The Internovel, a 10,000 word, dialog-based novella, is set in the transitional space between the ASCII internet of 1992 and the HMTL Internet of 1997. I wrote it in the spring of 1996, and you really need to consider it my version of “my shitty college art film.”

The Internet was a funny place in 1994. The World Wide Web was being used to do cutting edge things like allow people to keep track of the levels of coffee in a pot in a computer lab in England. Dial up services that were not AOL typically offered users the option of using a Terminal-based interface, and PPP or TCP was a luxury that often required a special login and administrative permission. It was a text-based Internet. – But change was coming. ASCII was giving way to Hypertext. That’s the world this novella was composed in, and the world it was composed around.

It was never meant to be a period piece, and I have resisted the effort to go back and make it so.  I share it today as a time capsule of the Internet as it affected a Midwestern college town in the Spring 1994.

It’s probably not fair to call it good writing, and in fact, the novellas near total lack of narrative was a thought experiment I was playing with. I was hoping that by working only in dialoged I could blur the line between  textual, electronic, immediate, and delayed conversation.

Today’s computers, high speed connections, multi-core processors and always-on-Internet life-streams make fifteen years ago seems so far away now-- and so foreign.
Because they is.

The Internovel

Gabe: But eventually, doesn't the surly mustang learn to love his captors?
Jeni: Um, no, he learns to fear them.
Gabe: No, they fall in love and have freaky centaur babies.
Jeni: Pain never brings respect; it brings. fear and underneath that fear is loathing
Gabe: There. Are. Four! Lights.
Jeni: Okay, I need to chart.
Gabe: Was it the Star Trek or the centaur babies that pushed you over the edge?
Jeni: All of the above
***Gabe wins.
Jeni: Sure, congrats

Jeni: I ATE the Heck outta blueberry muffin
Gabe: Blueberry muffins ought to fear you.
Jeni: really they should
Gabe: There's a four star alert on you out on the blueberry muffinnet right now.
Jeni: I bet. I tore through that muffin like nobodies business
Gabe: It turns out I'm a sysop on Blueberry.muffin.net. Who knew?
Jeni: Goddamn narc.

Gabe: It's snowing.
Jeni: Shut up!!!
Jeni: Is it accumulating?
Gabe: No accumulation.
Gabe: Just flurries.
Gabe: "Flurries" is one of our many words for snow.
Gabe: We're not so different, the Eskimos and us.
Gabe: Except they can see Russia from their igloos.
Jeni has gone away.