about hyperfiction

"...there is the exploration of evolving human relationships as in a Carolyn Guyer hypernarrative, the sheer pleasure of play as in John McDaid's many-roomed fun house, the revelation of character by randomly linked fragments as in a Judy Malloy hypertext; the possibilities are no doubt as rich and varied as in any other art form."
Robert Coover, The New York Times

"Nicely evocative ... the effect is remarkably close to the subjective quirkiness of memory, of past moments floating unpredictably to the surface"
Richard Grant, Washington Post Book World

"One of the promising things about the better hypertext poems like Judy Malloy's "Its Name Was Penelope" is that it generates random pages that add up to fascinating patterns or allows readers to create their own narrative and connections as they go along. Every time you read it, it's a different story. The reader decides when the text is over. That's what a successful work of hypertext-based literature can do that paper-based writing can't: share power."
Jimmy Guterman, Chicago Tribune

"Malloy uses the fluidity of the hypertextual medium to create a poetic text, which, in spite of its fragmentation and discontinuity, leads to a reading experience that is very satisfying because it allows the reader greater creativity as to the form the reading will take....In Malloy's text, the visual is transformed into the verbal. The border between text and image dissolves, and image becomes the text."
Jaishree K. Odin, Modern Fiction Studies (MFS)

"a thoroughly beguiling piece of fiction..."
Nancy Princenthal, Print Collector's Newsletter

"Penelope's compounded, disjunctive structure corresponds with and seems to arise from the narrator's restless splitting off of attention, under the opposed attractions of sexual and esthetic desire.....The analogy between the on-screen texts of Penelope and sequences of photographs prompts the reader's reflection up on the nature of each medium...the words of a text screen float on a motile surface, poised for instantaneous change into another, not fully predictable writing."
Barbara Page, Postmodern Culture

"[Malloy is] one of the most fascinating hypertext stylists ... The experiment with randomization is bold and surprisingly effective. As a result, Penelope can be read through multiple times ... each reading creating overlapping, but never matching, impressions."
Alvin Lu, The Bay Guardian

"...interesting for the way it strings passages together in a different random order every time it's read, emulating the fragmentation that takes place in human memory."
Robert Kendall, Poets & Writers

"The narrator's distinctly visual memory photos create a hypertextual collage very similar to the cinematographic montages of Trinh's films, which lead to fragmentation and discontinuity while simultaneously opening spaces for multiple readings."

"If the epigraphs stand for the sections that the father reads to his children, the textual spaces in between epigraphs tell the story of Anne, a photographer, who has faith and courage in her personal vision and embarks on her journey to become an artist in a patriarchal culture ...The multiple readings of the text finally exist not so much in what the lexias say but rather in the relations they forge with one another. These relations come into existence and dissolve with each reading and unfold into different versions of the text...the female text exfoliates outward, spilling over the boundaries in multiple directions that reveal to the reader the significance of the social, the political, and the historical in any artistic endeavor."
Jaishree K. Odin, "Judy Malloy's its name was Penelope" in Hypertext and the Female Imaginary, University of Minnesota Press, 2010

"Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall know things about hypertext that can only come from very strong engagement. Above all, of course, Forward Anywhere is distinguished by the quality of its language..... Both reflect on the self-conceived demons and intimate terrors of awakened imagination. Both might have something to say, if we are inclined to read that way, about female identity in world of mechanism and brutality."
Stuart Moulthrop, Convergence: The Journal of Research into new media technologies

".... a subtly worked epistolary text whose own concerns seem to take precedence over those of the two individuals. Read forward or randomly, it both coheres and surprises."
Marek Kohn, The London Independent

"....an entertaining, three-year dialogue..."
Claire Neesham, New Scientist

"....a singular work....the associative chain ties together important moments from both authors' lifes, moments that are examined to the light of the other's memories and bring unexpected associations....Every memory finds an echo in the next screen which fills it up with a surprising new meaning. This process brings a catharsis about in which the personal meanings become universals..."
Susana Pajares Toska, Hipertulia

"...Form and content achieve a near-perfect suture in the first selection in the Eastgate Web Workshop: Judy Malloy's l0ve0ne..."
Rita Raley, Postmodern Culture

"...The fact that the stories are interlinked creates the feeling of not knowing exactly when they take place. Time is disordered, there is no beginning or end -- it is like a collage. It is, therefore, a story without the typical narrative characteristics (introduction, exposition, denouement).LoveOne is a metaphor about the Internet, where you can find everything, pages for everyone and on any subject. In LoveOne there are also emotions, sex, music, cars, friends, fun, modems, the beach, all mixed up, as if it were an Internet portal..."
Joan Campàs, Dichtung-Digital

"Computers are ubiquitous and accepted, part of the life of this person, important, but secondary to the story, no social commentary, no fear of technology. One interesting scene, a marriage proposal, the couple is face to face, yet they use a computer to propose and accept marriage, an intimate moment, yet mediated by a machine, it could have been on a piece of paper, or by word, a need for a protected distance between two people, a distance that never closes....."
William Beaver, Commentaries on Reading Hyperfiction

Resist the impulse to know it already. Read it instead as a series: big L, naught, little v, little e, absent d, space, naught, little n, little e. (It is a title which points to love without asserting love, which points to presence--a loved one--while suggesting that "one's" absence.) Lve is an ideal which has been emptied, is somehow now elusive. Love is a "deflated" sign which "produces" instead of "protects" meaning. All of which is to say that Love one is a title which means while not meaning, which enacts a Derridian meaning-under-erasure. "one," in a previous incarnation, had been solid, unitary, identical with itself, yet in this case it has been emptied of content--is less, yet somehow more than it once was. Love one then is a title which resists construction and, therefore, deconstruction.
Dennis Bennett, Silent Computers Fraying at the Edges

"..... Intitially, there's this sense of loss - old computers are like toys that have never been played with. Then there's this feeling of nostalgia....Where do all the 9800 modems go when they die?....everything is really advanced and really mechanized, but also old, breaking down"
Todd Andrew Pontius

"...Malloy's most technically and visually sophisticated work for the web to date, while carrrying on her hallmark tradition of intense, compact writing"
Richard Kostelanetz,A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, : Routledge

"...a perfect example of thought and physical interaction working together"
interactivecinema.org

"...Graphic mimesis may take the relatively simple form of an adjustment of font such as, for example, the use of italics to represent handwriting. It could be argued that Roar of Destiny constitutes a more ambitious version of this. Even without taking into account any aspects of its hypertext structure, Roar of Destiny exhibits graphic mimesis of the sort identified by White. "
Megan Owen, Genre

"Judy Malloy explores the intricacies of gender and interpersonal relations, using a collage technique to elude facile analyses or constructions of narrative line. Computers drift in and out of the "Roar of Destiny" as structural cues, as elements within it, and as psychic affects that hack consciousness in the form of hallucinatory dreams."
Paul Hertz, Leonardo Electronic Almanac

"....the reader is immediately flung into the surreal, while always anchored one way or another to reality. The Roar, however, becomes more unreal with each reading and ultimately more complex as well... Through the subtle manipulation of color and font, this text forces the mind read at an almost metonymical level, in which case the story and the actual links themselves do not seem as important as the paths by which the mind of the reader is forced to wander."
David Carillo, This is the Page for Readings

"Malloy's narrative set-up resonates with other currently popular tropes, such as the movie The English Patient, where the near- disfunctional body, burnt beyond recognition, is hauled through the desert on the backs of camels (like the Pentateuch itself) to become the site of the production of a story. The relationship between the wounded, disabled, unrecognizable body in pain and the spinning of the narrative seems capable of carrying great cultural weight at this time"
Sue-Ellen Case, Modern Fiction Studies (MFS)

"....the lyrical My Name is SCIBE....abstract, poetic descriptions of her rehabilitation; her collaborators chime in with messages of their own-e-mail dispatches from the outside world. Like Malloy, the main character in SCIBE is locked in a solitary hospital bed, her past clouded by amnesia. Though the story itself is haunting and sad, Malloy found its creation therapeutic. "Everybody's words, their sharing of their lives made me feel that life was worth living, a thing I wasn't sure of at the time." Though Malloy's body was trapped in the hospital bed, with steel rods holding her bones together, her electronic collaboration saved her from despair."
Joyce Slaton, TWP

"......takes advantage of the computer as a temporal text processor. The dialogue appears on screen at the point when each character would speak....an "active book." It borrows techniques from film, such as shot-reverse-shot, to control the reader's experience of the text...."
The Electronic Labyrinth

"...A rich source of information about the women and works that have made media arts history -- or should. Not only is it a must-read but it is also a must-have..."
Dene Grigar, American Book Review

"...many of the artists' papers gathered here stand as frank, revealing, and inspiring expositions of their work, and Judy Malloy is to be congratulated on an important compilation of materials from a most important field...."
Sadie Plant, Tekka

"Judy Malloy's anthology Women, Art and Technology is a rare and welcome book. It is a collection of insiders' histories of a world that was only briefly glimpsed and that for the most part remained unrecorded. In the field of new media where obsolescence is the norm, the arrival of this exploration of the continuity of artistic vision and political concerns that have driven women's aesthetic experimentation with technology over the last few decades is a real gift..."
Carolyn Guertin, TrAce

...A large and comprehensive collection, it serves to illustrate that there are no boundaries to the human creative impulse and that preconceptions, stereotypes or any other human limitations, be they artistic, cultural or societal are there to be challenged by the artist.
Jayne Fenton Keane, English Studies Forum

"....Perhaps most fascinating are the book's multifaceted observations about the symbiotic relationship of media such as modern dance, sound, video, and computer programming....
Geary Yelton, Electronic Musician

"This is a phenomenally important volume."
Judith Hoffberg, Umbrella