Word: grammatron
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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...
...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...
...night while she waits for her philandering husband to come home. As the story unfolds, you can hear her clock strike midnight, read meandering asides about her paranoid fears of an intruder and see the floor plan of her apartment slowly revealed onscreen. More ambitious narratives, such as Grammatron by Mark Amerika, which tackles everything from Cabala to virtual sex, come across as pretentious, thanks to lines like, "I ask of writing what I ask of desire...to move beyond death's link to false consciousness." Meanwhile, the group project Fakeshop, shown above, is a multimedia symphony of overlapping windows...
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