Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 2 Chapter 5: Tim McLaughlin's "Notes Toward Absolute Zero"

"Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 2 is the second of a series of open-source, multimedia books documenting works of electronic literature held in Dene Grigar's Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) collection at Washington State University Vancouver. The five works selected for this volume are among the most unique and fragile in the collection. All constitute long-form writing produced with stand-alone hypertext authoring systems available during the late 20th and early 21st centuries." -- from Rebooting Electronic Literature Volume 2, Introduction

"Shipwrecks, train wrecks, and wrecked hearts permeate Tim McLaughlin’s Notes Toward Absolute Zero (NTAZ), 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 Volume 2, Chapter 5