Hyperfiction

Hyperfiction is fiction built from hypertext: a story told in passages—lexias—joined by links, where the reader’s choices among the links compose the story actually read. No single order is the work; the work is the pool of passages and the paths among them. Espen Aarseth gave the reading of such texts a name—ergodic literature—in which nontrivial effort is required to traverse the text: the reader does not merely turn pages but decides, at every node, where the story goes next. Print had rehearsed the form before the word existed—in Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), and Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963)—but the computer made the links live.

The first hypertext fictions predate the web and were made with conferencing systems and dedicated software. Scholarship names two pioneers: Judy Malloy and Michael Joyce. Malloy’s Uncle Roger (1986–87) ran on Art Com Electronic Network on The WELL—a three-part “narrabase”, a narrative database the reader searched with keywords and Boolean operators rather than followed page by page. It was sold on floppy disks in 1987–88 and later moved to the web, and it is routinely described as the first online hyperfiction. Its author has her own entry in this wiki.

Joyce’s afternoon, a story was demonstrated at the first ACM Hypertext conference in 1987 and published by Eastgate Systems in 1990 as the first commercial hypertext fiction. A narrator who may have seen his son die that morning; a structure of guarded, looping lexias in which what has happened depends on the path taken and the order of visits—afternoon became the form’s most studied work, the proof that a linked text could sustain the ambitions of a novel.

The instrument of that school was Storyspace, the hypertext authoring software created by Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce, and John B. Smith. Bolter and Joyce sold Storyspace to Eastgate in 1990, and Eastgate—founded in Watertown, Massachusetts, in December 1982 by Mark Bernstein—became the main publisher and distributor of hypertext fiction in the 1990s, selling serious hypertexts on diskette by mail order in the years before the web could carry them. Novelist Robert Coover introduced the new form to print readers in the New York Times Book Review in the early 1990s, and an early-1990s canon formed that scholars call the Storyspace school: Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, Malloy’s its name was Penelope (exhibited 1989, published by Eastgate 1993), and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995), whose stitched-together female monster—part Mary Shelley, part the author, part the reader—is the form’s own figure for itself: a body made of linked pieces. N. Katherine Hayles names the period the first-generation hypertext era; George Landow’s distinction between axial hypertexts (a line with exits) and networked ones (a web without a spine) maps its range.

Scibe belongs to this moment but not to this school. It is not one author engineering a labyrinth in Storyspace; it is eight writers posting live into two conferencing systems, the links drawn between pieces of an actual exchange. Networked in Landow’s sense, it is hyperfiction as conversation—its branching produced not by design alone but by several lives being lived in the same two rooms at the same time.

From 1995 the form moved onto the web: Moulthrop’s Hegirascope (1995), Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996), Mark Amerika’s GRAMMATRON (1997), which reached the Whitney Biennial in 2000. Hyperfiction never became a mass form—writing stories that must re-establish their world at every node is genuinely hard, as Steven Johnson argued in a 2013 Wired post-mortem—but its descendants are numerous: Twine fictions are cited in the scholarship as its direct heirs, and every branching narrative since walks paths these writers cut. Its historical place is secure: it is where literature first learned to use the link.

Sources and further reading