The opening of this piece
consists only of words, set up in a linear way.
Nevertheless, the difference to printed literature is
obvious. Some words are marked by color and, more
importantly, the lines appear in a predetermined way,
speeding up our reading so that we arrive in the text as
breathless as the young woman in the text arrives in the
train station from Moscow (see review
in dichtung-digital).
Another piece by the same
author is entitled "Help".
This work also consists only of words and the opening again
speeds up our reading. Here words are programmed to appear
in different windows representing different characters. The
opening again sets up the speed of reading, this time it
comes as a sort of dialog between the narrator and the
character. Java windows represent the passengers, who are
about to fling Jo out of the plane. Jo then finds himselves
among four persons who all have their own hope regarding
this new kind of fellow fallen from heaven. The Java windows
give the person's comment, the connected text on the screen
presents her inner thoughts. The story proceeds as a loop,
Jo is in the plane again, the passengers fling Jo again,
however, in this loop Jo's gender does change which turns
the love-tables among the five characters too. This example
gives an idea how text can be set up as sort of a
stage-performance.
A third example totally
different form these two is 
"Mass
Transit," a story
about seven people travelling through Manhattan on an warm
Saturday evening in June. Clicking on the splashpage, we see
a Preface. As is normal with such uncommon phenomena we are
told how to deal with it. We learn different ways to
navigate the text. First of all, we may look up the
characters' introduction to learn who is in the play and
where she is going.
Clicking on Delphine we get
a introduction of Delphine, if we want to know more about
her cousin we are brought to her introduction where, of
course, a link to Delphine is provided as well. Then we have
to decide how to navigate through the story. The
alternatives are navigation by location, time or
person.
The Clock brings up a chart
on which we can point to a given person at a given time.
Jason at 4-5 p.m. brings up the following piece of the
story.
The busdriver just caused an
accident. If we want to know how the "kid" saw the incident
we may click on the hotword; if we would rather know who
left the bus, we may click on the appropriate word. The map
on the left side is not as empty as it was in the beginning.
Now, at the end of the story, all the character's paths come
together. If we want to change position or perspective we
can do it in the map by clicking on any of the colored
circles.
However one may judge the
quality of this hyperfiction on the basis of those texts,
this example -created by Freedom Baird within an Electronic
Writing Seminar at MIT in 1996- is meant to explain how a
story can be set up in digital shape. The point of this
hyperfiction is to keep perspectives separate and to provide
links between them. Thus, one can switch from one character
to another and learn what he is thinking about the person he
is just meeting. This is not anything that a writer wouldn't
have provided in his text anyway. However, here the reader
has to decide what he is interested in right now, whether
she wants to follow this or this link. The effect is that
one perceives the story more as a puzzle than as a coherent
whole, and thus might become more aware of the coincidental
links which life consists of. We know this concept of life
as a puzzle from Robert Altmann's movie "Short Cuts" or from
John Roderigo Dos Passos' novel "Manhattan Transfer", which
might be alluded to in this hyperfiction's title and
location. We have seen from this example how the alternative
link structure of the web serves this concept in terms of
storytelling. We also have seen how images can be included
as illustrations of the character, as representation of
space, that is to say, of time in space, and as a navigation
map.
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