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The journal will be published continuously online at http://www.wright.edu/~martin.kich. The best of the work submitted to the electronic issue will be published in the paper edition each Winter.

All studies relevant to the topic–including critical, theoretical, biographical, bibliographical, interview, and review articles–will be considered for publication. I hope to begin publishing reviews of current cyberfiction with the next issue.

The journal also includes a sub-section called NETexts, which includes book reviews of Internet-related nonfiction.

Submissions are welcome from academics and afficionados alike. All styles of writing are welcome. My intention is that the journal be as inclusive and as eclectic as possible.

One copy of each article is sufficient. An SASE must accompany each paper submission. Those submissions should be addressed to Cyberfict, Martin Kich, English Department, Wright State University–Lake Campus, 7600 State Route 703, Celina, OH 45822.

Electronic submissions and inquiries can be addressed to martin.kich@wright.edu I will accept attachments in Word, WordPerfect, or Rich Text Format.

Anyone interested in reviewing fiction or nonfiction titles should send me a short note at martin.kich@wright.edu indicating his or her major areas of interest, relevant background, institutional or business affiliation, the number of reviews per year that he or she would be interested in writing, and a complete address to which review copies would be sent.

Response time on all submissions is 90 days for the online edition; decisions on the print edition will be made each Fall.

Contributors to the online editions will receive a copy on CD-ROM at the end of the year. Those whose work has been selected for the paper edition will also receive two copies of it.

Copyright remains with the contributors, though I do reserve the right to reprint issues or special collections of articles and to offer those for sale.

A limited number of print copies of each issue are available for $20.00, checks or money orders only, made payable to the Wright State University. Copies on CD-ROM are available for $15.00.

Martin Kich, Editor

English Department

Wright State University–Lake Campus

Days of Future Passed: The Novel, the Book, and the Internet

Lance Olsen

University of Idaho

The Collapsed Li-Yung: An Excerpt from the Novel Freak Nest

Lance Olsen

University of Idaho

Lance Olsen: A Biographical Note

Telegenesicide

Andi and Lance Olsen

But They Can’t Even Play an Instrument, or, Desert Nights: Flickering Signifiers and Semiotic Ghosts

Robert Dornsife, Creighton University

Russel Wiebe, Felician College

Cyberfictions: A Bibliography of Authors and Their Books–Kathy Acker to Jim Young

Martin Kich

Wright State University–Lake Campus

Review of The Computer and the Page: Publishing, Technology, and the Classroom.

Janet Wright Starner

East Stroudsburg State University

Review of Electronic Design and Publishing–Business Practices

E. Ted Bunn

Wright State University–Lake Campus

Review of Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing

Edward J. Gallagher

Lehigh University

Review of Opening Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices

Stephen A. Tompkins

Lehigh University

Review of A Rhetoric of Electronic Communities

Russel Wiebe

Felician College

Review of Safeguarding Electronic Information

Eric Sharkazy

Columbia, MD

The novel is, it almost goes without saying, about change. Its characters undergo psychological and/or social transformation as they circumnavigate myriad plot obstacles. Block a character's desire, and watch him or her grow, shrink, learn, fall apart, scatter, gain wisdom, shatter, or triumph through space and over time. And that change, at some base-line level, its Faulknerian anti-feats to the contrary, will always be linear because of the physical manifestation of the form within which it exists. Sentences will, except in the most egregious experimentation (and then only for relatively short distances, and inevitably within steel-hard linguistic parameters), march from left to right and top to bottom like an army of black ants on a swath of glacier. Their syntax will dictate certain structures and dismiss others. Experimental or not, they will trip from the bottom of one page to the top of the next by means of human touch: a pinch of the fingers, a flip of perhaps acid-free paper, so conventional to the deep-grid of the novel in particular and the book in general as to be invisible. Each chapter or lexical sequence will tick forward as well from the front cover toward the back . . . and into that overdetermined conclusion of whiteness just beyond the last smudge of language called The End.

This, we believe almost reflexively from our near-sighted synchronic perspective, is how it's always been done, how it should be and will. Yet, simultaneously and diachronically, we know just the opposite is actually true. Because we have learned a certain method of reading, a certain way to package and transmit information that has been extremely effective and useful for hundreds of years, we trick ourselves into believing it's the only method, the only way, like my colleague who in a moving and understandable show of civil disobedience asked recently to be passed over for an office computer so long as he could be assured an unlimited supply of sharpened pencils. Or like my sweet, hard-working, well-meaning student who, after listening to the sociohistorical lectures I delivered in my undergraduate Survey of American Literature course, studied his notes diligently and then wrote with sureness and poise during his final exam that the Civil War took place between 1964 and 1968 at Columbia University at roughly the same time Sigmund Freud published The Interruption of Dreams.

American culture has little sense of the past. It's somehow wired to forget, fumble the facts, question just what the good of all this mnemonic business is. If we have encyclopedias, spell checkers, and electronic date books, after all, what in the world do we need memory for? It's in our genetic coding, far down among the cultural DNA. Perhaps, if sufficiently inclined and industrious, one could even dog the impulse back to our pioneer consciousness, our Lewis and Clark of the Mind, that simply isn't interested in looking over its shoulder because what's exciting always seems to be what lies on the other side of the next intellectual mountain range, up the next economic river, across the next flash-trend prairie. It's surely an impulse that has become only more heartily reinforced in a postmodern edge-world where yesterday's news is, well, yesterday's news, and last week's MTV rotation schedule is, as another student of mine dubbed it, the Pleistocene Error. William Gibson, the godfather of cyberpunk, understood this at a visceral level when he announced in Neuromancer (1984), less a cyberpunk future prophecy than a metaphor for our present, that "fads swept the youth . . . at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly" (58). The result seems to his protagonist like "a deranged experiment . . . designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button" (7).

If our culture maintains any sense of history at all, it's regularly a fictive one flattened out and shot through with a golden nimbus of nostalgia. It's the one, in other words, where American Graffiti (1973) represents the fifties that never existed, and where, as Fredric Jameson asserts, "in faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as 'referent' finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts" (322). Extrapolate this notion to its logical end, Jameson argues, and we find ourselves in a culture of schizophrenia, "a series of pure and unrelated presents in time" (324). That may be overstated by half, but it does seem to be the case that much postmodern American culture tends to preclude a sense of context, a genuine sense of understanding and depth, the larger idea of the rear-view mirror. Production, as Baudrillard has it, has given way to reproduction. Reality cascades into the image redundancy of two mirrors facing each other.

My students' historical pratfalls, then, amount to more than goofy burlesque. They're a manifestation of our destiny, indicative of the young having their hands full trying to navigate the garden of forking paths that comprise their contemporary multidimensional simulation of existence. The last thing such people can worry about is what happened two hours ago, a month-let alone the day before they were born.

Such a sense of radical presentness leads us back to the novel's doorstep. Novels--all narratives--are not only about change. They embody it, as every book does.

Books have never done and been only one thing. Five thousand years ago baked clay tablets in Mesopotamia told the story of deeds to land. Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, among others, used the inner bark of the papyrus plant, pasting sheets together in strips sometimes one hundred and forty-four feet long, to document their worlds. The codex, made up of several sheets of vellum, or the treated skin of lambs, folded into a section called a gathering, existed for centuries after its appearance in 300 A.D. The Chinese practiced a simple form of printing over one thousand years ago, and there seems to have been some sort of forerunner to our printed book in Holland. Gutenberg, of course, developed his version in Germany during the 1440s and 1450s, and it reached England in 1476 when William Caxton set up shop at Westminster. More than thirty thousand different books were generated within the first fifty years after those presses started running. By the nineteenth century, printing had evolved or devolved (depending on one's point of view) into a mechanical trade rather than a handicraft, and by the early twentieth the book had become mass-produced, hundreds of thousands of copies of a single one generated.

Since the 1960s in the U.S., the context in which books appear has changed drastically. Then there were more than a hundred substantial publishers in New York City. By 1980, because of a recession and the beginning reconfiguration of the literary marketplace, there were only 79. By 1995, because of another recession and a spate of downsizing and multinational mergers, there were 15. Since then, HarperCollins joined forces with Bantam-Doubleday-Dell, and presently a mere five publishing houses dominate the scene. "In the five major companies," speculative fiction writer Samuel R. Delany explained to me recently, "The first thing that must happen to a book today is that it must be fitted into a 'slot.' It must be put into an official category. And that category will determine everything from the kind of packaging it gets to the amount of money that will be spent on its advertising to the target number of copies the publisher hopes to sell, and is therefore willing to print." No slot, no advertising budget. No advertising budget, no reviews or real distribution. No reviews or real distribution, no sales. Woe to the novel, then, that is narratologically amphibious.

Much in the literary landscape has devolved to the bottom line, a perilous maneuver when contemplating aesthetic matters. In this country, less than one percent of the material submitted to publishers finds its way between two hard or soft covers. Nonetheless, about 1.3 million titles remain in print, one hundred and forty thousand of which were first published in 1996, most by those five major publishing houses. About four thousand five hundred of them were novels, two hundred and fifty of them first novels, and many showed up in the roughly thirty thousand bookstores across the country--most of them now megastores like Barnes & Noble and Borders intent on inching independents out of the business.

In Galatea 2.2, a novel about a computer scientist trying to teach a nascent artificial intelligence how to pass a masters exam in English literature, Richard Powers reminds us "that a person, through industry, leisure, and longevity, might manage to read, in one life, half as many books as are published in a day" (290). Yet, from the contemporary author's point of view, any one of those packets of human information represents two to five years of hugely hard work for an hourly wage that would make a Dickensian street urchin snuffle in derision.

My point so far is simply that books have been many different things in many different galaxies at many different times. They have been wax tablets and silk. They've been clay and sheep skin. They've been scrolls and illuminated manuscripts and paperbacks and hardcovers.

Today they are in the always-ongoing process of changing once again, and changing strikingly. The most recent impetus for this metamorphosis has emerged over the last five or eight years with the proliferation of electronic media, especially the personal computer, modem, and emergence of the Internet especially the World Wide Web. Fairly tangible atoms of information have been morphed into ephemeral bytes at a rate of shift that's astounding. Moreover, the Net's growth, we learn from the media almost daily, has become geometric. By most measurements, it doubles in size every nine months or so. MCI, to cite only one example, has seen the flow over its network swell fifty-sixfold in less than two years.

In 1984, William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in Neuromancer and defined it as a "consensual hallucination" (5). He was lauded as a visionary and launched by a keen-witted publishing industry as the icon of cyberpunk. Now, just over a decade later, his ideas look a little drab, a little frayed around the digital matrix. Bruce Sterling, the self-proclaimed spokesperson for cyberpunk, a fairly short-lived quasi-movement concerned with exploring the realm of cybernetics in fiction within a dark, dystopian, street-savvy, amoral, near-future narratological cosmos, was right when he pointed out in his manifesto-preface to the Mirrorshades (1986) anthology that "the cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world. For them, the techniques of classical 'hard SF' extrapolation, technological literacy-are not just literary tools but an aid to daily life" (x-xi). The world is moving faster than our ability to conventionalize it.

What appeared as forehead-slappingly innovative vision in fiction ten or thirteen years ago appears presently as a kind of slightly off-kilter realism. Surely, in terms of the Internet, our culture has come to incarnate a strangely middle-class and hence oxymoronic version of the cyberpunk vantage point. What once seemed an anarchic consensual hallucination with an analog in the wild wild west now seems like a colonized and commercialized 24/7 advertisement for cars, tech and porn-the latter little more than the "copulation of cliches" Vladimir Nabokov always suspected it was (313). Just as Gibson's fiction has gotten tamer over the years, so too has the electronic beyond to which it refers.

Or at least that's the case with much of it. A small percentage, however, still retains its invitation to true aesthetic and political transgression and, astoundingly adaptable species that we are, many of us are already thinking: "Been there, done that, so what's new today?" Or, to reapproach the question: What sort of literary art can reflect the situation I've just described?

What kind of pluriversal fictive experience can mimic our culture's sense of this new pluriversal science-fictional otherness many of us feel we currently inhabit?

Change the book, change the novel.

My mentor in graduate school was fond of pointing out that every age gets the literature it deserves, which is an alluringly pithy way of suggesting that novels, short stories, and so forth are products of larger cultural forces-much to the chagrin of many individual and individualist writers who don't tend to feel, at the end of the day, that they're something akin to highly attuned switching stations through which myriad aesthetic, political, economic, psychological, and social tendencies flow. In a sense, however, that's just what they-we-are. So we need to spend a moment contemplating what impulses we are evincing and can evince with respect to the book, and hence to the novel whose structure is in good part dictated by the technology that gives it life.

Over the last decade or so, books have begun to transmogrify in some exciting and-at least to traditional readers-unnerving directions. First we find the advent of conventionally bound texts in experimental form, like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' ground-breaking graphic novel, The Watchmen (1986), or Derek Pell's Assassination Rhapsody (1989), or Art Spiegelman's Maus (1986, 1992), which represent bibliographic world-eating engines. Looking back not only to the underground comix from the sixties, but also to the surrealist collage novels from the twenties, medieval illuminated manuscripts, and even, one could probably go so far as to argue, Egyptian hieroglyphics, these combine text and image for sophisticated aesthetic effect. The Watchmen, for instance--which involves the complex story of a group of anti-superheros who dwell in a grungy morally ambiguous alternate dimension where the very idea of the superhero has been outlawed--fuses everything from interviews and cartoons to police reports, fake autobiographies, encyclopedia entries, trompe-l'oeil coffee-cup stains and paper clips on the page, and magazine profiles with references to art history, quotes by canonical poets like Blake and philosophers like Nietzsche, and allusions to the cut-ups of William.

Next we find fairly conventional books in electronic form, such as those which appear at the Bibliobytes Web site (bb.com/index.cfm), founded in January 1993 by Glenn Hauman, Todd Masco, and Andrew Bressen, where you can browse the first chapter of a Spider Robinson novel or Harlan Ellison story free, and then, if you like what you read, send your credit-card number through encrypted message to the publisher and download your choice in the print-size and format you like. Banned Books On-Line (www.cs.cmu.edu/People/ spok/bannedbooks.html) offers a Web site committed to making available everything from James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) to fairy tales like "Little Red Riding Hood" that have been prohibited somewhere in the world since first being published. Project Gutenberg (promo.net/pg/), whose purpose is to "make information, books and other material available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search," post ascii versions of texts by everyone from Edwin A. Abbott to Zitkala-Sa shortly after they have entered the public domain. Banned Books On-Line, the Gutenberg Project, and many others make those texts available at no cost.

Third we find new manifestations of the book in electronic form, especially hypertext, often generated by the Storyspace program, that allows the user to create and link fields of graphical and textual information called lexia at will and to retrieve that information consequentially, something like shuffled index cards. Non-electronic prototypes of hyperfiction appeared up to half a century before Michael Joyce's seminal Afternoon (1987) in such innovative texts as James Joyce's Finnegan’s Wake (1939), the virtually plotless, circularly structured, Celtically mythological linguistic explosion that is impossible to read as a traditional novel of rounded character and linear action; William Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959), an anti-narrative-more akin to the action painting of Jackson Pollock, the music of John Cage, and the montage of modernist film than to a conventional literary offering-in which "the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth, in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement" (229); and Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch (1963), a one-hundred-fiftyfive-chaptered fiction that "consists of many books, but two books above all": 1) the first can be read "in a normal fashion" and ends with chapter 56; 2) the second must be read in a sequence indicated in the foreword and begins with chapter 73 ("Table of Instructions"). Other slightly less-fractured fictions such as Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990), my own Tonguing the Zeitgeist (1994) and Time Famine (1996), and Paul Di Filippo's Ciphers (1997) approximate a hypertextual aesthetic through their informational density, hallucinatory jump-cuts, and invitation to readerly interactivity in the production of plot and meaning.

Many hypertexts are available for purchase from the Eastgate Systems Web site (www.eastgate.comPeastgate/welcome.html) and for browsing at no cost at the Alt-X Web site (www.altx.com), and include such fictions as John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse (1992), which fuses text, music, and graphics, and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995), which rewrites and refights Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) as a collage of journal entries, appropriated quotes, a story quilt of meditations, and a graveyard of body parts, among other things, as well as such hybrid works of crit-fiction as Christane Paul's Unreal City: A Hypertextual Guide to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1995) and Diane Greco's Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric (1995). In each case, what we're witnessing, as the book enters a new cyberformational stage in its evolution, is the enactment of Reconstruction-not as an essentially linear series of pyrotechnic abstractions by Derridean poststructuralist theorists, but in the very means of text-creation itself. The movement of the book at the end of the millennium, then, is toward arbitrary, discontinuous, unpredictable, illogical, digressive, consequential, unstable, convergent multimedia events that have begun to confuse conventional text with television and stereo, blending static images, sounds, and even film clips with processed language.

This is the aesthetic space postmodern manifesto writers like Raymond Federman augured nearly a quarter of a century ago. In "Surfiction: A Position" (first published in the Partisan Review in 1973), Federman essentially glosses his own 1971 concrete-poetry novel, Double or Nothing, in which no two pages share a common typography or structure, by claiming that we must "renew our system of reading," which has become "restrictive and boring" (40), by innovating the "paginal syntax" (41) of our texts. Why? "If we agree that life is never linear," he asserts, "that in fact life is always discontinuous and chaotic because it is never experienced in a straight line or an orderly fashion, then similarly linear, chronological, and sequential narration is no longer possible" (42). We must thus short-circuit our traditional reading strategies that propel us from the upper lefthand corner of the page to the lower right in a preordained manner. We must, Federman argues, reinvent the environment of reading by embracing new typographical prospects, shapes and designs, new relations among textual parts, multiple possibilities of plot and character, and even what we mean when we say the word "book," thereby engendering "a sense of free participation in the writing/reading process, in order to give the reader an element of choice (active choice) in the ordering of the discourse and the discovery of its meaning" (40).

This is also the aesthetic space George P. Landow affirms nearly twenty years later in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (1992) when he maintains that "we must abandon conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replace them with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks" (2). Or, as Shelley Jackson phrased it in a lecture delivered recently at M.I.T.:

Hypertext evaporates the hardcopy book into thin digital air while transforming Newtonian matter into Heisenbergian maze that blinks in and out of existence with no beginning and no end, no top and no bottom, no distinction between dominant text and footnote. Every collaged node is both original and pla(y)giarized, mine and someone else's, important and minor, appropriated and yet recontextualized, reconfigured. In feminist terms, it becomes a feminine domain, an arena of the traditional Other-"indirect," as Jackson puts it, "impure, diffuse, multiple, evasive." The reading process thereby concomitantly transforms from one unconsciously involved with final product into one self-reflexively obsessed with continuous process-and a process, no less, that reminds us with each saccadic flick of the eye that every one of us is always reading a different book than everyone else. The reader might extract him or herself at any point from this process, but he or she will never be able to forget the new realism of the fictive terrain he or she has just left, nor the fictionality of the diurnal Baudrillardian irreality he or she now must reenter.

If we begin to think of the World Wide Web, not as a series of semi-isolated hypertextual lexia, but as one gargantuan hyperFaction, we can also add a number of other electronic forms of the new book to this list: multi-user computer games and social meeting places known, respectively, as MUDs and MOOs, for instance; user-interest groups; tree-fiction, a form of hypertext that allows no returns to former decision points and no merging of paths; and electronic serials like The Spot, which follows the daily lives of five inhabitants of a California beach house and to which readers can contribute advice and plot suggestions. But the World Wide Storyspace hyperfictions, CD-Roms, and the rest are at best themselves transitional incarnations of the book, since the sheer volume of information wrapped up in the process of converging image, music, text and so forth into aesthetic "wholes" is simply too great for them to comfortably house, and hence the speed of reader-manipulation is often frustratingly slow, the variety frustratingly small.

So perhaps before long we'll be turning our attention to the "books" now under development in Silicon Valley that will look like the conventional leatherbound models-yet open them up and, voile, the reader will confront two backlit displays. Insert a super-high-density credit-card-like disk into the back . . . and take them to read in bed or bath, beach or bauhaus, while perhaps simultaneously surfing the Web via an infrared link, checking e-mail, and listening to voice mail. It will then be only a small shuffle to the glasses also now under development that will project text and image on the inside of their darkened lenses, mounted earphones on the frames feeding the listener all the sounds under the sun.

Even these, however, will be at best only halfway measures before the advent of fully functional and believable virtual reality, already the dead horse of science-fiction films and novels, which will allow us in fewer than fifteen years to move, as it were, from the outside of the computer screen to the inside, thereby entering a sense-around cartoon-gel room where we'll be able see and hear, say, Homer, maybe incarnated as a lobster, recite The Odyssey to us while we watch its events acted out by computer-generated thespians who never existed outside an algorithn' and read its text as it scrolls by on some screen, maybe incarnated as a fish tank, clicking on textured words or phrases that will send us into reams of research . . . hearing, if we wish, what ancient musical instruments sounded like, or maybe viewing examples of Greek architecture, or maybe linking to other epics, or tracts on epic composition, and so on-all the while monitoring our incoming video-mail and stock market reports and late-breaking Headline News via icons floating unobtrusively in some small corner of our perspective.

At this point, of course, we reach the brink of postliterate culture itself. After all, once we can quantum beyond isolated text into a wholly realized secondary world of sight and sound and touch, sex and adventure simulated-stimulations, I imagine most of the general population will switch off the text function, begin to wonder exactly what the importance might be to learning how those little ants marching across that swath of glacier function and what they mean. When, in other words, alternative modes of information packaging become sufficiently advanced, I assume keyboards and ascii, paper and print, will go the way of the short-lived if lucrative pet rock except, perchance, for small coveys of monkish archivists intent on translating such ancient texts as The Bridges of Madison County and The Warren Commission Report into virtual light, sonics, and feeling.

Eco-Texts and Digital Publishing

Surely such binary magic is still a good--though not a particularly vast, and clearly not unimaginable--way off.

But even these halfway measures I have mentioned, these digital amphibians such as hyperfiction and the hyperFaction of the World wide Web, share some interesting practical common ground: they are, as we shimmer atoms into bytes, the most environmentally friendly manifestations of the book in the history of the world. Digital publishing not only has the ability to take out a fair number of middlepeople, typesetter to printer, PR troops to distributors, from the increasingly expensive reading equation, thereby drastically reducing-or even doing away with altogether-the notion of cost in text production, therefore rethinking the hegemonic state of publishing in New York. It also has the ability to accomplish this task in a manner that disturbs not a single tree, spits not a single sulfate into the atmosphere, involves only electronic recycling.

Moreover, it has the potential to re-empower the writer (or, more likely, the community of creators involved collaboratively in the creation of each aesthetic complexity we can no longer in good faith refer to as "a novel") by drastically reducing the marketing apparatus that exists between her or him and the reader/viewer. As hypertext and the rest undergo phase transition into a near-future World Wide Web of fiber optic connections, much faster modems, breathtakingly large pools of memory, and, finally, the omni- encompassing virtual reality itself, we will all be linked to the same library/movie theater/sound stage with nearly unlimited potential in the evolution of aesthetics. Each of us will become producer of her or his own Web site, her or his own electronic avatar-in a word, her or his own multimedia fictive narration.

At that point, we will all become artists of our own identities and irrealities.

Inconclusions

The history of the novel in particular and the book in general thereby becomes, not only a series of ruptures, but also a complicated network of continuities, re-presentations, re-evaluations, re-collections, an ongoing circus of interesting minds in motion that will lead us, ultimately, to the days of future passed in the form of an electronically illuminated manuscript, both new and not new, emblem of the extreme Ovidian times we inhabit, where sudden and continual metamorphosis serves as more than dominant metaphor. Our rhapsody on mutability has gone high-tech. Down one trail we find gay fiction, down others neohumanist or politically incorrect or Native American or Northwestern or Southern or African American or--and here's where things get really interesting--all of them at some web-work at once, complete with sound and graphics and moving images.

Diversity, that is to say, whether subatomic or cultural, may well be old news from an old front from an old war. It is at least conceivable, taking narration's pulse here and now that we are on the cusp of some kind of aesthetic unified field theory evinced by a slew of truly postmodern texts that combine rather than separate, consolidate rather than differentiate-not in a way that mean-spiritedly or closed-mindedly excludes and thus limits, but in a way that good-humoredly and open-armedly includes, termites along.

This might sound like so much utopian dreaming. It shouldn't. I don't for a minute mean to suggest that the trajectory of both novel and book-and thus, in the final analysis, the World Wide Web and virtual reality itself-isn't open to severe interrogation. Just the opposite. So, instead of opting for a more conventional monologic rhetorical strategy of resolving, answering, framing, and fixing, I'd like to discontinue by spawning a zone of polyphonic inconclusiveness, an invitation to think along with me about yesterday's tomorrow in the form of eleven clusters of questions:

(1) "Since the surfictional story will not have a beginning, middle, and end," Federman concludes his manifesto, "it will not lend itself to a continuous and totalizing form of reading. It will refuse resolution and closure. It will always remain an open discourse" (46). But while in a sense this is true enough with respect to Federman's project in particular, and hyperfiction in general, especially when set next to novels of traditional nineteenthcentury realism, isn't it equally true that the illusion of free choice and open discourse with respect to any aesthetic object is to some extent just that, an illusion . . . that as much as a creator may wish to impart a sense of autonomy and self-determination to his or her reader/viewer, isn't that creator always the ultimate shaper of the text, the endmost provider of possibilities? Is it possible to produce an honestly random text that is still readable? Shouldn't we thus keep in mind that behind the thing itself still remains the map of the thing itself (in the case of most hyperfiction this takes the tangible form of the Storyspace writing program) generated by the creator, and that map of the thing itself by its very presence delimits choice, restricts narratological possibility, and regulates human freedom? If so, isn't it possible that we are in effect simply discussing a difference in degree, not kind?

(2) If anyone can, and anyone does, "publish" on the World Wide Web, or on what the World Wide Web will become, if "publish" is the right word, where will the quality, let alone the factual accuracy, of publication go? Will digital democracy soon become another term for the cultural slobocracy Erza Pound always thought it really was? Or, to put it another way: does anyone really want to know what everyone thinks about anything? Where will the ideas of aesthetic value and veracity--whatever we might mean by that-go? Where should they go? How do we monitor them? How will we find them, if we should wish to? And, if we shouldn't, what exactly are we "reading" for in the first place?

(3) What happens to our culture's conception of the author and authorship if books perforce mutate into multimedia collaborative events, akin to infinite encyclopedias, where it is virtually and literally impossible to know where one creative hand leaves off and another picks up? And, in a related matter, what happens to the flesh-and-bone creator, if all but the most popular can no longer make a living from their craft? Should we entirely dispense with copyright as we have known it and seek new paradigms, as the Office of Technology Assessment advocated in 1986, or somehow reaffirm individual creative ownership?

(4) Why do we feel it incumbent upon ourselves to assert that information wants to be free (the basis of that American Ur-narrative, the First Amendment) in cyberspace, when, in fact, the Internet is a global series of electronic connections, not limited to the geographical borders of the United States, and hence the idea of information wanting to be free (along with the First Amendment) amounts to little more than a local ordinance in cyberspace? How will this notion of free-and-not-free affect the novel's and the book's unfolding?

(5) Is it possible that the World Wide Web represents, not the kickoff of the new radically democratic or even anarchic Cybercity of Faction that I have suggested, but rather the beginning of a new technocracy that will ultimately discriminate between the computer-haves and computer- havenots, leaving the latter in the digital dust and giving rise to a fresh global and class polarization of shocking proportions?

(6) What will come to constitute the body in the Cartesian cyberspatial constellation, and how will that enter the algebra of the "book's" future? Our body's relationship to the "book" is also undergoing revolutionary change. The human touch that senses the heft, the facticity, of the manuscript, and makes one page another, is gradually dissolving. How will that conversion change the process of reading, viewing, perceiving, existing? Will the body come to resemble, as we use it less and less and live in multifold electronic irrealities more and more, prosthetic devices for our multi-gendered minds?

(7) None of this, obviously, is to propose that the conventional hardcover book won't be around for some time to come, coexisting-at least initially, though surely less and less-side-by-side with the electronic versions I've just discussed ("Que sera sera," John Barth comments in his essay on the subject, "The State of the Art," "but not always in a hurry" [45]). Will the proliferation of possibilities of what the book is and can be, however, lead to greater cultural (and hence, eventually, governmental) decentralization, or, ultimately, a push (as we saw recently with the issue of pornography on the Internet) toward greater cultural (and hence governmental) control? Why does it seem more comfortable for our culture to contemplate censoring materials in cyberspace than those on the printed page particularly when there are easy-to-use shareware programs such as Surf Watch designed to screen out what we may not want to view on the Web?

(8) Is it possible, as Barth suggests, that the medium of hard-copy print may hang around much longer than its technology warrants because it is able to accomplish certain things that its computerized counterparts can't--telling stories in a linear fashion even when their subjects aren't, for instance, or investigating the human experiencing of experience, the internal life of perceiving, feeling, and reflecting? If so, is it possible that the conventional hardcover book will continue to exist, not because of its technological potential, but because of its aesthetic or human?

(9) And what about that myth of cyberspatial longevity that tells us that archiving in the digital ether is tantamount to archiving forever? What are we then to think of RAND Corporation senior computer scientist Jeff Rothenberg's assertion that "the contents of most digital media evaporate long before words written on high-quality paper, [that] they often become unusably obsolete even sooner, as media are superseded by new, incompatible formats? (How many readers remember eight-inch floppy disks?) It is only slightly facetious to say that digital information lasts forever-or for five years, whichever comes first" (Barth 45)?

(10) What happens to humanities departments, to the very idea of reading as a communal activity, if hard-copy books evaporate into electronic hypertextual ones that each reader can, does, and must read differently from every other reader? Do such departments become our eccentric equivalent of medieval monasteries, entrusted to little more than housing the textual productions of the past, or do they teach us something about the nature of the reading process that has always been the case, simply now hyperbolized by hypertext? Does education become more interactive and hence more captivating for students . . . or just another version of commodified television with its MTV-ized rhythms, surfaces, and shine, all form and less and less reflective content?

(11) And, finally, the advent of the Internet, especially the World Wide Web, was supposed to herald a brave new world, a fresh way of perceiving, but has it in fact done so? Or is it, rather, at least here, at least now, actually a lot slower and visually less snappy than television and film, a lot more expensive than we ever thought it would be, a lot less interesting at an audio level than radio or CD, and, so far, more distracting and hard on the eyes than traditional print? If so, where in the world, or out of it, are we going . . . and why?

Works Cited

Barth, John. "The State of the Art." Wilson Quarterly Spring 1996: 36-45.

Burroughs, William. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove, 1959.

Cortazar, Julio. Hopscotch. Tr. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Avon, 1966.

Federman, Raymond. "Surfiction: A Postmodern Position." Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. Buffalo, NY: SUNY Press, 1993.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.

Jackson, Shelley. "Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl." media-intransition.mit.edu/articles/ jackson.html

Jameson, Fredric. "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." A Postmodern Reader. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon, eds. Buffalo, NY: SUNY Press, 1993: 312-32.

Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Vintage, 1955.

Powers, Richard. Galatea2.2. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996.

Sterling, Bruce, ed. Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Arbor House, 1986.

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The Collapsed Li-Yung

Lance Olsen

University Of Idaho

[The following is an excerpt from Lance Olsen's novel-in-progress, Freak Nest, a speculative fiction set in a Dickensian London in 2033.]

Rykki poked her head out of the Leicester Square tube station on the west side of Charring Cross Road and without hesitation entered the hominoidal rapids sweeping by her.

Zivv, Oran, Tris, and Jada waited for breaks in the crush as if they were waiting for open slots in a revolving door and followed.

They were yanked up and carried along into the narrow fumy lanes of Chinaton, which over the last thirty years had swelled and radiated through the West End, translating most of its economically ailing theaters into Buddhist temples, Mongolian wrestling arenas, and popular venues for Peking Opera.

Rykki caught sight of a pub with a sign in gothic lettering under the Chinese that read The Collapsed Li-Yung and caught scent of fat-fried farm shrimps and chips mixed with ginger, soy sauce, and lemon rinds, and she thought about trying to convince her brothers and sister to give it a try, even though they didn't have a pence of credit to their names, or even workable ID numbers, but then she began thinking better of it, just as the undernourished shiny-silver-bikinied mermaid leaning in the doorway pointed at her with a spindly white arm and appeared to read her mind.

"Blue Eyes fancy bit food, yes?" she asked. Her voice was squeaky and off-pitch. "Blue Eyes fancy eat? Come in, come in. Blue Eyes full of sad. We get you eat. We get you plenty scrap out back. We make better. Make happy happy."

She'd peeled the insides of her legs and bound them together to graft them to each other, then complemented the resulting fishtail effect by shaving and oiling her scalp and having some large purplish slightly sexual mushroomy makebelieve gills implanted below each ear.

Rykki's brothers and sister braked and clustered behind her.

Rykki laddered down her decision tree and opened her mouth to tell the mermaid no thanks, only the woman had already taken her by her wrist and Rykki was already zigzagging inside the dark wood-paneled pub muggy and breezeless as a summer locker room, half-foot-dragging and half-jogging to keep balance, her sister and brothers tagging along, the mermaid jabbering and gesticulating as she shuffle-hopped among small round wooden tables at which mostly elderly people huddled slurping away with chopsticks at bamboo steam pots heaped with noodles and chunks of orange squid, reddish-brown glazed chicken, and duck tongues the color of makeup Michael Jackson wore to his own funeral. Sometimes someone leaned sideways and spat tiny bones on the floor, and sometimes someone whined or skreaked, apparently to themselves, hands rock-climbing into the air, discomposed by what someone else was saying to them in their ear plugs on their pate-mounted cellulars.

"Not worry, not worry," the mermaid was saying. "We watch for own. Watch for small one like you, me. Kojak find you . . . snip snip. No babies. Cut you tubes. Bye bye." They banked down a hall, past signs for the gents and ladies and a governcorp poster reminding passersby to PRACTICE SAFE SUN, to a cramped cobblestoned passage where urine foamed in the shallow gutters along either side. "Every people city forget. City have short memory." She laughed. It sounded like a stepped-on magpie. "Very bad outside. Very bad. Every people huai. Every people yf-ding shi gao cub le. You come here. We feed. Make better. Make happy happy." The oceanic sound from the pub faded. The hoggish air took on the bouquet of vomity boiled viscera with just a dash of fungoidal liquefied dog shit in it. Shocked, Rykki's lungs froze up. The mermaid's fused feet made a schluffing noise across the wet stones. "Mu--tin want meet you. I know. You meet Mu-quin, then eat, okay? You be happy happy. Full. Everything good. Mu-quin make you Mu-quin's children. Make you jia-shu. Family. We all family here. We belong like one. You channel on my legs, Blue Eyes? You channel on Mu-quin's work? Every people artist here. Every people happy happy. Up through doorway. Mu-quin artist of artist. Princess Hacksaw . . ."

The spittly damp room they entered possessed a bare weathered uneven wooden floor. Drying herbs dangled from clotheslines, horizontal bamboo poles, open cupboards. They were scattered across long rectangular wooden tables flocked with mortars and pestles and a TV set. On the set's screen looped a vid of a man's head resting on the sandy bottom of a fish tank. Neon tetras flitted around it. The head was alive and its eyes were wide and the guy was holding his breath. The effect, Rykki knew, was some sort of optical illusion, but she couldn't work out how it'd been done.

There were no windows anywhere. Or maybe there were windows, only they'd been shuttered. Either way, besides the door looking out on the dim passage and the blue mist radiating from the telly, virtually no light inhabited this space.

Rykki had that immediate uneasy feeling which arrives when you can't tell where the walls of the room you're standing in conclude.

"Wait here," the mermaid said. "Mu-quip come. Every people eat." She pirouetted on her feet-tail and shuffle-hopped out the door. Rykki heard her laugh again as she made her way back down the passage. It didn't sound at all wholesome.

The kids waited.

Rykki and Zivv exchanged looks.

The head on the television opened and closed its mouth. A single bubble floated up from its nose.

Jada scratched the middle of her forehead.

"Come to think of it," she said, "I'm maybe not quite as hungry as I thought I was."

"Me either," said Oran.

"Food?" said Rykki. "Who needs food?"

A low growl rose from the darkness.

"Lovely," said Jada. "Just lovely."

"What was that?" said Tris.

Rykki took a step back and rotated her head minimally to engage her peripheral sight and saw a little stooped Mao-suited woman form from the shadows. She didn't so much shamble as wheeze and heave herself forward, swollen sandaled meaty blocks of feet never leaving the floor. Her neck stuck osteoporotically out of her shoulder blades at a ninety-degree angle in a way that made it impossible to see her face till she tilted her head to one side and peered up. Rykki then got a peek at those cataractal eyes, the brownish complication that passed as skin, and the long tapered mustache that gave her a catfishy look.

While Rykki and the other kids vetted her, another little stooped Mao-suited woman stepped from the murk and joined her chum. By comparison this second made the first seem peppy and girlish. The notion of moving her head any way at all had seen better days. She contented herself studying her clawed yellow toenails like a Roman oracle bird entrails and parenting slushy attempts at esophagus clearing.

Rykki had just concluded maybe that's what the growling noise had been about when a low pneumatic droning commenced behind them . . . a clacket . . . a hydromechanical whiz . . . and Mu-quin Li-Yung, proprietress and namesake of the pub, rolled into view.

She was slumping in a wheelchair, pet ocelot in lap. Then Rykki realized Mu-quin Li-Yung was the wheelchair. Her naked withered upper torso emerged from a mechanistic conglomeration of bicycle tires, blinking red Christmas lights, another TV set looping that same image of the fish-tanked guy's head, a car battery, length of coaxial cable, old-time digital clock with green numerals, small spinning bowtie antenna, and cyber-fruitcake of unidentifiable coils, vacuum tubes, and spark-plug-looking Dings. And the ocelot wasn't sitting in her lap, either. It was her lap, or more precisely her abdomen, black-spotted toast-brown feline head and shoulders sprouting from amidst appliances and just starboard of the stoma bag where Li-Yung's vitals should've been located . . . and fully mobile, too, or as fully mobile as the situation allowed, its eyes glowing redly as if surprised by a flashbulb and its neck craning side to side as if trying to birth itself from the machinery that comprised its host, growl from its throat almost subsonic.

Mu-quin Li-Yung drew up between what Rykki now understood were her bodyguards and braked. She scrutinized the kids through eyes so runny and sappish it was difficult to tell what color they were, though the stuff oozing from them definitely enjoyed a shellackish tint. The parts of her that were flesh bore the pigment and composition of greasy jaundiced steak. It appeared all the glandular substance had been lipposuctioned out of her breasts. Their nipples looked like wide bad bruises and the deflated sacs constituting their remnants sagged flatly down her ribby chest.

And those were her really pulchritudinous qualities . . . those and her golden baby- sucker-large nose ring, ornamentally extracted teeth, and astringent perfume smelling of a wet cupboard.

There were a good six centimeters between the base of her gaping nostrils, whose corners attached themselves to her face somewhere far out among the wrinkled frontier that maybe a century ago had been her cheeks, and her thin inverted-V lips. But there was almost no distance from her thin inverted-V lips to the knuckle of her chin. Her forehead eructed into a huge knot that conjured in Rykki's imagination a single protruding tough-skinned buttock which modulated into a bald ridge where her eyebrows probably once domiciled.

And her ears, large as a pair of a five- year-old's cupped hands, jutted almost perpendicularly from her white frowzled hair and were purfled with half a dozen pearl earrings each.

Mu-quin Li-Yung took some time for respiration and consulted her artificial pancreas, a watch-like device half-buried in her right forearm, tapped the stoma bag half-full of some pretty alarming constituents, and finally spoke, her toothless mouth moving gummily while her voice emanated from an antique Toshiba radio mostly hidden by her left armpit.

"Gwielo find-Mu-qupn foxy babe, yes?" she said. "See it in eyes. Gwielo know why? Gwielo guess?" She unhurriedly ran the fingertips that had palpated the stoma bag under her nose. "Bag of earthly delights. Sack of plenty. Can eat, still maintain figure. Diet of champions. Seek peace in luxury. Abundance. Why not? Live once, die once. Life big jet-boat tour on Thames. Retro all broke. Every people enjoy ride. Embrace speed. Gwielo come here want Muquin's bang-zhu? Mu-quin's help?"

"Well, em," Rykki said, "the lady who brought us said you might be able to spare us a bit of food. Maybe just the odd . . ."

"Dao-pian say that?"

"Dao-pian?"

"Fish doll. She say food here? Plenty eat?" Mu-quin Li-Yung laughed, gaspy and moist. The body guards produced some gulping noises that indicated they might be in on the joke as well. "She right, gwielo girl. Plenty plenty. Everywhere food." She raised her palms. "You name. We take care gwielo kind. We take care little one."

"We don't want to trouble you or anything. But if maybe you could see your way clear to spare us a little something, you know . . ."

"Gwielo run way, yes?"

Rykki looked over at Zivv, who couldn't take his eyes off the ocelot.

"We'd much appreciate it," she said. "Whatever you can afford. We're very hungry. We'll eat and be off directly."

"Mu-quip take care little one. Take care kind city forget. Hack into company puter. Phone. Bank. Don't matter. Encrypt file. Put bite on company to decrypt. All sort bang-zhu. All sort help. Food flow like river. Like Thames."

She petted her tummy. The cat leaned into her strokes. Mu-quin Li-Yung slivered her eyes contentedly.

"We don't want to be a bother or anything," Rykki said.

"Every people eat. Every people part of family have no family." She unslivered her eyes. "Look." She raised her pincers and swept them across the room.

Rykki did.

Her eyes had become accustomed to the dark. She still couldn't see the perimeter, but she could make out movement in every direction. Under one table rocked what seemed to be a phocomeliac man well over the seventy-year mark, hands sprigging directly from his shoulders, fingers fused into seal flippers, beside his partner tugging absentmindedly at her elastic facial skin, which she'd fisted out at least twelve centimeters from her cheeks. Under another slept a pair of middle-aged conjoined twins merged at the chest, thumb-sized translucent mole connecting their foreheads, four arms and legs shivering in REM, while near the table with the TV crouched one of those gray-haired Gargoylers Rykki'd once read about with a bumped back and head pushed in on one side, his pregnant mother having strapped herself with a corset so tightly her child had been born deformed and thus capable of bringing a good price from the underground biodealers.

The place was weirdly kinetic.

Rykki made out other humanish shapes leaning against what might have been a stretch of wall or some sort of partition, squatting on tables, scrunching on the planked floor just outside the blue photonic cloud from the television screen.

She'd never seen so many old people before.

Mu-quin saw Rykki seeing and laughed. Her substantial nose ring pendulumed beneath her nostrils.

"Gwielo know '64 World's Fair? Seen pictures?"

"I have done. Sure."

"Awesome science. Happy clean moonhouse. Shiny monorail city. Tidy white flat. Flying car. Smiling homemaker. Waving astronaut. Crystal Palace of twentieth century, no?"

"I guess."

"Only one thing."

" . . . ?"

"Only one problem."

"Got future all cuo. All wrong. No flying car, no tidy moonhouse. End cold war instead. Disintegrate of Soviet Union. No more fear nuclear wipe, but everywhere micro-war. Every people immune system arsed up. Earth shit itself. Malnutrition. Digerati. Fundamentalist. Designer drug replace happy homemaker. Terrorism replace waving astronaut. Urban tooth rot replace shiny monorail city." Her chest inflated and deflated. Air chuffed through her trachea. "Know one thing boss gwielo got right, eh? One thing future give bang on?"

"What?"

"Nice television."

Rykki craned her neck toward Mu-quin as if the gesture might compensate for her inability to understand.

"Nice television?"

"Future give great set. Hen duo channel."

"As in telly?"

"More than we can watch."

A short oval-faced woman with no angles whatsoever associated with her body squeaked a medical cart into the half-light from the passage. The front wheels clacked in circles rather than revolving forward. The woman's bloated skin was white and each limb so cylindrical they created the impression of a collection of water balloons tied together.

Instead of meds, the cart was loaded with bowls of henna-colored soup and mugs of stout.

"Eat eat," Mu-quin announced. "Good food. Make strong. Give healthy. Mu-quin feed family have no family."

The kids helped themselves. Rykki noticed something not completely departed at the bottom of her bowl seemed to be blowing bubbles, so she went for the stout. It tasted warm and corky and overran her nervous system immediately.

"This is awfully kind of you," she said.

"Who need two-parent family? Got nanite. Who need pure air for breathe? Bio-engineering rock, eh?"

Rykki drank. Foam mustached her upper lip.

"You're saying tomorrow will always be different from what we can imagine."

"We got satellite receiver. We got news twenty-four seven." The ocelot stretched itself across Mu-quin's thighs, purr revving, third lids curtaining satisfied yellow-green eyes. "Except boss gwielo forget something. Forget something big."

"What's that?"

"Boss gwielo forget us. Forget here."

Rykki looked around. Her brain felt smeared. A scratch on her right thigh itched.

The Gargoyler crouching by the television blew his nose daintily one nostril at a time into his palms and judged his prosperity.

"The down-and-outters you mean?" Rykki said, feeling simpatico.

"Not you." Mu-quin's tone changed. "Us. Here."

"Us?"

"Every people with sui-shu. How you say? Every people with years. Governcorp give special somebody life-extension service. Important politician. Musician. Scientist. All sort white med. Somebody keep governcorp keeping on. Rest of us? Forget. Rest of us governcorp leave to body running down. Say we strain natural resource. Diversion economic force. Make room for young somebody like you. Go. Leave special somebody alone." Her chest rose and fell. Her dedented mouth started to move. "Know what this called?"

" . . . ?"

"This called Politic of Age."

"Doesn't sound quite fair, does it?"

"Gwielo know what we say to Politic of Age?"

She shook her head no.

Mu-quin leaned forward.

"We say fuck that, Charlie," she said. "Sod off." The ocelot's eyes popped open. Its head raised, low growl barely audible once more, searching for something to vent its rage upon. "So much fung pi. Bugger law. Law don't mean jackshit here, you know?"

"Right, but . . ."

"Age is rage," said the phocomeliac's partner beneath the table, now busy rubbering the skin below her jaw.

"Rule to the gray," answered the Gargoyler.

Mu-quin's body guards gulped in agreement.

Rykki tasted something steel-like on the back of her tongue. It brought to mind the electric version of the color blue.

She blinked and the world quantumed ahead in a film with missing frames.

"See man there," Mu-quin said, aiming a pincer at a perfectly normal-seeming guy in hemp pajamas with scanty yellowish pollution-burned hair that'd once been maybe black. Arms crossed, he leaned on the table with the television on it and gazed at the fish-tanked head gazing at nothing. "Familial dysautonomia. Neurological skrim. Hold flame to skin, can't feel. Stick needle in thigh, think you being sexy. Woman sitting at feet? Anosmia. Loss of smell. Don't know if flat on fire. Nose gone to smash. We got skin disease here. Tired organ. Boil. Know all off by heart. We got pulmonary venous congestion. Parasite up bum. Brain abscess. Arthritis. Myotonic dystrophy. Mu-quin muscle turn to wood. Eye turn to jam. Uterus shrivel up, fall out. You name. Governcorp say fuck you. Say no treat cuz we too old. We leftover. Make room for next somebody. Gwielo know what we say? We say fuck you back. We say piss off. Don't give toss what you want. We want what every people want. Take shit on death. Want jet-boat tour on Thames, retro broke or no. So gwielo know what happen? Know what leftover do?"

The steel-like taste advanced into Rykki's sinuses and she assimilated the data that she couldn't fully feel her fingertips anymore. She wanted to be anxious but the pharmaceuticals in the stout wouldn't let her.

"I can't do.." She shook her head. "I'm feeling a bit mashed up, actually."

"We go guerrilla. Declare war."

"Think maybe I need to, em . . ."

"We say fuck governcorp. Fuck young. Fuck you."

Rykki's mind unclogged fleetingly.

"Fuck us?"

"Fuck you."

"Why fuck us?"

"Fuck you cuz we soldier now. Soldier of elder. And you . . ."

"Us?"

"You POW in battle of age."

Jada sat down gracefully like she was wearing an elegant hoop skirt she didn't want to crease.

As if on cue, Oran joined her.

Tris let the bowl of soup he was working on and aluminum spoon drop from his hands which remained poised like they hadn't quite unscrambled the current state of affairs.

"Kojak find toyboy body in passageway, you know? Overdose. Knife. You name. Pack up. Ship to crematorium. Only toyboy body no arrive." Her fingers returned to the stoma bag. "Turn up here. Make good supper for leftover. Yum-yum. Understand? Food come from where food come from. Every people got to eat. Or maybe find little gwielo girl and boy on street. Say wassup, little gwielo girl and boy? Look right through old people like old people so much furniture. Fuck you. Little gwielo girl and boy enter. Not leave."

"Hang on . . ." Rykki said.

More static swished beneath Mu-quin's armpit.

"Know what leftover do? Old crumbly? Gwielo guess?"

"You gave us the fast shuffle."

"Leftover take little gwielo girl and boy for walk. Cross Thames. We visit clinic. Soldier clinic."

"Soldier clinic?"

"Pet shop. Borrow this. Borrow that. Every people department store inside."

"Organ-grinders."

"You not so clueless, gwielo girl." She raised her chin and studied the darkness above her. "Know what?" She lowered her chin. "Baboon endangered specie. Wolf. Plenty youth, though. Plenty you. Plenty little gwielo girl and boy. Few baboon, wolf. Animal need your help. Every people have heart, you know? We help animal. POW help, too. Lend hand. Eye. Liver. Skin." She stroked the ocelot's head. "Welcome to big-farm, little gwielo girl and boy. You top-line crop."

"Run," Zivv told Rykki, speech slurred by the drugstore in his soup, then fumbled forward into the bodyguard on Mu-quin's righthand side in a languid parody of combat.

The room castled to life.

But the room was already behind Rykki, falling away, and Rykki was already running, or at least taking a stab at the general concept of locomotion.

Problem was she didn't have much sensation left in her legs anymore, either, so her progress quickly deteriorated into a kind of stumbling lumber. She found herself groping through the dim cobblestoned passage beyond the doorway, unable to hold to a straight course, shoulders slamming walls, feet plashing in that urine foaming along the gutters.

Her body came to her in a series of segments, some of which she sort of felt, and some of which she saw wafting up like a flock of detached black birds around her. The film she inhabited pounced ahead several more frames. She jumpcut to the dark muggy wood-paneled pub, the wooden tables at which mostly elderly Chinese men and women twiddled with their chopsticks and whined on their patemounted cellulars.

Outside on the choked pavement she collided with a male bobby who'd gone overboard with metallic silver mascara, lipstick, and fingernail polish, and a female bobby whose face was a Strawberry-Quik miscellany of skin graftings connected with prominent sutural scars.

"Help me," Rykki said, or thought she said, only it occurred to her her oral musculature had gone slack and the phrase had come out sounding a lot closer to "Hulma" than what she'd intended.

She tried again.

The female bobby stared down at her with small black glinting seal-eyes, the graftings having veneered all expression out of the rest of her physiognomy.

"Who do we have here?" she asked.

"Chinese, you think?"

"Bit more African in flavor, isn't she?"

"Could be. African. Sure."

"No no," said the undernourished shiny- silver-bikinied mermaid leaning in the doorway behind them. "No African." She raised her spindly white arm and pointed a finger at her forehead and smiled. "Blue Eyes--how you say?--not all ready for people."

"Not all ready?" asked the female bobby.

"Untogether, you know?"

"Bit dim, you mean," said the male bobby.

"Wallpaint. Lead baby. Brain big poultice."

The female bobby meditated on Rykki.

"Mothers do have 'em," she said. "She belong to you then?"

"Indenture."

"Got the papers, do you?"

"Inside. You see?"

Rykki concentrated very hard and said: "They snatched my brothers and sister and me. Back of the pub."

"Easy, Star," said the male.

The bobbies met each other's look.

"Won't be necessary," said the female to the mermaid.

"Sorry to bother you, madam," said the male.

"No no. Never be too careful." The mermaid's face brightened into

obsequiousness. "Kojak maybe want cup herbal tea for take-way? Make happy happy. Full. Good for healthy. Good for robust."

"We're fine, thanks."

"Much obliged, but we've got to be on our way. Cheers."

"Kojak come again. Always welcome. Law every people friend."

"Right. Well. Shall do."

"Ta-da," said the female bobby.

"Cheers," said the mermaid, settling her hands on Rykki's shoulders, revolving her with a certain degree of practiced tenderness, and aiming her straightaway into the enormously anti-hygienic arms of one of those bodyguards waiting just inside The Collapsed Li-Yung, esophagus rattling in excitation.

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Lance Olsen:

A Biographical Note

Idaho Writer-in-Residence, Lance Olsen was raised in a jungle compound in Venezuela, where his father worked for an oil company, and in the hermetically sealed, climate-controlled malls of northern New Jersey, where he seldom breathed unfiltered air. He received his B.A. (with honors, 1978) in English and Journalism from the University of Wisconsin, his M.F.A. (1980) from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and his M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia. Since then he has taught at universities in Kentucky, London, and Oxford. In 1990 he joined the faculty at the University of Idaho, where he is professor of contemporary fiction, British and American literature, and creative writing. He lives with his wife on an eighty-acre farm near Deary.

His first novel, Live from Earth (Ballantine/Available Press, 1991), is a magical realist tale about a young woman's love affair with her dead husband. His second, Tonguing the Zeitgeist (Permeable, 1994), finalist for the 1995 Philip K. Dick Award for best science fiction novel, critiques the commercialization of the arts at the turn of the millennium. His third, Burnt (Wordcraft, 1996), is an ecofiction that explores various kinds of pollution, and his most recent, Time Famine (Permeable), which Science Fiction Chronicle cited as one of the best novels of 1996, is a literary science fiction involving smart space probes in the twenty-first century, government radiation experiments in the Northwest in the twentieth, and the ill-fated Donner Party in the nineteenth.

In addition, Olsen has published two short story collections, a chapbook of poems, nearly sixty critical essays, fifty individual fictions, and more than a hundred reviews. He has also written four books about postmodern fiction, including the first study of the father of cyberpunk, William Gibson, and has edited two collections of essays on the future of American fiction, including In Memoriam to Postmodernism: Essays on the Avant-Pop.

He is currently working on a new novel, Freak Nest, an excerpt of which appears here, and guest-editing a special issue of the journal Para~doxa about the future of narrative. His digital avatar resides at: http:t/www.uidaho.edu/~lolsen.

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Telegenesicide

Andi and Lance Olsen

PRINT #1

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But They Can’t Even Play an Instrument,

or, Desert Nights:

Flickering Signifiers and Semiotic Ghosts

Robert Dornsife

Creighton University

and

Russel Wiebe

Felician College

Perhaps by now many of us have had the discussion with our students about contemporary forms of music and have heard any band that plays primarily with and through synthesizers dismissed with some version of the phrase, "But they can't even play an instrument." And of course we are all aware of the uproar over the discovery that Milli Vanilli lip-synched; not only did they not "play," but to the extent that they could be understood to "play," they did not play fair. In addition to bands that do not play fair, Milli, New Kids On the Block and no doubt others of whom we are not aware, are punk, thrash, trash, and other forms of rock in which the question what does it mean to play an instrument is raised in a variety of forms. Although we are only the most casual follower of rock and roll trends, we are a bit more avid in our attention to the ways in which our students taxonomize and criticize various forms of their own cultural experience. We note here that one powerful version of our student's taxonomies has to do with this very question of "play," and playing, of what it means for a musician or a band to play in some licit or illicit way. Musicians who can "play" are admired for that ability because they can make a claim to some "unaided" manipulation of their instrument--a manipulation from which their music as art is seen to derive. When our students "rate" a band, there are two preconditions that must first be established: the first is whether or not they play; the second, how much of that playing can be understood to be "unaided," to fall within the category of "playing a conventional instrument." The synthesizer is not considered a conventional instrument, and we suspect that has something to do with its ability to be any, or all instruments, and that it is this ability the synthesizer confers on its--might we call its operator a-- "player"? That makes the player of the "synthesizer" something close to a fraud. In effect, the synthesizing machine and its ability to pretend to be or to be made the occasion of another's pretense to be that which it is not reinstantiates some notion of "originality" as the foundation of our student's aesthetic. Our students seem to believe that the synthesizer "threatens" the embodied "player," offering the possibility that "playing" could take place without "players."

"But they don't even play an instrument" might be taken as a powerful version of the more general concern with the role of the machine in the construction of Art. Mark Poster suggests that "electronic language . . . is everywhere and nowhere, always and never. It is truly material/ immaterial" (Poster, 85). And it is just this ubiquity that seems to make our students nervous. They finally cannot seem to credit an "art" that is available to all.

We begin, then, from this seeming paradox: that although we are everywhere enamored of the machine, of computers, televisions, cd players, surround-sound, home theatre, vcr's, video cameras, laser-disc players cd-rom drives, scanners, cellular phones, and so on, we are at the same time luddite in our acceptance of the forms and abilities these machines confer upon us. The question what it means to be "human" becomes impossible---what is there that a human could do that a machine could not do better, and what might that better confer, defer, and so on?

Perhaps part of the difficulty is just this desire, or the impossibility of resisting the desire, to say everything, which is just the possibility that cd-rom drives with hypertext capabilities networked in some impossible cyber-library seems to unfold--a kind of (dare we offer this techno cliche?) a Borgesian library of babel. But we do offer the cliche (in spite of/because of our reluctance) to suggest that at some level there is nothing but cliche, or there is nothing but the fear of cliche in the machine world, that if there has been, as Bloom has argued now for years, some anxiety of influence, that anxiety is suddenly inescapable "all the way down." We all feel it. Shelley is no longer the only one who must deal with Milton's influence; no longer is the poet the only who must come to terms with the impossible double duty of that anxiety and the compulsion to be "unacknowledged legislator of the world;" it is each of us--that anxiety encoded in the impossible library in which everything is known but in which nothing can be understood.

Veronica Hollinger writes that "the human world replicates its own mechanical systems and the border between the organic and the artificial threatens to blur beyond recuperation" (Hollinger 31). Like our students, Hollinger maintains some fear, some anxiety as the word 'recuperation' makes clear. A less fearful though still ambiguous version of the idea that human and machine are hopelessly(?) intertwined is expressed in Haraway's call for a cyborg feminism, a feminism--and finally a post-humanism--that eschews "originality" with all its connotations of origin and foundation. As Haraway is aware, this abandonment of "origin," of some simple faith in the "natural"-- "but they don't even play an instrument"

--arrives with its own set of perils (149-82).

Perhaps we are ready to agree with our students that Milli Vanilli has not played "fair," but if we once abandon our reliance upon some set of "natural conditions," no matter how naturalized, how will we distinguish between the "bad faith" of Milli and the good faith of some other synthesizer driven band? We might frame this question as "how could we value Mondo Vanilli--Mondo 2000's satiric knock-off of Milli--and still condemn the original fraud?" Is it just that fraud of fraud or "knocking-off" a fraud confers legitimacy? As this example makes clear enough, no simple reversal of polarity will be adequate to found or ground the aesthetic that can make this distinction.

What might it mean to live in the space of the cyborg? Or what it might mean to live in cyborg space, or cyber-space? Is it, as Katherine Hayles suggests (69-91), a disembodiment and through disembodiment the risk of the natural world itself--that one right out that window (though of course as we write this that window is only imaginary--a projection of the present, the moment we write these words, into the future, but also, and oddly, the projection of the past, the past of the present of writing into the future that is the present). And it is just such an examination of the illinearity of the linear time-frame that William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" explores.

"I took it to Kihn" (28) Kihn, or even "kith and kin" is the destination of William Gibson's narrator in "The Gernsback Continuum" when he sees what Kihn calls a "semiotic ghost" (29). "People see these things" (28), says Kihn, last residue of natural authority, a homey sense of kin, and kinship, a kind of brotherhood of the cybernaut, Gibson's narrator reaches to Kihn in order to stabilize his wandering perceptions/hallucinations of reality--reality as seen/"scene"--as stage set.

The theme of what people see, of where the seen comes from and what future it reaches out toward, of how the future of a past's speculation or "dream" can shape both the present and the present's presence is one that drives Gibson's story. Gibson's narrator says, "It is possible to photograph what isn't there" (26), and thus the story takes shape around the oscillation between the absence of what people see and the presence or residue, the "trace" of the past's future in the present--the ability to photograph, to bring to sight that which is no longer there.

By situating itself at the boundary of the visual as "seen" "scene," and unseen, the story coalesces into what N. Katherine Hayles has called "an information narrative," a narrative that takes its themes and shapes from the proliferation of information technologies, strategies, and methods. Hayles defines an "information narrative as one in which:

The shift from presence and absence to pattern and randomness is encoded into every aspect of contemporary literature, from the physical object that constitutes the text to such staples of literary interpretation as character, plot, author, and reader. The development is by no means even; some texts testify dramatically and explicitly to the shift, whereas others manifest it only indirectly. I will call the texts in which this displacement is most apparent information narratives. Information narratives show in exaggerated form changes that are more subtly present in other texts as well. Whether in information narratives or contemporary fiction generally, the dynamic of displacement is crucial. One could focus on pattern in any era, but the peculiarity of pattern in these texts is its interpenetration with randomness and its implicit challenge to physicality. Pattern tends to overwhelm presence, marking a new kind of immateriality that does not depend on spirituality or even consciousness, only on information (80-81).

As Hayles later suggests, the so-called "cyberpunk" work of Gibson and others is one site of the information narrative. But whereas Hayles views these narratives as mapping the "displacement" of the physical by some disembodied "information," Gibson's story suggests that information is always the site of both the embodied and the dis-embodied--that the "machine" configured in a variety of modes from the photograph to the video tape player, the car, the highway, the coffee table book, and so forth is always a structure of presence and absence, that viewed through prisms of memory one woman's future is another man's past. In a recent interview, Gibson says "If I learned anything from writing The Difference Engine, I learned that the present is somebody else's past" ("Nod," 5).

In Hayles account of the "information narrative," she argues that a relationship can be discerned between the "machine text" and the text that has been explicated by deconstruction. Although it is easy to see the relationship between the decentered text of deconstruction and the multipli-centered text of hypertextuality, which has become the apotheosis of the computer text, the consequences of this relationship are more complex and more difficult to understand than Hayles and others suggest. Indeed Hayles' texts in particular find their resonance and reason in the belief that there is a traceable convergence between the multiplicity of post-structuralist textuality and contemporary scientific views of chaos and the science of complexity.

Unlike other thinkers who view Derrida and deconstruction in terms of its relation to the machine, Hayles is not content simply to note the resemblance of the deconstructive, or deconstructed, decentered text, to the text actually produced by machinic or hyper--textuality. Hayles situates her analysis of decontruction in terms of its structuring in the binary presence/absence. It is in that binary that she discovers the core of the deconstructive resemblance to machinic textuality. She writes:

Presence and absence were forced into visibility, so to speak, because they were already losing their constitutive power to form the ground for discourse, becoming instead discourse's subject. In this sense deconstruction is the child of an information age, formulating its theories from strata pushed upward by the emerging substrata beneath" (72).

Thus, for Hayles deconstruction is not so much the discovery or even the (non)critique of western metaphysics that Derrida claims, but rather the uncovering, the "emergence" of what was always already there.

Hayles began her account of this so-called "resemblance" in Chaos Bound in which she argued that the post-structural concern with "decentered texts," or newly complex textuality, mirrored the development of scientific concerns with chaos and complexity. Thus she could argue that both Shannon's reformulation of the distinction between noise and information and De Man's focus on the "undecidability" of meaning were both the result of the same cultural forces.

More recently, Hayles goes beyond the identification of chaos, complexity, and post-structuralism to argue that not only is decontruction an effect of these cultural forces, but that it has been supplanted by a more important, more meaningful, more explanatory paradigm. Hayles opposes the Derridean analysis of presence/ absence with her own focus on what she calls pattern/randomness. Hayles writes:

Critical theory has also been marked by this displacement. At the same time that absence was reconceptualized in poststructuralist theory so that it is not mere nothingness but a productive force seminal to discourse and psycholinguistics, so randomness was reconceptualized in scientific fields so that it is not mere gibberish but a productive force essential to the evolution of complex systems. The parallel suggest that the dialectic between absence and presence came clearly into focus because it was already being displaced as a cultural presupposition by randomness and pattern (72).

Hayles argues that although the machinic text might be seen to resemble the deconstructive text both are shaped by the binary pattern/randomness, that the discursive field is constituted not by "presence/ absence" but by pattern/randomness and that one central effect of this shift is to have forced presence/absence into vision.

In support of her view that the binary pattern/randomness has supplanted or superseded presence/absence, Hayles offers an account of her experience at the HITL (Human Interface Technology Laboratory) in which she had the "disorienting" experience of virtual reality. Hayles account of "virtual reality" expresses her underlying concerns about what we might call the "crisis of embodiment" engendered by a virtual reality that seems to offer the promise (or threat, depending on your point of view) of categories of experience that are no longer linked to the body (72). In some sense, then, though Hayles goes to some lengths to link her thought with Haraway's cyborg feminism, her reactions to virtual reality suggest another, more theoretically informed version of our student's plaint--"but they can't even play an instrument."

Hayles describes her encounter with virtual reality as one in which:

Questions about presence and absence do not yield much leverage. . . (in this situation,) for the puppet both is and is not present, just as the user both is and is not inside the screen" (72).

Given Hayles claim that pattern/randomness has supplanted presence/absence as the underwriting metaphor of machinic textuality, it is surprising to find the language of presence and absence resurfacing at the moment she claims it offers the least "leverage." Her concern appears to be with the momentum towards experiences that she (and we?) views as "disembodied," or "dematerialized." Of course this science-fiction notion is now seriously offered by both the pop press and reputable scientists as a possibility that we might see in our lifetime.

Hayles difficulty with her virtual reality experience seems to be that she is both/only a pattern of information, and thus, in some substantive sense, "not there" and a disembodied or empuppeted, or synthesized subjectivity. Her fear seems to be that her subjectivity is not, in some technical sense, in her body, but in the extension or dematerialization of her body, the puppet, and that her subjectivity, while in some sense animating (or is it animated, and thus nothing but a cartoon) that "puppet" that is (and isn't) her, cannot be understood to be simply present. The fact that her subjectivity is and is not present seems to be the source of her claim that presence/absence no longer yields a purchase on the slippery, virtual slopes and that we must look for another paradigm or risk capitulation to those forces that seek to overthrow, or supplant the body. In other words, it is the fact that her "subjectivity," or consciousness, or spirituality cannot be understood to be simply "present" that leads Hayles to her conclusion that there is a "crisis of embodiment." She writes:

I am now in a position to state my thesis explicitly. The contemporary pressure toward dematerialization, understood as an epistemic shift toward pattern/randomness and away from presence/absence, affects human and textual bodies on two levels at once, as a change in the body "the material substrate) and a change in the message "the codes of representation). To explore these transformations, I want to untangle and then entangle again the networks connecting technological modes of production to the objects produced and consumed, embodied experience to literary experience" (73, 76).

From this statement of her thesis, she turns to her analysis of the "information narrative," narratives that make, or can be read to make, the shift from presence/absence to pattern/randomness their "theme." But whereas Hayles reads these "information narratives" as showing the shift from presence/absence to pattern/randomness, we suggest that a close reading of Gibson's "Gernsback" shows that the "theme" Hayles discovers must be understood to thematize not pattern/randomness but presence and absence, and that arising from such an understanding will not be the anxiety that Hayles feels, but a patterned resistance to the claim that what names us as "human" is some stable instantiation of "embodiment."

At the end of her essay, Hayles acknowledges that her analysis has depended upon seeing the binary pattern/randomness in opposition to the binary presence/absence, and she expresses the hope that pattern and presence can be brought into complementarity. But "The Gernsback Continuum" and much of Gibson's other work suggests that pattern as the emerging structure of the electronic age is chimera. For the narrator of "The Gernsback Continuum," all patterns are simply structures of presence riven by absence and absence riven by presence: "it is possible to photograph what isn't there." It is that interplay that structures both his "embodiment" and his estranged consciousness or subjectivity.

Situated as a conventional retrospective narrative, Gibson's narrator begins his story by saying "Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode" (23). The opening line places the story's events in a near past, a past so near that its effects on the future, though fading, remain substantive. In the very first line, then, the force of what can no longer be "seen," what we come to view in retrospect as an "hallucination," and the power that unseen but nevertheless palpable "absence" might have on the present and the future is already broached.

In addition to this conventional positioning of narrative consciousness, Gibson adds a subversive, or unreliable, narrator. In the story's second line, "When I do still catch the odd glimpse, its peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye" (23), the eye of Gibson's story is revealed as ""unreliable." Although we may not want to hold that everything the narrator sees/tells/photographs/ hallucinates is mere hallucination, we can never quite forget that our narrative "I" has driven in Tokyo on an eighty-lane freeway or that in the story's central hallucination he has driven across the Arizona desert under the influence of a three-year-old diet pill: "I had a meal, showered, took a crumbling diet pill that had been kicking around in the bottom of my shaving kit for three years, and headed back to Los Angeles" (30). In the story's central allegorical moment, the utopian future that the narrator has been photographing blinks into an alternate reality that both is and is not mere hallucination. The scene's iconography places it firmly in the tradition of UFO sightings: "The light woke me, and then the voices" (31). The narrator himself entertains the notion that what he sees is the product of "amphetamine psychosis," but finally concludes that "I knew, somehow, that the city behind me was Tucson--a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real" (32).

Gibson is far from the first author to exploit the possibilities of the convergence of a narrative "I" with a photographic "eye," but in this story both the "I" and the "eye" are entangled in yet another and equally double eye--the eye that watches "video" or life as video, and the eye that encodes life, or narrativizes life as video. The narrator of Gibson's story is a narrative "I," a photographic "eye," and a televisual "eye," which itself divides into the eye that watches video and the eye/hand that shoots video. The narrator's return to health is dependent upon his ability to incorporate the events he has just experienced into an "episode" and the story's Twilight Zone ethos--many of its key elements set in the open space of the desert just outside Tucson, and the mention of the series on the story's final page--reinforce the identification of the story with a TV episode. The story takes as one of its themes the proliferation of media--story, photograph, TV show and finally pornographic video tapes seen in "hot sheet" motels. The proliferation of technical narrative devices Gibson's story thematize the power of the scene/seen in a variety of media, and ask what it means for information to be "present" and what constitutive force remains in absent futures, presents, and pasts.

A reading of "The Gernsback Continuum" suggests that though the speed of the machine can make the shift from one technical narrative strategy to the next a dizzying one, many of the strategies that we have developed to deal with other "machines of memory" remain available to deal with the dizzying and disorienting "facts" of the technological present. At some level, Gibson's message is just that same old one--that knowledge and a dose of skepticism about radical or utopian claims is the best antidote of all. When the narrator returns to sanity he does so by watching Nazi Love Motel, which I think we must see as another story of a utopia gone radically wrong because it tried to purify its past in order to purify its present and its future. Absolute purity becomes pornography: "It could have been worse, it could be perfect" (35).

The case that Gibson makes, then, is not that we can return to or retain some simple "embodied" condition by bringing pattern into a complementary relationship with presence, as Hayles argues, but that "embodiment" is always "embedded" within structures of memory. There is no simple "embodiment" in "The Gernsback Continuum." Rather there are continuums of past/present/future and within this temporality the body is always "disembodied and embodied" as a structure of memory. It is not pattern that stands in opposition to "presence," nor does the understanding of pattern (or patterns) threaten the physical "presentness" of the body. The body is always both a presence and an absence, a memory, a story, and a place. Machines may (indeed always have) multiply those places and forms just as synthesizers multiply the number of instruments that player can play, but perhaps that synthesizer is simply another instrument after all.

Notes:

1. Some versions of the claim for a relationship between Derridean textuality and computer textuality can be found in: Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991), esp. "Critical Theory and the New Writing Space," 147-168; N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1990), esp. "Chaos and Poststructuralism," 175-208; George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992); Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1993); Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990) esp. "Derrida and Electronic Writing," 99-128.

2. Hayles, Chaos Bound, esp. "Chaos and Poststructuralism," 175-208.

3. Hans Moravec, Mind Children (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988).

Works Cited

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Eribaum, 1991.

Gibson, William. "The Gernsback Continuum." Burning Chrome. New York: Ace, 1986. 23-35.

Greenland, Colin. "A Nod to the Apocalypse: An Interview with William Gibson." Foundation. 36(Summer 1986): 5-9.

Harraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990.

—. "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers." October 66(Fall 1993): 69-91.

Hollinger, Veronica. "Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism." Mosaic 23,2(1990): 29-44.

Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1993.

Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.

Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststrucuralism and Social Context. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990.

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Cyberfictions:

A Bibliography of Authors and Their Books–

Kathy Acker to Jim Young

Martin Kich

Wright State University–Lake Campus

This bibliography includes writers whose novels and/or collected short fictions have treated the current or future ramifications of computer technologies on human life. The bibliography provides a complete listing of each writer's published books, not just the cyberfiction titles. The initial date of publication under each imprint has been indicated.

Acker, Kathy. The Adult Life of Toulouse- Lautrec by Henry Toulouse Lautrec. Printed Matter, 1978.

—. Algeria: A Series of Invocations because Nothing Else Works. Ales, 1985.

---. Blood and Guts in High School. Grove, 1984.

---. The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula: Some Lives of Murderesses. Community Congress, 1973.

---. Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream. Grove, 1986.

---. Empire of the Senseless. Picador, 1988. Other Editions: Grove, 1988.

—. Essays. Serpent’s Tail, 1996.

—. Florida. Diana’s Bimonthly P, 1978.

---. Great Expectations. Re-Search Productions, 1982.

—. Hannibal Lecter, My Father. Semiotext(e), 1991.

—. Hello, I’m Erica Jong. Contact Two, 1982.

---. I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining! Empty Elevator Shaft Poetry P, 1974.

---. In Memoriam to Identity. Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.

---. Kathy Goes to Haiti. Rumour, 1978.

—. Literal Madness: Three Novels. Grove, 1988.

—. Low: Good and Evil in the Work of Nayland Blake. Petersburg, 1990.

---. My Mother: Demonology. Pantheon, 1993.

—. New York City in 1979. Hallwalls, 1981.

---. Politics. Papyrus, 1972.

---. Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels. Pantheon, 1992. Other Editions: McKay, 1992.

---. Pussy, King of the Pirates. Grove/Atlantic, 1995.

—. Pussycat Fever. AK, 1995.

Amerika, Mark. The Kafka Chronicles. Fiction Collective, 1993.

---. Sexual Blood. Fiction Collective, 1995. Other Editions: French, 1995.

Anthony, Patricia. Brother Termite. Harcourt, 1993. Other Editions: Ace, 1995.

---. Cold Allies. Harcourt, 1993. Other Editions: Ace, 1994.

---. Conscience of the Beagle. First, 1993. Other Editions: Ace, 1995.

---. Cradle of Splendor. Ace, 1996.

---. Eating Memories. First/Old Earth, 1997.

---. Flanders. Ace, 1998.

---. God's Fires. Ace, 1997.

---. Happy Policeman. Harcourt, 1994. Other Editions: Ace, 1994.

---. Mercy's Children. Ace, 1998.

Arven, Andrea. Wanton. Nexus, 1994.

---. Wicked. Nexus, 1991.

---. Wild. Nexus, 1992.

Austin, Richard. The Guardians. Jove, 1985. Other Editions: Pan, 1990.

---. The Guardians #2: Trial By Fire. Jove, 1985. Other Editions: Berkley, 1985; Pan, 1990.

---. The Guardians #3: Thunder of Hell. Jove, 1985. Other Editions: Pan, 1990.

---. The Guardians #4: Night of the Phoenix. Jove, 1985. Other Editions: Pan, 1991.

---. The Guardians #5: Armageddon Run. Jove, 1986. Other Editions: Pan, 1990.

---. The Guardians #6: War Zone. Jove, 1986. Other Editions: Pan, 1990.

---. The Guardians #7: Brute Force. Jove, 1987. Other Editions: Pan, 1991.

---. The Guardians #8: Desolation Road. Jove, 1987. Other Editions: Pan, 1991.

---. The Guardians #9: Vengeance Day. Jove, 1987. Other Editions: Pan, 1991.

---. The Guardians #10: Freedom Fight. Jove, 1988. Other Editions: Pan, 1991.

---. The Guardians #11: Death Charge. Jove, 1991.

---. The Guardians #12: The Plague Years. Jove, 1988.

---. The Guardians #13: Devil's Deal. Jove, 1989.

---. The Guardians #14: Death from Above. Jove, 1990.

---. The Guardians #15: Snake Eyes. Jove, 1990.

Aylett, Steve. Bigot Hall. Serif, 1995.

Baird, Wilhelmina. Chaos Come Again. Ace, 1996.

---. Clipjoint. Ace, 1994.

---. CrashCourse. Ace, 1993.

---. PsyKosis. Ace, 1995.

Barnes, John. Caesar's Bicycle. HarperPrism, 1997.

---. Kaleidoscope Century. Tor, 1995. Other Editions: Millennium, 1995; Phoenix, 1996.

---. The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky. Congdon and Weed/Contemporary, 1987. Other Editions: Worldwide Library, 1988; NEL, 1988.

---. A Million Open Doors. Tor, 1992. Other Editions: SFBC, 1993; Millennium, 1993.

---. Mother of Storms. Tor, 1994. Other Editions: Millennium, 1994; Orion, 1996.

---. One for the Morning Glory. Tor, 1996.

---. Orbital Resonance. Tor, 1991.

---. Patton's Spaceship. HarperPrism, 1997.

---. Sin of Origin. Congdon and Weed, 1988. Other Editions: Worldwide Library, 1989; NEL, 1991.

---. Time Raider: Battlecry. Worldwide Library/Gold Eagle, 1992.

---. Time Raider: Union Fires. Worldwide Library/Gold Eagle, 1992.

---. Time Raider: Wartide. Worldwide Library/Gold Eagle, 1992.

---. The Timeline Wars. SFBC, 1997.

---. Washington's Dirigible. HarperPrism, 1997.

Barnes, Steven. Blood Brothers. Tor, 1996.

---. Firedance. Tor, 1993.

---. Gorgon Child. Tor, 1989.

---. The Kundalini Equation. Tor, 1986.

---. Streetlethal. Tor, 1990. Other Editions: Ace, 1983.

Baron, Robert. Stormrider. Jove, 1992.

---. Stormrider 2: River of Fire. Jove, 1993.

---. Stormrider 3: Lord of the Plains. Jove, 1993.

Barrett, Neal, Jr. Babylon 5: Book 5: The Touch of Your Shadow, the Whisper of Your Name. Dell, 1996. Other Editions: Boxtree, 1996.

---. Batman: The Black Egg of Atlantis. Little, 1992.

---. Dawn's Uncertain Light. NAL/Signet, 1989. Other Editions: Grafton, 1992.

---. The Hereafter Gang. Mark V. Ziesing, 1991.

---. Judge Dredd. St. Martin's, 1995. Other Editions: Boxtree, 1995.

---. The Karma Corps . DAW, 1984.

---. Pink Vodka Blues. St. Martin's, 1992.

---. Skinny Annie Blues. Kensington, 1996.

---. Slightly Off Center: Eleven Extraordinarily Exhilarating Tales. Swan, 1992.

---. Through Darkest America. Congdon and Weed/Contemporary, 1987. Other Editions: Worldwide Library, 1988.

Bear, Greg. Anvil of Stars. Legend, 1992. Other Editions: Warner Questar, 1992; Easton, 1992; SFBC, 1992.

---. Bear's Fantasies. Newark, NJ: PSFS/Wildside, 1992.

---. Beyond Heaven's River. Tor, 1987. Other Editions: Gollancz, 1988; Severn House, 1989.

---. Blood Music. Arbor House, 1985. Other Editions: SFBC, 1985; Ace, 1986; Gollancz, 1986; Easton, 1990; Legend, 1991.

---. Early Harvest. Framingham, MA: NESFA, 1988.

---. Eon. Chappaqua, NY: Bluejay, 1985. Other Editions: SFBC, 1986; Tor, 1986; Gollancz, 1986; Legend, 1987.

---. Eternity. Warner, 1988. Other Editions: SFBC, 1988; Gollancz, 1989; Popular Library/Questar, 1989; Legend, 1990; Warner Aspect, 1994.

---. The Forge of God. Gollancz, 1987. Other Editions: Tor, 1987; SFBC, 1988; Legend, 1989.

---. Heads. Legend, 1990. Other Editions: St. Martin’s, 1991; BOMC, 1992; Tor, 1992; BOMC/QPBC, 1992.

---. Hegira. Gollancz, 1987. Other Editions: Severn House, 1988; Dell, 1989; Tor, 1989.

---. The Infinity Concerto. Berkley, 1984. Other Editions: Century, 1988; Legend, 1988; Ace, 1989.

---. Legacy. Tor, 1995. Other Editions: Legend, 1995; SFBC, 1995.

---. Moving Mars. Tor, 1993. Other Editions: Legend. 1993; SFBC, 1994.

---, ed. [With Martin H. Greenberg] New Legends. Tor, 1995. Other Editions: Legend, 1996.

---. Psychlone. Ace, 1979. Other Editions: Tor, 1988; Gollancz, 1989; Severn House, 1990.

---. Queen of Angels. Warner, 1990. Other Editions: Easton, 1990; Gollancz, 1990; BOMC, 1990; Warner Questar, 1991; Legend, 1991; Warner Aspect, 1994.

---. The Serpent Mage. Berkley, 1986. Other Editions: Century, 1988; Legend, 1989; Ace, 1989.

---. Sisters. Eugene, OR: Pulphouse, 1992.

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—. Nothing but the Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image. Cassell, 1996.

—. Susie Bright’s Sexual Reality: A Virtual Sex World Reader. Cleis, 1992.

—. Susie Bright’s Sexwise: America’s Favorite X-Rated Intellectual Does Dan Quayle, Catharine MacKinnon, Stephen King, Camille Paglia, Nicholson Baker, Madonna, the Black Panthers, and the GOP. Cleis, 1995.

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---. The Sky Lords. Gollancz, 1988. Other Editions: St. Martin's, 1991.

---. War of the Sky Lords. Gollancz, 1989. Other Editions: St. Martin's, 1992.

Brown, Eric. Blues Shifting. Pan, 1995.

---. Engineman. Pan, 1994.

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---. The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories. Pan, 1990. Other Editions: Drunken Dragon, 1990.

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---. The Crucible of Time. Del Rey, 1983. Other Editions: SFBC, 1984; Ballantine Del Rey, 1984; Legend, 1990.

---. The Days of March. Kerosina, 1988.

---. Interstellar Empire. DAW, 1976. Other Editions: DAW, 1986; Arrow, 1987.

---. The Jagged Orbit. Ace, 1969. Other Editions: DAW, 1984.

---. A Maze of Stars. Ballantine Del Rey, 1991. Other Editions: Easton, 1991.

---. More Things in Heaven. DAW, 1987.

---. Muddle Earth. Ballantine Del Rey, 1993.

---. The Sheep Look Up. Harper, 1972. Other Editions: Legend, 1991.

---. The Shift Key. Methuen, 1987.

---. The Shockwave Rider. Harper, 1975. Other Editions: Methuen, 1988; Ballantine Del Rey, 1989.

---. The Squares of the City. Ballantine, 1965. Other Editions: Macmillan Collier Nucleus, 1991.

---. Stand on Zanzibar. Doubleday, 1968. Other Editions: Easton, 1987; Ballantine Del Rey, 1988; Legend, 1988

---. The Traveler in Black. Ace, 1971.

---. Three Complete Novels: Children of the Thunder, The Tides of Time, and The Crucible of Time. Wings, 1995.

---. The Tides of Time. Ballantine Del Rey, 1984; SFBC, 1985; Penguin, 1986.

---. Timescoop. Dell, 1969. Other Editions: DAW, 1984.

---. Total Eclipse. Doubleday, 1974. Other Editions: DAW, 1984.

---. Victims of the Nova. Omnibus of the Zarathustra Planet Series: Polymath, The Avengers of Carrig, and The Repairmen of Cyclops. Legend, 1989.

---. The Whole Man. Ballantine, 1964. Other Editions: Macmillan Collier Nucleus, 1990.

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Duke U P, 1993.

Bull, Emma. Bone Dance. Ace, 1991. Other Editions: SFBC, 1991.

--- [With Will Shetterly.] Double Feature. NESFA, 1994.

---. Falcon. Ace, 1989.

---. Finder. Tor, 1994.

--- [With Stephen Brust]. Freedom and Necessity.

---. The Princess and the Lord of Night. Harcourt Brace, 1994.

---. War for the Oaks. Ace, 1987.

Bury, Stephen. The Cobweb. Bantam, 1996.

---. Interface. Bantam, 1994. Other Editions: Signet UK, 1997.

Cadigan, Pat. Dirty Work. Mark V. Ziesing, 1993.

---. Fools. Bantam Spectra, 1992. Other Editions: HarperCollins UK, 1994.

---. Home By the Sea. WSFA, 1992.

--- [With Karen Joy Fowler and Pat Murphy]. Letters from Home. Women's, 1991.

---. Mindplayers. Bantam Spectra, 1987. Other Editions: Gollancz, 1988.

---. My Brother's Keeper. Pulphouse, 1992.

---. Patterns. Ursus, 1989. Other Editions: Grafton, 1991.

---. Synners. Bantam Spectra, 1991. Other Editions: HarperCollins UK, 1991; Grafton, 1991.

Cain, Robert. Cybernarc. Harper Paperbacks, 1991.

---. Cybernarc #3: Island Kill. Harper Paperbacks, 1992.

---. Cybernarc #4: Capo's Revenge. Harper Paperbacks, 1992.

---. Cybernarc #5: Shark Bait. Harper, 1992.

---. Cybernarc: Gold Dragon. Harper Paperbacks, 1991.

Calder, Richard. Dead Boys. HarperCollins UK, 1994. Other Editions: St. Martin's, 1996.

---. Dead Girls. HarperCollins UK, 1993. Other Editions: St. Martin's, 1995.

---. Dead Things. Voyager, 1996. Other Editions: St. Martin's, 1997.

Card, Orson Scott. The Abyss. Pocket, 1989. Other Editions: Legend, 1989; SFBC, 1989.

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---. The Changed Man. Tor, 1992.

---. Characters and Viewpoint. Writer's Digest, 1988. Other Editions: Robinson, 1990.

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---. Cruel Miracles. Tor, 1992.

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---, ed. Dragons of Light. Ace, 1980. Other Editions: Bart, 1988.

---. Earthborn. Tor, 1995.

---. Earthfall. Tor, 1995.

---. Ender's Game. Tor, 1986. Other Editions: Arrow, 1997; Legend, 1990; Easton, 1993; SFBC, 1993.

---. Ender's War. Omnibus Edition of Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. SFBC, 1997.

---. Flux. Tor, 1992.

---. The Folk of the Fringe. Phantasia, 1989. Other Editions: Legend, 1990; Tor, 1990; SFBC, 1991

---, ed. Future on Fire. Tor, 1991.

---. Hart's Hope. Ace, 1983. Other Editions: Allen and Unwin/Unicorn, 1986; Tor, 1988; Severn House, 1993.

---. Hatrack River. Omnibus of Seventh Son, Red Prophet, and Prentice Alvin. SFBC, 1989.

---. Homecoming: Earth. Omnibus of Earthfall and Earthborn. SFBC, 1995.

---. Homecoming: Harmony. Omnibus of the First Three Books in the "Homecoming" Series: The Memory of Earth, The Call of Earth, and The Ships of Earth. SFBC, 1994.

---. Hot Sleep. Baronet, 1979.

---. How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. Writer's Digest, 1990.

---. Lost Boys. HarperCollins, 1992. Other Editions: SFBC, 1993; HarperPaperbacks, 1993.

--- [With Kathryn H. Kidd]. Lovelock. Tor, 1994.

---. Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card. Tor, 1990. Other Editions: BOMC, 1990; Easton, 1990; Legend, 1991

---. Maps in a Mirror: Volume One: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card. Legend, 1992.

---. Maps in a Mirror: Volume Two: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card. Legend, 1992.

---. The Memory of Earth. Tor, 1992. Other Editions: Legend, 1992.

---. Monkey Sonatas. Tor, 1990.

---. Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. Tor, 1996. Other Editions: SFBC, 1996.

---. Prentice Alvin. Tor, 1989. Other Editions: Legend, 1989.

---. Red Prophet. Tor, 1988. Other Editions: Legend, 1989.

---. Saints. Reprint of A Woman of Destiny. Tor, 1988.

---. Seventh Son. Tor, 1987. Other Editions: Legend, 1988.

---. The Ships of Earth. Tor, 1994. Other Editions: Legend, 1994

---. Songmaster. Dial, 1983. Other Editions: Tor, 1987; Legend, 1990; Severn House, 1994.

---. Speaker for the Dead. Tor, 1986. Other Editions: Arrow, 1987; Century, 1987; Legend, 1990.

---. Treason. St. Martin's, 1988.

---. Treasure Box. HarperCollins, 1996. Other Editions: HarperChoice, 1997.

---. Unaccompanied Sonata. Eugene, OR: Pulphouse, 1992.

---. Woman of Destiny. Berkley, 1984.

---. The Worthing Chronicle. Ace, 1983.

---. The Worthing Saga. Tor, 1990. Other Editions: Legend, 1991.

---. Wyrms. Arbor House, 1987. Other Editions: SFBC, 1987; Legend, 1988; Tor, 1988

---. Xenocide. Tor, 1991. Other Editions: Legend, 1991; SFBC, 1992.

Collins, Warwick. Challenge. Pan, 1990.

---. Computer One. No Exit, 1993. Other Editions: No Fault, 1993; Boyars, Marion, 1997.

---. Death of an Angel. Pan, 1992.

---. New World. Pan, 1991.

Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. St. Martin’s, 1991.

---. Girlfriend in a Coma. HarperCollins/ Regan, 1998.

---. Life after God. Pocket, 1994.

---. Microserfs. HarperCollins, 1995.

---. Polaroids from the Dead. HarperCollins, 1996.

---. Shampoo Planet. Pocket, 1992.

Daley, Brian. Classic Star Wars: The Han Solo Adventures. Ballantine Del Rey, 1995.

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---. Fall of the White Ship Avatar. Ballantine Del Rey, 1987. Other Editions: Grafton, 1990.<