[2] "SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment." (Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction , 7-8.)
[3] As another scholar of hypertext, Gunnar Liestøl, comments on Landow's model, "The flexible collection of intersecting context-dependent linearities should, as suggested by Landow, be conceived as multilinear and multisequential instead of as the negatives nonlinear and nonsequential (Hypertext , 4). Multilinearity or -sequentiality are not pure negations of line and sequence but designate complex structures of various kinds and occurrences of linearities or, rather, multiplication of linearities." Liestøl, "The Reader's Narrative in Hypertext," in Hyper/Text/Theory , 110.
[4] "Using Storyspace in the Classroom," Modern Language Association, San Diego, December 1994.
[5] However, I question Madden's assertion that "even a literature class that had only occasional use of computers would find hypertextual applications useful." (2) Madden's description implies that his students spent all their class time in the computer facility. My class was scheduled in the computer lab one hour a week to work on the Web Project, and I reserved extra drop-in time in case students needed more access individually. As it turned out, this was not enough time for all my students to become comfortable with Storyspace.
[6]Rosello, "The Screener's Maps: Michel de Certeau's `Wandersmänner' and Paul Auster's Hypertextual Detective," in Hyper/Text/Theory, 137-8.
[7] The source for these quotations is an anonymous questionnaire I designed; this questionnaire was not the official departmental course evalution. The answers are responding to the question: "Of all the computer-based resources we used this semester, which was the least useful to you? Why?"
[8] John Slatin remarks that "the greatest difference between text and hypertext is not in the relative quantity of material each form handles: it's in the technology that handles the material. What makes all the difference in the world is the fact that hypertext exists and can exist only in an online environment" ("Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium," in Hypermedia and Literary Studies , 157). If this is true, then my students were not actually producing hypertexts when they practiced with pencil and paper; however, I would argue that since hypertext is a construction of the human brain, it must "exist" in mental space before it can be represented, either on paper or in the memory of a computer, and that Storyspace, rather than making the existence of hypertext possible, presents the user with a different set of limitations for representing hypertext than those imposed by a piece of paper. A piece of paper may be a poor medium for demonstrating an understanding of hypertext, but so may a computer program if one is unsure how to use it.
[9] Landow & Delany, "Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies:the State of the Art," in Hypermedia and Literary Studies ,15.
[10] We spent much of the semester discussing this "individual vs. collective" theme, but never explicitly compared the situations in the books to our problems in trying to work together; it would have been interesting to make such a comparison and hear the students' response. Suvin notes that a classic sign of both science fiction and SF criticism is "crass individualism ....Yet the originality of SF as a genre is that its characters are used in attempts at systematic analyses of a collective destiny involving a whole community--a people, a race, a world, etc. Therefore the final horizon of individualistic--psychological and/or ethical--criticism is simply inadequate and (if used as the dominant critical approach and not as an initial tool) ideological." Suvin, with Marc Angenot, PPSF , 53-54.
[11] Shortly after submitting this article to CWRL , I found that a colleague from another department, Maggie Sokolik, had used Storyspace for a class project in the fall 1995 semester. Although her students were working on webs containing personal information rather than commentary on assigned readings, her end response to the project mirrored mine: if she were to do a similar assignment in the future, Maggie would have students build web pages rather than use Storyspace. (Personal communication, 11/30/95)