ho would have believed that, in the closing days of the twentieth century, humankind’s literature was being criticized by an intelligence far greater than its own? While writers scurried to and fro between their readings at universities and visiting professorships and residencies at writers’workshops, their words were being studied as carefully as DNA might be decoded by a geneticist beneath a powerful microscope. Trapped in their earthy plane, and their linear thought, these poets and novelists’ lines were as predictable as the behavior of ants. But for a few exceptions. Because a few writers had become freed from that plodding page-turning that begins at i and continues through 1079 that had imprisoned human thought for two millenia, and were producing a text the sheer complexity of which was enough to intrigue the observers, and give them cause to write criticism. But their efforts to radio this useful feedback to the creatures of earth failed, because the four hypertext novelists could barely afford shoes, much less the sophisticated directional electro-magnetic instruments necessary to understand and receive guidance from the criticism. And so this intelligence realized it was necessary to make a trip across the ocean of space that separated it from earth, in order to help the human race evolve into a form of intelligence capable of writing the sort of hypertext novels that this intelligence required to make it laugh.

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