h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Gunson's Ride - A2464733
Author: Pinniped (Budget Stripper) - U183682

A broken tale, terrible and true.

Very dramatic Pinniped.

Are the inset parts from a song ?

This was a story I'd never heard, well worth inclusion.

You were right this will give the scouts headaches.

And I don't feel inclined to let myself have a headache...

*sips *

OK what we want are the facts and nothing but the facts, alright? Time, place, date, name and number. And that bit about the engineer wailing - how loud was it and were there any witnesses? etc, etc...



I like it - I have to confess I was mildly intrigued as to whether loads of people were washed away or not, but maybe I just missed the inference? Or do I go to the link for that? Other than that, it's all there, just written a bit differently...

sprout

You're not wrong sprout

My thinking is that we all stand around admiring this for the next week, then punt it upstairs to see what Jimster's got to say about it. If this doesn't make the EG for all of the obvious reasons, then I'm sure it must be a shoe-in for the Underguide. Am I right Jodan?

I never promise anything, but sounds good to me.

Hi Pin..

Is this the same flood that Time Team were talking about this week?

Here's a link:
http://www.channel4.com/history/timeteam/2004_sheff_flood.html

That'll give folk all the background info they need - as well as your link there already...

Fascinating stuff. I was at Uni in Sheffield for 6 years and hadn't a clue about the flood


F/b

**wanders in, takes a look at the entry**


<--(Scout with a headache)

For want of knowing what the heck to do I concur with Greydesk - Jimster gets paid for taking decisions, I don't...

Wonderful bit of literature by the way!

It was indeed as per Time Team (what a good program that was, btw)

The link at the end reveals the whole story of the disaster.

I'm pleased people like it. I don't apologise for pushing the boundaries of EG-acceptability. I just think that we should all write our hearts out.

Pin

I never knew about this either until I saw part of the Time Team programme. All I took from that was the outline. This made it real and unforgetable. What better way to pass on the facts than to make them live.
Cheers Pin.

Hmm... left to make the decision, eh?

I'm sure there's factual content in here, and it's a smashing story, but it's so shrouded in this purple prose that I can't see where the facts end and your imagination begins.

I think you've gotten a little carried away with yourself there, Pinniped. I actually found it hard to read because of the dramatics clouding the actual story.

A Scout has recommended this, I'm pretty sure to test the water more than anything else, but I'm not so sure myself. I suspect this is more suited to the UnderGuide to be fair.

Hi Jimster

I know you can't see that boundary. Neither can I. The most complete account of this terrible story was made by Samuel Harrison, a few weeks after the flood in the spring of 1864. He wrote it in the journalistic style of his day, overblown and romantic. It's the most comprehensive account left to us. I merely echoed it. I've done the same before, with the tale of the Batavia, for example. Is this so different?

This marks the choice of the EG and its editors, I think. I don't advocate fiction in the EG, but I do advocate original writing with a provocative and thought-provoking style. If Entries must be strictly factual and formulaic and 100% correct, then the EG will always be severely limited.

If we're objective about it, the EG that has come to be falls between two stools. It's not comprehensive enough to be encyclopaedic. It's not creative enough to be a testament to the mercurial brilliance of Douglas Adams.

I love the UnderGuide, but it isn't the central project. The Edited Guide is the central project. This piece doesn't conform for one fundamental reason - it doesn't aspire to tell the reader everything in a self-contained article. Instead, it reveals a little bit of something few of us know about, our own history, terrible and raw. It points the path to discovering more for ourselves.

The reason that you found it hard to read is that it was written that way. The reason that it's strange and disjointed and impressionistic is because that's what that morning of the 14th March 1864 must have been like. There was no global news network to root the people who woke up to this. Imagine yourself in their place. Imagine.

You're never going to achieve the encylopaedia, Jimster. I don't claim to be anything special, but I'm striving for the other goal, to celebrate what the H2G2 really means to me by writing to the limits of my ability. I'm trying to grow with every Entry I post, and so are others. I beseech you to make room for those among us who would aim for that goal. That's all.

Pin

There is a significant difference between 'factual writing' and 'dramatisation'. The getwriting DNA site handles the latter admirably.

It's interesting that you mention Douglas Adams here. Douglas always made a clear distinction between his fiction (where anything goes) and his factual writing about subjects he felt were important (such as 'Last Chance to See'). If you cloud the message, it gets confused and lost. Communication is the key here.

All I can say is that this is a fine dramatisation of events, with some inventive fictional elements prsumably based on the true story, but that does make it too far removed from the factual to be within our remit here.

I don't feel the blockquotes sections realy add much to the entry other than confusion. If this is a poem written at the time then we'd need to see a source for it. If it's something you've written, inspired by the events, then that really isn't Edited Guide material. Also, the source of the quoted speech isn't clear. Are you claiming that these words were somehow recorded and are a true representation of events, or did you guess what you might have said in the circumstances and improvise? If the former, then it'd help to actually acknowledge the source more clearly. If the latter, then it's best dropped entirely if you're really keep for this to go EG-ward.

Alternatively, if this is how someone else has dramatised events (Harrison, maybe), then this also needs to be made clearer. I noticed you refer to Harrison at one point, and then mention him again in the links at the bottom, but again, it's not clear enough why you're referencing him. You know who he is and are clearly aware of his importance, but this isn't conveyed in the entry to the point where a newcomer will get the reference.

OK, Jimster. I'll pull it from PR and put it in AWW. Just a few last remarks from me before I go.

I appreciate the time you spent considering a reply. I wish you'd used it instead to look at the links behind the piece. You'd have found answers to your questions, but perhaps you'd also have understood better what I was seeking to do here.

The whole piece is original. I'm always careful to acknowledge the work of others on the infrequent occasions that I quote it, but there are no examples of that here. The only paragraph that echoes Harrison is the one that precedes his mention. Each sentence is a paraphrased repetition of the corresponding part of Harrison's account, of Gunson's ride up through Malin Bridge, three hours before a hundred people died there. I left the referential nod there for an interested reader to discover. Did I say reader? I meant Researcher, in the genuine context of the word.

There are no blockquotes. The italicised sections, the ones that you find superfluous, are snatches of the future story, what will happen in the hours and days to come. The incident described is to this day the worst man-caused accident ever to occur in Britain. Only deliberate acts of war match the damage and loss of life it caused.

"Last Chance to See" is a fine book. In it, Douglas Adams conveyed facts with a minimum of opinion, but he chose to do so in a dramatised style, with (for example) extensive use of reported speech that was surely never literally exchanged. The style is quirkish, with obscure section-titles and tangential introductions of several ideas. DNA was good at that. You've probably noticed.

I make no claim of comparable writing acumen, but in spirit that book serves my argument a lot better than it serves yours.

There are many facets to what I attempted here. Refining my personal writing skills was just one of them, though I know and you should understand that producing conventional EG-Entries would do nothing for me in that respect. Another important goal was to offer fellow Researchers a chain of discovery, a means of finding out what this difficult and disjointed piece really describes. It's quite fun to follow that kind of lead, I find, but having the time for deep-reading is a prerequisite. To explore Harrison's account, should you ever do so, would shock and shame you, but it would also expand your understanding of a people's history in a way that no EG-Entry can do.

The acquired ethos of Peer Review is to read a dozen pieces a night, I fear, to assimilate each one in ten minutes and to judge them on their succinctness and perspicacity. That's why the EG (in modern times at least, because you did once admit clever writing) is all the same.

You have a wood-for-trees problem, Jimster. You're just judging pieces on editorial convenience rather than writing quality. I don't mind if you don't like my particular style, because that's a matter of subjective choice. I deplore the fact that you reject anything difficult or marginal. I despair of your implication that writers exploring dramatic writing should head for "Get Writing". With that attitude, your project deserves to be supplanted by it.

Don't feel obliged to answer this. You've got a treadmill to run. It must be tough, and I genuinely sympathise. I'm going back to the writing I know, a personal and perpetual delight, rather than a job and a chore. You stick to the writing you know. I'll try not to bother you again for a while.

Pinniped

Historians have been putting words intopeople's mouths for years - much of the history we assume as factual relies upon surviving reports.

Imagine a history of the 1980's written from surviving fragments of The Sun in the year 2525.

I already did, more or less!
If you're interested, it's at A1929602
pin

I must read more often - I missed that one.

This bit - 'furnished with the characteristic sun-visors, emblazoned with the cartouches of his concubines' - will see daylight again I promise you.

Gunson's Ride is head and shoulder's above most of the things in the EG. Great job, Pinn. I personally think it contains an ample amount of factual material and belongs in the EG.

The only way I know Douglas Adams is through his work. Some of you here knew him personally and are much more aware of what he intended the EG to be than I am. Having said that, I can't imagine that he was really striving for a formulaic mediocrity.

Hyp