According to renowned hyperfiction writer and cultural theorist, Michael Joyce, in network culture, "we ache with a murky sense of a newly evolving consciousness and cognition alike, almost as if we could feel the evolution of consciousness in the same way a sleeping adolescent feels the bone ache of growing pains as if in a dream."

Joyce's first collection, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, charted a life of what Deleuze and Guattari call "complex mixtures" between the poles of art and instruction, teaching and writing. This new collection continues that complex mix in the form of what Joyce has called theoretical narratives, both a narrative of theory and a text in which theory often takes the form of narrative. His concerns range from hypertext and interactive fiction to the geography of cyberspace to interactive film. Joyce searches out the emergence of nature culture in spaces ranging from the shifting nature of the library to MOOs and other virtual spaces to life along a river.

While in this collection Joyce continues to be one of the most lyrical, wide-ranging, and informed cultural critics and theorists of new media, the essays exhibit an evolving distrust of unconsidered claims for newness in the midst of what Joyce calls "the blizzard of the next" as well as a recurrent insistence upon grounding our experience of the emergence of network culture in the body.

This book will have wide interest for general readers interested in new media and the internet as well as for specialists in literature, feminist and cultural studies, rhetoric, and interactivity. Students at all levels will be engaged by Joyce's provocative, poetical, and always accessible meditativeand analytic power.

Michael Joyce is Visiting Associate Professor of English, Vassar College. He is the author of the hypertext novel Afternoon: A Story, and of another collection of essays, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics.