For a sizable number of people now being educated, fiction is moribund. In spite of the "hip" efforts at avant-pop, the problem remains. You cannot win this revolution of bringing fiction into the 21st century with content. Fiction will not survive because of content shifts into excrement, drugs, horror, murder, science fiction or computer lingo. These efforts share the same problems as a text by John Updike or Joyce Carol Oates, both accomplished writers. Why Kathy Acker succeeds where others fail is because she has a strong poetry element that emerges throughout her work. I'm not speaking of writing a prose with a poetic lilt, I'm speaking of riffs, of portions devoted to poetry, of a strong emphasis on the noun.

I believe it will ultimately be poetry that will save fiction. It will be Gertrude Stein who will have provided the basis for fiction to take on new vitality in the next century. I'm speaking primarily of her ideas about the essence of the genres, as presented in Lectures in America. Her ideas on the weight of parts of speech as they relate to fiction and poetry are key.

In relation to time and fiction, I want to speak of another Internet innovation called client-pull. With this technique, the screen is refreshed automatically as if on a timer. The server, a machine, pushes data at a browser, such as Netscape, and this browser pulls down a new page. It's similar to having an automatic page turner. With the client-pull command written into the hypertext markup language-the language that determines what is seen on the Web-documents appear on a schedule set by the page designer. In frames, control is not totally out of the viewer's hands as it is possible to move backward or forward.

If you use that the timing technique in a frameset, half of your screen can change and the other half not. One part can be static and the other dynamic. This is a thrilling idea. It's often used in a rather rude manner in advertising or in an insulting way in literary or art circles. Flash: the world's in a mess. Flash: it's your fault. It's most often fast and strictly textual.

I have experimented with the client-pull technique to control the delivery of text and images. A twenty-second interval, for a small portion of text, establishes a meditative pace to the work. A page on the screen can be divided in any fashion, and one side of the page can dialogue with the other. This is a fabulous idea that really hasn't hit literature yet. With client-pull, animation is not required. You simply rotate text or texts and images. The number of combinations is staggering. You can scroll. Because the scroll bars clutter the page, I often avoid scrolling, choosing instead to move by linked words. Links can be provided by word links or by a timer.

The ability to have an automatic delivery of text is to be able to play with the convention of time as never before. You can create a romantic or percussive ambiance or add dramatic intensity at certain moments. Freeze frame on a kiss. This is a film analogy, and I don't want to be misleading. I do think the Web is a unique art medium. It's a much more readerly medium than film or video. A more intimate distance is established and a climate for intense interaction of reader and text is possible. There are some metaphoric implications for the use of frames, from visual art, from cinema. Indeed, the frame tends to make whatever it contains a focal point. And naturally it has the power to split focus, and to create spatial tension, as well.

Graphic designer and web wonker David Siegel has likened the Internet screen to the page of a book. I like to think of the screen format as a place to develop an electro-illuminated manuscript with theatrical possibilities. Certainly one can see the liberation of text in terms of color, graphics, and hypertext and perhaps most importantly in spatial and temporal freedom.

I'm making computer books online that I hope will be intimate with the reader, that will play under the eyes, be sensual, squirmy in the lap. This is what I'm aiming for with my "Moving Books." Essentially, for an art form to move forward, it must carry with it some degree of passion, of humanity. Much experimental work doesn't embody that. It's created by the head and, if you're lucky, the genitals. The heart and other organs get left by the wayside. As an artist, I want to break people's hearts with beauty, with affect, with humanity, with vision and ideas. I believe it's possible through work on the computer. The whole organism must move into cyberspace: the eyes, the heart, the viscera.

The debate over the advisability of literature on the Web seems futile. Better to seek models and satisfying new forms and ways to present them that advance the art of literature. The Web is like the Wild West and there will be many failed experiments, but some brilliant work as well. It's an exciting, responsive medium, and this causes not quite the right atmosphere for serious work. But there is no reason that meditative/dramatically intense works cannot be created on the Internet. I write rather naturally for the Web. That is, the writing is associative, inclusive, multi-tracked. In the case of fiction, which seems especially endangered, I'm trying to show how it might be saved. To do this, you must have dramatic stories with characters who move through space and time-material that involves the reader.

In terms of multi-tracked work, I feel I should mention the technique of intertextuality, which has existed for centuries, in an unnamed state. Although no longer formally interesting, it can now have a full and interesting realization as a technique. The computer's ease and rapidity in handling spatial and temporal shifts has revitalized intertextuality. To no lesser extent, nonlinear texts can also be played with in more elegant and coherent ways with fonts, color and html links.

The Web can stimulate reading-a certain kind of reading, not the novel of excess. I think people will increasingly gravitate toward literature on the Web. In keeping with our excited, elliptical times, I think you'll see more concentrated writing, more capsules. I look for more well-written, exciting texts: associative, interactive, inclusive. I'm hopeful more revelatory, inventive, spatially interesting, visually stunning, meditative works will appear.

Christy Sheffield Sanford, Copyright © 1996