Figurski at Findhorn on Acid

Figurski at Findhorn on Acid is a hypertext novel by Richard Holeton published on CD-ROM by Eastgate Systems in 2001 and republished on the open web by the Electronic Literature Lab, Washington State University, in 2021.

[4] Holeton extended the concept of "Someone, at Someplace, with Something" with two more characters, two more locations, and two more artifacts, to create an electronic text using Storyspace software, which became a novel-length MFA thesis at San Francisco State University.

[5][6] Holeton drew inspiration for the novel from writers such as Laurence Sterne and Vladimir Nabokov, whom he admires for their humor and self-reflexivity and considers precursors of hypertext fiction for their digressive and non-linear work.

The three protagonists are title character Frank Figurski, a Vietnamese-American, "No-Hands Cup Flipper” named Nguyen Van Tho, and a gender-bending French-Moroccan journalist, Fatima Michelle Vieuchanger.

[13] The novel employs or parodies multiple genres, including dramatic dialogue, scientific writing, journalism, dialectically transcribed language (e.g. Scottish youth slang), heroic couplets, haikus, and email.

[5] Figurski at Findhorn on Acid has been studied and discussed by a number of literary scholars and hypertext critics, including Dene Grigar,[6] Michael Tratner,[14] Mariusz Pisarski,[10] Astrid Ensslin,[3] Alice Bell,[11] and Chelsea Miya.

[9][11][6] In selecting Figurski at Findhorn on Acid for the "hypertext canon," Ensslin writes,"Holeton ranks among the few writers who have taken the original concept of hyperfiction in the sense of graphemic centrality into the new millennium.

"[3] Alice Bell analyzes the text in a framework of Marie-Laure Ryan's Possible Worlds Theory, arguing that much of the novel's absurdity results from incongruities among its layers of fictionalized and "real-world" events and locations, juxtaposing mundane episodes with bizarre situations.

[17] Critics have also discussed the novel as postmodern literature for its use of metacommentary, its blurring of boundaries between fiction and reality,[11][5] and its investigation of what Jean Baudrillard called the "omnipotence of manipulation.