The associative style of reading inherent in hypertexts like 253 is not engaging enough to provide a captivating read: the effort required to piece the whole together is more trouble than its worth. Almost half Geoff Ryman’s hyperfiction is dedicated to character exposition, the reader is never afforded character development and the whole text reads like a series of beginnings.
The characters are canned and packaged with a flavour of melancholy which ultimately affirms their reclusive individuality and a feeling of pity for the human race. 253 is an enormous character study where the subjects are only tenuously connected to their spatial counterparts (other passengers on the train) and reader/character empathy is never established. Amidst the brief interactions, insights, and personal expositions, the reader may become intrigued with characters but no relationship is built up enough to care about what happens to them.
As a result 253 feels like one big inciting incident tacked onto an insufficient ending. Ryman warns the reader “nothing much happens in [the] novel” (why.htm), and true to his word the hyperfiction is more of a database than a global narrative. The monotonous pattern of getting to know face after face on a train, eventually turns into a sensory overload. 253 provides a compilation of the information required for a “reader to rebuild, piece by piece, a [fictional] universe” (Close Reading New Media, 78), but why bother when an extremely similar place exists already?