Going Futher with Hypertext Fiction

Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, a story was written in 1987 and is the first known hypertext fiction. Its’ a story about a boy named Peter, a recently divorced man who witnessed a car crash that may or may not have involved his ex-wife and their son.

After reading about Hypertext fiction and narratives in this week’s readings, I decided to do some external research and find another example of this new technology similar to Joyce’s.

I came across a YouTube clip called: Patchwork Girl.
It is a work of electronic literature by American author Shelley Jackson wrote this piece of electronic literatrure/hypertext fiction. It was written in Storyspace and published by Eastgate Systems in 1995. Patchwork Girl is often dicussed as an important piece of hypertext fiction work along with the renowned Afternoon, a story. Patchwork Girl uses female body illustrations that are stitched together through text and image to tell a compelling story. All the pieces of the segmented story must be patched together in order to create one unified structure. You can take multiple directions through each chapter using linking words and images.

“Shelley Jackson’s brilliantly realized hypertext Patchwork Girl is an electronic fiction that manages to be at once highly original and intensely parasitic on its print predecessors.”