The Archives Pertaining to Bill Bly, Curator and Translator
This chapter provides a reexamination of Bill Bly hypertext We Descend. Previously criticized for its quality as a work of hypertext fiction, the work instead is recast as a hypertext archive, a compilation of texts relating to four distinct time periods held together through a focus on the character Egderus. Hypertext functions, the chapter argues, as a mechanism for moving through multiple disparate storylines chronicled in “generations of historical documents” and collected over a long period of time. At the heart of We Descend lies the nature of truth and what constitutes authenticity, particularly when evidence itself is questionable and controlled by a political agenda.