‘Breakdancing Jesus’ mural by artist Cosmo Sarson, Hamilton House, Bristol, UK.

The great Festival is in two days. The weary pilgrim, teasing her larchwood beads through her fingers and fearing that she will never see the Temple hung lousy with banners, or smell the grilling of sacred cat-meat, wonders whether to take the lonely and ill-kept track through the deep-cut hills, or instead continue along the ceremonial avenue that runs, sanctioned and leisurely, across the floodplain.

The waiter, not remembering precisely what the racist senator had ordered, stands with the bottle of bleach in his hand, hovering above both the abalone pâté and the asparagus soup.

The motorist sees the crippled, squeaking gull semaphoring from the roadside in her brake lights; in her boot is a heavy carjack that she has never used, and perhaps still won’t.

As he mutely waits for the kettle to boil, his knuckles held hard as calcium against his sides,  James knows that forgiving her would be the easier choice.

There persists a tendency amongst many people, particularly those who are not authors themselves (though authors are not immune) to see stories as impregnable and rather forbidding objects. They can feel like something revealed, rather than something constructed: a conclusive piece of excavation that an author has performed, discovering a pure, foregone seam of one thing after another. However, it is in moments such as those above – the fleeting, pregnant pauses of a character’s indecision before things plunge on in the customary steeplechase – that a fundamental fact about fiction comes clear. Storytelling is not the mining of a strip of monolithic truth. In those spaces where a choice has to be made we can see that, instead, a story hides an intricate machinery behind it: a fictive, thrumming world of pressures, influences, places, peoples, coincidences, syzygies, causes and effects that have their own logic, and their own obscured authoring.

This machinery, the construction of which is probably the vast majority of any author’s work, is like a Rubin’s Vase only perceptible in the negative: as readers, we have to look for it in those places where it is most obvious. When the dusty pilgrim decides to turn left, the corresponding possibilities of turning right spark into life; and even if, as readers, we only get to study one particular readout of the machine – one particular passage of events and decisions – it doesn’t mean that the machinery stops its rustling operations. The world it represents, no matter how small, goes on turning, and could certainly turn differently next time. That’s the thing about machines, and worlds: you don’t always know what is going to happen when you turn them on.

At different times in history, but particularly in recent decades, this sort of truth – that the work of an author is less a feat of writing and more a feat of engineering, or even programming, of a fictive space – has made some literary scholars very queasy. A specific, and historically blind, the definition of technology still holds sway over the popular imagination, despite the fact that a book has more moving parts than most smartwatches, and the Latin alphabet, like any writing system, is as digital as the Python programming language, and much, much harder to compile. If the Guardian videogames editor Keith Stuart is a technology journalist, then the Telegraph’s literary critic Tom Payne has to join him at that particular, overcrowded desk: their beat is essentially the same. Both are interested in the diagnostics of fictional worlds, and the calibration of their workings. Even words like ‘diagnostic’ and ‘calibrate’ set a gunmetal panic in most writer’s guts; barren, rod-backed words that have no place in the eely shamanism of their work.

The still-uncomfortable confluence of these ideas can be plumbed back to 1945, when the American engineer Vannevar Bush wrote a piece for the Atlantic Monthly, entitled As We May Think; which served as a peephole into a world, and its attendant machineries, where a union between modern science and art might become possible, and even desirable. In particular, he invited his readers to consider a machine that, as yet, he could not build. He called his machine the Memex and described how he thought it might operate: storing and linking all human information and allowing its operators to move between works, individual texts, without any authorial prescription. This core concept – what came to be called the hypertext in the 1960s – was not a revolutionary one. The marginalia of medieval psalmbooks leading you to other works in the monastic library, are as effective as any link on a webpage. However, it was the medium that became, wholly, the computer – consistently shrinking, cheapening, civilising and naturalising throughout the twentieth century into something approaching the printed word in terms of cultural invisibility – which superseded Bush’s original fancy and provided us with a bedrock on which not only to display our existing written culture, but upon which to create new artforms which exploited the machinery of the computer to mirror the machinery of the worlds that lie beneath the surfaces of every story.

In 1976 Will Crowther, an engineer for a US military contractor, built such a functional fictional world, which he called Colossal Cave Adventure, while time-sharing on his employer’s mainframe computer. Based on his weekend spelunking in the Mammoth Cave National Park of nearby Kentucky, it is considered the first example of interactive fiction and has come, unavoidably, to triangulate the very contours of the form. While undoubtedly a written text, Adventure was also, quite literally, a functioning contraption: a set of instructions for the computer to calculate its bounded world as happily as it calculated the physics of nuclear brinkmanship. Performing from the 700-line script which Crowther had written, the mainframe presented the reader with a text whose machinery was, at least partly, accessible. Readers could type instructions and the computer would, in return, narrate the opening of locked doors, the avoidance (or not) of bottomless pits, and the acquiring of unruly MacGuffins. Their choices of what to type, thanks to the procedural attention of the computer itself, reverberated through the corridors of Crowther’s imaginary grotto, reforming it as they went.  In exploring Crowther’s world, and in fiddling with its mechanisms, those pregnant pauses became longer and wider: vulnerable to cave-ins, collapses, redirections and opened shafts.

Interactive fiction has since accreted a rich literary culture of its own, along with all the accompanying furniture. It has its own polemics, schisms, discourses and honours. It has its own well-trod norms and weird, deep-cut deviations. At its best, it is a culture, and most importantly a technology, which has allowed me, as a reader, to experience many striking, complex and thoughtful worlds, and the stories implicit within them. In Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, I rifled through the cabinets of one family’s discordant, hoarded memories of the first Gulf War. In Emily Short’s Galatea, I attended a gallery opening for Pygmalion’s famous living statue, questioning the work on its own artistic merit as I became drunker and more unpleasantly flirtatious: boorishly and unwittingly activating the trauma that Short had encoded into Galatea’s every gesture and word. In howling dogs, I cycled between the same three, featureless cells for simulated day after day like dank air; each night contenting myself with falling asleep in the visored chair of the Activity Room and tinkering with the settings of my dreams.

howling dogs, created by the writer and digital artist Porpentine, is both distant and near to Crowther’s efforts over forty years ago. Though it shares some of its heritage, it has little of the infamous inaccessibility of even later interactive fiction works. For Porpentine to build it did not require a proprietary level of programming knowledge prohibitive to writers who, like myself, had never received any formal schooling in the subject beyond Excel macros and unlocking the secret pinball game in Microsoft Word. It was not the project of a senior software engineer,  working close to the tinplate of some of the most complex machinery on the planet. Instead, it was the product of a single artist working, like all artists, with a technology. In Porpentine’s case, this technology was called Twine: a tool which has done a huge amount to narrow the gap between the work of worldbuilders, in whichever department they might sit. Based entirely online,

Twine lubricates the interactions between the machine and the author almost to invisibility. The creation of a passage-bound world like Crowther’s, full of glimpsed opportunities, is as simple as writing Passages of text and linking them together, like web pages, by [[putting double brackets around a word or a phrase]]. Clicking on these links represent a conscious choice: do I take the [[left fork]], or the [[right]]? Twine even generates a map of the author’s growing mental topology, represented as a blueprint cartography of boxes of text and the routes between them. It is a map equally suited to physical space, such as that of Adventure, or more allegorical landscapes, as in Zoe Quinn’s seminal Depression Quest. Publishing one’s work is as simple as uploading a single file, a few kilobytes in size, to Dropbox or any of the several free Twine hosting services.

Every interactive fiction writer has their own gateway into the form, usually outside of any institution. Twine happened to be my own and constituted its own curriculum: a curriculum I both wish that I had encountered at school and am glad that I did not. It remapped my own conception of storytelling, not by any great thunderclap, but instead with a furtive, creeping realisation. As I pottered about with the tool, I uncovered more and more advanced techniques, orbiting the most fundamental concepts of computer science. Soon enough, I was not just building networks of static paragraphs for my readers to explore, but using the tenets of formal logic, the bread-and-butter grammar of the digital computer, to observe whether my reader chose to take the hill road or the busy highway; whether they had poisoned the soup or the pâté; whether

they unclenched James’ knuckles or tried to compress them tighter; whether they had had the fleeting, momentary courage, or cruelty, to put the gull out of its misery. After many years of writing, and both supervised and self-led schooling, I had discovered an actual vocation: the jalopying of engines of consequence, a grease monkey in my own imagination. Though my mum would never have wanted me to be a gearhead, I couldn’t have been prouder of myself.

I have seen similar, ratcheting ascents of realisation in many others attending the Twine workshops I teach; in the faces of both 7-year-old schoolchildren and 70-year-old academics. From initial scepticism, they pass to clumsy experimentation and then a burst of pure, combinatorial joy as they start to extend the horizons of what these techniques might accomplish.

For those who have not played at building worlds since they were very small, this process can be more tentative, and freighted with all sorts of prejudices about the fripperies of play, about the disappearances of the author, and about the fragilities of one’s own creation. Happily, this most often gives way to a positive impatience: a busy urge to begin eroding out passages, and sounding depths.

Twine won’t single-handedly combat the queasiness and snobberies that artificially segregate the work of computer programmers and writers. I still regularly hear the protestations. What happens to the author when a reader has the agency to change the path of their narrative? If all choices are equally valid, are any of them truly significant? How can a machine that performs brittle, unyielding logic have a place in the creation of art? What if – like Victorian idealists in the age of steam – comparing fictive worlds to computer simulations is just a case of historical relativism? How can I talk about a Tolkienesque gewgaw, written by a bored computer programmer to distract his daughters when they visited him every other weekend, in the same breath as works of ‘true’ literature? Writing a single, static perspective on this issue here does luckily afford me the luxury of not answering these questions. I can pretend, as we all do, that the narrative is already written, and the conclusion is foregone. If I stood by my own evangelism I should have written this essay as a Twine story, made its workings vulnerable, and let you make up your own minds. In lieu of this, I can only counsel some direction; some passages to follow. Go and read the work of Keith Oatley, and Marie-Laure Ryan. Read Merritt Kopas and Anna Anthropy and Emily Short. Come to the Interactive Fiction Summer School that I am curating at the British Library this July. More than anything, go to http://twinery.org and furtively, creepingly, tinkeringly, convince yourself.

I would like to use this space that I have been given to tell you something about the life of a forgotten man. His existence was briefly dramatic, and it always struck me as unfair that he should now go unremembered even amongst those historians who specialise in such men. Don’t worry, I won’t spend too many lines on him. I know that you are reading this to learn about my fictions, and it can get very boring when all that you are flung instead are dates.

Isaak Charles Walter Scinbank was born in Derby in the early months of 1808, in the house of his mother. His father, Walter, is credited for establishing one of the first paediatric practices in Britain. Walter was also an ardent angler, and Isaak was named for the near-legendary writer and fisherman Isaak Walton, whose book The Compleat Angler was written on the shores of the Derbyshire rivers Dove and Derwent. Young Isaak spent many salad days as a boy exploring the valleys, courses, springs and rills of the Derbyshire Dales with his father, and became an accomplished rodman himself.

 Much of Isaak’s adult life went unrecorded, and the present day is left only a few unsubstantiated rumours of him entering the naval profession and sailing to the China Sea and the Okhotsk. The only certainties are that he married Elagail Hopwood, the daughter of a Buxton bathhouse impresario and a forthright and defiant victim of scoliosis, and built a house with her on the limestone cliffs overlooking the Dales hamlet of Mill Dale, where Isaak Walton had fished atop the bridge.

 Though he did not seem cut from the soggy, gumptious cloth of a sailor, Isaak was commissioned in the summer of 1852  by Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the famous polar explorer Sir John Franklin, to travel to the Canadian Arctic in search of her husband who had gone missing amongst the ice and seal-blown islands some seven years previously. Scinbank accepted and left in November of that year with one ship, the Otranto, and a Benettonesque crew of Derbymen, Americans, Orcadians and even a Dutch wildman. The travails that they faced in the polar regions almost cost them their lives, but after nearly one year at sea Scinbank found John Franklin, with the remnants of his crew, on the western shores of what is now Axel Heiberg Island. Bringing him home to his expectant wife and an ecstatic public, Scinbank quietly slipped away from the hubbub and returned to Mill Dale and his Elagail, where he peacefully fished the rest of his life away on the proceeds of his reward. He died in 1878 at home, of a septic ulcer.

In September of 2014, 136 years after his death, I made up Isaak Scinbank entirely, beginning with the portrait at the beginning of this article, and extrapolating out from that.

Isaak is, and was, entirely fictional, but prosing him into existence was not as mean a feat as I imagined; mostly because I have spent the last six months narratively burglarising my way into an institution where the written word, even my own, is quite literally treated as a treasure; the British Library.

 Isaak is the main creation of my time as the Library’s interactive-fiction-writer-in-residence, a hyphenated, gamey mouthful of a title which I am in the process of discarding. During my time here, attached to the very successful Lines In The Ice exhibition, he has come about through a series of accidents, circumstances and serendipities which have all served to make him the man he never was.

 In retrospect, this is not so different from how most of us are made, fictional or not.

It is this happenstance which has always so intrigued me about the Library, and more generally about the processes of history. As I began my residency, with little notion of what it was that I would actually be producing for the money I had been kindly given, I firstly did what had been expected of me; I lowered myself into the archives, began to read, and felt really awful about myself. Lines In The Ice, still open at the Library until the middle of April, concerns the Western world’s almost-drunken misunderstandings with the Arctic region throughout history. I spent several months gingerly tree-hugging pages that had not been trees for six hundred years, or two hundred, or two, reading about exciting, psychotic men such as Martin Frobisher, a Tudor explorer so desperate for recognition that when he failed to find gold in the far North he resorted to tricking an Inuit hunter onboard his ship, subsequently treating the man so badly that the native preferred to bite off his own tongue and die of sepsis rather than spend another moment in Frobisher’s company. Amongst the volumes and volumes of unironic body hair and phenomenal tales of derring-do which served often to make me feel like a plump, smooth pattycake of a man, unremarkable and to-be-unremembered, one story stood out as particularly heroic and mythic. Sir John Franklin, his life standing as the factual scaffold of Scinbank’s fable, disappeared into the Arctic in 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage, another entirely-fictional construct in which it is convenient to believe.

 Searching for an ice-free line across the roof of Canada and down into Russia and China, Franklin’s crew were stranded and came to a chocolate box assortment of sticky ends, including scurvy, lead poisoning, tuberculosis, exposure and starvation. There was evidence of cannibalism amongst those who survived the initial ravages, vehemently denied by a Victorian public who could not comprehend the existence of their heroes’ oesophagi. Though many bodies, and the least-edible parts of other bodies, have been discovered in the intervening years in those still-desolate lands, Franklin’s corpse and the wrecks of his two ships had not, and this void in the historical record has since been deluged by a never-ending wash of conjecture, academia and expensive science. Only a few months after I had begun at the Library, a state-funded Canadian expedition uncovered the mouldering hulk of Franklin’s flagship, the HMS Erebus, denuded on the shallow seabed off King William Island. The elation that we all felt at the free publicity and fortuitous timing was a little sullied, as if we had all glimpsed the leaked pornography of an untouchable celebrity and felt immeasurably sad afterwards.

 You may have noticed that in my brief biography of Scinbank that I obstinately refuse to utilise this neat, settled, official history for my narrative, instead opting to clumsily divert the flow and insist that my fictional explorer found Franklin alive and mostly well. I made no attempt to transplant my alternates onto existing fact, so skilfully that you could barely see the join, but instead brutally established them and moved on. To me, this skimmed stone of a biography, the second thing of Scinbank’s that I completed after his portrait, is perhaps the least interesting element about the man-character. His official story, what might be pasted into his Wikipedia entry, is remarkably similar to how we are permitted to remember most real historical figures.

 History, as it actually happened in all its contradictory, meaningless, tangled impossibility, is hard to digest. In order to have any chance of understanding, no matter how imperfectly, it must be smoothed and made lozenge-like, so that it may pass through us and do whatever good it might do. What is lost in such abstractions, unfortunately, is perhaps what makes history so unbelievably interesting; the unpickable knots, the apparent nonsense, the unplanned chaos, and at its centre the bilious, vile, gorgeous, transcendent humans, who rarely really act on the historical scale with anything approaching sense. History as it is taught and written rarely allows us the jumbled, confused view of events from the many angles that they were experienced, a view more accurate but less saleable. Instead it permits us access to only those few scant details which had the wherewithal, or random chance, to survive to the present day. These feelings coalesced when I went to visit the National Maritime Museum, which houses a permanent Franklin collection, and saw the best that history could allow to survive of the man; a monogrammed fork, found in the possession of Inuit by Leopold Flintlock in 1859. It was such a silly thing to survive, such a utilitarian, bizarre thing, owing less to its rhetorical potency and more to the particular chemical makeup of metals on our planet. There was also the political factor to consider, which things are actively preserved according to the beliefs and values of the curators in charge of them. Accordingly, the innocuous fork has been press-ganged by the museum environment to stand for this boring, extraordinary, stupid and kind man’s life, and the eyes of millions each year pass over it and subsume it alongside the other scant prescriptions through which they move, like care home residents with their tiny cups of pills.

 I became more and more concerned with this erosive view of history because Isaak, my precious imaginary human, was going to be represented physically in the Lines In The Ice exhibition by some hardy, insufficient symbol, just like Franklin and Frobisher and all those other complicated humans made allegorical by time. A book is perhaps more complicated than a fork, more representative of the networks of temporal spaghetti that make up a human being, but in this complexity it has the potential to become even more political and overbearing. In my research I read many books that said little at all, despite running to many hundreds of pages, other than to bale the reader’s mind with a choking hay of imperialism or personal glory. Being resident in the Library, I knew that Isaak would have to be represented by a book, and thus it was. Alongside the Library’s incredible Conservation Centre I created another fictional character; Isaak’s sea-journal, kept aboard ship all those years ago.

 A fictional character queue-jumped into real events is not worthy of comment alone; it has been attempted by countless other writers before me. However, alongside this book and its own deceptions, Isaak went further than most in the brazen physicality of our installation. The book was given its own biography, covering both its fictional nascence at the hands of its publisher, Thomas Whiflick of Derby (another fake man, hurriedly notioned). Supposedly a present from his father and originally designed as an angling ledger, the book went with Isaak to sea and suffered numerous environmental indignities before returning with him to England along with Sir Franklin. On his death, it passed through the negligent hands of several unremarkable collectors, was dampened and scorched and forgotten, and was eventually accessioned by the Library, or so I say, into its great, partial repositories. Having created it and explained why it was in the collections, we simulated this age and travail (with tea leaves and candles, as if we were hurriedly completing primary school homework) and fastened to its own lectern within the larger exhibition. Isaak’s portrait and his biography hang on the wall next to it, in the same format and font as all the others. Apart from a minuscule caveat which I was forced to include by nervy Library executives, there is no indication that any of it is false. If you are timely you can go and see it for yourself, and unlike the other exhibits you can actually go and touch its leather, scrawl graffiti when the security guards aren’t looking. You can read the unfolding story of Isaak in his own spidery hand, a hand that I had to invent and learn as well as my own. Sometimes, unfortunately, the book is gone from the exhibition, seemingly spirited off for a minor repair; in actual fact it is only me, writing out the next piece of Isaak’s story, the next day of his voyage, the next complaint about the weather, the next unanswered letter home to his wife, all of it warped and faded through a dishonest process.

 It is tempting to think that my fears about the disingenuousness of the stories which history leaves to us would be combated by being in command of Isaak’s story myself. The diary is a form that lends itself to candid revelations, saucy details, human folly and complex unfoldings. How else can we know a person other than by breaking the heart-shaped lock, making sure nobody is looking, and reading their secrets? This may be true of other fictional characters, unaware that their lives are surveilled by the reader, but not so for men like Isaak. Explorers, or more generally heroes of their age, did not write their journals just for themselves, but instead for the presumptuous understanding that history would truly care what it was they had to write, unlike all those other poor unknowns putting down their hopes and faults. It is true that I wrote Scinbank as a minor figure in British history, overshadowed utterly by the man he was sent to rescue; indeed, at the very start of his diary he reassures himself that “they shall never publish mine, no matter what Mr. Whiflick says”. However, what becomes apparent, as he writes himself further and further away from home, is that Scinbank cannot help but daydream of the public adulation, scholarly interest and historical adamantine that other explorers have enjoyed. He certainly lived in the right Age to be remembered for his efforts. Therefore, throughout his writings we see him comfortably self-censor, prune and topiary his words, and the reported facts of his mission, into a shape that befits a Victorian officer and gentleman. He mentions dry statistics, boring homilies as to his men’s resolve and initiative, the ‘Boy’s Own’ clichés of his time and other times, and entirely fails to mention any difficulty not overcome, any behaviour not befitting, any disaster too horrible or weird. He does not bring back stories of what happened to Mr. Kjaer on Euston Island, or what he gave the Inuit of Bathurst which ruined their civilisation forever, or even what they found floating in the North Sea off Berwick-Upon-Tweed, just days after their departure from London.

Ordinarily, such weirdness and coincidence and life, base life, is lost. For every book in the Library’s archives there are thousands of other books unwritten, on everything that went on in between those initial authorships. There is so much of Franklin and Frobisher and Ross and Parry and all the others that went unrecorded or instead perished, so much life beyond their roles as dry tools for political machination and scholarly top-downings. These men deserve better, and far worse, than forks, books, wrecks and flags.

 In Scinbank, then, I saw a way to emancipate true history, as never experienced by any one human, from its role as a linear allegory that we tell ourselves to convince that there are patterns and causal logics to things. I could not draw out the unspoken facts of the lives of these great men, but I could create a lesser man, an honest man, a flawed and flabby man not so different from myself, and tell every one of his stories. In his diary, in the exhibition, in the encapsulated and endlessly contextualising environment of the Library, Scinbank is represented as an understandable, typical gentleman of his age. In there, he is all dates and places. However, the vast, hidden bulk of my work at the Library, the underwater trunk of my iceberg, lay in building Isaak’s secret world. I stepped beyond the physical survivals of his diary, and those scant artefacts which I have cribbed from junk shops to stand for him; a scrimshawed whale’s tooth, a leaf, a few oxidised coat buttons. I wrote music that was sung by his sailors onboard ship and in their bunks at night, ancient tunes reinvented and given new, imperfect and off-key meanings. I constructed maps which show this tension between the public and the unreported, allowing that public to fly over Scinbank’s Earth like an Inuit shaman in the form of a tulugak, a holy raven, in which nothing physical or spiritual is left unnoticed. I built text-based games for the web, locked behind passwords which take the form of locations and places mentioned in Scinbank’s diary; it is only by reading this conventional history that you may access the true, visceral accounts of what occurred in those places, and what Scinbank hid from himself. In doing so you may play the role of this man, and other men and women, and enact and make choices about those stories from his life which did not survive with his memory into the present; the stories of his incredible wife, of the native peoples which he met, and of the brief intimacies that he and Elagail could snatch behind their coal bin, a few moments before he left their house in Mill Dale.

In Scinbank’s long-vanished life, the distinct moments and fleeting impressions which are usually left to the romanticising preserves of literature, I have built him more truly than any story could, more honestly than he would ever tell himself, and in doing so I have created an amalgam of him and me, an indistinct, febrile yet complete presentation of what my residency was all about; being a particular person, in a particular place, and at a particular time. The casserole of our two lives begins in the curves of Scinbank’s face, a vampiric mix which is so coincidentally similar to my own, and which extends out into every glovefinger of this man’s frustrating, barely-reported, overshadowed existence.

I have been to the Library several times and watched people walking through the exhibition.  They follow the labelling avidly, their eyes passing over important things, partial things, and in so doing building a chunked, optimised version of the past. Scinbank’s diary is no different; though some may pause and thumb through his words, there are too many for any one person to stand and read at once. However, what I can only hope is that some people, some ersatz scholars or bored chroniclers with nothing else to read, will take the leads and hints from that book and move out into the great spiritual landscape that I have built for him in webspace and other spaces, all of it confounded and refusing to conform to any conventional structure. In reading this they will see how accidental Scinbank is, how circumstantial the events of his life, and below it they will start to plot its genesis; how I took the Library as a culture, as a part of the history that it contains, and made myself resident in it, noticing everything, taking nothing as disposable, and subsuming it all randomly into the mass of Scinbank complete. In that mess they will see scraps of the trip I took to Orkney some years ago, when I was so unsure of myself and of my place in the world, and how I unwittingly camped in the same bay that Franklin himself moored in on his way to the Arctic all those years ago, and how it would not be strange if he had felt that same way, in the same place, as I did. These scholars will see glimpses of the time I spent in Wapping trespassing on the foreshore, nearly drowning on the inward tide amongst the ghosts of the Otranto and the Erebus and all of those other blunderbuss, obvious ships. And in my bibliographies, the research and self-scholarship which I will continue to write, my readers will see that I have left nothing out; no truth too embarrassing, no story too insignificant, no horror too horrible.

Perhaps by that point, some twenty years from now, I will have finished the work I began at the Library, and I will have joined Scinbank’s story and life back up to the present, bringing my own unique catch of history ashore as he used to do in the River Dove with his father. By then it will have been accessioned into the Library’s archives, as I have been promised it will. Perhaps my readers will be true scholars by then, and they will call up On My Wife’s Back, as I have been calling this project, on the catalogue system with as little pomp and ceremony as Franklin’s journals, or Shakespeare’s folios, or the Gutenberg Bible, and they will see both Scinbank the encyclopedia entry and Scinbank the human, Scinbank as he would like to be remembered and Isaak as I cannot help but draw him. In this work they will, in turn, see myself, feeling dreadfully depressed in front of all those colossi of history, and feeling that the only way to make my mark was to be subversive, to point out how the Library is not an impartial observer of history but a prime suspect in its committal. I have called On My Wife’s Back a sort of hooliganism, with a vain, pointless hooligan at its centre, and in weighing the life of my Isaak against the history of which he is a part, perhaps this is all that writers and artists and game designers and musicians can hope for; to conduct a soon-forgotten bit of violence.