DOWN is a novel, available in Hypercard stack and ASCII text format.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 moldering 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 rumor 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.
But Lang doesn't go down without a struggle...
To get your copy, choose one of the three versions to download:
 Down/Text | 700K. For IBM PC people without Supercard, or anyone else who doesn't have a Mac. Plain ASCII text for your word processor. |
 Down.html | 1.9 Meg. Color illustrated directory of ZIP compressed and UUencoded HTML documents. These can be viewed on any platform as long as you have a Web browser that handles GIF images (and I presume that's what you're using to read this with.) |
 Down/Color | Color Hypercard stack for Hypercard 2.2. on 14" colour monitor or larger. Full book-like layout and features. Comes in two halves, as the colour graphics take up more room. Each stack is around 1.3 Meg when uncompressed. |
"Is this shareware?" I hear you ask?
Well, maybe. If you enjoy reading DOWN, you could send whatever you think it's worth to:
Matthew Spong
127A Copeland Rd.
Beecroft 2119
Sydney AustraliaBut then again, if you're like me and have drives full of unpaid shareware, forget it! I don't need the money, I'd much rather just hear from you and get lots of mail from readers. You can reach me at elric@real.com.au, and sensetive stuff can be encrypted with this PGP key. 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, (although most mainstream houses have already rejected the manuscript.)
Here's a sample of my next book: Woodcode. At the rate I usually work it should be out mid 1996.
Graham Mann gave me a big boost into the Internet by allowing me to sneak into the UNSW labs late at night and use their big Quadra 840 AVs to search for HTML resources when I was writing this page. Graham is one of the most bizzarrely talented beings on the planet, and much to be respected: psychologist, artist, sound sculptor, Fortean investigator, writer, amateur astronomer, robotics engineer and Professor of Artificial Intelligence, to name a few sub-careers. This link goes to a page with sound files from our favourite radio program, Stalking the Nightmare, on 2MBS 102.5 FM, fortnightly on Friday morning 1AM.
Smoky Sky, Matthew Spong 1994The image above is comprised of five Polaroid shots I took during the bushfires of January 1994. They cover about 180 degrees, from SouthWest to NorthEast. Taken in Blackwattle Bay Park, down the end of the Glebe peninsula, you can see the Glebe Island suspension bridge under construction, the Glebe Island turntable bridge, the old grain silos, the abandoned CSR factory of Pyrmont, the city peeking out above the rooftops, the fish markets, and the huge clouds of smoke that hovered over the city for a week. Sydney has veins of native bushland running all through the suburban sprawl, and in this summer some kids were torching them all through the North Shore region, an affluent part of Sydney known for it's beaches and waterways, full of mansions and quiet, tree-lined streets. Charred black leaves rained from the sky over the Cyberspace warehouse and the smell was like barbeques. Click on it for a closer look.
Cobwebs blown off Tuesday 5/3/96. Stay tuned for more changes. Someday.
