As the technology of hypertext matures and becomes widespread, the changes it brings to textuality will affect all fields of writing, including those associated with literature. Using an important recent work of hypertextual fiction as a focal point, this paper offers a perspective on hypertext informed by literary and social criticism. It invokes Jean Baudrillard’s distinction between technologies of displacement (the “robot”) and technologies of augmentation (the “automaton”) to argue for the design of texts and systems that are accessible and enabling rather than opaque and objectifying.
II. HYPERTEXT AND DECONSTRUCTION
The arrival of hypertext is more than an advance in information technology. Seen from the viewpoint of textual theory, hypertext systems appear as the practical implementation of a conceptual movement that coincides with the late phase of modernity. This movement rejects authoritarian, “logocentric” hierarchies of language, whose modes of operation are linear and deductive, and seeks instead systems of discourse that admit a plurality of meanings, where the operative modes are hypothesis and interpretive play and hierarchies are contingent and local. The editors of a recent collection of post-structuralist literary criticism strike a characteristic note when they announce that each of the essaysin their volume “develops an insistent coherence of its own that drives toward conclusive and irrefutable assertions. But it does this while holding open the possibility of a multiplicity of competing meanings, each of which denies the primacy of the others” (Mach87,7).
Until recently this deconstruction of discursive authority seemed to have only limited relevance to society at large. Critical debatesover literary texts, however vigorous, never seemed to have much bearing on the future of information systems or the political economy of the west. But hypertext offers to make the interpretive agenda of post-structuralist literary theory a matter of general textual practice. Now every instance of written discourse, from the corporate memo to the visionary novel, lies open to deconstruction in actu. Since any writing can be linked or woven into a de-centered matrix of information, its affiliation with a specific, identifiable speech act comes into question. Issues that were once of concern mainly to philosophers of language thus have begun to present themselves to theorists of information technology under the guise of problems in groupware design, versioning, and on-line publishing. While it may at first seem that deconstruction and the creation of distributed electronic text systems are incommensurable parts of the same phenomenon, in fact they are united in principle. The changes that have come to the technology of writing take us out of the realm of self-validating truths and decrees and place us instead in a context that requires negotiation, cross-reference, and a constant awareness of diversity, This fundamental change in our discursive practices cannot help but have effects on social institutions beyond the domains of literature and media. If we are to respond intelligently to these developments it is essential that we begin a dialogue between theorists of literature and theorists of information technology, and that ideas emerging out of this collaboration be implemented both in technical and artistic practice—categories which may in fact tend strongly to converge in the next decades.
In order to approach hypertext from some ground common both to literature and information technology we require a broader view of technology and social change. The perspective adopted here draws on the work of JeanBaudrillard, a social theorist who has written extensively on the phenomenon of simulation. Baudrillard uses this term both in reference to specific technologies, such as the creation of “artificial realities” in military training applications, and to more general cultural practices, such as the political influence of “silent majorities” and other demographic inventions. According to Baudrillard, simulation subverts reality: “Simulation is no longer that of territory, a referential being or a substance.It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baud83,2).
Needless to say, this notion of “hyperreality” is highly problematic and the objections to Baudrillard’s views have been many (see for instance Jame86,85; Krok88,14-16; Hutc88, 223). Like Marshall McLuhan, whom Baudrillard occasionally and grudgingly accepts as a precursor, Baudrillard seems to posit an unfallen state—McLuhan’s “unified sensorium,” Baudrlllard’s pre-simulation “reality”—into which the serpent of postmodern technology has crept. This view is of course perilously naïve: no definition of “reality” can divorce itself so neatly from technology. “Reality,” however defined, depends in large measure on technologies of perception and representation. Baudrillard’s conflict of “reality” and “the hyperreal” is really a struggle between competing technologies or modes of cognition—the same struggle between authoritative, serial processes and de-centralized, parallel processes whose traces can be seen in the development of hypertext. Hence, in spite of its naïveté, Baudrillard’s commentary on “the precession of simulacra” can be essential in an understanding of hypertext and its larger social implications. This paper is an attempt to outline such an understanding through examination of one hypertext system, Bolter, Joyce, and Smith’s Storyspace, and scrutiny of a work of narrative fiction written as a demonstration of that system, Michael Joyce’s “Afternoon.”
III. FICTION MACHINES
According to Jean Baudrillard, the rise of simulation threatens an apocalypse:
Here comes the time of the great Culture of tactile communication, under the sign of the technico-luminous cinematic space of total spatio-dynamic theatre.... This is a completely imaginary contact-world of sensorial mimetics and tactile mysticism; it is essentially an entire ecology that is grafted on this universe of operational simulation, multistimulation and multiresponse (Baud83,140).
Baudrillard has clearly seen something terrifying on the horizon, but it is hard to say exactly what that might be. Perhaps it is a new technology of entertainment (“feelies” or “simstim”), perhaps a global information order (“noösphere” or “matrix”), perhaps it is some sinister extension of the present media ecology combining all of the above. Whatever it may be, Baudrillard’s bogey has not yet caught up with us. In spite of the apparent dominance of reality-as-representation or “the hyperreal,” the organization of political and economic life in the west has not yet become an artificially determined feedback circuit. If it had, after all, Baudrillard’s warning would have been pre-empted: the self-referential mechanisms of representation would be invisibly woven into the fabric of reality, beyond all critique. It is still possible to isolate and criticize self- generating sign systems. We retain the ability to examine the implications of “a universe of operational simulation” and to adopt countermeasures should these implications prove as dangerous as Baudrillard suggests. A “total spatio-dynamic theatre” might be well and good so long as the emergency exits were clearly marked; but such totalizing structures often provide no outlets, or tend to collapse into a singularity from which nothing can escape. It follows that we must carefully scrutinize changes in communications media, particularly where those changes affect the scope of imagination and expression. This scrutiny seems especially appropriate to recent changes in the possibilities for literature, particularly in the domain of hypertextual narrative and interactive fiction, for it is there that the foundations of Baudrillard’s globe-theatre may even now be taking shape.
David Porush has identified a genre of “cybernetic fiction” in which authors confront the importance of the machine by playing on the recognition that “their texts are constructed of words, that words are part of the larger machinery of language, and that language is shaped the still larger machinery of their own consciousness....” But this play is not to be taken too seriously; for all their gestures toward immachination, these writers are careful to register the fact that their texts are products of human agency (Poru85, 19). These writers regard fictional mechanism strictly as a metaphor, but as Porush observes, the metaphor tends to escape the bounds of the figural. Cybernetic fiction is the first step toward the construction of actual fiction machines.
Such fictive engines have existed for some time, both as experimental novels (e.g., Cortazar’s Hopscotch or Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars) and more recently as electronic fictions (e.g., Disch’s Amnesia or Pinsky’s Mindwheel). All of these mechanized narratives set out to revolutionize the traditional economy of story (or narrative potential) and discourse (or actual telling). Instead of offering a single, exclusive arabesque through a universe of possibilities, these fictions allow readers to choose among multiple paths. Given divergent choices, the narrative may differ markedly from one reading to the next. The discourse of the moment emerges through an asynchronous exchange between reader’s desires and writer’s designs—hence works of this sort are often called ‘interactive fiction’, even though strictly speaking that is a misnomer. As one forthright writer of such fictions confesses: “There are grounds for arguing that no truly interactive system of any sort exists —except perhaps implanted pacemakers and defibrillators—since true interaction implies that... initiatives taken by either user or system alter the behavior of the other” (Joyc89,7).
The greatest obstacle to interactivity in fiction resides in the text-to-reader leg of the feedback loop. The narrator of Tristram Shandy proclaims that good writing “is but a different name for conversation,” but his claim is disingenuous. In true social interaction the interlocutor must be free to range in any discursive direction, but writers of fiction exercise such liberty only at the expense of coherence and intention, qualities which even post-or anti-modernists have a hard time abandoning. The cleverest “interactive” systems, like the simulated raconteur RACIER, put no constraints on the reader-to-text leg of the loop, but all impose limits on the text’s response.
Hence experiments in multiple narrative find themselves flanked by problematic alternatives. On one hand lies the text as trackless expanse, which is the dangerous topography Milorad Pavic stakes out in his “lexicon novel in 100,000 words,” Dictionary of the Khazars. The book is a collection of documents concerning a vanished Central European people, spanning twelve or thirteen centuries and comprising dozens of characters and narrative lines. As in any encyclopedia, there is no predefined sequence of reading nor is it easy to infer any single, hierarchical assembly of the data. The reader needs a great deal of curiosity and resourcefulness to survive in this unknown territory and no doubt none but the very brave will attempt the journey. This is perhaps the ironic point of the epigraph that appears just inside the title page: “Here lies the reader / Who will never open this book. / He is here forever dead”(Pavi88, 3).
If we proceed in the opposite direction from Pavic’s wilderness of signs we come to the text as Cretan labyrinth, where the reader must either penetrate to the center or be liquidated by some pre-emptive fate. The first generation of “electronic novels,” most of them heavily indebted to role-playing games, present this sort of geography. In Pinsky, Hales, and Mataga’s Mindwheel, for instance, reading consists of an interrogative journey through four electronically preserved minds. The reader is dispatched by a guide (“Dr. Virgil”) in search of a “wheel of power” that will save humankind from self-destruction.
Readers who fail to follow the right set of clues, or who cannot elicit these clues from the programmed “minds,” draw this response from Dr. Virgil: “Perhaps you are not the right one for this quest.... Whatever you did, it seems to have been particularly senseless for somebody trying to save a planet. Oh well, do you want to try again?” (Pins87,75).
The expected answer in this case is of course “yes”—readers are meant to cycle through a series of experimental assaults until they solve all the verbal puzzles presented by the text, and any reader can succeed eventually: all enigmas here have solutions. As their earliest critics observed, electronic texts like Mindwheel are informed by “the optimism of the scientist at least as much as the mystery of art” (Nies84, 122). They are thus necessarily committed to certainty and singularity, since readers are rewarded for eliminating alternatives and zeroing in on the most successful strategy. Such empirical entertainments have their value, of course, and I would argue vigorously for their importance as a genre; but it would be wrong to suggest that they exhaust the possibilities of interactive fiction.
IV. AFTERNOON OF THE SIMULACRA
There is a course open to hypertextual narrative which leads neither to the puzzle palace nor to the wilderness. In 1985, setting out to write a “test file” for a new interactive text program, the novelist Michael Joyce produced a variably structured fiction called “Afternoon,” a piece that marks an important innovation in interactive narrative. Joyce’s story, loosely inspired by Cortazar and Antonioni, invites the reader to circulate digressively among a matrix of characters and events that are never quite what they seem on first presentation. “I want to say that I may have seen my son die this morning,” an unspecified speaker confides in many versions of the narrative, disclosing a rich field of fictive possibility. But the narrative produced by “Afternoon” will not validate or disprove either the speaker’s desire or his perception. Like the Dictionary of the Khazars, “Afternoon” is a “mystery” only in the older sense of that word, the sense of ritual or hieratic procedure. But unlike Pavic’s openwork encyclopedia, “Afternoon” does provide someovert structure, wherein lies its importance for cybernetic fiction.
In the first generation of electronic fictions, the reader’s ‘interaction’ with the narrative is controlled by a parser: a routine that scans anything the reader types on the prompt line, searches for certain strings of characters, and identifies the chunk of text indexed to a given string. This response convention is the most pernicious kind of referendum—it solicits ‘free’ responses but is in fact able to respond only to a very restricted set of constructions. Unhappy with this arrangement, Joyce introduces a different convention in “Afternoon,” built around “words that yield.” A word in the text “yields” when it cues the next discursive move. For instance, in the phrase “I may have seen my son die this morning, ” “son” or “die” lead to an accident site, where the narrator finds skid marks and a school report on “The Sun King.” Under the convention of yield words, Joyce’s text becomes a scattering of fragments which may be reassembled by verbal association. Yet this implied re-weaving of the text does not mean that “Afternoon” is driven by a desire for wholeness and singularity.
The notion of “words that yield” replaces a fraudulent referendum with a fairly straightforward multiple choice. This is still a reductive structure, but Joyce limits tendencies in this direction by making the entire process of selection optional. Almost every textual node in “Afternoon” carries a default link triggered when the reader either enters some word without a specific yield or simply sends a blank response. This means that any response will generate movement through the text, and it therefore also means that the reader usually will not know if a transition was activated by a yield word or by default. This design decision effectively removes “Afternoon” from the problem-solving genre. There are no grail quests here; to read “Afternoon” is to wander and explore, not to seek and appropriate. The text preserves a more or less coherent linearity, but it does not sacrifice associative freedom. It therefore represents, I would argue, the most successful current application of “hypertext” (or “non-sequential writing”) to fictional narrative.
“Afternoon” redefines the limits of its genre, suggesting that electronic fiction may be about to come into its own as a form of literature. But because it defines the state of the art, Joyce’s text also reveals some inherent problems in hypertextual fiction—problems whose implications need serious attention. Considered from the point of view of an ordinary reader, “Afternoon” seems an elegant compromise of formality and free play. But an ordinary reader’s perspective is of only limited value here. No hypertext is ever identical with its functional product, and there is much more to “Afternoon” than meets the reader’s eye. Above the network of interwoven, intersecting stories is a hypertext system called Storyspace (Joyc88, 10). The relationship of “Afternoon” to this unseen structure is peculiar, and it suggests that the tension between determination and randomness in hypertextual fiction may not be so easily resolvable.
The description of Joyce’s “yield” scheme given above omitted an important detail. The transition from one place in the text to another is governed in some cases not just by the reader’s current response, but also by the history of her previous responses. The linking mechanism in Storyspace allows the writer to specify both the verbal content that will trigger the link and a list of places which the reader must have visited beforehand. Unless both conditions are satisfied, the “yield” link is replaced by the “default” link. With this system in operation, “Afternoon” resembles an automated railway in which the points keep switching of their own accord. Since the story is heavily recursive, readers may find themselves frequently returning to the same textual locales; but a yield word that took them from “son” to “Sun King” on the first iteration may now lead somewhere else entirely. The text can seem to have a mind of its own and readers may easily feel lost within its shifting circuitry—an outcome consistent with the nondeterminist principles of the text. Joyce has said that “Afternoon” has “no flow chart” and that there is no sense in trying to map its complexities. The mysteries of the text’s design and function are not meant to be penetrated; it comes to us already deconstructed, designed for reception as process, not product.
And yet Storyspace contains a facility that could help to demystify such complexities: a function that generates graphic representations of structures created within it. The program can at least approximate a map or architectural outline (if not a circuit diagram) of “Afternoon” - in fact it does so automatically whenever one opens the text with the structure editor as opposed to the separate reading module. Jay David Bolter, co-designer of Storyspace, contends that hypertext frameworks represent an evolutionary step in the technology of writing (Bolt89, 12). These systems for “topographical writing” are intended to satisfy the impulse writers have always felt to move beyond the two dimensions of linear text into the three dimensions (and more) of text-as-network. Obviously readers cannot follow meaningfully into this “writing space” unless they are provided with some sort of navigational aid, so a mapping facility becomes essential, if only for orientation (Land87, 331). But the map display in Storyspace is not just a visual index. Changing the appearance of the map, for instance by redrawing a link line so that it points to a different locale, changes the actual organization of the text, in this case rerouting a pathway from one place to another. The map is not only an aid to navigation but a tool for reshaping the text. Reading space becomes writing space.
This sort of sympathetic or as Jorge Luis Borges called “partial” magic, whereby the map becomes a metaleptic surrogate for the thing it represents, brings us back to the discourse of simulation. Baudrillard’s essay on the subject begins with a reference to Borges, in whose vision the map-as-territory decays, leaving only the gross physicality of the real behind. Baudrillard inverts Borges’ parable, arguing that it is the real that has decayed, allowing its artificial, cartographic double to take its place. We no longer have access to reality, only to a systematic representation -hyperreality, which now recursively maps itself.
Applying Baudrillard’s analysis to Storyspace, one might at first suspect that the idea of mapping textual space is an analog for the encroachment of hyperreality. In this view, Bolter’s topographic writing space would represent an alienation of prose from its ‘proper’ procedures, a step toward the ultimate simulation of narrative. Hypertext, one might claim, threatens to replace the ‘reality’ of books with a ‘hyperreality’ of information networks whose complexities will give rise to uncontrolled self-reference and involution.
But this critique grossly misapplies the idea of simulation. In order to understand the true import of topographic writing, we must once again rewrite the parable of the map. For it appears that a map, when applied not to physical space but to textual or storyspace, does not represent a conspiracy to mimic and usurp prior structure. The textual map in Bolter’s writing space is not a simulacrum or doppelganger, it is an empowering abstraction. The difference lies in the fact that its techno-magical influence over the text is extensive rather than intensive. Baudrillard’s map-as-simulation is sinister because it subsumes“the real’ into an autonomous system. But the map of writing space cannot be self-governing because it lacks a feedback loop. It can transform the text but at least in versions of the program I have seen, it cannot spontaneously transform itself. The map exists only in order to pass information to and from the writer/reader. The terms of Baudrillard’s parable are thus re-inverted: this map acts not to guarantee the closure of an information system, but to open the system to change.
But the map, as we have seen, is not the only ordering principle available in Storyspace. The system of conditional “yields” developed in “Afternoon” employs a very different kind of structure, one that does contains a feedback loop: “Afternoon” is able to modify its current behavior by referring to a record of its previous behavior. More important, it performs this process in relative invisibility. Ordinary readers, who are concerned only with narrative discourse, are unaware of the logical transactions that underlie each textual jump. Set free to wander through the spaces of the story, they remain more or less unaware of the way the text is anticipating and controlling their movements. It is the logic of “yields,” then, and not the map, that most closely resembles Baudrillard’s spectre of supreme simulation.
V. ROBOTS AND AUTOMATA
The two ordering techniques we have under consideration here, the visible map as against the invisible protocol of transitions, stem from two different approaches to artificial systems, or as Baudrillard would have it, two different “orders of simulacra,” the automaton and the robot: “The automaton is the analogy of man and remains his interlocutor... . The [robot] is man’s equivalent and annexes him to itself in the unity of its operational process.”(Baud83,92-93). Bolter’s topographic writing system does indeed present an analogy of discursive consciousness (the ancient analogy from which spring ‘places of invention’ and ‘memory palaces’), and it is meant to augment rather than supplant human imagination. On the other hand, while the inner machinations of “Afternoon” would be hard to pass off as an artificial intelligence, they do operate as a sort of narrator-equivalent, and their tendency is definitely to “annex” the reader to their process.
Compared to its precursors, “Afternoon” is undoubtedly a kinder, gentler form of electronic fiction, and it would be ludicrous to present it as a pernicious mechanization of narrative: “Afternoon” is no plague vector for robotic literature. Indeed, Joyce’s preference for esoteric over exoteric structure has the weight of western literary tradition behind it. As he puts it, “a fiction is essentially a selfish interaction for both its author and its reader,” and it is hard to gainsay him this (Joyc89, 7). The problems of structure in “Afternoon” spring from causes rooted deep in the postindustrial imagination, indicating that our understanding of narrative, and of imaginary creations more generally, is approaching a crisis. The nature of this crisis is not hard to specify. There is a third order of simulacra in Baudrillard’s scheme, comprising “models from which proceed all forms according to the modulation of their differences” (Baud83, 100). It is in this order that we find the real terrors of simulation, chiefly the prospect of totalizing, self-governing systems that would be capable of dictating the terms of cultural, political, and economic survival.
One vision of the third order is William Gibson’s cybernetic “matrix,” a “consensual hallucination” representing the sum of electronic knowledge/capital (Gibs84,51-52). The world governed by this global simulacrum tends toward the dystopic—“like an experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button”—but out of narrative necessity if nothing else, Gibson’s world leaves some room for human agency. A starker and perhaps more accurate view of third-order simulation occurs in “Aliens,” a shrill but provocative short story by David Leavitt. Leavitt puts his prophecy in the mouth of a sixteen-year-old game hacker who announces“the great computer age when we won’t need dungeon masters. A machine will create for us a whole world into which we can be transported. We’ll live inside the machine —for a day, a year, our whole lives—and we’ll live the adventures the machine creates for us. We’re at the forefront of a major breakthrough - artificial imagination. The possibilities, needless to say, are endless” (Leav86,86-87).
Truer words have hardly ever been imagined. When the human propensity for world- building embraced the culture of the machine, it begat first cybernetic fictions and then fiction machines. Michael Joyce’s “Afternoon” has redeemed electronic fiction from adolescence, lifting it up from the dungeon of linear game quests into the relative liberty of Storyspace. But electronic fiction now finds itself at a decision point. If future developers pursue “robotic” structures like the esoteric machinery behind the “yields” in “Afternoon,” then the genre is likely to move toward seamless simulations that are less interactive than manipulative. Taken in this direction, electronic fiction could indeed provide the genetic material out of which “artificial imagination” might evolve. The suggestion that a few eccentric fictions could lead to the triumph of global simulation may seem to be paranoid fantasy, but assuredly it is a fantasy which the military-entertainment complex takes very seriously. And sometimes paranoia becomes parable. The greatest of such parables is Borges’ short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in which a secret cabal of faceless men produce the encyclopedia of an imaginary planet. Through a process of insidious subversion the culture and history of the imaginary world come to replace those of the real world: “The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and over that it is a rigor of chessmasters, not of angels” (Borg62, 17).
I submit that hypertextual fiction has the potential to instantiate such rigorous and un- angelic games. But if future writers and system designers turn their attention to ‘automated, structures like the topographic analog of Storyspace, the genre could evolve toward a literature not of “selfish interaction” but of genuine mutuality. It might contribute not to the further precession of simulacra but to more critical forms of social discourse. In an influential recent essay on postmodern aesthetics, the critic Frederic Jameson half-blindly foresees such a possibility:
An aesthetic of cognitive mapping—a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system—...will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism... the world space of multinational capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale. (Jame86, 92)
Jameson’s skepticism about a politically relevant postmodern art (“if there ever is any”) may have much to do with the fact that he has not yet encountered hypertext. Nevertheless Jameson’s projection is important, if nothing else because it underscores the fact that the changes in textuality with which we are concerned have important social and political implications—a fact that seems undeniable even if one does not share Jameson’s ideological agenda. The model of textual relations invoked in this “aesthetic of cognitive mapping” might well be an implementation of Roland Barthes’ dream of writing as “that social space that... allows no enunciative subject to hold the position of judge, teacher, analyst, confessor, or decoder” (Bart79, 81). Such a writing space presumes a new community of readers, writers, and designers of media—a community in which these roles would be much less sharply differentiated than they are now. There are signs that hypertext and hypertextual narrative are moving in this direction. HyperCard, for all its imperfections and despite its egregious lack of a map-driven structure editor, has introduced thousands to the basic concepts of distributed textuality. And more important, the likelihood that HyperTalk will become the scripting language of future Macintosh Systems suggests a future in which “robotic” design decisions will be easy enough to circumvent with the help of HyperTalk “automata.” The HyperCard world may constitute the low end of the hypertext enterprise, but it has nonetheless stimulated a number of projects which redefine the idea of interactivity in narrative. Robyn Miller’s “Manhole” (Prolog Software, 1988), situates its reader (interagent?) in a spatialized, object-oriented environment that invites a relatively free exploration of a three-dimensional space. John McDaid’s fiction-in-progress, “Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse,” allows its user to manipulate as well as explore the constraints of its textual space. If one looks beyond HyperCard and the PC world, more sophisticated systems such as Joseph Bates’ “Oz” hold the potential for further exploration of truly user-collaborative narrative—though with the prospect of “simulated realities” the Baudrillardian spectre once again presents itself.
The evolution of a new writing space or an“aesthetic of cognitive mapping” asks a lot of the future, but then, there is much indeed at stake. One way or the other, hypertext fiction appears destined to lead us toward a world “where we won’t need dungeon masters anymore”—but such an outcome could arise just as easily from the perfection of the dungeon as from its abolition, from the immanence of the masters as well as their eradication. It remains to be seen which world hypertext will ultimately allow us to produce.
VI. REFERENCES
[Bart79] Barthes, Roland, “From Work to Text,” in Textual Strategies, Josué Harari, ed., Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1979., pp. 73-81.
[Baud83] Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman Semiotext(e), New York, 1983.
[Bolt89] Bolter, Jay David, Writing Space, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New York, 1989 (to appear).
[Borg62] Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, trans. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, New Directions, New York, 1962.
[Gibs84] Gibson, William, Neuromuncer, Berkeley Books, New York, 1984.
[Hutc88] Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, New York, 1988.
[Jame86] Jameson, Frederic, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-71.
[Joyc88] Joyce, Michael, “Siren Shapes:Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts,” Academic Computing, November 1988.
[Joyc89] “Selfish Interaction: Subversive Texts and the Multiple Novel,” in Barton D. Thurber, ed., Literacy in the Computer Age, Paradigm Press,New York,
[Krok88] Kroker, Arthur and David Cook, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics, 2nd ed., St. Martins, New York, 1988.
[Land87] Landow, George P., “Relationally Encoded Links and the Rhetoric of Hypertext,” Hypertext ‘87 Papers. Hypertext ‘87 Conference, Chapel Hill, 1987.
[Leav86] Leavitt, David, “Aliens,” in Debra Spark, ed., 20 Under 30, Scribner’s, New York, 1986.
[Mach87] Machin, Richard and Christopher Norris, “Introduction,” in Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry., ed. Richard Machin and Christopher Norris, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
[Nies84] Niesz, Anthony J. and Norman Holland, ‘Interactive Fiction,” Critical Inquiry 11(1984): W-112.
[Pavi88] Pavic, Milorad, Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words, trans. Christina Pribicevic-Zoric, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1988.
[Pins87] Pinsky, Robert and P. Michael Campbell, “Mindwheel: a Game Session,” New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly , 10 (1987): 70-75.
[Poru85] Porush, David, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction, Methuen, New York, 1985.
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[Source: S. Moulthrop. 1989. Hypertext and “the Hyperreal”. In Proceedings of the Second Annual ACM Conference on Hypertext (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA) (HYPERTEXT’89). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 259–267. https://doi.org/10.1145/74224.74246.]