This chapter focuses on images and appropriations of computer networks in contemporary literature. Continuing the narrative of earlier chapters on compasses, steam engines, wires, and waves, this chapter explores the manner in which writers used images of networked machines to reimagine community, individuality, and the body. Ciccoricco reads fiction by William Gibson and Porpentine Charity Heartscape as serving to train its readers in the ambivalent business of navigating their own networked realities. “Just as metaphor itself relies on distance between source and target,” Ciccoricco argues, “figurations of networks are vital to the project of maintaining a critical distance from the social and political networks that we propagate and that in turn interpenetrate our experience.”

Experimentation is central to the Irish literary tradition, so it is striking to see that many new forms of digital literature remain uncultivated on this island. Where Irish literature has engaged with the digital, it is usually in the form of film-poetry, fragments of text set to video and sound. Other national canons have long progressed to more technically sophisticated genres – literary games, walking simulators, interactive fiction set in immersive virtual worlds – but Irish digital literature remains dominated by the film-poem, and in many respects, seems stagnated. But the situation in Ireland is not entirely bleak: in the figure of Doireann Ní Ghríofa, now a household name after the success of A Ghost in the Throat (2020), Ireland has a high-profile author who has shown a willingness to embrace the digital, something which may encourage further support for multimodal writing among arts practitioners and policymakers. Through its emphasis on Ní Ghríofa’s e-lit works, this chapter explores the past, present, and future of digital literature in Ireland, its major impediments, and possible futures.

The material properties of platform and medium figure prominently in Scott Rettberg’s examination of digital fiction as literary engagements with computer code, video gaming, hypertext, audio and visual plug-ins, and virtual reality. Narratives with multiple or interactive pathways, role-playing and perspectival shifts, and mass authorship reconceptualize postmodern and contemporary literary themes and techniques within digital textualities.