the internet in fiction

The whole cyberpunk rubbish of the 80s was in large part based on being able to connect into a network and have a virtual reality experience with other people. William Gibson's Neuromancer - a book I don't like much - describes this cyberspace as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by a billions of legitimate operators in every nation". And, well, you already know his "Pattern Recognition".

Lost Boy, Lost Girl by Peter Straub has an interesting Internet ending.

I think there are a bunch of romance etc. novels with epistolary email sections.

Funny how none of these are particularly good.

I'm really interested in authors writing present-day fiction in which characters use the internet; I've been thinking about how it can be put to use for the story. Was wondering what other people are thinking/doing about this.

xpost Funny, yeah! What can be done?

Tom Clancy's Net force.
Breaking point /
Author: Clancy, Tom,

The Street : a novel /
Author: Gruenfeld, Lee

Whole wide world /
Author: McAuley, Paul J.

The PowerBook /
Author: Winterson, Jeanette

Tom Clancy's Net force.
CyberNation /
Author: Clancy, Tom; Pieczenik, Steve R.; Perry, Steve.

The metaphysical touch /
Author: Brownrigg, Sylvia.

The jazz /
Author: Scott, Melissa.

The egg code : a novel /
Author: Heppner, Mike,

Illegal tender /
Author: Hammond, Gerald,

occasionally don delillo gets all in your face about 'cyberspace' and it's really quite embarrassing.

(the woman staring at the webcam from sweden is quite nice, in the body artist. but then thinking the guy had "come from cyberspace" doesn't work at all for me, although it's better than the ending of underworld.)

(bcz he's clearly read all the william gibson nonsense and it seems rather less clear that he actually knows much about the actual internet we actually have in actual life)

this is the worst! i wonder if talking about the internet is something that generation of authors will be able to do satisfactorily, at all.

Surely Tom Wolfe must show how much college students use the internet in I Am Charlotte Simmons?

"I have Said Nothing is a hypertext short fiction. Bracketed by two fatal car accidents, the work is a meditation on the enormity that divides us from others. The author explores the interaction between the fragmentation inevitable in hypertext and the causality necessary for the creation of story." (eastgate)

anyone else read hypertext? thoughts?

Casuistry, can you expand on that a bit?

There are any number of problems with the format, but the biggest one is that I have never felt compelled to "click" on a hypertext link for any reason other than boredom or idle hopes that it will get better. That is not a good enough reason to keep clicking. I have never seen a hypertext where I felt enticed to click on a link, nor have I come across one where I had built up enough trust to want to click links until some cumulative effect built up.

(There are pieces of interactive fiction that I've found to be extremely effective, but that is different from how I understand hypertext.)

http://www.wwnorton.com/pmaf/hypertext/ihsn/i_have_said_nothing.html

yes casuistry, i agree that there are many problems with the medium. it reads almost like a technologically advanced version of do-it-yourself adventure books. the structure of hypertext has innumerable new effects and implications on the reader and the meaning of the text, which often are in tension with one another: on the one hand, the form lends itself to alienation, separating the reader from the text. aside from losing the literal connection offered in print form (a reader can hold a book, touch a physical text), hypertext is purposefully and inevitably fragmented so that it will never reach the reader whole. on the other hand, however, the interactive quality of the hypertext (since it is the reader who must keep the story going and choose which path it takes) forges an intimate connection between Douglas and the reader, since in a sense they create the story together

that said, i'm not sure "i have said nothing" is the most effective or engaging piece of "literature," although there are parts of it i find interesting

If only it did. CYOA books were generally not great literature, but at least many of them were compelling enough. And they knew some basics: They would usually begin with several pages of narrative before their first choice, enough to draw you in an make you care about what was going on before giving you any options, and those options were meaningful before you chose them. And the form of the book matched up with the narrative of the book -- you had the agency to choose because you were the main character making the tough decisions.

In that excerpt, though, you start of with a piece of mediocre flash fiction, where the only fact is that someone you don't care about has died, and then you're give oblique options for exploring how she died and why it is you would care about her death. And, as I describe above, you click on the options not because you care about finding out more but because you're bored with what little you've been given. After a few more clicks I get tired and want to go to some more enthralling piece of hypertext, such as the Wikipedia.

i think the form and content are, in fact, related. Douglas describes the literal fragmentation of the human body upon impact with a Chevy going seventy-five miles per hour ("it fractures your ribcage, your skull, blah blah") through an equally fragmented text.

and i think there's something deliberate about the juxtaposition of such a jarring, dark story and the gradual method of its revelation, which may feel like a game...and as casual/familiar and matter-of-fact as wikipedia:

"---It fractures your collarbone; your scapula; your pelvis; your sacral, lumbar, thoracic, and cervical vertebrae."

but i'm not sure why i'm defending it, since i'm not a huge fan of the genre or of this particular example. uh, not that this is a disclaimer or anything........

See, and I'd think a better idea would be to take each fragment of body and connect it back to a story from the person's life. Links could connect mentions of the various body fragments that appear in other stories, which could be used to draw interesting connections between stories, etc. That could be beautiful.

Also, the text as-is isn't fragmented -- the narrative is. Each fragment is in perfectly fine shape, and seemingly unbruised (or at least, the ones I saw were). But a car crash doesn't immediately scatter the fragments of a person's narrative, it scatters the fragments of a person's body. The violence has been reduced to a weak metaphor of violence, and one displaced.

I was going to suggest Matthew Beaumont's e (which is just a collection of back and forth emails in an advertising company - parts are hilarious, parts blechy - and it hasn't aged well), but someone up-thread beat me to it. But that's what first came to mind for me.

(terrible book all around)

There was something similar in Britain, called Prestel, but it never took off the way Minitel did.

I also thought of e (which is a bit rubbish), and Cryptonomicon (which isn't, but has annoying parts - why does he change the name of Linux, for example?). Snow Crash has influenced the internet more than it's about it.