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

It's snowy outside. There's nowhere to go. It isn't safe out there. But h2g2 doesn't care: instead of grumbling, we're working on 'Holes in History'. I'm reading 'Forgotten News', a book by Jack Finney, who has been a real inspiration to me. (Read his 'Time and Again', please.)

Jack Finney wrote this:

'Some several years ago I was thinking of writing a novel - which I did, eventually, calling it 'Time and Again' [best time-travel novel ever! DG] - whose central character would somehow be able to do what I've always wanted to do: visit the nineteenth century. Physically, literally, go back in time to a New York of the last century [he wrote this in the 20th], and walk around seeing the sights. But I wanted him to see a lot more than what all of us know he'd see: more than gaslights and horsecars. I wanted him to see everything I wished I could; as clearly and with the greatest actuality I could manage.

So I began something I called 'research,' though really too much fun to entitle me to describe it as soberly as that. I spent a winter, that is, exploring nineteenth-century newspapers, on microfilm....looking friends in the eye, I told them I was working, too.'

He describes some of the research he did:

'It turned out, at least for me, rich in event and character: peoples with as strange a lot, as malevolent, eccentric, and amusing, as any I could ever hope to come across. Reading column after column of directly quoted testimony - hearing, in the old type, these long-ago people speaking arguing, lying, and shouting in their own words - made them real.'

I think he would have liked what we're doing. I know I do.

PS Finney also wrote 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'. Talented fella.