Judy Malloy
The Roar of Destiny Emanated from The Refrigerator. I got up to get a Beer.

Described by interactivecinema.org as "...a perfect example of thought and physical interaction working together... ", The Roar of Destiny is a complex hyperpoem constructed with hundreds of carefully crafted, intertwined lexias. The reader, like the narrator, is involved in a continual struggle between the real and the virtual -- between stark black-backgrounded paths that lead to despair and depression and bluegreen-backgrounded paths that follow beside clear mountain streams; between purple screens that relate the narrator's sojourn in a desert home and white screens that detail the relationships between co-workers in a virtual workspace.

The primary interface in this poetic experience of environment and altered environment is a dissolving and reassembling dense structure of phrase links. Radiating from this structure, are story-bearing lexias -- each composed of a narrative fragment that sometimes runs decisively in the center of the screen and sometimes is raggedly merged with peripheral words and hyperlinked phrases. The reader follows the narrative by reading the bolded words in the narrative lexias -- while at the same time absorbing the peripheral words and links in the way that one views the links in online newspapers.

The first person, the "I" of the narrative, is a way of connecting the reader to the narrator. It leads the reader into the details of the narrator's immediate environment -- the small things, the seemingly inconsequential events that trigger memories and thoughts. In the Roar of Destiny, the narrator's name is Gweneth. She is not me. This is a work of fiction.

........................ The roar of destiny
...........................emanated from the refrigerator
................................ I got up to get a beer

The Roar of Destiny,
an early work of new media
literature on the World Wide Web, was
profiled in Richard Kostelanetz's
A dictionary of the avant-gardes,
(Routledge, 2001) in the Fraunhofer
Net Art Guide, (2000) and is
included in the Boston CyberArts
HyperGallery. It was also featured
on the cover of Leonardo in 1996.
and in Malloy's book chapter in
Interactive Dramatologies.
((Heide Hagebolling, ed,
Springer Verlag, 2004)