Hypertext: beyond the end of the book (abstract)

Abstract

Extended Abstract For the narrative artist, hyperspace haa all the charm of a starry sky in August: the weather's comfortable, the t winkle's alluring, but the vista's intimidatingly awesome. The simple linear trajec-tories of the earthbound, once thought confining and inflexible, are seen to have a certain rea.wur-ing structure, an " A " and a " B " between which narrative, ever on the go, might safely move, feet on the ground. It's pretty out there in infinity, but if you head out, how do you get home again? Creative artists are still fumbling in this new space, this new medium, toying with the possibilities of multidimensionality, nonlinearity, interac-tivity, polyvocality, and, increasingly, the incorporation of other arts, visual, kinetic, and aural, but not yet convinced that narrative, as we lovingly know it, c'an overcome the motionsickness associated with the absence of gravity. Most academic hypertext projects preserve a sense of gravity by allowing a body of informa-tional satellites to circle loosely about some core subject, a poem, say, or an historical event, a social entity, a philosophical or legal problem, etc., and such models might well serve artistic projects but they cannot define or delimit them. Nor does it help to implant a line. All thdse centuries of resisting the tyranny of the line, and suddenly it is gone ss though it never existed, but reinventing it, though an option for some, is a bit like building a road in outer space so we can take our cars out there, Most narrative artists, for the moment, prefer to stay home where the environment's friendly and there's plenty of company. They still like the familiar paths with their beginnings, middles, and ends, even if not always traveled in that order. The navigational procedures are still so demanding out there in hyperspace, that there's too little time to appreciate style, voice, eloquence, character , story. Links and maps seem more compelling than text, aa though the ancillas of book culture-the tables of contents, the indices and appendices, the designs and jackets and headers-might have swallowed up the stuff inside. There's an appeal in interactivity–and a threat. And, maybe worst of all, where's closure out there? How do you know when one journey's over and another can begin? So the field is largely left at present to the rash, the young, the enterprising. Flights are being made in vehicles that seem aa creaky …