Lucy's Sister—A Guide to the Internet

"Another Joyce hypertext available for the Mac platform from Michael Joyce's homepage, like Woe, is Lucy's Sister. A lengthy area within Lucy's Sister seems to be modeled on internet chat, complete with typos and complaints about scrolling through messages. The reader arrives in the middle of an ongoing discussion, much as in an actual internet chat, and comments seem curiously oblique, as though some messages aren't getting through, or arent't getting read. Eventually, characters sign off. . . . Lucy's Sister seems a much more limited hypertext fiction, with a clear ending space which leads, of course, back to the beginning space from which one may choose a different path. In fact, one may be forced onto a different path if the reading is a continuous one, since Storyspace keeps track of the paths one has followed in each reading. But the activity of navigating it still retains the visible map in the background (clearly visible in the chat session). With this network of links always visible, not merely available, one can never believe that the pages represent actual internet chat. There is no suspension of disbelief, no confusion as to the medium in which these words are presented." -- Dean Tacuich, "Hype - Hyphen - Hypertext: Hypertext Fiction in the Classroom," in English Matters 2