Rob Swigart (born January 7, 1941) is an American novelist, poet, short story writer, futurist, and archaeology scholar best known for his satirical work, archaeology writing, science fiction, and interactive novel computer game, Portal (Activision, 1986). He is the author of sixteen books, including fourteen novels, one business book, and one translated prose poem.
His second novel, A.K.A./A Cosmic Fable, was nominated for a BSFA Best Novel Award in 1979. [1]
His latest novel, Mixed Harvest, won a Nautilus Gold Award in 2019. [2]
Swigart's poetry and fiction have appeared in a number of magazines, including Antaeus, Atlantic Monthly, Epoch, Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review , New England Review, New York Quarterly , Poetry, Poetry Northwest , and South Carolina Review.
Rob Swigart was born in Chicago to attorney Eugene Swigart Jr. and actress Ruth Robison Swigart. [3] His family moved to Cincinnati, where Swigart grew up, in 1947. [4] He currently lives in California. [5]
Swigart majored in English at Princeton University and received a PhD in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. [5]
Rob Swigart was an Associate Professor at San Jose University for 35 years, after which he was Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University Archaeology Center. His research, teaching, and archaeological writing focus on ancient societies and the 6,000-8,000 years during which humans adopted agriculture, as well as the consequences of this switch from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming. [6] [7] [8]
Rob Swigart began writing at a young age, first poetry and then short stories. He started writing seriously in graduate school, as he studied literature and taught fiction writing. The stories he wrote as a graduate student grew into his first novel, Little America (1977). [9] He then went on to publish two more novels in a similar satirical style.
In the 70s and into the 80s, Swigart's poetry was published in a number of literary magazines across the United States, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Reed , New York Quarterly, and Michigan Quarterly magazines.
Building upon an early interest in archaeology discovered while visiting sites around Central America, Swigart later wrote two archaeological novels published as textbooks, Xibalbá Gate (2005) and Stone Mirror (2007), while he was a visiting scholar at the Stanford Archaeology Center. [8] [10]
Following the release of Stone Mirror, he attended a series of seminars at Çatalhöyük, where he was a novelist in residence in 2005. The seminars, focusing on the connection between religion and the development of cities, inspired his collection of stories about the human past, Mixed Harvest (2019), which explores what happened before religion and sedentism. [8]
Swigart also published the Thriller in Paradise series, technothrillers set in Hawaii; and the ongoing Lisa Emmer series of historical thrillers.
Rob Swigart contributed to the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext, a digital literary periodical produced by Eastgate Systems and distributed via floppy disks in folios. [11] His multimedia hypertext work, “Directions,” was published in issue 1:4 (Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext, 1994). The work includes astronomical images, scientific graphs and maps, poetry, prose, black and white BITMAP images, and sound effects all arranged in a modified Periodic Table of Elements. [11]
Following, Swigart was a founding member and Secretary of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). [12] During his time at ELO, Swigart participated in the Preservation, Archiving, Dissemination Project, an initiative that considered how to move electronic literature from defunct platforms to current technologies. [13] [14] He also published interactive multimedia novella About Time [15] and other hypertext fiction and poetry, including short story “Seeking." [16] [17]
Swigart worked as a research affiliate for the Institute for the Future, US-based not-for-profit think tank established to help organizations understand trends and plan for the future.
As a futurist, Swigart developed scenarios and wrote stories around topics such as climate change. [18]
Rob Swigart published three satire novels in the late 1970s: Little America (1977), A.K.A./A Cosmic Fable (1978), and The Time Trip (1979). Swigart's satirical work has been called avant-garde [19] and postmodern, [20] as well as absurd and iconoclastic [21] for its unconventional style and content.
A.K.A./A Cosmic Fable was nominated for the BSFA Best Novel Award in 1979, alongside J. G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company , Tom Reamy’s Blind Voices, Thomas M. Disch’s On Wings of Song , and Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise. [22]
Though Swigart's satirical work has elements of science fiction, Swigart's first science fiction novel, The Book of Revelations, was published by E. P. Dutton Co. in 1981. It is an experimental New Wave science fiction novel about a futures researcher in California. [23]
Portal is a text-driven adventure computer game published for the Amiga in 1986 by Activision. Ports to the Commodore 64, Apple II, and MS-DOS were released later, and versions for Macintosh and Atari ST were announced and developed but never released.
The user plays as an unnamed astronaut who returns from a failed 100-year voyage, only to find that humans have disappeared from Earth. The astronaut discovers a barely functional computer connected to a storytelling mainframe called Homer. Homer tells stories of the past, but much of his memory is missing. [24] With the computer and Homer's help, the player attempts to piece together a narrative and discover what happened to the human race.
Rob Swigart later published a hardcover novel building upon the story, Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval (1988).
In April 2012, Subliminal Games launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to recreate Portal as a modern third-person adventure game. The project was cancelled in June 2012 after falling short of the funding target.
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.
Robert Lowell Coover is an American novelist, short story writer, and T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction.
Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links that provide a new context for non-linearity in literature and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Its spirit can also be seen in interactive fiction.
Shelley Jackson is an American writer and artist known for her cross-genre experimental works. These include her hyperfiction Patchwork Girl (1995) and her first novel, Half Life (2006).
Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version.
Portal is a text-driven adventure with a graphical interface published for the Amiga in 1986 by Activision. The writing is by American author Rob Swigart, and it was produced by Brad Fregger. Ports to the Commodore 64, Apple II, and IBM PC were later released. A version for the Atari ST was announced and developed, but not published. Until recently, it was thought that a Macintosh version was similarly developed yet left unpublished. The published Macintosh version was rediscovered in 2021 by a game collector.
Edward Falco is an American author, playwright, electronic literature writer, and new media editor.
afternoon, a story, spelled with a lowercase 'a', is a work of electronic literature written in 1987 by American author Michael Joyce. It was published by Eastgate Systems in 1990 and is known as one of the first works of hypertext fiction.
Stuart Moulthrop is an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, both as a theoretician and as a writer. He is author of the hypertext fiction works Victory Garden (1992), which was on the front-page of the New York Times Book Review in 1993, Reagan Library (1999), and Hegirascope (1995), amongst many others. Moulthrop is currently a Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He also became a founding board member of the Electronic Literature Organization in 1999.
Eastgate Systems is a publisher and software company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts, which publishes hypertext.
Judy Malloy is an American poet whose works embrace the intersection of hypernarrative, magic realism, and information art. Beginning with Uncle Roger in 1986, Malloy has composed works in both new media literature and hypertext fiction. She was an early creator of online interactive and collaborative fiction on The WELL and the website ArtsWire.
Stephanie Strickland is a poet living in New York City. She has published ten volumes of print poetry and co-authored twelve digital poems. Her files and papers are being collected by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book And Manuscript Library at Duke University.
Belén Gache is a Spanish-Argentinian novelist and experimental writer.
Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink was an American writer, scholar, and teacher. Writing hypermedia fiction under the pen name M.D. Coverley, she is best known for her epic hypertext novels Califia (2000) and Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day (2006). A pioneer born-digital writer, she is part of the first generation of electronic literature authors that arose in the 1987–1997 period. She was a founding board member and past president of the Electronic Literature Organization and the first winner of the Electronic Literature Organization Career Achievement Award, which was named in her honor. Lusebrink was professor emeritus, School of Humanities and Languages at Irvine Valley College (IVC).
"I Have Said Nothing" is an early work of hypertext fiction written by J. Yellowlees Douglas. In 1993 it was published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. in The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext , along with “Lust” by Mary-Kim Arnold. In 1997, Norton Anthology published an online version of the work, along with Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story as part of its print publication Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction.
Lynda Clark is an author and creator of interactive fiction. Her short story, “Ghillie’s Mum” won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Europe and Canada in 2018, and was shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Award in 2019. Her debut novel, Beyond Kidding, was published by Fairlight Books in October 2019.
Richard Holeton is an American writer and higher-education administrator. Holeton's creative works are foundational in the hypertext and electronic literature genres. As a writer, his most notable work is the hypertext novel Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, which has been recognized as an important early work of electronic literature and is included in the hypertext canon.
Figurski at Findhorn on Acid is a hypertext novel by Richard Holeton published on CD-ROM by Eastgate Systems in 2001 and republished on the open web by the Electronic Literature Lab, Washington State University, in 2021. Re-Imagined Radio presented a radio interpretation of this novel in 2022 in which Holeton made an appearance. It is a work of interactive fiction with various paths for readers to choose from, an early example of electronic literature, and one of 23 works included in the literary hypertext canon.
The NEXT: Museum, Library, and Preservation Space is a repository of net art, electronic literature and games. It is supported by the Electronic Literature Lab, Washington State University at Vancouver and the Electronic Literature Organization. This is a digital museum dedicated to reviving and maintaining these works to make them accessible to all. Physical artifacts are held at the Electronic Literature Lab in Washington, US.