Eastgate Systems announces the publication of Rob Swigart's long-awaited collection of hypermedia stories, Down Time.

Down Time consists of twenty-one stories of the computer age, connected by shared characters, events and objects. A police officer, a terminal patient, a computer technician, and a high-school guidance counselor are just a few of the characters we follow as they try (and fail) to understand themselves, their lovers, and the strangers they meet. Interactive elements allow readers to create their own paths through different stories, revealing new correspondences and connections.

The stories are cool, luscious, haunting, the dreams our machines might (and maybe do) dream. Like storytime back home, a consolation for the depredations of a hyper-mediated life. --Bill Bly, author of We Descend

In Down Time, elements of computer technology become telling metaphors for the functions and dysfunctions of modern life. As Swigart's characters negotiate broken marriages, illness, alienation, acts of brutality, and indifference, their disparate lives intersect to form an intriguing and often surprising pattern of connections. Their struggles to make meaning out of the larger 'circuitry' can be both touching and frightening. -- Rob Kendall, author of A Life Set For Two

"Swigart is a serious, accessible, intelligent...writer who deserves to be more widely known." -- Newsday

"The social and personal network is down, and all the king's sysadmins can't put it back together again. Yet in Down Time's fragmentary fables, the characters ... start to put aside the workarounds and excuses and determine how to actually live in a failure-fraught world." -- Nick Montfort

Rob Swigart, an affiliate of the Institute for the Future, develops scenarios for Fortune 500 companies. He is the author of eight novels including Little America, The Time Trip, and The Book of Revelations. An interactive novel, Portal, was published by Activision in 1986 on computer disk, and appeared in print two years later from St. Martins Press. He is also the author of Directions (hypertext, available from Eastgate Systems). Most recently he co-authored, with Robert Johansen, Upsizing the Individual in the Downsized Corporation. He is presently finishing a novel about Central American archaeology.

Down Time
by Rob Swigart
Eastgate Systems
ISBN 1-884511-39-2 (CD for Macintosh and Windows) ..... $25.00