Electronic Fiction in the 21st Century

Critical Writing
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Year: 
1992
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Abstract (in English): 

In the 21st Century, readers will turn on and interact with
literature that is displayed on affordable, book-sized computers.
Electronic fiction forms will include "narrabases" (nonsequential novels
that rely on large computer databases); "narrative data structures" that
elegantly organize fictional information on eye-pleasing computer
screens; complex narrative investigations based on the adventure story
model developed in computer games; and stories told collaboratively by
groups of writers in online communities. Computers may even store their
own observations and use them to tell their own stories in their own 
words.

Author's Note: At the time of the writing of this classic paper I was excited
by the possibilities that hyperfiction offered for a new literature. I still am.
However, I now see print literature and e-literature more as parallel art forms
where ideally writers in each medium understand each other's vision and, 
as between poetry and fiction, sometimes move with ease between the two mediums
(Source: paper as published on web)

Paper was actually written at least two years before publication and so no Storyspace narratives are mentioned.

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Jill Walker Rettberg