Anyone who has ever read a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book understands the concept of hypertext fiction, storytelling that is non-linear in its organizational structure. Modern readers can understand the concept of hypertext because they are familiar with hyperlinks, connections from one hypertext file to another (for example, clicking on the hyperlink "View my complete profile" on the right will direct you to the hypertext file that is my Blogger profile).

Hypertext fiction is a remarkable creation for two reasons. First, it unfetters literature from the shackles of linearity and temporality. No longer do books need to be read sequentially from start to finish; authors are able to guide their readers to skip around in space and time. Second (and more significant), writers penned hypertext fiction before engineers invented hypertext.

In July 1945, Vanevar Bush -- the Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (a federal agency during the Second World War) -- published the article "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly. In it, he proposed a proto-hypertext computer system that he called "memex"  (a portmanteau of memory and index), which would create links between two pieces of information. "The process of tying two items together is the important thing," Bush wrote, predicting hyperlinks. "This is the essential feature of the memex." But it wasn't until 1967 that this concept was given life and the Hypertext Editing System (HES) research project was conducted at Brown University.

Twenty-six years before the HES and four years before Bush's article, Argentine poet, critic and writer Jorge Luis Borges published "The Garden of Forking Paths," arguably the first work of hypertext fiction ever published. In this short story, Borges explored the theme of alternate realities and the forking of a narrative in space and time -- "an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times," or hypertexts. Borges wanted his work to replicate a labyrinth; readers should be dropped into it at any instance in the story and forced to fumble their way around from point to point within it. (This fumbling around is a similar idea to starting off, for example, on Bob Dylan's Wikipedia page and ending up on that of Oslo, Norway by clicking on various hyperlinks.)

Published in the same year as "Garden," Borges's "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" predicted "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels thirty-eight years before their inception. He thought of a book that trifurcated twice backward in time to create nine different stories, providing the following diagram to illustrate his point. The reader had a choice of any of nine different beginnings (x 1-9), any of three events that followed (y 1-3) and ended up at the same conclusion (z).

The internet has made hypertext and hyperlinking such a commonplace idea that it becomes difficult to appreciate Borges's innovations. If he were alive today, perhaps he would abandon print as his medium of choice and migrate to the World Wide Web, where his vision of forking paths can be realized more easily. In fact, here is University College London student Vaios Papanagnou's project to create a hypertext version of Borges's "Garden." You can also check out University of California San Diego student Shannon Chamberlain's hypertext version of Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1961), a literary masterpiece and perhaps the first novel-length work of hypertext fiction ever published.