| Author: | Adrienne Eisen |
| Pub Date: | 1996 |
| Genre: | Hypertext fiction, Electronic literature |
| Url: | https://web.archive.org/web/20010603003944/http://www.altx.com/hyperx/sss/ |
| Language: | English |
| Six sex scenes: a novella in hypertext | |
| Country: | United States |
Six Sex Scenes is a hypertext novella created by Adrienne Eisen and published on the web in 1996.
Six Sex Scenes is a first-person narrative told from the perspective of a young woman. It has been described as "the story of a young Jewish woman's dysfunctional love-life, with frequent flashbacks into her equally dysfunctional childhood".[1]
Six Sex Scenes consists of many lexia: individual webpages with a few paragraphs of the story. While some contemporaneous web hypertext fictions used in-text links, Six Sex Scenes presented the links at the bottom of each screen. Each lexia has 3-4 links to other lexia, allowing the reader to read the story in many different orders. "a menu of options at the end of each story-section. This menu is actually a contents-list for the story's next stage. If we clicked on a link that says ‘Bored’, we will find ourselves reading a section entitled ‘Bored’: so in a sense, although we may be unclear about the shape of the story as a whole, we are shown at the end of each section, in a relatively straightforward way, where we can go next". This means that Eisen "allows us to read a section all the way through before reminding us that there are multiple choices to be made".
Mark Bernstein writes that Six Sex Scenes uses counterpoint structure and avoids the cyclical structure common in many other hypertexts.[2] Adrian Miles described the episodes as "largely unmotivated in terms of realist or literal narrative conventions",[3] although Bernstein noted that the counterpoint structure emphasised contrasts or links between childhood and adult experiences: "Greenheart’s hypertext habitually alternates time frames: a writing space describing a childhood scene tends to be linked to scenes of adult life, and adult scenes tend to be linked to stories of childhood."
A sequel titled Making Scenes was published as a print novel in 2001.[4] [5] [6]
Six Sex Scenes was one of the winners of the New Media Invision Awards in 1997.[7]