I had forgotten about Josh Brown’s article. I’ll have to go back and take another look. Thanks.

(possibly…)

in England in the 1870s there is a discussion of ‘complexity’. the people who subscribe to a unilinear notion of history tend to like the idea of complexity as a way of denying that freedom of the will has any susbstantial role to play in the science of society or history – human behaviour is just a very complex form of simple molecular behaviour.

my sense is that discussion of interactive games with multiple paths boil down to a similar relationship. i.e. the game is just a more complex version of the usual unilinear version of history.

an article I just read on the chnm site seems relevant here – Joshua Brown’s ‘History and the Web’:

“That was our intention. We quickly learned, however, that we had fallen into a pattern that is seemingly intrinsic to the spatial interactive game approach. Instead of expanding the historical imagination of users and promoting their active inquiry, we had actually limited the choices open to them, in particular curtailing their ability to make informational linkages and to draw their own conclusions. In short, the narrative outcomes were preordained…”

The Bergson/Benjamin/Vertov assertion of freedom in the face of such models is not – i am almost certain – captured in any existing game or web site; and i am not sure how it ever could be… But this – for me – is a key point of departure for thinking about such issues…

s

Also, I should check to see if Dan Cohen (Dir. of Research Projects at CHNM), who works on Victorian religion and mathematics has done anything with Erewhon.

I’ll close with mentioning two points that have long held my attention, and which are – possibly – relevant.

The first is Samuel Butler’s late Victorian (dis)/utopia ‘Erewhon’ (1872) – a story which includes Butler’s Darwinian speculation that the next stage of evolution will be machine intelligence. But I mention ‘Erewhon’ here because the Erewhonians envisage time as a giant scroll, constantly in the process of being unwound, and in which the past and the future are already written. This is the earliest statement of a unilinear history that I have come upon.

The second point is just that Bergson (with his idea of duration), Walter Benjamin (in his theses on the phil. of history) and Dziga Vertov (with his invisible director in ‘Man with a Movie Camera’) all seem to be attempting to place human freedom back into the positivist unilinear model of history – and i wonder if, somehow, their work is not of great relevance for the issues of computer games and history.

ok, back to the archives!

s

To take your last point first: well said … that’s exactly what started me thinking about this in the first place a couple years ago.

On “history for its own sake,” I have George Sarton especially in mind, who like Wells was working very much in the context of post-WWI unease, and indeed hoped to establish the history of science as the cornerstone of a New Humanism that would once and for all reconcile humankind’s moral and technical faculties. (For example, the very first post-WWI issue of Isis opened with an essay entitled “War and Civilization” in which history of science was presented as a very real and practical antidote to industrial warfare.) In that sense, I think we can say Sarton’s ends were at once disciplinary and cultural. And not unrelated (though I’m still trying to work out how) to Wells’.

Finally, I really think you’re on to something in suggesting using reactions to Wells as markers to the new divide between professional and non-professional history of science. I would like, for instance, to compare Wells’ reception among science museum professionals to that of academic historians like Sarton, Singer, and Thorndike, who were all actively trying to distance themselves from museum-based pratitioners in this period.

Happy to provide you a distraction … I needed it too.

(though i should not say it, this conversation is a welcome break from the 1001 essays on new media that i am trying to get my head round).

to take your last point first. I see that my ‘history for its own sake’ touched a nerve. I am with you that professional disinterestedness is a relatively recent ideal, but I think it does matter that such an ideal – or some related ones – had just come into operation by the 1920s, so that the different reactions to Wells’ history, inside and outside the academies, are in a way markers of a fairly new divide between professional and ‘popular’ history writing.

(I’d also be interested in what you mean about 1920s history of science having a ’specific end in mind’. Which historians of science do you have in mind here? And what ends do you have in mind – cultural, or disciplinary?)

On the wider post – i did not mean to suggest that you were making any point about Wells as serving as a model for later writers, or indeed to suggest any significant point about your post.

I picked up on the discussion of Wells because for the last year I have been vaguely wondering why he changed from distopisan fiction to utopian prophecy. On one level I think this might be related to his encounter with the Fabians and subsequent rejection of the Marxist idea of class struggle which had informed much of his sci-fi. But I sense there is something else going on that I have not put my finger upon…

In general – and attempting to return to the main topic of the initial post – Wells does seem to occupy an important place in terms of the construction and dissemination of a kind of unilinear vision of history which holds that the study of the past and the study of the future are related activities, that the future simply follows the past according to predetermined patterns, and which seems to be the basic model of history which – interactive narrative adventure aside – informs the kind of movie and game histories that you mention.

Not off track at all. Thanks for the comment. Wells definitely had a different career trajectory than Stephenson and other contemporary authors, and I didn’t mean to suggest that current authors are following some pattern established by Wells. (I’m certainly not a Wells expert, but I share your recollection of his biography.) I simply meant to point out that there seems to be a persistent interest in the historical among sci-fi writers and that Wells is where I first happened to notice it.

Also, I’m not really sure it matters whether or not Wells was writing history “for its own sake.” As I see it, disinterestedness is a relatively recent disciplinary value among historians, and even now it is often more keenly professed than it is practiced. Certainly in the 1920s, history (especially history of science) was usually written with some specific end in mind.

Talk to you soon,
Tom

As I recall, Wells spent the period 1890-1900 turning out sci-fi short and long stories. Then, around the turn of the century (or just before) he switched to a new utopian genre, which he himself considered a form of sociological literature. At the same time, his writing moved from sci-fi to serious novel set in Edwardian England. Then, and only in 1920, did he publish his famous history of the world.

Thus rather than Wells moving fluidly between these genres, it would seem that (putting the contemporary novels aside) there is a definite trajectory that he works through over the course of his life: distopian sci-fi -> utopia -> history. All these are clearly related, and the history i think was written, not for history’s sake but in order to better ground his futuristic predictions (and in the context of a post-WWI unease).

What is not at all clear to me, however, is the transition from distopian sci-fi to utopian future. For it would seem that Wells dramatically changed his mind about the likely course of the future around 1900. I cannot work out what was at the root of this.

Apologies for bypassing games.
talk to you soon,
Simon