Authoring Systems & the Art They Wrought

• Tim McLaughlin's Notes Toward Absolute Zero
• Storyspace
• 1995

Shipwrecks, train wrecks, and wrecked hearts permeate Tim McLaughlin's Notes Toward Absolute Zero, a hypertext narrative produced with Storyspace in 1993 and published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in 1995 on 3.5-inch floppy disk and in 1996 on CD-ROM. As the title suggests, it is a story about cold so absolute that order and predictability are lost. As Rob Kendall points out in his study of the work, "Parsing the Cold: McLaughlin's Notes Toward Absolute Zero," the overarching theme of the narrative is the power of cold to both destroy and preserve.