Hello World is the story of a life online. Part travelogue, part memoir, Sue Thomas draws on her online travels as well as her physical journeys in the USA, Australia, Spain and England. While the book is non-fiction, it is a direct descendent of Correspondence, Thomas’ extraordinary novel that also deals with the synergies between digital and physical worlds. Like its fictional counterpart, Hello World will trigger feelings in readers of both recognition and irritation and will stimulate debate on the nature of the physical in a wired world for years to come.
Hello World is now available as a free download from Raw Nerve Books. It was first published in 2004, along with this web complement containing extra materials, and you can still buy the print version.
Sue Thomas was born in England in 1951. Both her parents were Dutch but made their home in the UK and her interest in cultural outsiders - physical and virtual, android and androgynous - probably stems from those somewhat confused beginnings. Her books include the novel Correspondence, a mix of flesh and machine short-listed for several prizes including the Arthur C Clarke Award (London: The Women's Press, 1992; New York: Overlook, 1993); Water, a novel of fluids, imaginations and passions (New York: Overlook, 1994; UK: Five Leaves, 1995) and an edited anthology Wild Women: Contemporary Short Stories By Women Celebrating Women (New York: Overlook, 1994; London: Vintage, 1994).
In 1995 Sue Thomas founded the trAce Online Writing Centre at The Nottingham Trent University and was Artistic Director for ten years. She is now Professor of New Media in the School of Media and Cultural Production, Faculty of Humanities, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.
Her web-based work includes a reconfiguration of Correspondence at Riding the Meridian; and Lines at Lux: notes for an electronic writing. With Teri Hoskin, she co-edited the Noon Quilt website and book, and her work appears in In Place of the Page an ongoing cross-platform discourse on space created by Brigid Mc Leer. An excerpt from Correspondence appears in Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture (MIT Press, 2002). 'Spivak', an excerpt from Hello World, was published online at The Barcelona Review in 2003. A short piece 'Travelling with Joni' appears in Raw Nerve's 2003 collection The Feminist Seventies.
email: sue.thomas@dmu.ac.uk
web: Sue Thomas' web page
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