PROPERTIES OF LIGHT     This work by Adoro author Linton Robinson is exactly the sort of thing we started our hyperlit section for: the perfect application of hyperlinks and php database technology to telling/showing a story. The chapters are completely independent--each one the description of a different picture taken by the photographer/narrator. The chapters are linked more by "rhyming" of internal words and images as by any sort of linear time, though we can see a biography unfolding as we move through the various "color ranges" of the chapters.     A major thematic obsession with the unity or polarity of space and time resonates, as hinted at by the artwork which opposes, but rhymes the aperture size of a lens with the time of exposure. Time doesn't flow in order here, it is a measure of exposure of each image, letting us weave the lingering impression into a view of what lies outside the aperature.

SKY SEEDS     This sequential, chaptered serial novel by cult-idol science fiction writer Grayson Moran is contemporary SF whose characters are mostly teenagers, and most Mexicans. Not that either category matters much when the long-absent father returns to Earth to start shaping things up. Jerked from barrio alleys to the Yale campus, Las Vegas palaces, and the institial hyper-reality called "The Sky", these kids have to grow up fast because they're playing grown-up games. Like planetary domination, universal civil war, and the hidden source of race, humanity and life on earth. Using their newfound hyper access to continue their smuggling careers, the guys carve quite a career across the galaxies: but end up finding out that the real struggle is at home. And in their own blood and minds.

FLESH WOUNDS     The logo shown here is highly appropriate to this collection: a tangle of barbed wire. These stories, mostly from the Seattle area from what we've seen so far, are open wounds waiting to inflict themselves. Very urban, very disaffected, very unflinching in reporting and callous in inference, they are a document about the lacerations of human-on-human crimes of the law, body, mind, and heart. But saved from being a pornography of creepiness and violence by a certain indefinable attitude of redemption that we experience as a subtle subtext. Or perhaps we project redeeming value out of self-protection.

TIJUANA BIBLE     The thumbnail here might be misleading. Or possibly not. There seems to be plenty of sex in these brooding "Tijuana nocturnes", but they are also violent, loving, callous, and dangerous by turns. It's a world of whores and drug dealers, gunrunners, missionaries, underage punks, striving losers, prisons, bars, the desert.     We're uncertain whether to call this a "hypernovel" or just an "eBook" because it seems like disjointed articles at times, but at others seems to be drawn together in a pattern of character development: the character being the narrator himself, indentified here as "El Gacho".