Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
There are books that chronicle histories, and there are books that chronicle the histories of other books.
In recent years, the former category has come to dominate the national literary consciousness. Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens,” Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s “Oppenheimer,” Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” — anyone can become an armchair historian (or at least a literature bro’s semblance of one).
And as the attention spans of modern readers continue to dwindle, historical literature evolves with it, with entire libraries and their experts now condensed into multi-chapter narratives. Writing is leaner, topics shift in the blink of an eye and writers just love to open with attempts at snappy one-liners.
Patrick McCray’s new novel, “README: a Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines,” cements itself as a book chronicling the histories of other books. Despite the myriad of existing narratives that detail the rise of the computer, McCray’s narrative is unique in the way it uses said books — ranging from Norbert Weiner’s scientific exploration “Cybernetics” to Ester Dyson’s popular internet book “Release 2.0” — to visualize that development.
At a Wednesday talk hosted by the Silicon Valley Archives, McCray described his book as “a window into the history of computing” and “an opportunity to think about lost or submerged hopes, visions, ideas about the future.” When rushing forward into the future, especially at a school like Stanford, it is almost instinct to regard the past as a fixed linear line. McCray reminds us that despite how the past may have unfolded, the evolution of any technology is an accumulation of choices rather than chance or fate.
“README” leans into those lost visions. Inciting something that borders on nostalgia, McCray is concerned with not just history but history as it could have been. In exploring the tendrils of the emerging internet, for instance, “README” references the early internet browser ViolaWWW (also known as Viola). Developed by University Berkley’s Pei-Yuan Wei, Viola’s initial promise as a digital distributor was overshadowed by the emergence of NetScape and the browser wars of the late 90s. One could, however, imagine an alternative world where Viola and Wei’s vision of a communally-accessible web triumphed, rather than the streams of purely commercial content that dominate the modern internet.
McCray seems to view “README” as being equally about computing history and the books that chronicled it. It is a dabble not quite in media studies and not quite in literary history, but rather in the legacies of the latter overlaid onto the evolving narratives of the former. And books are not just chronicles for McCray. As he told the Stanford crowd, they are also “central tools for constructing the intellectual culture that we all inhabit.” He emphasized how before digital understanding became the norm, literature offered a guide into web browsers, the internet and computers as a whole. Dan Gookin’s “Dummies” series, for instance, played a key guide to navigating the ever evolving landscape during those aforementioned browser wars.
What distinguishes McCray from other meta-literary critics (Stanford’s Center for the Study of the Novel is home to several prime examples) is his concern with the physicality of literature. Referencing the enduring artifice of medieval manuscripts, McCray spoke of how “this technological object, with suitable changes and modifications over time, has persisted so long.”
On a very meta level, “README” as a book itself stands as testament to his message. It is so tangible, so utterly visceral in its deep-set elements of paper and time. For McCray, “README” is more than just a piece of historical scholarship. The texture of the pages, the way a spine has been cracked and repaired and cracked again over the ages — McCray considers these details every bit as important as the ideas housed in the pages themselves. This physical permanence is more than just artistic pleasure; McCray noted the ease of censoring digital-only works, as opposed to the physical stability provided by print copies.
In his talk, McCray described historians as being “obsessed with either continuity or change.” “README” sees McCray continuously toe the line, combining his fascination with technology with a deep reverence of its associated literary history. Books, then, become both technologies and living artifacts at once.
McCray’s presentation at the event was overlaid with a profound sense of optimism for his medium. “Over the course of rapid and remarkable technological transformations, one of the things that I was happy to see with my own work was that the centuries-old technology of the book has still continued to endure,” he said.
Such happiness speaks directly to his novel. At its core, “README” is a project concerned with mapping the evolution of computers through books. Even at one of the world’s most technologically-dominated, forward-thinking campuses, histories are fundamentally held in physical, printed writing. Books are, and will remain, chronicles of the past, testaments unto themselves and — as McCray has shown — glimmers into what came after and what could have been.