Ew. I’ve glanced at ‘253’ by Geoff Ryman, and I admit I’m intrigued.

I needed a real hypertext, and though the layout is simplistic, the point comes across. There are 253 people on this train, each with a present and a past, all heading to the same future (if you skip ahead). It’s surprisingly good to read, and certainly evocative. I certainly didn’t expect that kind of ending, though really I should have.

I was taken by how… over-the-top it is. There is so much drama on one train, so many stories in the lives of its passengers. It’s pretty tragic, and pretty… well, pretty.

But it’s not as enthralling as it wants to be. Sadly, I only read a handful of the entries, and I guess that’s the doom of this story. Oddly enough, I’m somewhat sure it was the point of the story as well, the ability to jump from person to person at will, from the snippet of the train journey we see to the catastrophic end and back again, but once the ending is apparent, once the story has an its conclusion the middle doesn’t seem as important. Sadly, in a story like this that culminates in one major event because of one major failure, the lives of those affected are not overly relevant. One character caused this, and yet we get 252 others to look at.

Yes, I realise we must acknowledge those who suffer because of the one, but we are unfortunately given the choice, and right now I just don’t feel like it. Does that make me a bad person?

Yeah, I guess so. Unfortunately, this narrative has also made me see that perhaps my own hypertext story is a bit stupid. I don’t really like them, why should I try and create my own?

For those who want to give it a go, the story begins here: http://www.ryman-novel.com/