The Author Got Hyper About It

For

get what Virginia Woolf said about what a writer needs--a room of one's own. The writer she had in mind wasn't at work on a novel in cyberspace, one with multiple hypertexts, animated graphics and downloads of trancey, chiming music. For that you also need graphic interfaces, RealPlayer and maybe even a computer laboratory at Brown University. That was where Mark Amerika--his legally adopted name; don't ask him about his birth name--composed much of his novel Grammatron. But Grammatron isn't just a story. It's an online narrative grammatron.com) that uses the capabilities of cyberspace to tie the conventional story line into complicated knots. In the four years it took to produce--it was completed in 1997--each new advance in computer software became another potential story device. "I became sort of dependent on the industry," jokes Amerika, who is also the author of two novels printed on paper. "That's unusual for a writer, because if you just write on paper the 'technology' is pretty stable."

Nothing about Grammatron is stable. At its center, if there is one, is Abe Golam, the inventor of Nanoscript, a quasi-mystical computer code that some unmystical corporations are itching to acquire. For much of the story, Abe wanders through Prague-23, a virtual "city" in cyberspace where visitors indulge in fantasy encounters and virtual sex, which can get fairly graphic. The reader wanders too, because most of Grammatron's 1,000-plus text screens contain several passages in hypertext. To reach the next screen, just double-click. But each of those hypertexts is a trapdoor that can plunge you down a different pathway of the story. Choose one and you drop into a corporate-strategy memo. Choose another and there's a XXX-rated sexual rant. The story you read is in some sense the story you make.

Amerika teaches digital art at the University of Colorado, where his students develop works that straddle the lines between art, film and literature. "I tell them not to get caught up in mere plot," he says. Some avant-garde writers--Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino--have also experimented with novels that wander out of their author's control. "But what makes the Net so exciting," says Amerika, "is that you can add sound, randomly generated links, 3-D modeling, animation." That room of one's own is turning into a fun house.