This has been making the rounds lately, and it’s skillfully done: a small hypertext(-ish) fiction that expands as you click on words in the text. What I found interesting is the shift in the narrator’s voice as the text becomes more elaborate: at first almost off-putting in its terseness, then friendly in a boring way (try expanding everything except “made” from a fresh page load). By the time you’ve expanded everything, though, the narrator seems obsessive and neurotic—maybe mimicking the reader’s own obsessive action of clicking to fully expand the story.

Andrew Plotkin’s The Space Under the Window (1997) is another experimental narrative that uses a similar form, although you must type in words that occur in the text to expand it, instead of just clicking on them. Plotkin’s program has a temporal element as well—”expanding” the text can add new events, not just elaborate on what’s already been related. There are multiple endings in Space, as well: depending on how you choose to elaborate the text, different final texts emerge.

(more analysis and comparison after the cut)

Both programs are playing on the idea of temporal granularity: the idea that any event is wholly composed of smaller events, and that the description of an event is interchangeable with descriptions of those smaller events. Both programs have something different to say about the topic, too: Telescopic Text shows that the act of paying attention risks rendering you unbearably verbose; The Space Under the Window argues that what you pay attention to can have an effect on what you’re observing.

Space is, I think, the more successful text, in the sense that it tells a more interesting story. But Telescopic Text has a better interface (as evidenced by the 900+ bookmarks on del.icio.us, versus Space‘s four). The operable portions of the text in Telescopic Text are immediately apparent, in a format that affords interaction—the hyperlink. The operable words in Space lack the same visibility, and the program doesn’t gracefully accept unexpected input (“Currently, there is no ‘closed’ near the narrative”).

The relationship between the user’s action and the outcome in Telescopic Text doesn’t subvert any expectations, but it manages to be satisfying (maybe for that very reason). I would imagine that thousands of people have read the entirety of Telescopic Text, while probably only a handful have read all the text in Space.

Both texts are very short; maybe no longer than your average prose poem. I wonder if the same format or interface would lend itself to a longer work—telescopic novel, anyone?