253 redux

WorldbyStorm

Jan 28

This I find fascinating, a piece on Geoff Ryman's 'internet' novel 253 from 1996 about 253 individuals on a tube train.

It's about 253 people on a Bakerloo line train in London hurtling towards death. Its subjects are a fascinatingly diverse array of receptionists, musicians, immigrants, businesspeople, homeless people, lawyers, artists, failures, successes, victims of crime, perpetrators of crime, occasional historic figures and ghosts. "253 happens on January 11th, 1995," Ryman writes, "which is the day I learned my best friend was dying of Aids."

The innovation of 253 was that readers could look at each carriage of the train and click to read exactly 253 words about the inner lives of each of the 253 passengers. Each instalment is a miniature story. They could then be read one after the other or the reader could jump, via hyperlinks, to other passengers at which the subject of the instalment is staring or has a connection elsewhere on the train. It was the early years of the web. "It could take forever to load a single page," says Ryman. "There was no broadband. There was no wifi."

I have the book and didn't realise before reading it that it had an online component. Lacking the hypertext element may have diminished some of the impact of the work but not entirely. In any case, and perhaps this indicates how little I used the internet at the time it was published in book form (1998), I never accessed the website which stopped functioning sometime in the 2000s.

But it's back.

Recently he began the job of restoring 253 to the web. He used internet archives, the print book and an encoded version he once sent to his graphic-designer collaborator Roland Unwin to re-create it. Doing so, he says, "wasn't as horrific as I thought it would be". Since January 11th this year, it's newly available at www.253novel.com.

Recommended.

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