Joyce, Michael

1945–

Hyperfiction Novelist

Michael Joyce is an author whose afternoon: a story was named “the granddaddy of hyperfiction” in a 1992 New York Times review. Hyperfiction, or hypertext fiction, is a form of writing, developed by Joyce and several others in the late 1980s, that relies on hyperlinks to connect readers to various story passages in the order of their choosing. In fact, the reader must choose, or else the novel ends on the first page, making the reader's role in the story's ultimate outcome, in theory, at least as important as the author's. There are so many possible avenues, in fact—so many possibilities for a story to go either forward or backward in time, for the prominence of one or all characters to change with each reading—that a work of hyperfiction can never truly be read the same way twice. It can even be said that a work of hyperfiction has no end (or beginning) at all. For Joyce, whose other hyperfiction works include Twilight: A Symphony (1996), Twelve Blue (1996), and Sister Stories (2000), hypertext fiction's radically new qualities make it a far more accurate reflection than traditional novels of the role of rote chance [Page 267]and the absolute arbitrariness of events in “post-modern” life.

Joyce was born in Lackawanna, New York, on November 9, 1945, and grew up in South Buffalo, New York. He was one of eight children of a steel-worker father (Thomas) and homemaker mother (Joyce) in an Irish-American family. Joyce graduated from Canisius High School in Buffalo, later studying English and philosophy at Buffalo's Canisius College. He graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from Canisius in 1972, later receiving his master of fine arts degree in 1974 from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop for Fiction. At various times in his life, Joyce has worked as a professor, a consultant, a carpenter, and a New York City community organizer; he gained what he calls in his curriculum vitae “a life-time's experience, during one day as a taxi driver.”

Joyce published his first novel, The War Outside Ireland, in 1982; he won the Great Lakes New Writers Award in fiction for this effort, beating out Shoeless Joe, the W.P. Kinsella book that was the basis of the movie Field of Dreams. Joyce writes in the introduction of his 1995 book of essays, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, that 1982 was also the year that he bought a personal computer, an event that he indicates began to change him almost immediately. Suddenly, he writes, he understood that he was possessed of “two minds,” his own and the silicon brain contained in his computer. “Slowly I came to recognize myself veering toward becoming something of a cyborg,” Joyce writes. “Previously stable horizons across my psychic landscape gave way to dizzying patterns of successive contours, each of which was most assuredly real, each of which did not last.” Such new technology-laced perceptions formed the basis of the hyperfiction he would pioneer during the late 1980s.

Probably the first serious attempt at a hyperfiction novel, afternoon: a story was written during a single week in 1987, using the Storyspace hypertext computer authoring system that Joyce himself invented, with the assistance of computer-communications researcher and fellow author Jay Bolter. Influenced by such 1980s hypertext writing systems as the HyperCard system created for Apple's Macintosh computer, both Storyspace and afternoon predate the hypertext-driven World Wide Web by several years. Like the works of several other hyperfiction authors, afternoon was initially distributed on diskette by publisher Eastgate Systems. Joyce continues to write all his hypertexts in Storyspace, often moving them to the Web later.

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