In “The Unknown”, I came across this sentence in the opening page, “So now it was the three of us driving to Seattle.” Here, with the ease of one click to either “the three of us” or “Seattle” will enable the reader (me) to have instant access to the description of the trio and their work or their experience in Seattle. More importantly, this is my first step in deciding where to go next. This is just not possible in any normal fiction unless the description comes in paragraphs or chapters (dictated by the author) later on. Try clicking on them to see what I mean.         

             As opposed to normal text in books, hypertext has no primary axis of organization (Landow). In short, hyperfiction has no centre. This characteristic enables me to have thousand and one ways of reading “The Unknown”. There is no strict order in reading and thus a reader can embark on so many different approaches to reading the text (which I did). This is simply impossible or even ridiculous in the case of a book. A reader can’t read the introduction, proceed to chapter five, nine and  then back to one and make sense of it. With hyperfiction however, it is a different ball game altogether. As the nature of hypertext is such that points in space contain all other points and because from the vantage point each provides, one can see everything else (Landow), a reader can choose key words or chapters that interest him, move on, and yet at the end of such a random approach, still make sense of it.

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