{"id":750,"date":"2002-12-08T15:47:15","date_gmt":"2002-12-08T23:47:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/12\/08\/750.html"},"modified":"2002-12-08T15:47:15","modified_gmt":"2002-12-08T23:47:15","slug":"hyperfiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2002\/12\/08\/hyperfiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Hyperfiction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A recent SH<\/cite> article ("The\n More Things Change: Science Fiction Literature and the New Narrative<\/a>,"\n by Niko Silvester) quotes Gary Westfahl as noting that sf lags about 40 years\n behind literary fiction "in the use of new and experimental forms of narrative."\n I found that an intriguing and thought-provoking notion; I'd noticed the\n lag, but I hadn't noticed quite how long that lag can be. I think part of\n the reason for the lag is the conservatism that Westfahl and Silvester mention,\n but I think another part of it is simply that sf readers and writers tend\n not to read "that mainstream stuff" and so they tend to be unaware of what's\n out there; as a result, it seems to me that many sf readers and writers tend\n to view things like breaking the fourth wall as inherently sfnal, despite\n the facts that sf doesn't do it often and that literary fiction has been\n doing it forever. Ditto other experimental narrative forms.<\/p>\n

(It may be no coincidence that so many sf writers are uncomfortable with computers,\n the Internet, and other recent high-tech innovations.)<\/p>\n

It's also true that some kinds of experimental narrative, notably the varieties\n of hyperfiction, were hard to publish until fairly recently. But now that there\n are online sf magazines, that's not an excuse.<\/p>\n

So if we take the 40-year lag as given, it should be only another 30 years\n or so before we start seeing a substantial number of pieces of hypertext sf.\n But I'd like to close that gap a little, bring sf up to only about 10 years\n behind the times. Write us some of that there hyperfiction! So far we've had\n something like 4 submissions that could be considered hyperfiction (out of\n about 4500 total submissions), and none of them were quite what we were looking\n for. I'd like to see more people trying this sort of thing.<\/p>\n

But there are a couple of constraints:<\/p>\n