The Making and Unmaking of Califia

Chapter from WomenTechLit (2017) Maria Mencia, ed.

M.D. Coverley/Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink

CALIFIA:  "Once upon a time there was an Island named California where dreams came true."

So begins the opening address to the reader in the electronic narrative, Califia - a story of five generations of Californians on a quest for a lost stash of gold. The gold was buried, it seems, in the Southern California mountains some few years after the great gold rush of 1849.  And then, through a series of California dust-ups, it got lost. From the discovery of the earliest clues - the Baja Map and the blue-blanket embroidery of Willing Stars - the characters puzzle though earthquake, fire, a mysterious train wreck, Hollywood nights, strange land-buying expeditions in the desert, flight plans, and Chumash legends to link together the elusive path to the dream of riches - and the longing that makes seekers of us all.

Califia (2000), Eastgate Systems), by M. D. Coverley (pen name for Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink).  The descriptions in italics are from the M.D. Coverley website.

Introduction

By now, all of us (or at least everyone reading this) have probably marveled at the speed of change in the world of digital communications technology.  Who would have thought that Flash, a central element in the development of interactive web sites, would be gone in a flash (pun intended)?  Nonetheless, we move from desktop to laptop to tablet to hand-held or wearable devices, from browser to browser, and from software to cloudware in rapid succession.  For users and readers, this has made our digital experience a swift ride.  But for writers and artists – a rollercoaster in the dark. 

When digital electronic writers began creating for the computer, the rate of tech change came as a sneaky surprise.  Certainly, there were examples of newer inscription technologies not preserving as well as previous ones (words written on stone last longer than papyrus, vellum lasts longer than paper).  We also had ample evidence of early 20^th century film either becoming unplayable or orphaned without machines to play it on.  Still, there just wasn’t any precedent for the lightning-fast loss of digital material. 

Califia was begun in hypertext form in 1995.  It was published by Eastgate Systems in 2000.  By 2010, it would no longer play on most computers.  Holy crumbling stone, a shelf life of ten years! 

And, although Califia is longer and technically more complicated than most other e-lit fiction, the trajectory of its creation and loss – the pattern of its life-span – bears many similarities with other e-lit writing.    

It took a long time to make and a relatively short time to unmake.

CALIFIA is a multimedia, interactive, hypertext fiction for CD-ROM.  Califia allows the reader to wander and play in the landscape of historic/magic California.  It is a computer-only creation of interactive stories, photos, graphics, maps, music, and movement.

Early Stirrings

As a print writer, I had always been interested in multi-voice, multiple point-of- view narratives – what is now termed the “networked novel.”   I particularly liked the structure of John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy – a "four-way conveyor system” – as he called it.  I tried this approach in print, but the possibilities were limited.  In my first novel (Love and The Dragonfly), written in the 1970’s, I experimented with multiple modalities by using the “elements” feature on my IBM Selectric typewriter; this allowed me to assign different typefaces to each kind of segment/fragment.  However, using conventional print, I could do no more than change fonts on a static page.  The opportunity for layering, multiple linkages, imagery, sound, and symbolic architecture – the technology to actually do that – would not come into my hands for another fifteen years.

As with many ambitious, epic-like narrative works (both in print and in digital form) the idea for Califia germinated long before the writing began.  For many years, while I was “working” on the concepts for Califia, the technology did not exist for its creation. 

Like the characters in Califia, I had a legacy of gold from my ancestors – but most of it was in the form of photographs, documents, brochures, old newspapers, diaries, and family myths.  I started assembling these.  And I began to teach myself the skills I would need to write the novel that I imagined.  In addition to word processing, I learned to manipulate images and photos, create animations, do some programming, and edit sound.  It was to be a montaged, multi-modal, interlinked story of three California families as their lives intersected over five generations of Los Angeles history.

CALIFIA: The moment I began to create the first screen on the computer, I could see it happening: the weary and beleaguered Samuel Walker - leaving the Tejon Ranch with his wife, Willing Stars, and the renegade mission Indians - desperate to find a place to hide the heavy gold he had mined in the Sierras.

And the generations that followed, dreamers all, risking their lives for the belief that the gold was still there, buried and waiting for the one who could decode the clues, read the hypertext of star lore and plot maps and legends of gold and movies and airplanes and the history of water and land combines: find pattern in a seeming chaos of desire. Erskine Summerland was in my imaginary California, flying a plane from San Simeon to Tehachapi and straight into a mountain. Quintana, of Chinatown, lost to fire and water. I saw Augusta, just the other day, digging in her own back yard the morning after her father was buried, certain he had left a stash of gold coins under the eucalyptus grove above Hollywood Boulevard. . . .

And you, too, were there. All of us at the interface between acceptance and passion. The western edge is a place where, as Joan Didion once wrote: "the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."

NEH Seminar - Literature in Transition, UCLA

In 1995 I was awarded an NEH fellowship to attend Katherine Hayles’ seminar, “Literature in Transition: The Impact of Information Technologies” at UCLA. The seminar provided an overview of recent scholarship on electronic textuality and offered participants the opportunity to develop their own electronic texts.  It was a watershed time for me.  This experience served as a catalyst for bringing Califia from concept to finished coding.  Kate was a knowledgeable and inspired leader; she arranged for our group to become familiar with the new fiction and poetry, the authors and artists working in this medium (in fact, many of the students in her seminars subsequently became pioneers of e-lit), and the tools for creating digital projects.  I first tried Storyspace, but I wanted to use color images and sound, which Storyspace did not support – so moved to Toolbook.  Happily, by the end of the seminar, I had a start on Califia in electronic form. 

CALIFIA was written in Toolbook software.  Platform requirements: Windows 95, 98, 2000, or later [Mac/Windows emulator], Pentium-speed processor, and sound card.  It has Three Narrating Characters, Four Directions of the Compass, Star Charts, Map Case, Archives Files, 500 Megabytes, 800 Screens, 2400 Images, 30 Songs, and 500 Words. Graphics were prepared using Photoshop and Micrografix Picture Publisher. Music was edited with Cakewalk.

The Software Scramble

Once I was set with an authoring system that met my needs, the writing of Califia was rooted and running.  I had the rough outline of a story, the raw images, and a structure that would allow me to integrate the characters, history, myths, and popular culture into what I hoped would be truer than reality.  Oh, but I needed sound.  I set out to get some tunes.

CALIFIA features the work of excellent California musicians.  The flamenco music is written and performed by Michael Olsen.  The classical lute and mandolin music is performed by John Schneiderman.  Clips from The Grateful Dead were made available by the Grateful Dead organization with the valuable assistance of Alan Trist.

Califia was a joy to write.  It took some experimenting to build the structure in a way that the navigation would be seamless:  one keystroke could take the reader to any section of the story.  Having the freedom to indicate relationships between characters, places, symbols, and events (present and past) gave the story a vitality and dimensionality that I could not have conveyed in traditional print.  Each working day was an opportunity to invent something new.   

CALIFIA traces five generations of Californians from 1849 to the present; its layered histories contain legends of early sea and land explorers, Chumash Indian tribes, lost gold mines, and the Dream of Islands that makes all Californians seekers.

By far the most time-consuming and headache-producing part of constructing Califia was getting the software and the early computer hardware to do what I had in mind.  Fortunately, technology improved as the writing went on and seemed to deliver additional functionality.  When I started, I could only use 256 colors; by the time I finished, every shade in the rainbow was possible, millions of colors.   Someone less delighted with the medium might have anticipated trouble on the horizon: but not me, not then.

Golden Days

The year 2000 was a great year in the Califia journey. The tech problems were solved, the piece was pretty much finished, and Eastgate Systems had agreed to publish it.  Reviewers were kind, friends were congratulatory, and readers were enthusiastic. 

CALIFIA: consists of four journeys that the reader can choose among:

The Comets in the Yard - The Journey South is just a few blocks down Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood to Paradise Home, where Violet Summerland forgets among the palms.

Wind, Sand, and Stars - East takes the characters into the desert-land of Windmills and Goldmines - to meet the Man from Windpower. The Dipper Mines begin to appear in the sky and on the ground.

Night of the Bear - In the North is San Simeon, but along the way our characters get visits from the spirits, an unexpected plane ride, and another look at the Summerland-Beveridge history.

The Journey Out - The golden West brings a choice of endings and a suggestion of beginnings. Augusta, Kaye, and Calvin find the Blue Blanket, and, with it, the message from Willing Stars.

The Writing on the Wall and then, suddenly, the Wall Itself

"Perhaps the dream they sold us is not quite the dream we got."

The way in which these fragile works begin to fray, the edges to crumble, and the center fail is now somewhat well known. The disturbing signs are much the same, although they may not happen in the same order.  The company that makes the software to process photos, animation, or sound goes out of business.  The authoring software platform is sold to another company, which declines to support it.  The method of storage and transfer evolves (from floppy disk to zip disk to CD-ROM to thumb drive to cloud) – and corresponding changes in machine hardware won’t accommodate a work.  The machine rendering advances so far that the work is all but unrecognizable.  Successive browsers do not support the coding.  All of these happened to Califia. 

And then, one fine morning, it was not possible for me to play Califia on my own desktop.  The center had collapsed. 

CALIFIA: is narrated by three contemporary California types:

Augusta, the day-trader, lives in Whitley Heights in Hollywood, California.  She is looking for the stash of coins she believes her father buried on the hill behind the house. 

Calvin, the would-be movie director, lives next door.  He is between film projects and hopes to find out more about the mysterious death of Jack Summerland.

Kaye, the mystic visionary, floats in one day in her midnight-blue cape, decorated with moons and stars, and tells the legends and family myths that set our characters on a journey of discovery.

California Optimism

Today, Califia sits in a technological limbo.  But, as a child of the West, I am hopeful about the prospects.  New techniques of archiving and preservation are being developed.  “Virtual Machine” software is emerging that can replicate the operating system of an obsolete computer, provided that a working model still exists.  These developments may bring a future when a copy of Califia can be called up and experienced just as it was in the beginning.

And the promise of a literature that combines text, image, sound, and architecture still beckons.

CALIFIA: Even now, Augusta, Kaye, and Calvin are out in the Mojave Desert, looking for the lost paradise.

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