Foreword to the 1st Edition (1997)
Someday, when the gulf allegedly fixed between "linear" writing and hypertext has either been bridged or is at last shown never to have existed at all, essays like this one will be regarded as awkward and unnecessary, however evocative they may be of a naive but exhilarating era. That day is not yet. Everyone who proffers a hypertext to the world must still provide an explication of the apparatus. This foreword is no exception.
_We Descend_ is in the form of an archive -- that is, a hodgepodge of documents whose only commonality, in some cases, is that they have ended up in the same place. Much of the material is fragmentary; some is ambiguous; and throughout, one of the hidden story lines concerns the sequence of curators, including (but not necessarily ending with) the putative author.
Examine the archive in whatever way you wish: there is no single or "right" way to navigate through these writings. A default path (linear, but not chronological) has been provided — a medium-length tour that gives some sense of the range of materials incorporated in this volume.
The default path has also been designed as a kind of main artery, to which all tributary narratives eventually return. Dead ends and inescapable loops have been eliminated to the greatest extent possible.
There is no such thing as a transparent interface, even for that venerable institution, the pagéd book -- just ask any undergraduate cracking a scholarly tome for the first time (or, for that matter, the world-renowned academic trying to find SIMMs in a catalog).
Every effort has been made to arrange these writings as simply and as sensibly as possible — not always an easy task with such heterogeneous materials.
But of necessity, some of the labor of negotiating any hypertext must fall to you, dear reader. There are a number of navigating strategies spelled out in the Directions; you are encouraged to experiment to find which are most congenial, but you will probably need to use them all to find your way to every writing in the archive.
A suggestion on what to do first: after visiting and pondering the Directions, return to the Title Page and just START — in other words, take the default path or "tour". It will introduce you to the major characters and lead you through the three principal bands of time in which the story unfolds.
But it will also leave sizeable tracts of temporal territory for you to discover on tours of your own devising. The Inventory is designed as the platform from which such tours may depart.
[Text in square brackets is provisional, editorial marks and remarks of the curator(s) of the Archives. Outside of the passages in dialogue form, where it signals a thoughtful pause, an ellipsis ( ... ) indicates a lacuna in the archival document(s). _Underlining_ of words and phrases is usually done for emphasis, or to indicate a title, as in handscript; it does not designate linked text.]
[The various editorial conventions may not be consistently applied throughout. That happens.]
And a last (fore)word: a character will gradually emerge from the writings who seems to be (or seems to believe he is) in charge -- he could be called Editor, Compiler, Selector, Redactor -- any of these names will serve to describe (or denominate, as with the Scholar) his function in this story (or group of stories). Although he left no testament, he, too, has a story, some of which can be gleaned from his many comments and notes scattered throughout the Archives.