Coover, an author who teaches hyperfiction writing at Brown University, reviews 11 hyperfiction novels (which he calls “hyperfictions”), which apparently represent the total output of this genre in the previous year. Hyperfiction is a subclass of hypertext, which is a way of presenting information on a computer in which gobbets of text, images, sound, and actions are linked together in a complex nonsequential web. (The gobbets are sometimes called “nodes.” Coover calls them “text spaces.”) The links may be imposed by the author, selected by the user, or both. The scheme was first proposed to help readers locate specific facts and encourage browsing in databases. The works reviewed by Coover are hypertext novels, that is, fiction in hypertext form.

He selects two as being important, Victory garden, by Stuart Moulthrop, and Afternoon, a story, by Michael Joyce, and disposes of the rest as being substandard. Although he says that Victory garden “exceeds all other known examples of the form in complexity, sophistication, narrative richness and formal exploration,” his detailed discussion of it gives the impression of an ill-formed collection of bits and pieces of the worst fiction from Omni and Mad Magazine stitched together every which way but up. Of Afternoon, which he calls “a benchmark,” he says, “the story is something like a hypertextually expanded novella, with a great many of its 539 text spaces devoted to self-conscious speculations about hypertext.…” In spite of this, he calls it “a graceful and provocative work.…”

Either of the hypernovels may be obtained for $19.95 from the publisher, Eastgate Systems, 134 Main Street, Watertown, MA 02172.

Coover is not the only hyperfiction enthusiast. A month after the publication of his review, the Book Review for October 3, 1993, devoted its entire letters page to a discussion by its readers of whether hyperfiction is a new narrative art form or just another literary fad. Some, led by Pamela  McCorduck,  extolled it as, in her words, “a medium right in line with the most interesting intellectual currents we find ourselves floating upon here at the end of the 20th century.” Others bad-mouthed it in a variety of unlinked terms. I confess to having come no closer to it than Coover’s article.