Gosh, I’m writing a lot this morning. I think I’m just tired of sitting around.

Anyway, a guy over at Slashdot asks the question, “Is hypertext literature dead?“. I glanced at the comments, many of whom predictably said, “Dude! Wikipedia!” These people missed the point completely. Hypertext is alive and well, certainly; it’s how the Web works. And interactive fiction is alive and well. Not only is there a small but lively culture devoted to what we used to call “text adventures,” every computer game with a significant story-telling aspect to it is a kind of interactive fiction.

But hypertext literature, however, is dead…and good riddance to it, say I.

Back around the time the World Wide Web was becoming popular (and when was the last time you heard anyone say, “World Wide Web”?), it was common to hear people say that hypertext was the future of fiction. Authors would take advantage of hypertext to write books consisting of short, linked pages that could be read in any order, or that had multiple endings. You could choose to follow one character all the way through, and then follow another character, or read it back to front—assuming that there even was a front or back. It was to be a process of exploration, where the reader participated in the creation of the text they actually read. It was a Brave New World.

You might be thinking of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books as a kind of hypertext literature, and they were, I suppose; but most of what I saw had something different in mind. It wasn’t meant to be a game; it was meant to be serious literature, serious exploration of characters. You were meant to read the whole thing, in time, but in your own order. I remember looking at a few experiments along these lines, back in the day. They were somewhat interesting. But, you know, they used to say that atonality was the future of serious music. The results were somewhat interesting, and yet melody and traditional harmony are still with us.

Just off of the top of my head, I can think of three reasons why hypertext fiction simply hasn’t caught on. The first is simply pragmatic: you get lost. As a reader, you want to read the whole story…but if you’re linking from page to page through a vast network of pages, it’s hard to have any idea how much you’ve read and how much is left. And since you didn’t usually have links to every page from every page, it’s hard to know how to find the pages you’ve not read. Ultimately, you end up with a linear list of pages somewhere in the work, and you keep having to go back to it to find starting points you’ve not yet read. It’s a lot of work.

The second is artistic, and has to do with the nature of story. A story, like a piece of music, is essentially linear. It has a structure: earlier parts lay the groundwork for the later parts, and the later parts build on the earlier parts. Imagine breaking a symphony up into ten second segments, and mixing them randomly: no doubt someone has written a symphony like that, but I doubt very many people have enjoyed it; and it wouldn’t work with, say, Beethoven’s 9th. A story has a logical order to it that builds to a climax. That order may not be purely chronological; we’ve all read books in which the chronological events are told out of sequence, and to good dramatic effect. They are told out of sequence because that’s how they best build to a climax.

This is true even in computer games like the various Legend of Zelda games: the player is free to wander about the world and solve problems in the order they choose…but only up to a point. The overall flow of the game is, in fact, tightly controlled so as to build up to the climax.

Hypertext literature rejected this notion in principle. The reader was to determine the order, not the writer. As a result, any order was as valid as any other. I suppose there might be stories that can be adequately told in this way; but in general, this notion runs contrary to the very nature of story.

The third is also artistic, and has to do with the skill of the author. Writing a work that can be effectively read in any order is hard. As an analogy, compare Pablo Picasso with Jackson Pollack. Picasso went through a period they call “high analytic cubism” where he painted “portraits” of people that looked like nothing so much as a flock of hundreds of little squares, hanging in space, all at slightly different angles. The notion, as I understand it, was that each square represented a point on the person’s face: the face was analyzed into hundreds of tangent planes, and each plane was exploded out in the form of a little square. If this is what Picasso really did, if it isn’t just hooey, then the resulting painting really is in some sense a portrait of the subject, even though it looks like nothing much, and involved quite a lot of real work. I couldn’t do it.

Jackson Pollack, on the other hand, laid canvases on the floor and dripped paint on them. Anybody can do that.

And that’s the problem. To do hypertext fiction really well wouldn’t involve a rejection of classic story structure. Instead, you’d need to have a deep, deep understanding of how stories work and of your story in particular, and your story would have to lend itself to being told in any order. You need the right author, and the right subject, and that’s a very small set. I’m not saying that it can’t be done…but the idea that it will ever be mainstream is, and always was, simply nuts.