Twenty years after Stuart Moulthrop created Victory Garden Michael Gray revisits the now-classic hyperfiction to explore not just why the work earns the moniker "academic," but also what such a dismissive label overlooks in the reading experience. Moulthrop"s hyperlinked, web-like plot badgers his readers with indecision, envelops them in a fog of information, and ultimately requires them to one, give up; or two, avoid the brutal cost of war by choosing a well-hidden but cheerful Hollywood ending; or three, sacrifice the protagonist in a tragedy-confirming gesture of realism. Moulthrop"s labyrinthine plot entangles his readers in a postmodern test case: as readers, we see, as per parallax, the First Gulf War through the eyes of a U.S. college town, emails sent to and from U.S. troops, and night vision enhanced, network TV coverage. Causality is not a feature of Victory Garden"s simulacra. Gray locates Moulthrop"s greatest success in the moment when readers succumb to the pressures of...