A recent article in ebr: electronic book review celebrates the oeuvre of Professor Stuart Moulthrop (English) on the occasion a new web reconstruction of his hypertext classic Victory Garden.
In the article, Mariusz Pisarski contextualizes the groundbreaking work of Victory Garden:
The dense network of interconnected text spaces (993 lexias and over 2800 links) delivered an abundance of divergent stories that run in parallel or, sometimes, in contradiction to each other. Add to this some blind alleys and “secret” spaces, and the result is an electronic labyrinth, a garden of forking paths not only in a postulated, metaphorical sense, but in a manner that is embodied into the mechanism of reading and experienced in interaction with the text. Being inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ “Garden of Forking Paths” and its mind-bending theme of possible worlds in the context of the First World War, Victory Garden successfully managed to propel Borgesian motifs into contemporary context of modern wars and modern technologies. This makes Moulthrop’s fiction highly relevant at any time and its full migration to the Web amounts to one of the most important e-literary events of the year 2022.
Victory Garden was first housed on Storyspace in 1992. Click here to enter the labyrinth.