When I think of electronic fiction back in the nineties, I think of illumined words in darkness and sparkling lights. Doubtless, some of this would be caused by what is becoming a nineties web-page joke: animated gifs, embedded midis and texts that sometimes glistened with starling truths but which often fell down, sluggish with over-glittered kitsch and clichés. Some succeeded, some didn’t. Over a decade has passed. Some of the texts that I enjoyed and I would have liked to link to have disappeared into the ether. Some of the authors remain, but have either moved on to print media or have done other venues and projects on the internet. But works of magic still exist, and still glisten on this world of wires, signals, binaries and hexadecimals. They will continue to inspire and be inspired by print media, and there will be crossovers in either direction.

Storm-etched Phonemes

I have been writing in this medium for over a decade now, and when I began, my ultimate goal was, as it is now, the print media. My own vision of a faerie isle bathed by the light of the storm, which I began in 1997, owed something to various manifestations of the Amor and Psyche story, as well as the Countess d’Aulnoy’s Laidronette. As with many other purveyors and lovers of myth and fairytales, this expanded into its own tale, with its own set of mythologems. It was not perfect, I was very young and very inexperienced when I started writing about a mad dwarven perfumer named Ipede Dwinkum, and an equally mad young princess who disappeared through a muggy green swamp in search of her Serpent. The stories went through several changes and revisions, and my world grew as I grew up.

Things have changed substantially in this arena. While lay-people and clueless academics deride online fiction, they still mine the internet for ideas and the random fiction of unknown writers, to use as examples on courses about online fiction, or for other purposes best not discussed in polite company. There is a wealth here which to me is a second coming of all those anonymous oral storytellers who used to walk up and down immeasurable byways through the corridors of time and culture. While self-publishing and online publishing will continue to be viewed with suspicion and stigma by some quarters, I believe that the cross-over between mediums will contribute to, if not legitimization, at least a partial acceptance. As with other mediums, certain venues are more reputable than others and certain types of online fiction will gain more credibility than others. What is the key? It is really the same as other mediums, first, there has to be a certain standard, secondly, a form of peer-review. Basic rule of thumb seems to be that if it is accepted by a certain group or level of peers, it’s legit.

Where does it leave the rest of us who are somehow in-between, not quite legit or peer-reviewed? I don’t know. There are days, when being a writer on these frontiers for over a decade is more painful than other days. Days when you feel your work is cannibalized, your effort is thankless and futile. But at the end of it, all I can see are positive outcomes. It is good if there are crossovers and more and more people are aware of web fiction as a new and dynamic medium in which the boundaries of the text can be challenged, where a true hyper-textual model is possible, beyond what Joyce could envision. It was because of this delirious possibility that, armed with myth, literary theory and a deep love of James Joyce, I started my own hypertextual, storm-tossed web in 1997. I wanted to dive into text; my desire was for a living breathing textual world to wrap around me and my I-narrators. I wanted to do strange things with point of view and tenses. This in turn, led to an M.A. in Literature with a thesis on postmodern fairytale appropriation vis-a-vis Angela Carter, which in turn, informed my current phd research on phenomenology in the postcolonial gothic. Perhaps someday, I will reach the holy grail of a book deal and more respectable publications, but even when I reach that goal, I will still remain fiercely proud of my independence and autonomy as a self-published creator of hypertextual electronic fiction.

There is a fluidity here that allows writers to bridge the gap between text and performance, taking us into myriad possibilities with regards to story arcs, points of view and how both reader and writer is re-defined by the hypertextual experience. In the end, this isn’t a story about peer review, the relative obscurity of hypertextual authors or any of our many defeats and occasional triumphs. For me, I delight in the fluidity. A story could start in one section of my web, and end in another, while cross-referring an earlier note, posted several years ago. Text bogles or dragons could meander from the actual fictive spaces to my editorial ramblings. There are so many gaps, gashes and crevices available to people who delight in this arena. And there are so many ways in which the narrative voice can develop which simply cannot be done in more traditional mediums.

So, if you ask me why we write, weave and sometimes dream about the manner in which we are going to present this content to you, I will assert that this is a by-blow of all the permutations of experience that we undergo as storytellers, mythmakers and word-children. The nature of who we are has not changed. The arena has. The medium shifts. While my tale is hardly a success story as much as it is a rite of passage experienced by someone who grew with the internet and who passionately loves it, it remains an example of how diverse web-published fiction can be and how many paths lead here and depart from here.

Online fiction on the Web: Crossovers and Success Stories

Online fiction and literature has been the subject of literary and narrative theory for the past few years but it still remains fairly obscure and on the fringes of acceptability. I would suppose some of the reasons for this include the wide diversity in both subject matter and quality. However, over the past decade or so, there have been notable cross-overs between print authors and online fiction. One of the earliest to test the fluidity of this form was Tad Williams, notable author of Memory, Sorrow & Thorn and the Otherland books. While not the first to create episodic online fiction, he was arguably one of the first pioneers of this medium who was also an established author. The Shadowmarch community was initially formed so that fans of Tad Williams would be able to subscribe and pay for instalments of the stories. The stories overlapped both a traditional fantasy world and the eerie interstices of the world of Faerie. Eventually the Shadowmarch project was canned and we got the Shadowmarch print series, with two books out and the first part of the third book in the works (and much anticipated by his fans!). Other established authors who have published online include Elizabeth Bear, whose Shadow Unit is an imaginative episodic collaboration with writers Sarah Monette and Holly Black. Shadow Unit still has an active audience and fairly efficient business model. Another example of electronic fiction that succeeded in gaining both critical acclaim as well as a working pay model is Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, a feminist retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I would be remiss and unscholarly, if I did not mention one of the more recent and more interesting cross-over endeavours, by the fairly established fantasy writer, Catherynne M. Valente. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is a novel, posted in episodic form, which is (still) offered free but is fueled by donations which one can offer via the tip jar on her site. Valente is apparently no stranger to online fiction, from a brief visit to her site, I note that she has both an intriguing Omikuji project as well as The Ice Puzzle (2005). Like many of more recent fantasists such as Jeff Vandermeer, John Scalzi et al, word of Valente’s new novel exploded through the blogverse/web 2.0-verse sometime in June and is a testament to how blogging, tweeting and internet culture has evolved, creating more than one bridge between traditional fiction and its online manifestation.

Notable Examples of Online Hypertextual Literature

This list is not exhaustive; there are numerous directories with works of online literature, ebooks, `zines with short stories and other examples of novels published in episodic form online. Some of these are more prominent than others and I will leave for you the pleasures of discovery! For this particular list, however, I limited myself to sites with complete stories, linked by hypertext, which were free to read and which were self-sufficient examples of what hypertextual fiction can do, and which crossed the frontiers of fiction by making full use of the hypertextual experience. Novels published on blogs or websites alone do not count for this list. If you know of any other websites which fit this bill, please let me know.

1. The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot by Stephanie Strickland
2. Through the Cobweb Forest by Connie Toebe and Lisa Stock
3. Odysseus She by Katherine Phelps

You might also want to browse the Electronic Literature Organization’s Showcase of Electronic Literature.

Critical Reading, Electronic Literature Advocacy and Literary Theory

1. Electronic Literature Organization
2. Booting the Binary Bard by Katherine Phelps
3. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media by Marie-Laurie Ryan (book)
4. Materiality and Matter and Stuff: What Electronic Texts Are Made Of by Matthew Kirschenbaum
5. “Do you want to hear about it?”: The Use of the Second Person in Electronic Fiction by Ruth Nestvold
6. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace by Janet H. Murray (book)