Hypertext Fiction Online

afternoon, a story, by Michael Joyce is arguably the first major work of hypertext fiction and is one of those works most critics deal with. This online version is from Hypertext Fiction Selections – part of the Norton site associated with their Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology (Edited by Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy. Norton, 1997.)

Matt K. pointed me to an interesting digression – a report, Hypertext Markets: a Report from Italy, by Walter Vannini, that discusses an Italian translation of afternoon, a story and the state of hypertext fiction in Italy. He draws attention to the proliferation of CD publications. When I was last in Italy I noticed at the newstands a proliferation of hybrid publications – magazines including a DVD or CD. You don’t see that much anymore in Canada.

The interest among mainstream print publishers seems to have settled on electronic titles of a more traditional kind than hypertext, i.e., multimedia, “family entertainment,” and educational/recreational titles, mainly on CD-ROMs. The catalog for such work is fairly rich, even if most of them are quick-and-dirty (and sometimes very dirty) recasts of previously published material. For the moment, most of these titles resemble the worst of documentary television, and require more or less the same amount of interaction (i.e., next to none at all).