In this novelistic romp that is by turns hilarious and brilliant, John Barth spoofs his own place in the pantheon of contemporary fiction and the generation of writers who have followed his literary trailblazing. Coming Soon!!! is the tale of two writers: an older, retiring novelist setting out to write his last work and a young, aspiring writer of hypertext intent on toppling his master. In the heat of their rivalry, the writers navigate, and sometimes stumble over, the cultural fault lines between print and electronic fiction, mentor and mentee, postmodernism and modernism. JOHN BARTH’s fiction has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. For many years he taught in the writing seminars at John Hopkins University. He is the author of such seminal works as The Sot-Weed Factor, Chimera (for which he won the NBA), and Giles Goat-Boy . Coming Soon!!! A Narrative By John Barth Mariner Books Copyright © 2002 John Barth All right reserved. ISBN: 9780618257300 Excerpt Its opening mini-icon: READ ME Call me ditsy, call me whatchadurn please; just an old-fart Chesapeake progger"s what I am, with more orneriness than good sense — else I wouldn"t be sitting here a-hunting and a-pecking on "Big Bitsy"s" ergonomic keyboard whilst the black wind roars and the black water rises and the power flickers and the cabin shakes. I"d"ve hauled my bony butt across Backwater Strait to high ground over in Crassfield whilst the hauling was still doable, before the storm- surge from Zulu Two (stay tuned) puts Hick Fen Island* eight fingerforking feet under Backwater Sound. "Whoa ho there, Dits," my mind"s ear hears the gentle reader gently interpose: "Where"s Hick Fen I.? Where"re Backwater Sound and ditto Strait and mainland Crassfield? Who"s Zulu Two, and whaddafug"s a progger, and who"s thissere EARL character, that you haven"t even mentioned yet?" All in good time, mon semblable et cet, which Yrs Truly don"t happen to have a whole skif?oad of just now. Anyhow, old Ditsy- Belle"s a gal that likes her stories straight up, if you read me: Get things going, says I, then cut to the chase, or old Dits"ll chase to the cut. Once upon a time"s about as far as we"ll go in the way of wind-up for your pitch. You say It was a dark and stormy night? We copy, mate: now on with the story, ess vee pee. Ditsy-Belle, Ditsy-Boy: I"ve done time in my time as mainly male and ditto feem; have attained the age where what"s between my legs matters less to either of us than what"s between my ears or just twixt you and me. Which is to say, a certain high-density disk-in-the- hand that I progged from the bush this morning after Zulu One (a dark and stormy night forsooth) in the westmost marshes of B.E.W.A.R.(E.), the Backwater Estuarine Wetlands Area Reserve (East): a double-sided disk triple-zipped in a ZiplocTM baggie inside another inside another and hence bone-dry enough, as bones go hereabouts, that I could read its blot-free label through all three bags in the mucky marshgut whither it"d wended from wherethefuckever. To wit: COMING SOON!!! Not quite your classic message-in-a-bottle — of which, by the way, I have found none in seven decades of dedicated progging — but piquant, piquant, no? After Tropical Storm Zulu, however (now redubbed Zulu I), the marsh-pickings were uncommonly plump, and tempus was a- fugiting — the Weather Service warning all hands that Tee Ess Zee had made an unheard-of U-turn off the Jersey shore, regrouped and refueled, and was chugging more or less back our way as full-blown Hurricane Zulu; first time they ever reached the end of the alphabet, and with autumn prime-time yet to go! Anyhow, a chap can"t just kick back in the cordgrass and thumb through a computer disk with his/her bareassed eye, capisce? So I tossed CS!!! in the crab-basket with my other objets trouvés and carried on with my progging, I did, figuring I"d cull and triage and boot up and peruse at my fatherfreaking leisure. But stay: ¿Qué quiere decir, Q"est-ce que ça veux dire, Was bedeutet ein progger, prithee? A: One (of any gender, both/all/none, in good old low-in?ected English) who progs. And that"s a long Oh, mind, as in programmer, not a shorty as in, well, long. Q: And to prog? Or, as some may spell it, progue? Let us begin with the Chesapeake Estuarine System, kiddies, and cut thence to the chase. Formed in its current configuration 10K years back, it was, at and by the end of the latest glaciation, with a probable prompt 35,000,000 years earlier from a mile-wide meteorite- strike 140 miles SE of Our Nation"s Capital. The drownèd mouth of your Susquehanna River, is your C-peake Bay, and your largest mothering estuarine system in your USMFA, maybe your ditto world. At 300-plus kilometers north/south but only an average dozen-plus east/west and a mere measly average three Ditsy-depths top/bottom, she"s as ta