Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 1 Chapter 1: Introduction

"Rebooting Electronic Literature is an open-source, multimedia book that documents seven pre-web works of electronic literature held in the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) library at Washington State University Vancouver. The seven works selected for this project are among the most unique and fragile. Sarah Smith's King of Space (1991), the first documented e-lit work of science fiction, was produced with the early hypertext authoring Hypergate. David Kolb's Socrates in the Labyrinth (1994) is one of a handful of hypertext essays produced during the pre-web period and certainly the only one focusing on philosophy. J Yellowlees Douglas' "I Have Said Nothing" (1994), which — along with Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story — appeared in W. W. Norton & Co.’s Postmodern American Fiction (1997), the only works of electronic literature ever published in one of Norton’s many collections. Thomas M. Disch's AMNESIA (1986) is a text adventure game, the only published by Electronic Arts and one of a handful authored by a prominent print writer. Rob Kendall's A Life Set for Two (1996) is an animated poem programmed by the artist in Visual Basic. Judy Malloy's its name was Penelope, Version 3.0 (1993) is a retooling of Version 2.0 (1990) by Mark Bernstein from the original BASIC program into the Storyspace aesthetic. Finally, Mary-Kim Arnold's "Lust" (1994) packaged with Douglas’ in The Eastgate Quarterly Review, Volume 1, Number 2 is a hypertext that straddles the genre of fiction and poetry." -- from Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 1, Introduction