The Unknown: The Original Great American Hypertext Novel
by William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratto, Frank Marquardt, Adam Richer (visuals), Katie Gilligan (visuals)
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The Unknown (also known as The Unknown: The Original Great American Hypertext Novel ) is a web-based hypertext novel written by William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg and Dirk Stratton with Frank Marquardt.Kristin Krauth describes it as "a satire on publishing and promotion as well as a tough and funny look at the nature of creating hypertext".Journalists writing about The Unknown when it was new tend to emphasise both the novelty of reading a story on the web, and the humour of the work. For instance, Brad Quinn wrote, in 2000, "I have spent hours reading The Unknown. It's impossible to know how big it is, because I rarely run across the same page twice. But as much as I hate to read anything longer than a short e-mail or a box score on the Web, I don't mind reading The Unknown, mostly because it's fun."The collaborative writing at the heart of The Unknown has inspired later projects, including the Polish work Piksel Zdrรณj which was explicitly modelled on the picaresque and digressive nature of The Unknown. (from Wikipedia)