The field of hypertext has a much fuzzier history. Or, criticism should at least see its history as fuzzy, indeterminate, and twisting if we want to be faithful to the medium's ideas about narrative. The history of hypertext that is universally accepted (and, excepting the previous lexias' sarcasm, that is the accepted history) is suspiciously linear and clear for a genre which boasts of its multilinearity and indeterminacy. Indeed, one of hypertext's parents, post-structuralism, teaches us to be critical of histories that emphasize an absolute point of origin too much.

I'm not attempting to rewrite hypertext history - that would be a project in and of itself. I'm only concerned with the history as it pertains to establishing an orthodoxy in current hypertextual writing. After Bush and Nelson laid out some of the inspiration for inventors and scientists to start hammering out the technology needed for hypertext, and after some very well-known literary theorists started kicking around ideas about reader-centered texts, bite-sized lexias, rhizomes, and texts without centers, most critics tend to trace the rest of the history of hypertext as mostly the work of themselves and their colleagues - and most critics live in the house called Eastgate. While it is important to recognize the canon's accomplishments, there is no record of hypertext's losers. What literature failed to make it to the monitor? Why is Eastgate the only commercial publisher of hypertexts? Why is it next to impossible to find new hypertexts or hypermedia on the Web? How is it that Storyspace is the only authoring program designed for literary hypertext?

Where in this narrative are there multiple paths that could have been followed?

The history of hypertext answers none of these questions.

Hypertext criticism must examine non-hypertexts that have influenced the field, or else its creative vision will be limited to seeing the future as pushing the limits of a program, system, interface, or publishing house - not the limits of the field itself. More recently, critics (like Aarseth, Douglas, and Loyer) have called for the abandonment of any print aesthetics that would hinder hypertext's evolution. Likewise, rooting my critical stance in an unquestioned aesthetics, typical only of one set of early hypertexts, would hinder the creativity of new definitions and projections central to my thesis.