Hyperfiction
A recent SH article ("The More Things Change: Science Fiction Literature and the New Narrative," by Niko Silvester) quotes Gary Westfahl as noting that sf lags about 40 years behind literary fiction "in the use of new and experimental forms of narrative." I found that an intriguing and thought-provoking notion; I'd noticed the lag, but I hadn't noticed quite how long that lag can be. I think part of the reason for the lag is the conservatism that Westfahl and Silvester mention, but I think another part of it is simply that sf readers and writers tend not to read "that mainstream stuff" and so they tend to be unaware of what's out there; as a result, it seems to me that many sf readers and writers tend to view things like breaking the fourth wall as inherently sfnal, despite the facts that sf doesn't do it often and that literary fiction has been doing it forever. Ditto other experimental narrative forms.
(It may be no coincidence that so many sf writers are uncomfortable with computers, the Internet, and other recent high-tech innovations.)
It's also true that some kinds of experimental narrative, notably the varieties of hyperfiction, were hard to publish until fairly recently. But now that there are online sf magazines, that's not an excuse.
So if we take the 40-year lag as given, it should be only another 30 years or so before we start seeing a substantial number of pieces of hypertext sf. But I'd like to close that gap a little, bring sf up to only about 10 years behind the times. Write us some of that there hyperfiction! So far we've had something like 4 submissions that could be considered hyperfiction (out of about 4500 total submissions), and none of them were quite what we were looking for. I'd like to see more people trying this sort of thing.
But there are a couple of constraints:
- It should use the hypertext form effectively. Which is to say, there should be multiple discrete pages, and they should have links between them, and the result should be a result that you can't easily obtain using standard text layouts. Footnotes and two-column layouts don't constitute hypertext—Jim Kelly's layouts in "Undone," for example, cool as they were, did not go far enough for me to consider them more than a sort of proto-hypertext. Likewise, a choose-your-own-adventure story, while a step in the right direction, is largely just a branching tree of linear stories, and can work almost as well on paper as online.
- It should tell a good story—engaging and thought-provoking, with compelling characters and situations, and so on. In other words, our usual standards apply to hyperfiction as well as to regular fiction.
There are a lot of reasons people don't write hypertext. Besides the genre's usual lack of interest in experimental forms, hypertext is hella hard to write—figuring out what paths a reader can take, making them all interesting and internally consistent, even just debugging; all of that is hard, and to make it harder, you may have to tell a different kind of story than you'd tell in linear text fiction.
But when it's done well, it can be very interesting. I'd love to publish some.
