Notes Toward Absolute Zero: A Long Prose Poem

Notes Toward Absolute Zero: A Long Prose Poem is a printed, hardbound edition of McLaughlin's hypertext Notes Toward Absolute Zero. It includes a preface that describes the author's process of developing the original hypertext. Notes Toward Absolute Zero features "shipwrecks, train wrecks, and wrecked hearts." McLaughlin's work is "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." -- from Rebooting Electronic Literature, Vol. 2