User:PepperCutie/We Descend

Lead paragraph

We Descend is a hypertext novel whose many writings can be read in a number of different ways. The fictional work is an archive of writings gathered and transmitted over a span of many generations. We Descend was created before HTML was widespread. This work was originally made in StorySpace and has gone through iterations. The Electronic Literature Organization's NEXT Museum has released the Complete Edition, which compiles all volumes.

Origins and influences
Bill Bly explains that he started with the phrase "If this document is authentic" in 1984. He wondered how it would be authenticated, what would be authenticated, and who would do the authenticating?

Bly read a book that appeared in the New York Times Book Review on June 21st 1992 called "The End of Books" by Robert Coover. The book introduced Bly to the concept of hypertext, and had a list of practitioners at the end, including Mark Bernstein of Eastgate, who published many works of hypertext literature.

Bly demonstrated a hypertext story he was writing at the Eastgate Conference in Boston in September 1995; it didn't have a name yet, but it became We Descend.

Bly's academic background in drama and theatre with a focus in Greek & Latin informed his creation of We Descend

Publication history
Bill Bly started to work on We Descend in 1984, submitted to Eastgate a year after the conference in 1996, started volume 2 in Storyspace in 1999, switched to Mark Bernstein's Tinderbox in 2005 and then ported to HTML and CSS in 2014. Volume 2 of We Descend was published in The New River in the Fall 2017 issue but didn't appear until 2018.

A 'Preliminary View' of Volume 3 of We Descend appeared in The New River in the Fall 2019 issue but didn't appear until 2020. This work was traversed as a pathfinders project for the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver that later was remade into the complete edition.

We Descend was one of the twelve subjects of Ann Mangen's PhD thesis: New narrative pleasures? A cognitive-phenomenological study of the experience of reading digital narrative fictions in 2006.

Story structure and navigation
We Descend is a collection of documents gathered and transmitted over a span of many generations.

Within We Descend, there are multiple storylines that converge and collide with one another with different character point of views the reader can choose how to navigate through.

Each piece of literature is displayed through different time periods; the archives originated from the Last One who dates back to the ancient civilization and its collapse, the archives were passed through to Egderus Scriptor, the one true curator. Then there was a dark period that spanned many generations. An Unknown Scholar came into possession of the archives and while trying to find a home for them, he was banished from the community. The archives passed through a few different authors and catastrophes with the Scholiast being the last author to annotate certain passages, becoming an archive of its own, before Bill Bly became the last curator to discover and share the archives to the fullest reach.

We Descend was exhibited at the Electronic Literature Organization's first conference and media art show, State of the Arts, in 2002.

eliterature.org

ELO State of the Arts Symposium: E-Literature Gallery

The collection of creative works featured at the Electronic Literature Organization's State of the Arts Symposium, at UCLA, April 4-6, 2002. This is an index of works by title.

11:30

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Volume 1, 1997, on floppy disk (and CD, after 2000), with Storyspace 1.0, sold and distributed by Eastgate Systems, Inc., $24.95 (for Mac OS 9 and earlier)

Volume 1, 1998, on floppy disk, with Storyspace 1.0, sold and distributed by Eastgate Systems, Inc., $24.95 (for Windows 95 up to Windows XP)

Volume 1, 1998, "WeDescend_30node," with Storyspace 1.0 (produced for readings and performances)

Volume 1, 1998, "Excerpt," HTML version, in the Gallery at Word Circuits (based on "WeDescend_30node")

Volume 1, 2006, on CD, with Storyspace 2.0, sold and distributed by Eastgate Systems, Inc., $24.95 (for Mac OS X 10.2 and later)Volume 2 "Demo," November 2011, with Tinderbox

Volume 2 "Complete," August 2014, at wedescend.com

(published on pathfinders, how do we want to do this? How to add information?)

Critiques
Torsa reviewed this work.

Awards
Bill Bly was awarded the Mary Shelley Award for his work on We Descend Volume Two at the 2020 Media Ecology Association.