By Richard P. Morin
Hypertext fiction pioneer Bobby Rabyd a.k.a. Robert Arellano, visiting lecturer of English and modern culture and media, has extended the scope of publishing with the release of his first novel, Sunshine '69.
The Internet-based novel incorporates text, pictures and sound to create what the author calls "a Web-based time machine" that allows the reader to explore and contribute prose to the open-ended tale.
"Seeing my fiction in print, although gratifying, yields a residue of ennui; it always looks so dead, flat, immutable. For several years, I have experienced an authorial rebirth through 'Net serialization - letting characters evolve, situations mature on the basis of an interactive audience's response," said Arellano. "So when we were discussing publication options for Sunshine '69, I said to [Robert] Coover, `Let's do it like Dickens did it.' "
Coover, the professor of English who served as editor for the piece, has high praise for Rabyd and his work. "No one has grasped the nature of this new thing called the 'Net with more supple-minded alacrity than the writer Bobby Rabyd," he said. "Bobby Rabyd is that rare thing: an exceptional creative talent perfectly in tune with his own rapidly changing time."
Unlike most novels, Arellano's work has a participatory element best utilized through the Internet. "Sunshine '69 is constructed to allow readers to become participants in the novel," he said. "Through Web-based tools readers are given the ability to enter the novel via calendar dates from the summer of 1969. Readers can also choose to enter the novel through a clickable image map of the San Francisco Bay area or select from multiple points of view from the dozens of protagonists: a rock star, a Vietnam vet, a flower child or a CIA agent - even an odd, dotty dervish named Lucifer."
The novel chronicles the death of the 1960s through some of the major movements of what the author dubs the "Summer of Hate."
It all starts where it ended: mass murders, rock festivals, moon landing and military actions. Some of the characters are real, some imagined. In Sunshine '69, the premium LSD known as Orange Sunshine is personified in a flower child who, in the midst of making sense of what's happening to her generation, is kidnapped by the CIA and turned into a deadly double-agent. Her infiltration into counter-culture happenings from Hell's Angels' runs to the Woodstock Festival transforms the tapestry of a decade in decline. Arellano hopes correspondents on the Internet will help him find the redemptive stories in what he calls the "breaking of a counter-culture."
"Sunshine '69 is not just one author's novel. The guest book lets everybody add their story - recollected or imagined - to a collective, organic document that will look very different by the fall. The result is an imaginative collaboration between author and reader that makes the creative process more democratic," said Arellano, who, according to the New York Times Book Review, published the Internet's first hypertext magazine in the spring of 1992. "In 1948, George Orwell wrote 1984 to try to foresee how his future would become our present. The summer of '96 gives us the opportunity to make sense of what happened halfway."
Sunshine '69 is being published on the World Wide Web by Sonicnet, an Internet source for alternative music and culture.