In the 1990s, when the possibility of hypertext became more widely known, there was a wave of literary theorists in acadamia who hailed hypermedia as an epochal shift in the nature of fiction itself – perhaps, indeed, its final form. They were so sure of this because they saw it as the truest, most concrete fulfillment of critical and post-structuralist theory – freeing the reader from the tyranny of the author and of structure and narrative. They believed that, perceiving this new freedom, hypermedia literature would be embraced by writers, artists, other literary theorists, and the public at large.

Then hypermedia basically died.

This essay explains the reason why: that they were so caught up in their theories that they had been completely divorced from how readers actually understand and experience stories, and specifically narrative, theme, and authorial intent – not as an oppresive imposition to be liberated from, but as the whole point: the whole point is not to impress the ideas you already have on a text, as a post-structuralist does, but to welcome an author's unique voice and ideas into your head and experience something that has been intentionally assembled for you.

This book sparked my lifelong love of Infocom, parser interactive fiction, and my off and on obsession with someday writing a piece of interactive fiction of my own. It's an incredibly interesting book about an incredibly interesting medium (not just parser, but for me, mostly parser IF, because that's what spoke to me) that I wish more people knew about. I've also been thinking about writing future stories as hypertext, if I can figure out how to do that right.

I reject the fallacy that we can "control" the future in any large scale way, build mass movements or central organizations to guide the flows of accelerating history; yet I still think that holding in your heart an image of what the future should look like to you, and choosing to keep getting up each morning — "Carlyle had risen full of strength that day, for it was the day…" — and keep working towards it in whatever small way you can, not tricking yourself that your prefiguration will ultimately mean anything necessarily, but doing it because it's healing, because it grants you purpose, is worth it anyway, and often doing so doesn't fix the world, but it can make the world a little better, even if the complex flows of chaos that swirl out may undo any larger goal: you can ease the pain and sorrow of the world that crushes us, and that is worth it anyway. Thus I'm not against praxis, I'm against deluded praxis, centralized praxis, praxis that comes with eschatology.

This essay by one of my favorite authors echoes that feeling, even though I disagree with some of of its more solutionistic, liberal statements of belief in the actual power to change things, or in incrementalism. And what it has to say about purity culture in activism is well worth hearing as well. Some quotes, as has become customary:

[…] hopepunk sketch[es] out a body of imagined worlds which are positive but not utopias, because their positivity lies, not in the world already being excellent, but in the world moving toward the better thanks to the efforts of excellent people who work to make a difference. […] Hopepunk stories tend to showcase cooperation, collective action, resilience, partial victories as the world is moved toward, not to, a better state, ending with (re)construction underway and the world chang/ing/, not chang/ed/. The subgenre has also been described as weaponized optimism […] connected with what Malka Older has called speculative resistance.

One general signature of hopepunk is that its stories counter tales of emotional darkness or rottenness, […] violent, amoral, and often dystopian/apocalyptic trappings […] plots and character choices [that] advance zero-sum narratives where achievement requires causing someone else’s fall, or portraits of human nature in which, in the end, people will always be selfish […] and in which systems will always be corrupt and unsalvageable. In Hopepunk […] ordinary people[…] while [some] make bad choices, enough make good choices to leave a positive sense of the capacity of humans to choose good. […] [V]ery few [stories] depict how studies show people really behave in crisis, banding together to supply pop-up pantries and mutual aid.

Before it sounds like hopepunk could describe any story where […] or good guys beat bad guys, these are not […]. […] The punk movement is anti-establishment, with long ties to political activism and resistance, anti-consumerist, anti-corporate, anti-authoritarian, with a strong ethic of visibility and in-your-face active expression of these sentiments.

Punk is also messy. While the grimdark hero […] is one opposite of the Disney Princess, hopepunk is another opposite. The Disney Princess and many hero stories are purity stories. […] Punk is grungy in aesthetic, and hopepunk shares that, building better among the garbage of the bad. It also expresses negative emotions, not despair but productive anger, as well as kindness which sometimes needs to take the form of confrontation […]. Hopepunk showcases resilience by showing failure, setbacks, and compromise, not as heroic flaws or formative backstories, but acknowledging that messing up is an unavoidable part of taking action in the first place.

Most grimdark heroes make mistakes, but they are giant character-defining mistakes […] reinforcing the idea that any failure or impurity is a big deal, not a normal part of living a reasonable life. […]

Messiness and impurity paired with positive change are one core way hopepunk differs […] from a huge body of narratives, and even political logics. As articulated by philosopher/sociologist Alexis Shotwell in her brilliant book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, ideas of purity often do harm to action and activism […] Purity is also used (often strategically) to make ethical choices more difficult. […] Shotwell discusses the impossibility of true purity—practically no foods or products exist that don’t harm something—and the importance of acknowledging harm done in order to be able to evaluate levels of harm, reduction of harm, etc. […]

Hopepunk narratives are genre stories which have depictions of human nature (teamwork, honesty, resilience) but which also counter purity narratives, by having space for partial victories, unfinished projects, compromise, and mundane not-character-defining failures and mistakes. Setbacks in hopepunk tend to be more about the outcome for the world, what now needs to be done to help or fix the problem, in contrast with stories where setbacks or failures are mainly beats in character development, the point where the hero must stand by his vow never to kill again, or prove her leadership skills to keep the team together.

Fiction does not give us many stories of continuing to slog on after an unsatisfying partial victory. That makes hopepunk powerful.

Interestingly, even my almost post-apocalyptic, ultimately-doomed dystopian cyberpunk stories are, in a sense, all ultimately about this, with an unconditional accelerationist twist: we can't control where we're going; that's in the hands of technocapital's hyperstitial ideas and egregores; but we can try to make things better, try to improve, to stop harming, to keep doing something, and that is meaningful and does, in a small way that may butterfly-effect out into a large way, change the world for the better in a way we can't possibly predict.

[…] it’s been with considerable surprise, these past few years, that I’ve found myself becoming something of a [semicolon] maniac. […] I’ve come to love the awkward things, and to depend on them for easing me through a complex thought.

I blame my grammatical fall on an unlikely corrupter: William James. […] it took me a while to realize that one of the things I was loving about [his writing] — one of the things that made me feel as if I was sitting beside a particularly intelligent, humane and excitable friend on a long trip in a horse-drawn carriage — was his use of semicolons. […] Semicolons, along with exclamation points and dashes and whole sackfuls of commas, are, for him, vital tools in keeping what he called the “stream of thought” from appearing to the reader as a wild torrent.

And once I’d seen him using semicolons this way, their pleasing possibilities became irresistible. I’d been finding myself increasingly flummoxed by the difficulty of capturing even a rough approximation of thought on the page, and it seemed absurd to leave such a handy tool unused out of obscure loyalty.

[…]

It’s in honoring this movement of mind, this tendency of thoughts to proliferate like yeast, that I find semicolons so useful. […] No other piece of punctuation so compactly captures the way in which our thoughts are both liquid and solid, wave and particle.

And so, far from being pretentious, semicolons can be positively democratic. To use a semicolon properly can be an act of faith. It’s a way of saying to the reader, who is already holding one bag of groceries, here, I know it’s a lot, but can you take another? […] there can be something wonderful in being festooned in carefully balanced bags; there’s a kind of exquisite tension, a feeling of delicious responsibility, in being so loaded up that you seem to have half a grocery store suspended from your body.

All the advice here is excellent, of course, especially with the little meta-demonstrations of the points each piece of advice is trying to make; but my favorite advice is with regards to the semicolon:

I have grown fond of semicolons in recent years. The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added; it reminds you sometimes of the Greek usage. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn't get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; to read on; it will get clearer.

The other advice:

1. "The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along."
2. "Colons are a lot less attractive for several reasons: firstly, they give you the feeling of being rather ordered around … secondly, you suspect you're in for one of those sentences that will be labeling the points to be made … with the implication that you haven't sense enough to keep track of a sequence of notions without having them numbered."
3. "Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! … It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention."
4. "Quotation marks should be used honestly and sparingly, when there is a genuine quotation at hand, and it is necessary to be very rigorous about the words enclosed by the marks."
5. "The dash is a handy device, informal and essentially playful, telling you that you're about to take off on a different tack but still in some way connected with the present course — only you have to remember that the dash is there, and either put a second dash at the end of the notion to let the reader know that he's back on course, or else end the sentence, as here, with a period."
6. "The greatest danger in punctuation is for poetry. Here it is necessary to be as economical and parsimonious with commas and periods as with the words themselves, and any marks that seem to carry their own subtle meanings,"

Roger and Ann needed to meet Sergey in San Francisco.

“Should we take a train, or a steamship, or a plane?” asked Ann.

“Trains are too slow, and the trip by steamship around South America would take months,” replied Roger. “We’ll take a plane.”

It's important for genre writers to be able to laugh at themselves, and also to recognize the failings and flaws their genre can tend towards. This is a really great, and hilarious, example of that for technology-focused science fiction writers.

Nevertheless, it's also important not to draw the wrong conclusion from it — which I've seen people do before.

When analyzing the pastiche this story is doing, it's important to separate out two aspects: there's the sort of meta-level aspect that has to do with how much it is focused on the technology and explaining it, and then there's the object level aspect, which is how poorly it does that (with a lot of maid and butler dialogue and sexism and so on).

I've seen a lot of people use the obvious absurdity of the latter to discount the former, but that's a faulty inference: you can actually do this sort of thing right. It's easy to avoid Maid and Butler dialogue once you know how to recognize it; yes, in avoiding that bad execution, you'll inherently have to remove some of the technological focus and explanation, unless you're very clever, but not all of it.

Likewise, I've seen a lot of people use the fact that it feels absurd to even focus on the technology in the story and explain it as much as it does to say that science fiction shouldn't focus on and explain technology. But that, too, is a faulty inference: the thing is that writing this scene this way seems absurd to us, but that's because we're already familiar with the existence and functioning of these technologies and their impacts on everyday life! If you are writing a science fiction novel that's about technologies that people will be unfamiliar with, and the point of the novel is to explore what those technologies could develop into how those, how they'd work, and how they might impact everyday life, then it would actually make perfect sense to focus on and explain them as much as this story does!

Ultimately, then, what this story conveys is less of a grand sweeping indightment of technology-focused science fiction, as many haters of the genre would have it. Instead, what it tells us is that the focus of a peice o fwriting, and even the way something is written, should be determined by the relation of its audience to the subject matter and the subject matter itself, and so while it's absurd to write everyday scenes this way, writing with such a focus on technology in science fiction actually can make a lot of sense, but we need to be careful to avoid the common, easy writing pitfalls that can happen when trying to execute that.

You can also write science fiction that doesn't do this — that's just pure immersion, not remarking on anything that would be familiar to the characters of the story — and that's great and fun as well. Dune does that, as does Neuromancer, and Book of the New Sun; there are a lot of famous examples. But one could still pastiche that writing style rather easily in much the same way, and in fact people have. I think that's an important point to make: you can pastiche literally anything in this way, by just executing whatever you're pastiching poorly and transposing it into a context where its preoccupations and writing style doesn't make sense. So this can't function as an indightment of a specific subgenre, but instead merely as a warning, to course correct and ensure you don't end up doing it badly.

It should also be said that a lot of people seem to think that exploring interesting new technologies, how they might develop in the future — or might have developed in an alternate present —, and how they would work in everyday life, is somehow less legitimate, interesting, meaningful, or valuable than exploring subjects like the societal or political impacts of that technology, or focusing entirely on social or psychological issues over technological ones (as speculative fiction does, extrapolating sociopolitical issues into the future, or literary fiction does with the present, or period fiction does with the past). There's sort of this generalized disdain for science fiction that's considered it "too nerdy" and technological.

But honestly, I don't see any inherent reason why exploring sociology or psychology is more legitimate than exploring technology or human interfaces with technology. Obviously there are shallow sci-fi books that devolve into gee-whiz gadgetry — that don't explore the possible inconveniences or limitations or negative consequences of various technologies, or don't actually explore them in any more than superficial way at all, even the positive aspects, just using them as whiz-bang set dressing. But that sort of shallow, superficial exploration is equally possible to do with books that focus on sociopolitical subjects — what is a soap opera but that, for instance? Likewise, we can't have an ecosystem that's entirely just technology-focused science fiction, as that would be blinkered and unhealthy; but simultaneously, we shouldn't want to only have sociopolitical explorations to the exclusion of all else either. We need both, and there's more than enough room in the modern science fiction genre for both.

This manual is intended to focus on the special needs of the science fiction workshop. Having an accurate and descriptive critical term for a common SF problem makes it easier to recognize and discuss. This guide is intended to save workshop participants from having to “reinvent the wheel” (see section 3) at every session.

The terms here were generally developed over a period of many years in many workshops. Those identified with a particular writer are acknowledged in parentheses at the end of the entry. Particular help for this project was provided by Bruce Sterling and the other regulars of the Turkey City Workshop in Austin, Texas.

This is a great treasure trove of dryly hilarious descriptions of common science fiction story pitfalls, the collected and concentrated wisdom of very many writers over very many years, some of them great writers and some of them lesser-known, yours for the taking!

A criticism, but a hopeful one that leaves open the possibility of construction and improvement, of the idea that science fiction was ever really, in the main, about "big ideas," or what that even means.

This, if anything, is the ideological bedrock underlying "ideas" SF — that Things Can Get Better. Historically, almost all civilisations prior to the Enlightenment ran on the mythology of a distant golden age in the past, which bequeathed us a bunch of moral precepts and firm knowledge about how the world works which we poor degenerates living in the debased relics of a higher civilisation should turn to for guidance. The very concept that we are actually discovering how the universe works, and improving our lives, was a revolutionary rupture with the past…

The second assumption is that science fiction has ever primarily been a genre of big ideas. I'm not at all sure that this is the case. Certainly fiction with big ideas has found a home within SF, but that's not the same thing at all! For almost all of its history, most SF has been pulp adventure fiction, conceived and written as escapism … The big ideas are, if anything, secondary, not to mention exhibiting a tendency to date badly and carry sinister ideological overtones (as William Gibson so brilliantly skewered in his short story "The Gernsback Continuum").

Calls for more big ideas in SF are generally a political cri de coeur. We might equally imagine a similar essay in the context of mid-sixties Soviet fiction, calling for more fiction about tractors and breakthroughs in agricultural genomics.

despite my cynical pose, I am more than a little sympathetic to Stephenson's project, because I share his axiomatic belief in the loose constellation of post-Enlightenment values that brought us this idea of progress and constant improvement. If only because when you stop moving you're dead, and reverting to a late palaeolithic lifestyle looks like it would be a drag, and that's the most likely alternative long-term future for our species if we burn all the coal and oil, wreck the climate, and turn our back on the Enlightenment's ideological values.

(I think it's worth saying that critical theory, intersectionality, poststructuralism, postmodernism, egoism, perspectivism, all the products that critique Enlightenment values are themselves post-Enlightenment, made possible by the very same idea that ti's possible and allowable to actually build upon a tradition to improve it, to attempt to find out things, and to criticise things. Thus, in agreeing somewhat with Stross's positioning of himself as post-Enlightenment, I at least am not denying the possibility of critiquing the Enlightenment either; just that critique itself has limits and flaws, and insofar as postmodernism denies the possibility or desirability of improving a philosophical tradition, of finding out or knowing things and using that knowledge, then yes, I do take issue with that, and I don't care if they use "Enlightenment Western white colonialist instrumental scientistic reason" or whatever as a sort of label of devil against me)

In recent decades SF has been spinning its wheels. In fact, in the past 30 years the only truly challenging new concepts to come along were cyberpunk and the singularity. Both of which amount to different attempts within the genre to accommodate the first-order implications of computers and networking as the defining technology of the near future … — cyberpunk was the sociological/post new wave SF modelling of a future derived from the 1970s and 1980s weltanschauung, and the singularity was the chew-toy of those members of the hard SF brigade who actually understood computers. … What we call "hard SF" today mostly isn't hard, and isn't SF: it's fantasy with nanotech replicators instead of pixie dust and spaceships instead of dragons. Explorations of Singularity teeter dangerously on the precipice of a tumble into Christian apocalyptic eschatology, and in any event beg far too many questions about the nature of intelligence to make a convincing stab at artificial intelligence.

In fact, those people who are doing the "big visionary ideas about the future" SF are mostly doing so in a vacuum of critical appreciation.

Greg Egan's wonderful clockwork constructions out of the raw stuff of quantum mechanics, visualising entirely different types of universe, fall on the deaf ears of critics who are looking for depth of characterisation, and don't realize that in his SF the structure of the universe is the character.

On Hannu Rajaniemi's brilliant "The Quantum Thief" — I have yet to see a single review that even notices the fact that this is the first hard SF novel to examine the impact of quantum cryptography on human society. (That's a huge idea, but none of the reviewers even noticed it!)

And there, over in a corner, is Bruce Sterling, blazing a lonely pioneering trail into the future. Chairman Bruce played out cyberpunk before most of us ever heard of it, invented the New Space Opera in "Schismatrix" (which looked as if nobody appreciated it for a couple of decades), co-wrote the most interesting hard-SF steampunk novel of all, and got into global climate change in the early 90s. He's currently about ten years ahead of the curve. If SF was about big innovative visions, he'd need to build an extension to house all his Hugo awards.

So what's at the root of this problem? Why are the innovative and rigorously extrapolated visions of the future so thin on the ground and so comprehensively ignored? … I'd put it down to us mistaking Sense of Wonder for Innovation. We used to read SF to get the heady high of a big vision, the "eyeball kick" as Rudy Rucker describes it, of seeing something brain-warpingly different and new for the first time.

today you don't need to read SF to get a sense of wonder high: you can just browse "New Scientist". We're living in the frickin' 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980. (Definitely than in 1970.) We're carrying out this Mind Meld via the internet, and if that isn't a 1980s cyberpunk vision that's imploded into the present, warts and all, I don't know what is. Seriously: to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF.

We people of the SF-reading ghetto have stumbled blinking into the future, and our dirty little secret is that we don't much like it. And so we retreat into the comfort zones of brass goggles and zeppelins (hey, weren't airships big in the 1910s-1930s? Why, then, are they such a powerful signifier for Victorian-era alternate fictions?), of sexy vampire-run nightclubs and starship-riding knights-errant. Opening the pages of a modern near-future SF novel now invites a neck-chillingly cold draft of wind from the world we're trying to escape, rather than a warm narcotic vision of a better place and time.

And so I conclude: we will not inspire anyone with grand visions of a viable future through the medium of escapism. If we want to write inspirational literature with grand visions we need to dive into to the literary mainstream (which is finally rediscovering fabulism) and, adding a light admixture of Enlightenment ideology along the way, start writing the equivalent of those earnest and plausible hyper-realistic tales of Progress through cotton-planting on the shores of the Aral sea.

But do you really want us to do that? I don't think so. In fact, the traditional response of traditional-minded SF readers to the rigorous exercise of extrapolative vision tends to be denial, disorientation, and distaste.

This essay is an extensive, detailed, almost anthropological tour through the development of word formatters/processors like Microsoft Word, and how they harm and restrict the process of creative and meaningful writing, and then how they've slowly been overtaken by better plain text structural formats without formatting — specifically Markdown, but their reasoning for why Markdown is better also applies to Org!

Abstract

Year after year, document formats like .docx, .ppt, and pdf lose a little bit of steam. You might not have noticed… But Markdown is growing over and into the old formats, slowly, and nicely, like moss on a stranded star destroyer. Notes on a revolution in slow motion. … From online tools to native apps, from GitHub to Slack to ChatGPT, bit by bit Markdown is taking over. It’s not a big deal. Hardly anyone has heard the word Markdown. But awareness has increased significantly, especially among younger professionals, students, and AI tool users. Increasingly, it shapes the way we format and share ideas. And that’s fantastic news.

Summary

The shift from proprietary, closed formats to Markdown’s open syntax seems slow, subtle, and mostly hidden. Over time, this mostly technical matter has become surprisingly visible, tangible, and significant. Markdown changes the graphical User Interface, the economics of writing, and ultimately, writing itself. It changes not only the storage but how and what we write.

The slow shift from formats to Markdown is particularly powerful for productivity and educational apps. Emphasizing clear, structured thinking rather than visual decoration, moving from .docx to plain text slowly transforms how we communicate through computers. These are big claims on an ephemeral matter. To clarify in what ways Markdown transforms digital communication, let’s look at the history, economy, the design of traditional formats and how they compare to Markdown:

• First, we’ll look at formats (1.1) and formatting (1.2), how they are connected, and how they differ from Markdown (1.3).
• Then, we’ll review the recent history and the economy of formats (2.1). We’ll look at the evolution of Microsoft’s .docx and how it influenced its appearance (2.2) and compare it to a simple Markdown editor (2.3).
• To fully comprehend the subtle evolution of writing, we need to understand why formats were (and still are) so resilient (3.1), why it took Markdown so long to take its tiny bites out of Word’s big cake, why it is successful with a younger audience (3.2) and why we need to encourage our education system to move from docx to plain text.
• We’ll close with a subjective call for more Markdown and fewer formats.

Lightweight markup languages are designed to be used with a minimum effort compared to full-blown and therefore more complicated markup languages such as HTML or LaTeX.

Some are doing their job better than others. In my experience, many design decisions of widely adapted markups such as Markdown, AsciiDoc or reStructuredText (and others) are questionable from a usability point of view. At least I do have some issues when I have to use them in my daily life.

Unfortunately, I hardly see any people out there using Org mode syntax as a markup language outside of Emacs although there are very good reasons for it as an easy to learn and easy to use markup language.

With this blog article I wanted to point out the usefulness of Org mode even when you are not using Emacs as an writing tool. Of course, when you are using Emacs to type Org mode syntax, you get probably the most advanced tool-support for typing lightweight markup on top. But this was not the point of this article.

Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer's use. Worse: it is a near-monopolist, dominating the word processing field. Its pervasive near-monopoly status has brainwashed software developers to such an extent that few can imagine a word processing tool that exists as anything other than as a shallow imitation of the Redmond Behemoth. But what exactly is wrong with it?

…

But one by one, Microsoft moved into each sector and built one of the competitors into Word, thereby killing the competition and stifling innovation. Microsoft killed the outline processor on Windows; stalled development of the grammar checking tool, stifled spelling checkers. There is an entire graveyard of once-hopeful new software ecosystems, and its name is Microsoft Word.

…

As the product grew, Microsoft deployed their embrace-and-extend tactic to force users to upgrade, locking them into Word, by changing the file format the program used on a regular basis. … Each new version of Word defaulted to writing a new format of file which could not be parsed by older copies of the program.

…

The .doc file format was also obfuscated, deliberately or intentionally: rather than a parseable document containing formatting and macro metadata, it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures used by word, with pointers to the subroutines that provided formatting or macro support. … In the 21st century they tried to improve the picture by replacing it with an XML schema … but somehow managed to make things worse, by using XML tags that referred to callbacks in the Word codebase, rather than representing actual document semantics…

…

This planned obsolescence is of no significance to most businesses, for the average life of a business document is less than 6 months. But some fields demand document retention. Law, medicine, and literature are all areas where the life expectancy of a file may be measured in decades, if not centuries…

…

Nor is Microsoft Word easy to use. Its interface is convoluted, baroque, making the easy difficult and the difficult nearly impossible to achieve. … Its proofing tools and change tracking mechanisms are baroque, buggy, and inadequate for true collaborative document preparation; its outlining and tagging facilities are piteously primitive compared to those required by a novelist or thesis author: and the procrustean dictates of its grammar checker would merely be funny if the ploddingly sophomoric business writing style it mandates were not so widespread.

…

The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable. I do not write novels using Microsoft Word. … But somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems.

A fairly sober, realist attempt to predict some things about the future roughly 500 years from now by science fiction writer Charlie Stross. A useful sort of handbook guide for plausible future predictions for writing science fiction.

[…] To understand the literary gothic—to even begin to account for its curious appeal, and its simultaneous qualities of seduction and repulsion—it is necessary to undertake a little time travel. […]

[…] The gothic has adapted and grown, like a stone grotesque acquiring moss, though it has never departed from its underlying principles. Edmund Burke in his essay on the sublime identified what it was that Vasari felt, and what it was that so seduced the readers of Matthew Lewis and Anne Radcliffe: the idea that terror, and terrible things, could excite the emotions in the way the sight of a mountain range receding into mist might do. […] This potent conflation of terror and excitement helps account for one of the most obscure and dangerous aspects of the gothic: its villains may commit revolting acts of violence, both sexual and moral, but they are never as repellent as they ought to be. […] The reader may find themselves entertaining not only sympathy for the Devil, but a bit of a furtive crush.

[…] The gothic is, rather, a sensation, like hunger or desire; and, like hunger or desire, you may be hard-pressed to describe it, but you’ll know it when you feel it. […]

The uncanny is a sensation as intrinsic to the gothic as terror and the sublime. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud writes of how it is “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” Imagine, for example, opening the door of your home to find some many-limbed monster rearing its toothy head: you would scream and run. There is nothing uncanny about that. But imagine, on the other hand, that you open the door and an old friend is waiting for you. At first, they do not turn their head to greet you. Then they do so slowly, with a curious pained movement, and when eye finally meets eye there is a look not of fond recognition but of contempt, and repulsion. Few, I suspect, would choose the latter visitor over the first.

Diane Long Hoeveler, while a professor at Marquette University, travelled extensively to view chapbooks in various libraries. She spent a great deal of time working her way through boxes of materials which were, at that point, sometimes uncatalogued, or not accessible to anyone outside the rare books room.

While she studied these materials, she developed a scholarly interest in Gothic chapbooks, which, to her thinking, were worthy subjects for broader literary scholarship. She began the Gothic Archive for that purpose. Once she started to build the collection, she naturally modeled it to suit her own needs as a researcher and a teacher of undergraduates and graduate students.

The Archive is, therefore, designed to be useful as a teaching tool and for research purposes. She envisioned a digital space in which students could go beyond simply reading Gothic chapbooks; she hoped they would also learn about their connections with other Gothic texts, and explore Gothic themes and tropes.

Dr. Hoeveler was also a great collaborator and always encouraged the research of others; to that end she hoped the Archive would capture Gothic scholars' interest, leading to the creation of new knowledge in this often-overlooked area.

Dr. Hoeveler passed away in spring of 2016, leaving an immense legacy of scholarship, and The Gothic Archive as a work in progress. Wendy Fall, one of Dr. Hoeveler's doctoral students, has assumed editorial responsibilities for the archive.

In its present state, The Gothic Archive is a growing digital collection of late eighteenth and nineteenth-century British Gothic chapbooks and related materials held in a variety of private and research libraries in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The chapbooks have been digitized or transcribed and linked to summaries and supplemental materials. Questions about the archive can be sent to wendy.fall@marquette.edu.

This is a much more pleasing to the eye, readable, mobile-friendly, complete mirror with its own custom interface. It includes all the chapbooks and their thumbnails in addition to the glossary itself.