Stuart Moulthrop is Associate Professor at the School of Communications Design, University of Baltimore: "About the paranoia often noted in users of this technology, there is nothing remarkable. It is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation ..."

"Hegirascope" is a work of hypertext fiction intended for the World Wide Web. This is not a novel, nor will it necessarily meet your expectations about interactive fictions. I am trying to explore forms of narrative writing -and stories - that emerge from Web hypertext and seem well suited to that environment. For the moment anyway, that is my hegira. What you're seeing is at most half of something else toward which I'm presently slouching (Fall, 1995). What started as an experiment now looks more like a study, though for what I can't yet say. I like the Netscape-HTML environment and believe strongly in the Web as a delivery system. Yet the constraints of both are heavy, and at this writing the Netscapees are about to rattle the chain of being yet again. "Hegirascope" employs the Netscape "META" tag to enable "client pull," which means that the word does not keep still. Almost every page in this text is programmed to yield automatically to another page after a delay of some seconds (with exceptions, of course). You may override this timed transition by using one of the links on the page: after the opening sequence, almost every page has links. To understand what this is all about, you really have to go and do. Solvitur ambulando, caveat lector, have a nice trip.