way to do it wrong. Start at the title page and press read, or open lexia 1 directly. At the foot of every lexia stand the choices its 1994 page offered: go forward, go back, follow a link, rewind, go home. From lexia 1 two strands open—to lexias 2 and 51—and they interweave from there. Follow whichever pulls. You can also read straight through from 1 to 67, follow one writer by way of the who page, or navigate by person, place and thing in the index. If reading on a screen isn’t for you, every page carries a reading aloud—see below.

What were ARTS WIRE and The WELL? Which parts of Scibe lived where?

They were online communities from before the web—text-only, reached by modem, organized into conferences on subjects, where you posted under your real name and the talk stayed.

ARTS WIRE was the arts, online: a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts, running 1992 to 2002, proposed by Seattle artist Anne Focke. Malloy joined its staff in 1993; she did not found it. The WELL—the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, founded in Sausalito in 1985—was the older and larger room, famous for the quality of its talk and its founding rule, You Own Your Own Words. The wiki has entries on ARTS WIRE and The WELL.

Scibe was written simultaneously in both—Malloy posted into ARTS WIRE’s Interactive conference and into a WELL arts conference, and the other writers answered from whichever room they lived in; the header on each lexia tells you where a piece was posted. The two halves kept talking to each other: Judy is always reporting what is happening “on Arts Wire” and looking “out my WELL window” in the same breath.

A third name, TMN (The Meta Network), belongs only at the edge of the story: in the work’s web years the ARTS WIRE edition was served from TMN’s tmn.com addresses, and lexia 66 links out to it. Those addresses are long dead. This edition was copied from The WELL, where the work survives entire.

Why does it look like a terminal?

Because that is what 1994 looked like. Scibe was written on screens of amber or green text, eighty columns wide, in rooms made of words—and its writers were logging in from hospital beds, borrowed floors, motel rooms and the road. The amber type and the command lines of this edition are not decoration; they keep the work in its native weather. The lexia pages are set at the width the work was written for, and every page of the frame is made of text you could have read over a modem.

Can I listen instead of reading?

Yes. Every lexia has been read aloud—one voice per writer, and a voice modelled on Judy Malloy’s own for the title page—and the reading sits at the top of each page. The whole work is also a podcast: the feed is linked from the title page, and a podcast app will play the title page and the sixty-seven lexias in story order. The readings are this edition’s addition; the words they speak are 1994’s, unchanged.

Why is it on the web now? Who put it here?

Preservation. The work had exactly one home left: a directory in Judy Malloy’s pages on The WELL. If that goes, the work goes—and its twin, the ARTS WIRE copy, is already gone. So in October 2026 the WELL original was spidered complete—every page, every link—and rebuilt here, text untouched, where it can be read, heard, searched and cited.

The edition names no maker in its frame; that is deliberate, and the work’s eight authors are the only names it trades in. Questions, corrections and objections go to the contact address in the colophon.

Who owns the text? What happens if a rights holder objects?

The eight writers own it, exactly as they did in 1994: the copyright line carried across the edition—“© 1994 Judy Malloy, Tom Igoe, Chris Abraham, Tim Collins, Anna Couey, Valerie Gardiner, Joseph Wilson, Douglas Cohen”—is the whole of the law here. This edition asserts no new rights in the work and claims no ownership beyond each author’s own share.

And the standing rule, stated in the colophon, is simple: if Judy Malloy, or any of the eight writers, or any rights holder, objects to any part of this preservation, a line to the address in the colophon and the site comes down—promptly, and without argument.

Is there more like this?

One direct descendant. In 1997 Chris Abraham opened Item 8 in the artist conference on TMN—an open, public room, set up in Scibe’s image, where anyone could write; among those who chose to write there were students from Ginny Little’s writing classes. It was nobody’s assignment and part of no program. (Little and Abraham separately co-taught an accredited online creative-writing course for EFA—Education for the Arts, the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency’s magnet program—but that course was its own thing, next door to Item 8, not around it.) Item 8’s own FAQ tells that story.

And Scibe itself still stands where it always stood: the 1994 original is on The WELL, in Judy Malloy’s pages—the footer of every page here links it, and it rewards the visit.