Novels of interest to IF enthusiasts

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I unexpectedly ran across a particularly IF-ish book today, and I felt the inclination to share, and possibly other people can chime in with other similar works.

The book in question is A summer journey to Brazil by Alice R. Humphrey which is free on Project Gutenberg.

It is, unusually, written mostly in the second-person, so of course it immediately reminded me quite a bit of interactive fiction. A brief excerpt:

And now you are again on the ship. You look at beautiful Lisbon and know that if it had not been for Brazil you would never have seen it. It has been so easily reached from England on this steamer, but what an interminable journey it would have been by rail! Spain seems far enough away when one is traveling “on the Continent,” but Portugal! Indeed, this enterprising, seafaring, colonizing country of[Pg 9] three hundred years ago is nearly forgotten. How many know now that her sailors named Formosa (beautiful) as they found its lovely shores, or think to trace her hand on every Continent!

It is also a travelogue from 1900, which reminded me of 80 Days, in several good ways.

But it’s not all good news. Several parts of it are too racist for modern sensibilities, which might be reason enough to skip it. I was expecting the racism, but it’s also quite anti-Catholic, which perhaps I should have been expecting, but there it is.

If you can get past those concerns, I think it’s enjoyable enough, and written with a certain charm.

Indeed you feel in a very foreign land. There is not a tree or plant you have seen outside of greenhouses. The colors are all more brilliant, the motions more slow, the greetings more elaborate, the beggars more loathsome, the whole place more ancient and semi-decayed than anything you know.

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Sound interesting!

IMO the two canonical IF-adjacent novels are House of Leaves and Pale Fire – they both engage in intertextual games that require the reader to interpret, rather than just passively absorb information, and since the former is more genre-based and the latter is more literary, between them they stake out a pretty broad continuum for this kind of thing.

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I think Rayuela by Julio Cortázar is also pretty canonical, although maybe not so much the English version.

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The Garden of Forking Paths by Borges is a very well-known literary work about branching & merging narratives; it’s not a novel itself, but rather a short story about a branching novel.

And similar to your first example, If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino is a well-known example of a literary novel with second-person narration.

Both of these are pretty “canonical,” I think?

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The already mentioned, “House of Leaves” and “Rayuela”/”Hopscotch” were the first to spring to mind for me.

Another with clear IF affinities is B.S. Johnson’s experimental 1969 novel “The Unfortunates”, the “book in a box” with 15.5 septillion reading combinations.

I’d also like to offer a nod here to Richard Brautigan, who, after providing five alternate endings to his 1965 novel, “A Confederate General from Big Sur”, finishes with:

“Then there are more and more endings: the sixth, the 53rd, the 131st, the 9,435th ending, endings going faster and faster, more and more endings, faster and faster until this book is having 186,000 endings per second.“

EDIT & P.S.: In addition to Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night…”, a further example of second-person narration being used to good effect is Carlos Fuentes’ short novel “Aura”.

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“The Lady, or the Tiger?” by Frank Stockton was one of my favorite stories as a kid. To my surprise and delight, the book What Is Your Quest? by Anastasia Salter points to this story as one of the proto origins of contemporary IF. It makes sense! The story hinges upon reader engagement. It poses a direct question (the one in the title), which forces you to pull the text apart to answer the question for yourself.

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A «vote how you want the story to follow» weekly series by… well… myself

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Oh, less egocentric, S from JJ Abrams

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.\_(Dorst_novel)

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John Sladek’s short story collection, Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek, includes a story called The Lost Nose: A Programmed Book. Written in the late 1960s, it’s an early example of a choose-your-own-adventure type story. It centres around Fred, a character who has lost his nose, and the reader must guide him on a quest to find it. Originally the story took the form of a colourful scrapbook, and was a present for Sladek’s girlfriend Pamela.

Tonally it is very silly and reminded me a lot of my own work of silliness, Escape from the Crazy Place. So in 2016 I converted the story into a Twine game, and contacted Sladek’s publisher, David Langford, about the possibility of giving the game a public release.

Langford forwarded my email to Christopher Priest (yes, that Christopher Priest!) who was literary agent for John Sladek’s estate.

This was Mr. Priest’s reply:

I’ve had a think about your suggestion of putting The Lost Nose on Twine. I can see why you suggest this, and I assure you I am not trying to be a spoilsport by saying I can’t really see a way of letting it happen.

It’s not a question of money, nor even of copyright, although copyright is important and is a major hurdle. The Lost Nose was originally created for fun, with no thought of money. John made it for his then girlfriend Pamela, who later became his first wife. Although Pamela sold the physical object some years ago, I know she still has strong personal feelings about the past. We should have to give her the courtesy of telling her we intend to put it up on the internet. I don’t know what she would say. The copyright belongs to John’s estate, and we would need their formal permission to republish it. Permission was given for its use in Maps, but that was a print edition, not something made freely available to anyone who cares to look at it or download it.

As the years go by I see John’s work as increasingly great and important, and as far as possible I try to do what I and the estate believe is best for his reputation. Ideally, I should like to see a high-quality printed reproduction of The Lost Nose, perhaps from a niche publisher, and have already floated it with a couple of firms. If it was on the internet then I imagine no printed edition would ever appear.

Sorry!

Sadly, the high-quality printed version never saw the light of day, Christopher Priest has himself passed away and the Twine version still languishes on my hard drive. But I recommend reading Maps, if you can find a copy. Sladek is an underappreciated author, in my opinion.

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In terms of puzzle books that feel like IF, The Eleventh Hour enraptured me as a kid. You solve ciphers, search for clues and oddities in the illustrations, and follow the narrative in the book to figure out a whodunnit—and, as far as I can recall, only in sealed pages at the end, after the story was over could you find the canonical answer. It feels different than Encyclopedia Brown type mysteries or even locked room detective stories because there was so much stuff to interact with.

Eta: here’s an example:

An illustration from the Eleventh Hour, with several anthropomorphic animals playing a game of Blind Man's Buff. There are several ciphers hidden on the page and margins.
An illustration from the Eleventh Hour, with several anthropomorphic animals playing a game of Blind Man's Buff. There are several ciphers hidden on the page and margins.600Ă—600 184 KB

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The Eleventh Hour is incredible! That book had a massive influence on me. I still own a copy!

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I don’t own mine still, but I would love to buy another again!

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I enjoyed that one (and solved it).

Chris Manson’s Maze has recently gotten attention because it inspired the puzzle videogame Blue Prince (recommended). But it’s been a powerful inspiration for me – Hadean Lands, Delightful Wallpaper and arguably even The Dreamhold are influenced by it.

Invisible Cities!

On the nonfiction side, Roger Brucker’s The Longest Cave is the story of Pat Crowther exploring Mammoth Cave.

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The novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, in their use of the present tense, their focus on objective description (and descriptions of objects and environments - “chosisme”), often strike me as IF-adjacent.

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I’m reading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke right now, and the protagonist’s effort to map the enormous building he lives in, with rooms he’s named things like “The 122nd western hall”, is reminding me of mapping a parser game. :smile:

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Huge Piranesi fan and it would be my dream to create a game in that world.

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There’s a short-short story called “Hall of Mirrors” by Fredric Brown (link to Project Gutenberg text of the story) that’s a l’il second person science fiction epic. Brown’s probably best known today for having written a story called “Arena” that was (very loosely) adapted into an episode of the original Star Trek. Most of his stuff is short, Twilight Zone-ish fantasy and science fiction stories, although he wrote fiction of every length and in just about every genre.

Anyway, “Hall of Mirrors” was what jumped to mind when I saw the topic, even before seeing you mention a different second person story. I’d recommend not reading the terrible Project Gutenberg summary and just jump into the story; the story will only take a few minutes to read and the summary gives most of it away.

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Maze absolutely had a chokehold on me as a kid. I hadn’t heard about the Blue Prince connection, but that’s another reason I should get around to playing it, sounds like!

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I love my copy of S though I haven’t read all the way through it - I won a copy as an IFComp prize and it’s basically a book stuffed with feelies. I’ve read the first part and I’m held back a bit by my eyesight - the gray hand-written parts (in pencil?) are a little dim so it’s not a book you can curl up with before bed without sufficient light. And due to my weird compulsion I’m afraid the feelies are on specific pages for a reason so it’s on a shelf in the box so nothing gets out of order until I get the best opportunity to sit down with it.

I had Maze as a teenager and loved the illustrations, the passively menacing narration, and the visual choice-narrative nature of it. My brain could never even approach solving the puzzle even though I attempted draw a map. I was quite proud that I figured out the rebus had something to do with William Shakespeare.

It has a tribute site where it can be read in full and is exhaustively analyzed. I never knew how the puzzle worked - much less the solution - until I perused this site a couple years ago.

I’ve also got a copy of Romeo And/or Juliet by Ryan North which is essentially a modern choice-narrative novel instead of more obliquely ergodic fiction.

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Mention of Fredric Brown reminds me of one of my old favorites: “Rogue Moon” by Algis Budrys which predates even the concept of video games, but which perfectly captures the sense of mapping a deadly territory by way of infinite rebirths. An artifact has appeared on the moon, which kills anyone who makes a wrong move within it. So the investigators send in transporter clones, psychically linked to their originals, to map the artifact one step at a time, sharing their progress – and their deaths – with their originals, which slowly drives the originals mad. (Caveat: though I remember it fondly, it was written in 1960 and apparently features poorly aged gender stereotypes, as per a lot of golden age sci-fi.)

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