William Gibson: Something that started with Pattern Recognition was that I discovered I could Google the world of the novel. I began to regard it as a sort of extended text — hypertext pages hovering just outside the printed page. There have been threads on my Web site –readers Googling and finding my footprints. I still get people asking me about “the possibilities of interactive fiction,” and they seem to have no clue how we’re already so there. ^
Why bother making novels hypertext anymore? Google is the footnote finder for footnotes that weren’t footnoted. I don’t think this constitutes “true” hyperfiction, in that it is one-way links from text to linear footnotes, but maybe if Gibson got together with the people with the highest page rank on each term, he could set up his own link maze to keep people happy.