Introduction

We Descend is the first hypertext of Bill Bly published in 1997. This novel is a collection of archives that the author joined and set them out as a hypertext. This means that it can only be read on a computer, it is electronic literature. He decided to work on it as he found this new way of writing very interesting and revolutionary. It offered him the chance to make his stories more intriguing and entertaining. There is not only one possible way to read the text. The reader decides how he wants to follow the story. He can therefore feel like a detective, putting together the pieces of the narration and collecting hints to understand the case. Or like a historian analyzing different sources and points of view to find the truth. Still, as this way of reading might be a little confusing for people who are not used to it, Bly offers us a page with directions to read his novel. There two different methods are proposed to follow the story: one suggests pressing the “Start” button and then to follow the bottom links and the other one suggests pressing “Inventory” first.

The “Start”-button leads us to the Ancients’ writing Storms and Haze (a dark apocalyptic tale). Then follow the Scholar’s Diaries (pages 1 to 3), Egderus’ Testaments (1 to 4), and the Historian’s Notebook (1-3). After that Egderus’ testament continues (pages 5 to 7) and then the Scholar talks again in his diary (pages 4 and 5). In the end we read the Remnant’s Says (pages 1-3) and the Afterword that Bly added and we see a picture called Scholar Sky.

By clicking on the “Inventory” link we will find a list of different documents. It is not really clear who wrote them, but they are organized according to their supposed authors: the Scholar, Egderus, the Historian, the Remnant and the Ancients. By clicking on the different authors we find a short description of their writings. In addition to that we can bring the different documents into a chronological order by following the Up and Down buttons. This way of reading helps us to get a better knowledge of each text and character, and to get a better overview over the whole content. In addition, it becomes clear here that every document is assigned to a specific color (the Scholar’s Diary appears on green pages, Egderus’ Testament comes in lilac, the Historian’s Notebook is pink, the Remnant light yellow and the Ancients’ tale is brown) which also helps us to divide the different sources and to structure the hints we get.

Still it remains difficult to get a grasp of the whole content and many questions remain open. This might be due to the fact that the provided readings are only an excerpt and that we cannot read the whole work unless we pay for it (it is available for 25 $ at the Eastgate company ). Still with my analysis of time I am trying to make this work easier to understand for the reader and to show some aspects one does not get on the first glimpse.