Hyperizons

A study of interactive reading and readership in
hyperfiction theory and practice,
with an outlook to hyperfictions' future inspired by the reading of
Sophie's World and The Pandora Directive

 © Lisbeth Klastrup, 1997


This dissertation was written as a part of the Masters-programme in Image Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury 1996/1997. The dissertation was supervised by lecturer Bernard Sharratt. It was passed with distinction October 1997. It is currently on loan at the University of Kent University Library. For a brief introduction to the contents of the dissertation, please read the Introduction.


Readers guide: a few words on terminology and references
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Conclusion
Bibliography

A few words on terminology and quotations

This dissertation enters a field of study where both theory and practice are still at an infant stage and during the process of writing it, I have found that I have occasionally been forced to apply a terminology and methodology of my own invention. For instance, there are no guidelines in the MLA handbook on how to annotate a hyperfiction-work and I have consequently had to decide which way would be the most logical way to annotate my quotations. Hence, to ease the reading of the paper, I offer a brief explanation of the terminology and 'quotational' practice employed in this paper

In accordance with much of the existing literature on the subject, I refer to the individual unit (screen, 'page' or 'node') in a hypertext network as a 'lexia'.

Where I have not been able to find a precise term in the literature at hand, I have invented my own terms where I found it necessary to be able to describe some of the aspects of subject in question more distinctly. As a hyperfiction 'work' tells more than one story, and since the content of the stories it can tell depends on the way the reader navigates through the web of links the hyperfiction work provides, I have chosen to call this 'entity' of both stories and structure the 'storyweb' for the sake of both brevity and terminological clarity. In these storywebs, according to the way the author has linked the web, the reader will often find himself taken back again and again to certain lexias; these I have called key-scenes. Sometimes these key-scenes are part of a progressively ordered number of lexias. Where this has been the case, I refer to this path of lexias a key-trail.

I have chosen to quote the lexias, or snippets from these, as I would quote paragraphs from a 'hardcopy' work that is: separated from my own writing by means of indentation and font size.

Since one of the principal characteristics of hypertexts is the fact that they can be read from the vantage point of whichever lexia preferred, logically it is impossible to number the lexias in a progressive order like the pages in book. Consequently, it is not possible to anchor hyperfiction quotes by referring to specific pages or chapters and I have chosen to provide the link-name and/or path where the lexia in question can be found. For instance, when the reference at the end of a quotation reads:

"Afternoon, lexia: he, he says, my emphasis"


"Afternoon" :

refers to the title of the hyperfiction work,

"lexia: he, he says" :

'he, he says' refers to the name the author of the work has given this specific lexia. The lexias are ordered alphabetically under the menu-option 'Writing Spaces' in the Storyspace menubar and can be accessed directly from here by double-clicking on the lexia requested,

'my emphasis':

indicates that the words in bold in the quotation have been emphasized by me, not by the author of the lexia.

Should the reader be unfamiliar with the works of Michael Joyce and Stuart Moulthrop, I recommend that they visit Eastgate's website at which it is possible to order these two fictions. Furthermore, an extract of Moulthrop's Victory Garden is accessible at http://www.eastgate.com/VG/VGStart.html. Read the introduction to Joyce's afternoon at http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Afternoon.html. You may also visit the website linked with Sophie's World at http://www.sol.no/sofiesverden/.

I supplied the original hardcopy of this dissertation with a videotape containing a number of scenes from Sophie's World and The Pandora Directive recorded of the computer. Unfortunately, I am not able to provide this service for the WWW-readers, which might make the reading of part III somewhat less clarifying than I could have wished for. However, to my knowledge, both Sophie's World and The Pandora Directive should still be available at various computer game retailers.

 I welcome any comments or questions concerning this piece of work. Please forward them to lklastrup@hotmail.com.

 

Lisbeth Klastrup, Copenhagen, March 1999


Introduction

In the world of existing computer phenomena, a primitive predecessor to Gibson's cyberspace 'matrix', in the shape of hypertext structuring, is now finding its place in everyday reality. Conceptualised as early as in the 1940's by the American scientist Vannevar Bush, hypertext can be defined as the method of binding a number of documents or 'screens' together by means of links, mainly words, that when clicked on take the user to another text link elsewhere in the document or to another document altogether.

In the last few years the explosive growth of people accessing the World Wide Web seems to point in the direction of 'hypertext'-programs (and hence 'hypertext-thinking') becoming everybody's working tools, on an equal footing with word-processing programs such as Word or WordPerfect. As technology has advanced and the tools with which to create hypermedia produc