It concerns the adventures of Lang, a young layabout inhabitant of Levinfield, a city that has fallen into a bit of a decline. Levinfield is millions of years old, and the slow pendulum swing of civilization, from high to low, advanced to backward, vigorous to decadent, is a well known fact. Lang and his friends live amongst the wreckage of greater ages, digging up ancient machines for their own use, in a lazy twilight lifestyle I envy greatly.
But Lang enjoys delving into the tons of mouldering books that fill the slowly collapsing libraries, and they fire him with a desire to go exploring the forest which lies to the West of the city. While his friends try and persuade him not to leave, fearful of what he might find, he prepares his rusting, ancient motorcycle, gathers supplies, and sets out on the old roads, undriven for thousands of years.
You will read how he hunts and kills the white deer, which has, for generations, been the source of a rumour that the forest is haunted by the ghost of a lost truck driver, who wanders through the trees eternally searching for his map.
And about his disastrous meeting with Catherine, descendant of the once-rich clans who still live in their ancestral villas beyond the forest. She lives alone, decoding the babble of the birds who nest in the forest. They preserve an ancient language, now lost, which still carries a lot of power, if you know how to use it.
When Catherine decides to make Lang pay for killing her pet, the white deer, she uses this power to create a bottomless pit. An empty universe, a void, that will close and contain whatever is thrown in for eternity.
There are three different versions of the book to choose from.
• DOWN/Mac+
(Cards fit into the screen of a Mac Plus. This version pages the fastest, but has the fewest words on each page. Still, it's good for fast readers.)
• DOWN/Powerbook
(Cards are the size of a Powerbook screen, as the name would suggest. Bitmap graphics. Pages a little slower than Mac+ version. Full book-like layout, with two blocks of text on each card. Of course, I don't recommend you read this on a Powerbook, not unless you're plugged into mains current, or else Hypercard's tendancy to access the hard drive every time you turn a page will soon flatten the battery.)
• Down/Color and Down/Color2.0
(This one's the flashiest and most book-like, but the page turning speed, at least on my Mac II, is slower than the others. For 14" colour monitor. The two stacks are the first and second halves of the book, as the colour graphics take up more room.)
Each stack is around 1.5 Meg when uncompressed. I've tried to make their interfaces intuitive, but I was on a steep learning curve when putting them together, so if you, as either a page layout guru or Hypercard wizz, recognize childish mistakes in their construction, just send me a note. You could write the note on the back of the envelope when you send in your shareware fee.
Yes, DOWN is shareware.
If you enjoy reading DOWN, please send whatever you think it's worth to:
Matthew Spong
127A Copeland Rd.
Beecroft 2119
Sydney Australia
If you can't afford the money, that's cool. Just make sure to propagate my book wherever you can. Send copies to your friends and enemies, and especially to anyone you know who works in the publishing industry! Make sure to include this Readme file with any copies you pass on.
The future? Stand-alone versions, done with Macromind Director, in MacPlus, Powerbook and colour monitor formats. A Web homepage so it's easy to find. (Jeez, I'll have to buy a modem... after I get my own phoneline!)
And watch out for my next book, WOODCODE, which should be out before the end of the year.
