Openings are a problem in hypertext, but not so bad a problem as what one faces in conventional writing. In hypertexts and other sorts of machine-dependent "cybertexts" there may be strictly speaking no first line or lexia, since the starting point of any given reading may be computed on the fly. I once wrote a fiction that had a different opening for each day of the week. While this strategy may seem to complicate the problem of beginning -- well begun in hypertext is not half the battle, but rather some smaller fraction 1/N where N is the number of initial variations -- I find the indeterminacy of multiple openings oddly reassuring. Starting a talk like this is another matter entirely.

Being stuck for a good opening, I fell back on an old trick well known to psychotherapists, AI theorists, and teachers of college composition. I made a list. Given the title of my talk, this turned out to be a list of troubles. Making this list did for me what it has always done for my students: it took my mind off the talk for an hour or so, the only problem being that the list grew rather long. So I cut out everything that sounded too much like Dave Barry and ended up with this selective register of complaints:

• The trouble with hypertext fiction is that Randy Trigg's life is too complicated.

• The trouble with the World Wide Web is that it may shortly become the social equivalent of air conditioning -- indispensable, reasonably reliable, and generally invisible to its users.

• The trouble with scientists and engineers is that they really *do* change the world.

• The trouble with driving in Pittsburgh is that the human mind does not intuitively grasp differential topology.

• The trouble with computers is that they work.

• The trouble with this talk is that it begins with what seems to be manifestly the wrong idea, namely *trouble.*

Trouble? What trouble?

Times, it would seem, are great. Oblivious to all those distant rumblings in Asia, the western markets are brimming over with irrational exuberance. For the first time in decades, employment is booming and worker compensation seems to be edging up without an immediate threat of inflation. Our particular corner of the economy, information technology, has gone from a sideshow to a featured performer, with some people saying that the Internet will eventually affect our culture as deeply as broadcasting or telephony, if not moreso. It's certainly hard to pass a billboard, TV ad, or bumper sticker without glimpsing somebody's URL.

Strangely enough, people do not seem entirely fed up with all this yet. According to last week's Times/CBS [Microsoft?] poll, Americans adore information technologies. 59% of those surveyed agreed with the statement, "computers solve more problems than they create." Only 29% believed the reverse. (Strangely, 97% of the same respondents thought monopoly capitalism should be protected by Constitutional amendment, but that's another story...)

It's certainly possible to disbelieve the hype, but even if incredible, these statements of faith in technology cannot be totally ignored. The X-Files writers have things backward, of course: it's not the truth that's out there, nor do the media giants want you to "fight the future." For whatever dubious reasons, we are being told that information technology is the secret of our success ("Bill Gates is the captain of our side," says pollster Yankelovich), and even in the most egregious propaganda there is usually some grain of historical determination, if not truth. Time are indeed great. The Cold War is over and everyone's a winner, even if some jackpots are bigger than others. We're told that a "long boom" has commenced, an economic recovery with amazing staying power, and the stimulant responsible for this "unnatural condition," as William Gibson might have called it, is not Viagra but the Internet, an in large measure the Web, which is to say, hypertext.

And that is why we really are in trouble.

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