Web Fiction
Online writing of fictitious characters appearing in the guise of Web sites, Usenet and mailing-list authors, online avatars, and other virtual “personalities.” Also called Net Fiction.
A lot of younger netusers don’t even read fiction anymore; instead, they follow blogs because “the real world’s more interesting than made-up stories.” In other words they’ve never cultivated the ability to hold themselves through a prose narrative and have no ability to stay down inside the world of a work of prose art — but they could read the web fictions of artificial bloggers, avatars and other fictitious, manufactured “personalities.”
Pre-Web online netfictions
Any accounts from early usenet or BBSing?
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The early Web and “Way New Journalism” era
There were several netfiction projects and popular online “characters” that existed before the peak of blogging.
alt.personalities
alt.personalities was the title for a collection of online characters and fictions active in the mid-1990s. The characters appeared in netnews threads, gopher files, early blogs, web sites, and even hardcopy chapbooks.
Walter Miller
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Little is left of this Pathfinder-era character, who was quite possibly the first “electronic hillbilly.” There’s the original Geocities page: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Prairie/9179/walter.htm. At the turn of the millennium this was supposedly updated to www.waltermillerhomepage.com, but — like most sites from these “characters” of the 90s — it’s gone.
Walter’s mentioned in Levi Asher’s 2009 online memoir of the 90s Web era, and he’s also included in Asher’s 1997 hardcopy anthology, [amazonify]1884777384::text::::Coffeehouse: Writings from the Web[/amazonify].
Web-fictions in the 21st century
The age of blogging and other online messaging (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) makes net-fiction easy. There’s probably some out there.
Gary Benchley
Gary Benchley is the name of Paul Ford’s fake character, who turned up with a series of letters in The Morning News beginning in the autumn of 2003, and eventually turned into the lead protagonist of an eponymous novel, [amazonify]0452286638::text::::Gary Benchly, Rock Star[/amazonify]. (Ford had previously experiemented with fictitious online web-characters on his Ftrain.com site.)
Related pranks, forgeries and fakes
Not all of what would be web-fictions are done with a literary intention. Several elaborate fake-jobs have been perpetrated. There’s probably a lot of that out there now.
BAD
Apeared in MIT Press. Instead of fictitious characters, this “prank” impersonated Timothy Druckery, Mark Amerika and others. [archive]
“Art prank” in Vice Magazine
This disappeared from the net but a reference exists in archive, sans images. (Vice Sept 1999?) (References original article)
Paul Maliszewski’s “Faking”
Paul Maliszewski began online “faking” in this period, but he apparently did not have a literary motive. An article called “I, Faker” (The Baffler #11, 1998) publicly revealed his work. [archive]
The Baffler also printed a directory of the “fakes,” including letters and other public writings by the following characters:
- Gary Pike
- Carl S. Grimm
- Pavel R. Liberman
- T. Michael Bodine
- Noah Warren-Mann
- Irv Fuller
He then authored a book on the history of (offline) “faking”: [amazonify]1595584226::text::::Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders[/amazonify] [tout.com/content/2009/02/fakers_paul_maliszewskis_new_collection.php”>brief interview] [more]
For further reading
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