Just days from the year 2000, we can certainly appreciate the fact that the space odyssey now available has nothing in common with that imagined a few decades ago, a time in the not so distant past where the near future seemed to promise physical travel throughout the universe, across both space and time (accompanied by essentially traditional, imperialist or colonialist notions of the future, other planets substituting for Africa or the Far West).

Our world is therefore renewed in a much more profound manner, in terms of our very notion of communication, of human relationships, even of intimacy. For we have been given not a new means of locomotion, but a genuine extension of ourselves, a replicate of our brain - the personal computer, endowed with memory and capable of understanding and manipulating the signs of natural and artificial/logical languages; coupling the computer with the telephone has made it possible to project oneself as a virtual subject, or virtual presence, onto other screens, to exchange ideas, desires, fantasies, stories. We have then been able to build (potentially infinite) networks through countless documents and to set out on virtual journeys through the microcosms - interconnected texts, images and sounds - that compose them.

To accurately measure the impact of this exceptional tool on literary activity, we should first recall the distinction between traditional notions of text and "text" as conceived by post-structuralist and post-modern theoreticians. The latter was introduced by such authors as Roland Barthes precisely in order to define what authorial experimentations of the modern period (roughly, 1850 to the present) had to bring to literature. Authors of electronic literature have taken up this same conception of text to account for the specificity of their work:

Text is traditionally thought of as the faithful transcription of speech or narrative, its integrity fixed and preserved in writing. As such, it is understood (1) that the author must assign a beginning, a middle and an ending, (2) that he should give to the reading a unique, linear, and precise meaning, and (3) that the reader's task consists in correct interpretation.

To summarize, the classic text is a closed unit (a linguistic + a semantic unit), and its writing is clearly separate from its reading: the author remains master of the text; the reader must respect that mastery, and his task is to retrace the linear course of the reading previously assigned by the author, and to grasp its meaning, also determined beforehand. If several interpretations are found to be possible, it is understood that, in the end, one of them will be deemed to be better than the others: this will be the one considered most faithful to the original meaning of the text.

This notion emerged from the confluence, mainly in France, of Structuralist, Marxist and Freudian theories at the end of the sixties: text is henceforth thought of as a "fragment of language, itself placed within a perspective of languages." (Roland Barthes, "Texte (théorie du)", in Encyclopedia Universalis).

Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of Structuralism, contributed to explaining the operation of language and text by defining the basic element of all articulated language - the sign - as the convergence of a signifier (the materiality of letters and their order in words, phrases, paragraphs, chapters) and a signified (the meaning). Above all, he insisted on the arbitrariness of this convergence.

Marxism and Freudianism, whether or not one agrees with all their propositions, have nevertheless provided the two the great critical theories of the century, fundamental reassessments of the classic conception of the subject (center of the world, master of himself and of his utterances) and his relation to language. Marxism has been able to show the extent to which both the subject and the operations of the world are dependent on the economic order; Freudianism, that the unconscious, for being ignored, has all the more impact on the formation of one's personality, actions, and utterances.

Post-structuralist theoreticians have thus relied on the arbitrariness of the sign, such as defined by Saussure, and on the critique of the classic subject and his relationship with language, furnished by Marxism and Freudianism, to develop a new conception of text.

That the text stages the play of the signifier means that the classic linear organization of "beginning-middle-end" is undone, and replaced by a "stereographic [organization] of combinatory play" (R.Barthes, "Texte (théorie du)", in Encyclopedia Universalis), fragmentary, ramified, that is, at the concourse of multiple readings, one signifier leading to another in unexpected ways, allowing the reading to generate multiple meanings not necessarily thought out by the author:

«the subject of the writing and/or of the reading is not required to make objects (works, statements), but fields (texts, utterances); he is caught up in a topology himself.» (R. Barthes, "Texte (théorie de)", Encyclopedia Universalis)

The mutli-linearity of the course of writing/reading gives the signifier its autonomy in respect to the signified: the text is burst, fragmented, atomized: writing/reading can isolate a word, a fragment, or re-contextualize any particle of text in an assemblage of texts.

Many readings and courses of reading are always possible: none is a priori better than any other, for reading re-creates the text every time; thus, the distinction between writing and reading is blurred, as is that between author and reader; reading is no longer merely a form of consumption, it also produces texts, it is also writing.

The multiple courses of reading - or reading trajectories - also call upon other texts: this is intertextuality, which retraces a path to an array of texts from the current text, each leading to others, potentially for ever:

"Every text is an intertext: other texts are present within it, at various levels, in more or less recognizable form, texts from past culture and those of the surrounding culture; every text is a new fabric of old citations. ""(R. Barthes, "Texte (théorie du), Encyclopedia Universalis)

The multiplicity of possible reading trajectories, combined with the intertextual nature of writing/reading, contributes to shattering the limits of text, leaving it potentially always open. Therefore, no reading exhausts it: other readings and virtual trajectories are always possible;

Finally, the notion of post-modern text is not solely limited to contemporary literature, nor just to writing: "text", says Roland Barthes, is present in classical texts, just as it is in "low" or "minor" literature; from the moment a reading is no longer merely consumption, but production, it authorizes itself to draw the "text" out; likewise, "text" is found in visual arts, photography, cinema, etc. (see La Chambre claire, a book by Roland Barthes devoted to photography and to Christian Metz's work on cinema).

This new structure demands a new space and a new temporality; for the computer itself installs text in an altered space and time: the text's linear unfolding in the traditional book (even if the mind has, of course, always been capable of returning to the past, of jumping ahead, of describing tangents elsewhere, in other texts, in life, etc.…), such unfolding, then, becomes transformed into a truly non-linear deployment, multiplied and exploded - and in an almost instantaneous fashion: one only has to press a key, or point and click. Welcome to hyperspace.

With the Internet, the proliferation of reading trajectories by means of intertextual references becomes immediately feasible: following links installed in the text, other texts can appear on the screen, themselves linking to others, etc.

Thus, while textual space undergoes a veritable explosion, a mutation in hyperspace, conversely, the temporality of text is flattened, reduced to the point of disappearing in instantaneity: in text that is cut into fragments (such as hypertext appears to the reader due to the materiality of the medium, the computer screen), each of the fragments is immediately accessible thanks to the links, and can potentially lead to any other. With no pre-established order, temporality vanishes. Causality as well. It's no accident, then, that one of the applications most used by writers of hypertext is called "Storyspace". Hypertextual fiction is organized in space, not in time: therein text makes its garden, or its labyrinth.

Time is then reified into a series of moments the reader may revisit by conjuring the places to which they are linked, preserved in the digital memory of the textual grove (that is, by following the right links): for the topology of hypertext is also a "topos" in the medieval sense of the term - a method of memorization, where words and ideas are recalled thanks to their association with the stages of an itinerary one may revisualize at will.

One therefore witnesses a dual movement from the virtual to the real, and from the real to the virtual: the computer being itself a simulation, a projection, and a replication of the human brain, what we see happening in hyperfiction, in the type of writing and reading enabled by the computer, is, all in all, the actualization, the realization, the projection, in a real machine and on a tangible screen, of the way in which the human mind operates on text (backtracking to previous instances, jumping ahead, etc.).

But a parallel, converse movement occurs, since every writing project and, especially, every reading trajectory can not anticipate, follow, or presume to realize and actualize every virtual possibility that is given by the electronic medium, which, in theory, by its very nature, could come to cover the entire web, link by link, with every reading. Many, then, remain in the realm of the virtual.

It is these characteristics of the electronic medium that truly contribute to the reappraisal of the act of writing and reading, as well as of the role of author and reader, as referred to by post-modern theories of text: indeed, faced with the power of the computer, the author must abandon absolute power over the text; it escapes his control in any case.

Authors of electronic literature therefore choose to emphasize this elusiveness by playing with the interactive possibilities of the Web, by methodizing interactivity, by making of the reading a multiple choice game/itinerary, each reading therefore becoming a writing of the text, for only the pursuit of such or such a path allows for "writing" the text, by actualizing and realizing it; moreover, all paths not being practicable at once, with each reading, some "texts" remain "unwritten" and drop back into the virtual.

The notion of identity and that of authorship, pivotal to all our appreciation of art since the Renaissance, is put into question, not only because of the decision-making role devolved to the reader, but because the "author" himself often plays out different identities.

One of hypertext's characteristics is to allow the reader to trace the paths taken by his reading, and thus to contribute to writing "his" text, to inscribe his mark in hyperspace: whether by printing the read passage, by displaying and printing the list of such passages - thus drawing a map of the reading -, or by retaining the possibility of backtracking, in order to take another route.

Hyperfiction often takes the form of a labyrinth where the reader gets lost, sinking deeper and deeper with every choice, every link, reading only a portion of the text. Often, too, choices are a consequence of previous choices: using a filter, the application scrolling the hypertext selects the paths offered the reader who follows the itinerary. The text thus takes the form of a labyrinth, reconfiguring itself as the reading progresses, and the reader, going ever more astray, must abandon all hope of mastering the process.

Not that the reader must feel obliged to be held prisoner of the text: he is not obliged to read through its entirety, searching for the beginning and the end, hopelessly lost in any case. Reading does not have to be exhaustive: at any moment, the reader may choose to leave the text, perhaps to come back to it another time - the author himself invites him to do so. Thus, Michael Joyce (author of the seminal hypertext, Afternoon, a story) warns his reader in these terms:

One mustn't forget that due the specificity of the supporting medium - the computer - access to hypertext depends on an underpinning system; just as the reading of a book requires that one lift the cover and turn the pages, the reading of hypertext assumes respect for set of procedures.

It is the nature of the supporting devices that has enabled hyperfiction to develop as an autonomous literary genre. The first program for creating hypertext, Hypercard, was launched in 1987. Many more would follow, including one of the best known and used, Storyspace, created by Jay David Bolter, John Smith and Michael Joyce, author of Afternoon, a Story (1987), a founding work of the genre. One may then follow an evolutionary progression from stand-alone systems, such as Hypercard, to the networked systems; from "read-only" texts to truly interactive texts, which invite the reader's intervention and allow him to add his own links and text. (For more information on the evolution of the medium, see (among many others) Georges P. Landow, "What's a Critic to Do?", in Hyper/Text/Theory, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore & London, 1994; the Eastgate Systems Web site, creators of Storyspace.)

Operating procedures can vary, then, firstly according to the programs used and their degree of sophistication and, secondly, according to the instructions specified by the author when creating and organizing the hypertext (as, for example, in the number and type of choices to make, the role assigned to the reader, who may have to take on that of a character in the narrative, or in the types of links provided: indicated, hidden, or conditioned on preceding choices, etc.). The instructions may or may not be explicit, and sometimes their discovery, by means of trial and error, comes to be part of the reading process itself. Thus, in the reading of hypertext, the necessary, if not enforced, relationship with the machine can't be long forgotten. Contrary to a book, where it is easy to get lost in the narration to the point of forgetting the supporting medium (the glued or sown pages, the ink, etc.), the reader of hypertext is constantly brought back to the physical presence of the computerized environment - oscillating between mastery and loss of mastery of the medium, between intimacy and distance in relation to the text. The screen imposes a local and necessarily partial vision of the text; it is the screen that determines the fragmentary form of hypertext, its labyrinthian topology and the absence of points of reference, where the inquiring reader loses his bearings.

Which we may interpret as a metaphor for the human being's place in the modern world: thus, hyperfiction as literary genre, aside from its playful aspects, is revealed to be a carrier and revealer of a fundamental existential inquiry. "I link therefore I am", as Mark America says at the start of the critical hypertext entitled Hypertextual Consciousness, mocking Descartes and underlining the extent to which the "thinking" of the post-modern hypertextual subject, and his very identity, are precisely "subject" to being lost in the "web that covers the world" (WWW), as if another world.

Throughout the 20th century (and even before, "text" being at work in many a classical writing rich enough to harbour it, as pointed out by Roland Barthes), authors have performed textual experimentations more or less akin to the notion of text described by post-structuralist theoreticians. In a sense, these experiments constitute "proto-hypertexts" (as Jean Clément calls them) - not that their authors foresaw the invention of the personal computer or the World Wide Web before their time, but because these literary precedents were often the inspiration or model for "cyber-authors". One should note that the type of text under consideration here is fictional narrative, corresponding to the structural characteristics of post-modern text outlined above. However, some "extreme" poetic experimentations are just as representative, and as enlightening, for shedding light on hyperfiction, because they constitute seminal texts in modern literature...

And what do we discover?

That precisely because of its medium - the computer, and particularly, in the process of reading, the screen - hyperfictional narrative registers mid-way between poetry and narrative (novel or short story). Why? Because, with the each page display, each fragment, the screen introduces a break in the hypertext, a suspension - a mark of that abolished temporality discussed earlier. A truly - and quite literally - vertiginous break, as opposed to the simple page frame of the traditional book, a frame lain flat and without mystery, stuck, in fact, to another such page that reassures and immediately establishes a connection from one page to another - and we know that behind it - how simple! - there's another page; one only has to turn the pages... But the screen-break isolates the hypertext fragment all the more that it burrows "depths" behind and around the fragment, as black and as empty as astral space, as a cathodic netherworld - that is, (once again) hyperspace - that disquieting strangeness... Indeed, like the Freudian unconscious, hyperspace is disquieting because, in its contradictory ways, it is both black and luminous, intimate and strange, silent and full of voices, words, sounds and often indecipherable messages, where hypertext (as we've seen above) - and with it, the author/reader - sinks into a labyrinthian space...

Like the unconscious?

Like the Book, as well: that dream of Stéphane Mallarmé's (French poet of the end of the last century): "Tout, dans le monde, existe pour aboutir à un Livre" ("Everything, in the world, exists to become a Book"). That dream of a global, total, infinite, and unfinishable Book is "the" fundamental, foundational and exemplary dream of modern literature. Mallarmé was not the only one to have it. "Un coup de dès jamais n'abolira le hasard..." ("A throw of the dice will never abolish chance"), Mallarmé's well-known prose poem, extends over 21 pages, using blank spaces and variations on typography, the interlacing phrases losing and joining each other - like the reader/author - in the text, which they create from their shattering brilliance: for the writing here neither describes nor refers to anything ("Rien n'aura eu lieu que le lieu" ["Nothing will have taken place but the place"] one reads from the scattered fragments), it sparkles, generating the idea, and becomes a play of balance, from word to word, from verse to verse, which the mobility of reflections forces toward a diffraction, a spacing out, as of words on the page, or reflecting sheet-folds in the book:

"des motifs de même jeu s'équilibreront, balancés, à distance, ni le sublime incohérent de la mise en page romantique ni cette unité artificielle, jadis, mesurée en bloc au livre. Tout devient suspens, disposition fragmentaire avec alternance et vis-à-vis, concourant au rythme total, lequel serait le poème tu, aux blancs; seulement traduit, en une manière, par chaque pendentif" (Mallarmé, Crise de vers", in Divagations)

"Écrire-... Tu remarquas, on n'écrit pas, lumineusement, sur champ obscur, l'alphabet des astres, seul, ainsi s'indique, ébauché ou interrompu; l'homme poursuit noir sur blanc. Ce pli de sombre dentelle, qui retient l'infini tissé par mille, chacun selon le fil ou prolongement ignoré son secret, assemble des entrelacs distants où dor un luxe à inventorier, stryge, noeud, feuillages et présenter...[...] un Lieu se présente, scène, majoration devant tous du spectacle de Soi; là, en raison des intermédiaires de la lumière, de la chair et des rires le sacrifice qu'y fait, relativement à sa personnalité, l'inspirateur, aboutit complet ou c'est, dans une résurrection étrangère, fini de celui-ci : de qui le verbe répercuté et vain désormais s'exhale par la chimère orchestrale." (Mallarmé, "Quant au livre", in Divagations)

Thus for the description, between poetry and prose, a hundred years earlier, of the spatiality of hypertext, as of the reader/author's "exquisite" (jouissive) loss of identity (in the words of Roland Barthes, in Le Plaisir du texte) as he sinks into the maze of hypertext...

What one witnesses, then, at the birth of modern text, in the work of Mallarmé (but also in Marcel Proust's novel, À la Recherche du temps perdu, and in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, which share the dream of the "total book"), is a self-reflexive conception of writing. The telling of a story becomes secondary: rather than mirror the world, writing turns its attention to itself and tells its own story, as it were, as it comes to be.

Different methods are employed to achieve this: I have categorize them according to the types of experiments being undertaken, mentioning examples of texts, on the one hand, and of hyperfictions, on the other, which share similar procedures in their writing. The selected examples are as varied as possible (different periods, different nationalities).

(1) Texts that question the traditional narrative; and, among them, five sub-categories:

(1-a) Texts that question the author-reader relationship, as in Denis Diderot's novel, Jacques le Fataliste (1773): heavily influenced by Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), the novel presents two levels of narration: the first recounts the adventures of the two main characters, Jacques the valet and his master - and the characters often take over the narration themselves, introducing an additional reflexive depth (or mise-en-abîme) into the narrative -; the second consists of the author's own commentary on the text, addressed directly to the reader, sometimes even providing the latter with a response.

(1-b) Texts that question the identity, place and psychological depth ascribed to characters, as in Paludes (1895), one of André Gide's "soties", or farces, portraying an author attempting to write a text which he will call "Paludes", and who defines himself at the start by simply stating: "I'm writing Paludes" ("J'écris Paludes"). The many secondary characters are only given names. The main characters, the narrator, his "great friend" Hubert, and his friend Angèle, are given no more psychological or physical description. The method's objective - and effect - is to highlight, so as to condemn (with much humour), the superficiality of a social life in which human relationships are reduced to behaviours and habits devoid of meaning - and with it, traditional narration which reinforces the illusion.

Another example of this procedure, but used to seriously reassess modern capitalist society at the start of its invasion in the United States: Manhattan Transfer (1925), the novel by American author John Dos Passos, presents an extraordinarily complete tableau of New York society between, approximately, 1890 and 1925. Portraying characters from all levels of society and in many social situations (immigration, war, roaring twenties, prohibition, precursors to the depression), Dos Passos creates a new form for the novel: he proceeds by flashes, fixing his attention on one character before going on to the next, then coming back to the first, or dropping him entirely. It is an impartial, non-psychological observation of the human being thrown into the world and defeated.

(1-c) Texts which reexamine the temporality of narration, as in Julio Cortazar's "The Night Face Up" (1959), from the collection End of the Game and other stories. In this short story, a story is supposed to occur in the present time, while another takes place at the time of the Aztec, perhaps as a dream of a character in the first. The stories then inter-penetrate each other, until "dream" becomes "reality", and "reality" "dream". At the same time, logic is muddled: how can a man from the past dream of the future (while seeing it such as it is in the present)? Through the examination of temporality, it is of course narration itself - in the reader's all-too-blind willingness to believe anything the narrator tells him - that is put into question.

(1-d) Texts which question the value, truth and coherence of narrative, as in Dans le labyrinthe (1959), a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet in which a soldier wanders - as the title states - through a maze of city streets, all alike and equally deserted, returning again and again to places that seem the same but may not be, meeting similar characters that vanish and reappear... Searching for new forms to treat new relationships between man and his world, the structure of Robbe-Grillet's novels are not linear but circular, organized around thematic elements that repeat and overlap, such as they are, or sometime slightly modified, demonstrating that a subject's life is not a sequence of isolated events, but a whole constantly anticipating its own completion. The cold, objective style underlines the subject's alienation from the world, and himself. (Also see works by other authors of the Nouveau Roman: Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute.)

(1-e) Self-referential texts, that is, texts in which the narration makes evident, by means of "mise-en-abîme", the process of its own writing, as in Marcel Proust's novel sequence, À la recherche du temps perdu, where, beyond drawing a portrait of Parisian society of the day, the narrator deals with his own inability to write, until the last chapter, in which he finally gains insight into the rapport between recollection and writing that will allow him to get to work and start writing... the novel that we have just read.

(2) Texts that experiment the process of writing as such; and, among them, five sub-categories:

(2-a) Texts that use "automatic" writing techniques, receptive to the unconscious and liberating the author: the automatic writing of Dada and Surrealist poets of the first and second decades of the 20th century, un-censored writings "dictated by the unconscious"; William Burroughs' cut-up techniques, "discovered" in 1959, where the author arbitrarily assembles varied, previously cut out fragments of texts; and specific examples from Quebec literature, like the poetic works of Paul-Marie Lapointe: Le Réel absolu and, especially, Écritures, also employing automatic writing;

(2-b) As opposed to (2-a), texts created under specific, and more or less constraining limitations, such as Georges Perec's La Disparition, written entirely without the letter "e" (the "disappearance" of which the uninformed reader main remain unaware); also see works by fellow members of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (OULIPO), such as those by Raymond Queneau;

(2-c) Texts systematically referring to other texts and/or generated more or less entirely from citations, as James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), a novel based on the transposition of Homer's Odyssey to Dublin in the 1920s; the works of Kathy Acker, an American post-modern writer who "reappropriates" classic texts from a feminist and critical-terrorist point of view;

(2-d) Texts that play with page layout, with the visual aspect and arrangement of words on the page, like Mallarmé's poem, already mentioned, Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard; and Calligrammes (1918), a collection of poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, where the words are arranged so as to give a visual representation of the poem's subject (ex., "La cravate et la montre");

(2-e) Interactive texts (requiring the participation of the reader, or that of one or several other authors, or even that of a machine), as the "exquisite cadavers" of the Surrealists, where one author writes a fragment of text on a sheet of paper, folds it so as to hide his writing and passes it along to another, who writes his own fragment, and so on, the subject and the logic of the resulting work obviously being completely arbitrary.

Of course, the texts under consideration often use several of these procedures at once to put the classic text into question.

I conclude with a short list of "must reads", hypertexts that have already attained "classic" status and in which the same procedures are to be found. I've chosen to mention only hyperfictions, that is, fictional narratives, each written by a single author (see "Perspective", another section of this magazine, for other forms of hypertext). Of the following hyperfictions, one should note that many were published by Eastgate Systems and are available on autonomous media (mainly in the form of Storyspace diskettes). Storyspace is a program for creating hyperfictions that can then be published or freely distributed. These texts may be kept as autonomous (stand-alone) programs, or exported for viewing on the Web.

- Michael Joyce, Afternoon, a Story, (Eastgate Systems, 1987, Storyspace): This text is considered "The" classic hyperfiction. Created in 1987, it is the story of a man who, having witnessed a car crash, wonders afterward whether the car was that of his ex-spouse, possibly accompanied by his son. Composed of 500 fragments, the work is nevertheless interactive, the sequence of fragments depending on the reader's choice. (Other texts: Twilight: A Symphony (Eastgate Systems, 1996, Storyspace).)

- Stuart Moultrop, Victory Garden (Eastgate Systems, 1992, Storyspace): the immensity of this hyperfiction, composed of 993 screen-pages and of 2804 links, intentionally discourages any attempt at an exhaustive reading. A labyrinthian garden with no single perspective or outcome, made for visiting as one visits an exhibition or foreign city. In this hyperfiction, Moulthrop connects real and imaginary fragments, giving the reader occasion to explore the ramifications of a love triangle and the events of a war (the 1991 Gulf War). (Other text: "Hegirascope")

- Judy Malloy, l0ve0ne (first selection of the "Eastgate Web Workshop", work in progress, begun in 1995): Judy Malloy takes fragments of information, images and words, fictional or not, as molecular units to form a narrative plot. For the most part, these stories (in this hypertext, as in other works by Malloy) are narrated by female characters from all levels of society. The author seeks to take the reader into the mind of these women. (Other texts: Uncle Roger, 1986; Its Name Was Penelope, Storyspace diskettes.)

- Douglas Cooper, Delirium (work in progress, 1994- , Time Warner): This hypertext tells the dark but amusing story of a celebrity who dreams of murdering his biographer. Comes with a map, a discussion newsletter for readers, and a black and white design reminiscent of films of the silent era.

- Carolyn Guyer, Quibbling (Eastgate Systems, Storyspace): "Quibbling is a highly personal love story, at once erotic and traditional, portraying a feminine "Self", of fluctuating identity, confronted with "Others", with whom she is interested. Through motifs of maternity, distance and intimacy, of art and writing, of priests and nuns, bleak and sexual, geographic and labyrinthian, Quibbling recreates the experience of writing, that is, the shaping of a story from fragments of an experience, by parallelling it with the way in which we recreate ourselves from the moments that make up our life. Guyer is praised for his fluid, sensual writing.

- Mary-Kim Arnold, Lust (Eastgate Systems, 1994, Storyspace): "A gem", says the New York Times Book Review. The fiction opens with a poem, in which every word is linked to a different entry point to the story. Between poetry and prose, Lust draws the reader into artistically recombined scenes of terror and seduction. The hyperfiction experiments with a limited number of fragments (38) and links (141). The sequences and their significance vary according to the reader's initial choice. This work makes the best use of the characteristics and limits of the genre, and constitutes one of the most influential hypertexts yet written.

- J. Yellowllees Douglas, I Have Said Nothing. (Eastgate Systems, Storyspace diskette(s)): this hyperfiction, which opens and closes with two car accidents, is a meditation on the extent of what separates us from one another. Douglas explores the interaction between the inevitable fragmentation of hypertext and the causality required for the creation of a story. The result is a hard, uncompromising assessment of the way in which we fragment ourselves in our desire to avoid suffering, and the inevitable, that is, death.

- Jean-Pierre Balpe, Trois mythologies et un poète aveugle (November, 1997): Jean-Pierre Balpe is a French author of hyperfictions interested in the possibilities of computer-generated literary works. Programming the machine so as to allow him to combine linguistic narrative elements within a field which he previously defined according to a semantic grammar, the author obtains a potentially infinite array of texts from the machine.

The non-stereotypical aspect of the narratives [as of the poems] generated by this type of grammar depends on the variety of abstract descriptions, the flexibility of their possible combinations, the richness of classes of choices and dictionaries defined in the program. The power of the generator is proportional to the richness of the information described, and therefore to that of the world defined by the author and the possible choices. (Jean-Pierre Balpe)

Trois mythologies et un poète aveugle was an event held in November 1997, at Centre Georges-Pompidou. It presented an interactive, real-time dialogue between a poem-generating robot, programmed by Jean-Pierre Balpe to generate four types of differently styled poems (the "three mythologies" plus that of the blind poet), and a music-generating robot, created by Jacopo Baboni-Schillingi. The poems were read as they were being generated by three reader-poets; musicians were also at work interpreting the output from the musical robot. For Jean-Pierre Balpe, this kind of work has no intention of eliminating the author, but, on the contrary, of offering the latter new means of expression, in a sense allowing him to combine the experiences of the Oulipo writers (writing within constraints) and those of the Surrealist poets (automatic writing).

The "classic" hypertexts presented here are written in English. But more and more experiments are being undertaken in French: see, among others, the "Toile du CICV" Web site, listed bellow.

Sites visited: