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The Silent History

Chris Flynn October 04

If you’ve picked up a copy of the all-conquering food magazine Lucky Peach and happened to check out the colophon, the eagle-eyed amongst you might have noticed that the editor-in-chief of the magazine is Chris Ying. Look a little further down and you will spot the names of Eli Horowitz and Russell Quinn. Nothing remarkable there perhaps, except Ying, Horowitz & Quinn recently formed their own McSweeney’s offshoot company YH&Q in order to specifically create the best-selling magazine and other, more groundbreaking digital projects.

The first of these to come down the pipe is The Silent History. Launched 1st October on iPad and iPhone (Android versions may follow) USA Today is claiming it will, ‘change the way we read’. The premise is as follows: A story has been written by Horowitz and authors Matthew Derby and Kevin Moffett, in which a generation of children have been born without the ability to use or understand language. They may, however, have other, more sinister gifts. This narrative unfolds over thirty-two years, beginning in 2011 and culminating in 2043 and explores how society copes, or in many cases fails to cope with these children as they grow up. The story has been divided into six volumes and each one has twenty installments, each of which is around 1500 words in length. Characters that are introduced in the early passages are followed throughout the narrative.

Once you’ve installed the free app, volumes can be downloaded individually for $1.99 or the entire story for $9.99. Now, here’s the first juicy part—it is released to you serially. The first twenty installments are synched daily over the course of a month, like a season of a TV show, building to a climax. Then, there will be a one-month break before ‘season 2’ and so on. In all, the six seasons will run over the space of a single year.

If that sounds interesting, here’s the second juicy part. In addition to the 120 episodes, hundreds of ‘field reports’ have been created by writers working across the globe. These are 500-600 word riffs on the main stories, with characters all their own, and have been pinned (geo-tagged) to specific geographic locations. In fact these can only be read by using the GPS map included in the app and proceeding to that spot, whereupon they will become available to the user. What’s more, these field reports contain information and plot devices that will only make sense if read on site, so the presence of the ‘silents’ will be felt by the reader witnessing some real-world event.

Wired magazine have called The Silent History, ‘part book, part multiplayer game, part Google map, and entirely revolutionary.’ The long-term idea is that readers will eventually be able to submit their own field reports and thus convert their experience of reading the narrative into a collective choose your own adventure story, of sorts. In an interview on Buzzfeed, Horowitz claimed the inspiration for the project was The Wire, sci-fi movie District 9 and walking tours. Field reports have been generated in China, the Antarctic, the White House (so they will know when the President has read it) and the Greek Islands.

They have also been created in Australia. Disclosure time: Horowitz asked me to send writers out into the wilds of our cities to create field reports. In Brisbane, users will be able to read silent stories penned by authors Krissy Kneen and Christopher Currie. In Sydney, The Lifted Brow’s editor Sam Cooney has been lurking in unexpected places. In Melbourne, former mX Books Editor Andy Murdoch and author Josephine Rowe have been geo-tagging their field reports at various strange locations (Murdoch wrote all the Greek reports too, when he was there on holiday earlier this year). I have contributed also but if you want to read any of these reports you might have to squeeze into some tight spots, maybe climb over some fences or duck into some alleyways. If you’re especially game, you’ll have to find a way into the storm drain under Rushall station, by the Merri Creek. There’s something down there.

Watch the trailer for The Silent History here, narrated by Thao Nguyen, Ira Glass and Miranda July.


 

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