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Do different forms of narrativity, different forms of literary communication and different ways of interaction with literary 'texts' develop under the influence of new technology? These are questions that have been posed for years with respect to the computer and the interactive media derived from it. What is a good interactive narrative? In which direction will art and literature develop and what will the consequences be?

In this debate, which is underway in academic circles as well as outside them (is the moo the best model for literary interactivity? Is Tomb Raider the overture for the twenty-first century picaresque novel?) all the old questions about what literature (and art) is are revived in all their intensity. It often happens that unconsciously, one's notion of what literature is lies hidden in assumptions mentioned in passing, or in one's choice of subject or examples.

This is true of two books about literature and new media, computer and cyberculture which confront each other here. Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck gives an overview of the development of narrativity for computer applications. The other book, Darren Tofts' Memory Trade, constructs the (pre)history of a cyberculture which already seems to be over. These two very different books design a (literary) future for the digital age based on a construction of a past with a hoped-for future.

These two books represent diametrically opposite visions of the (computer) literature of the future; two views of literature, two literary tastes. On the one hand is Murray, the mit Trekkie, with her preference for recognisable stories and the nineteenth-century novel, on the other is Tofts, the Wakean, with his preference for linguistic experiments.