Hypertext & interactive fiction

Whatever you do, it’s worth investigating different ways to go about it. With fiction, the most obvious way is by writing for different genres, but there are other ways, as I’m currently discovering.

Strange Horizons says it’s keen to receive/publish more Hypertext Fiction. Here are some examples:

  1. The Unknown, by Scott Rettberg, William Gillespie, Dirk Stratton and Frank Marquardt
  2. 24 hours with someone you know, by Philippa J Burne.
  3. Cheese Run, by Lisa Malone, on The Full English Magazine (my magazine :D)

A similar style, which probably takes an awful lot more work, not to mention programming skills, is Interactive Fiction. Not sure how you’d go about writing this, but it’s interesting to play with, nevertheless. Some examples:

  1. Zork: a famous text/typing based game from 1980 that you can play in your browser.
  2. Sunshine: apparently the web’s first interactive novel.
  3. … a bunch more at the Interactive Fiction Database

As a final note, the Wikipedia page gives some examples of hypertext fiction (which, it says, includes any fiction with a non-linear narrative) that preceded the invention of the internet. Big ones are: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Nabokov’s Pale Fire–which I’m sticking on my reading list–and the fantastically titled The Garden of Forking Paths.

One thought on “Hypertext & interactive fiction

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s