SOURCE: "Interactive Fiction," in Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991, pp. 121-46.

[In the following excerpt, in which he discusses Michael Joyce's interactive text "Afternoon" (1987) at length, Bolter places interactive fiction within the context of Modernism and suggests possibilities that the genre offers to authors and readers.]

Robert Coover on hypertext and reading:

With hypertext we focus, both as writers and as readers, on structure as much as on prose, for we are made aware suddenly of the shapes of narratives that are often hidden in print stories. The most radical new element that comes to the fore in hypertext is the system of multidirectional and often labyrinthine linkages we are invited or obliged to create. Indeed the creative imagination often becomes more preoccupied with linkage, routing and mapping than with statement or style, or with what we would call character...