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The History Eaters

by Neil James Hudson

History is full of surprises. No corridor, no matter how well indexed, is wholly predictable. Each shelf contains details whose existence was unsuspected. Those things that one knows for certain are shown to be mere conjectures, sometimes absent of fact altogether. And much of it has simply gone missing.

Even the new consignments cannot be foreseen. Shuttles dock and leave more or less continuously, depositing their cargoes and leaving with impolite haste, as if they fear contamination. Their comings and goings are dutifully logged, stored and indexed, themselves a part of history. Sometimes it seems that they know what confusion their deposits will cause and must leave before an angry Historian calls them to account.

Rarely do we have visitors, especially unannounced. I had assumed that we were receiving a new set of records, logs, accounts, reports, diaries, photographs and net pages, all awaiting logging and storing, as their creators sighed with their relief and got on with the present and future. When a living human comes to History, it is as if they have forsworn their lives, and know that they will spend all their existence wandering through the stains of the past. They also become my problem, and I have problems enough.

But I kept a professional civility as I greeted the man who stepped off the shuttle, climbing past boxes of discs and papers. A white-haired man with a white moustache, an expression that said that now he really had seen everything (which he hadn’t; that would take a lot longer) but an aura of fear, I think, real fear at the vast universe of information into which he had immersed himself.

“Professor Neutske,” I said, and extended my hand.

He held it in his for a couple of seconds, as if he were waiting for a photographer. “It’s a pleasure, Curator,” he said. “I met your predecessor once. I was sorry to hear she retired.”

“Callisto?” I asked, as if I had had many predecessors. “We’ll not see her like again.”

“I was surprised to hear of her retirement.”

I decided he would have to ask one more time before I told him. Instead, I guided him towards the large viewing window in the side of the room.

“Look, Professor,” I said. “It never stops.” 

Earth could be seen, but he would have marvelled enough at that on his journey. He craned his head towards the left side of the window, and stared. History curved somewhat, and the front end was clearly visible from our position. And what a mess it was. No one had designed this space station, it had grown. Too small from the day it had begun service, extra rooms, wings and floors were constantly being added to make space for the material that was constantly being moved in. Neutske now looked at the front of History, where robot drones and the occasional suited human were busily extending it further into space, like a city’s suburban sprawl. We built forwards, back, upwards, even inwards when an unused space was discovered - which happened frequently given how haphazard the extensions were.

Neutske leaned back, and faced me. “Why did she retire?”

I sighed. “Callisto didn’t retire. She went miscellaneous.”

I was pleased that some of the colour left Neutske’s face.

I showed him to one of the rooms which had originally been intended for visitors. It had long been taken over by the minutes of student meetings of no consequence, since the rooms themselves were seldom in occupation.

“I apologise for the mess,” I said, “although History is like that. I apologise also if you are used to a higher level of comfort.”  He waved my apologies away. “I will, of course, need to know the nature of your studies if I am to help.”

Neutske looked me straight in the eye. “I need access to the index.”

I did not avoid his gaze. “Professor, it has been a pleasure, but like all pleasures, a brief one. The shuttle returns to Earth in twenty-five minutes. Be on it.”  I turned my back and walked away.

“They warned me about you,” he said. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to use this.”  I turned back. He was holding out a piece of paper. I walked over and took it. All documents are of interest to me. “It’s a warrant for access to the index, from the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. You’ll see it’s been countersigned by the Home Secretary.”

I saw it had been countersigned by an underling. I pretended to study the paper, then took an old-fashioned biro from my pocket.

“NO,” I wrote in large letters over the page. “Return this to the Home Secretary,” I said. “I’m sure that after your immediate audience, she will respond to this outrage by sending armed police to remove me from power. We are, after all, a matter of great concern to her.”  I looked again at the warrant. “Alternatively, if you’ve finished with it, you might consider donating it to our collection. It was written to get rid of you, not me.”

“Curator, I’m here to research the environmental impact of the nuclear industry in Scandinavia,” he said.

I stiffened. “Are you,” I said.

“Yes. And also Christmas traditions during the Second World War.”

I wondered if he knew the extent of his insult. My muscles tensed, and I made an awkward attempt to relax.

“And the Leopold Franke fossil collection. I’m quite anxious to have a look at that.”

I exhaled slowly. “You are studying,” I said, “information instability.”

He stood up again. “They’ve all gone. Records and collections that definitely arrived here--you’ve got records of their arrivals--suddenly vanished. Where did they go?”

“Of what are you accusing us?” I asked.

“Oh, you misunderstand!  You Historians do a fantastic job. Without you, Earth would be impossible. We’ve got too much information--we can’t even fart without generating a chemical analysis, a doctor’s report, and a “breaking news” item in the local paper. It became so hard to operate, to actually do anything without stumbling across precedents and records and those ominous “lessons of history”, that it had to go. None of us wanted to destroy our own history, so it all got shipped up here, indexed, and available for inspection - while the Earthlings downstairs find themselves free to get on with their lives.”

“Only half a mile away,” I said frostily, “is a room devoted to the history of History.”

“Excellent! Only, part of the deal is that the stuff isn’t destroyed. If that were allowable, there’d be no need for History--we could just junk it all and have done with it. So when the past starts going missing ... we need to know what’s gone wrong. But we didn’t put it under the care of monkeys: we got the best. We might need it some day.”

“We have a job to do,” I said, hoping he’d be impressed by my modesty.

“Some people are still interested,” he continued. “When it goes missing, they notice. I’ve been following this up - I’ve found thirty-seven possible examples of information destruction in the last seven years.”

“Three thousand,” I said, and secretly enjoyed his shocked reaction. “There have been three thousand, seven hundred and eighty-six cases of information instability or destruction, and an unknown number of miscellanea. People don’t notice as much as you think, Professor Neutske. Perhaps when you’ve settled in, you might join me in my office.”  I left his room.

“Naturally, whichever phenomenon has affected the archive is also responsible for Callisto’s disappearance,” he said. “The difficulty will lie in tracking it down.”

“You believe you can actually locate the source of the instability?”  I had no such hopes.

“You have a responsibility,” said Neutske, leaning back, “to keep History in as good order as possible. Stopping these disappearances must be your priority. You may even get Callisto back.”

I was pleased that I managed to keep my mouth closed. “That is a little ambitious,” I said. I failed to add that the same was true of me. Callisto’s return would mean my instant demotion. As things were I was in charge of History, and I wanted to stay there. “What, in your opinion, is the cause?”

He played with his pen, tracing it over a napkin. I watched him carefully: if he formed any words, it might need filing. “Beings,” he said at length.

“Beings?  What kind?”

“Parasites.”  I noticed that he was avoiding my eyes. “Beings who feed on our archives.”

“This is nonsense,” I said. “What evidence do you have for their existence?”

Neutske opened the folder in front of him. Inside were neatly printed pages, an inventory of sorts. “Read this,” he said.

I took the paper. “1. Dogs in Moonlight, George Boris Elviri. Oil on Canvas. 2. Petty cash receipts, Aug 08, Grant’s Clothing Store. 3. www.joinus.com, web page. 4. Seymour Hyams, 1981 diary.”  I read no further. “This is a miscellany.”

“Indeed. I looked up your reports on miscellanea, and began to catalogue the most recent manifestation. I gave up after two hundred and fifty items.”

I flicked forward through the papers, proving that this was true. “What on earth is the point of a catalogue of miscellanea?”

“I cross-referenced the items with the History index. None of them was on it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“These items did not exist until the room became miscellaneous,” said Neutske, who looked rather too pleased with himself. “High grade items disappear, to be replaced by low-grade rubbish. It’s my belief that these miscellaneous items are, in fact, the faeces of the parasites.”

“This is preposterous,” I said. “How on earth could you prove such a thing?”

“By catching one,” he said. “And I need the index as bait.”

We were on the edge of history. Further in, almost at the centre, you would find Jan Marie Neutske’s birth certificate. His medical records, which would detail the standard illnesses of his early years, were elsewhere, about half a mile outwards and a floor or two above - it would take about ten minutes to get there if you went by bike and knew where you were going. School records next, that was the other direction entirely, further back to some of History’s earlier regions. You probably wouldn’t want to take the most direct route there, as there were parts of History that we preferred to avoid. However there was an interesting diversion as the seven-year-old Neutske had been witness to a robbery at a supermarket. There were several written records of this, as well as an audio recording of Neutske’s interview. After this we follow his university career. It is not long before we find mention of him in the newspaper archive, thankfully much of this has now been digitised and we do not necessarily have to visit its physical location on the station.

Don’t waste your time in the registry office archives, Neutske never married. Sometimes an absence of information can be information in itself, but we know--although you would have to descend another thirteen floors to prove it--that he has lived alone all his life. He has had papers published, and I can find them for you. He has been careful with his money, and it’s a pity that his bank wasn’t. That you will learn about in a small room in the lower half of the station that many have now forgotten about, which is perhaps a shame, as the scandal contained therein could still bring down several powerful figures.

What more would you like to know?  I can show you how the language developed which he now speaks, I can take you to the dusty box containing the receipts for his clothes, I can trace you his ancestry and send him a card on his birthday - perhaps the one his maternal grandfather sent him when he was seven, which is now kept at the rear of History, rather too far away for me to visit if I can possibly avoid it.

The one thing I will not show you is the index of History. This is too precious an artefact to fall into the wrong hands: damage the index and everything becomes miscellaneous. If you turn your back on the ways of Earth and actually want to look through our archives, you have no choice but to ask me where to look. I have better things to do than to tell you, but it’s part of the job. I have an instinctive grasp of how to find things on History, where each snippet is likely to be filed, how easy it will be to read. That is why I am Curator of the history of Earth. I was born on History, and I will die on History. I have no need of any other world, certainly not Earth, which has become an anti-History almost. I fear that if I came into contact with the planet, we would destroy each other and leave nothing. I am a part of History, and I know this place better than any other being.

On my journey back to my quarters, I acquainted myself with some of the changes that had happened to History. There were extra archives tacked on at the sides, which were themselves already being extended. It seemed that scarcely any collection hadn’t expanded. The contents of History seemed to be racing their container in expansion, desperately trying to burst History’s seams as surely as History was trying to keep them in.

I stopped. Before me something was wrong. I threw open a door, knowing already what I would find.

The room in front of me was crammed with papers, discs, tapes and even computer equipment. By History’s standards, it wasn’t full - I could easily have shoved twice as much information in there.

But it was random, misfiled. None of these records belonged together. I knew that they didn’t show up in the index - or rather, they didn’t show up in this room. Order had broken down. I could never locate any of these records. They may still have existed, but they were lost.

How had this happened?

Professor Neutske made an appointment to see me the next day. I met him after a small breakfast and a newspaper. I ignored the current crop of dailies, which would already have been filed in their separate archives, and would not in any case have arrived in a physical form. I chose instead a paper from a century earlier. I preferred news from the past: I already knew how the stories would end, which relieved me of any worry on how the news would affect me.

I expected him to argue for access to the index again, but in fact he did not mention the subject, and instead quizzed me about the miscellanea. I showed him toleration, but only the minimum of help.

“When did you find that the fossil collection had gone?” he asked.

“Only certain parts are missing,” I said. Although part of my attention was indeed being paid to the Professor, most of it was devoted to writing a report, my own small contribution to the contents of the space station. “Particular collections of Victorian gentlemen, rather than particular eras or geographical areas. I was engaged in a project to ensure their preservation. Except, I was unable to find them.”

“But the index ...”

“Showed me the exact area of History that I should have been looking in. It gave me the particular floor, and the room in which they had been housed. I was able to estimate that it would only be a fifteen-minute walk from this office.  But, Professor, there is no such room.”

“So the index was wrong.”

“Think, please, of the implications of what you’re saying. If the index is wrong, what exactly is right?”  He was quiet for a minute. “The whole of History would have become miscellaneous. We would have nothing. No record, no book, no printout or account ledger or diary could possibly be found. If the index is wrong, we’ve lost history completely. For this reason, no entry or alteration to the index is made without the knowledge and approval of three qualified Historians, one of whom must be the Curator, and the location of the index is secret. The fossil collection had been correctly logged, filed and indexed. The room had vanished.”

He frowned. “But then, surely this would cause orbital instability?”

I shrugged. “Our engines are constantly adjusting for small changes. As you may have noticed, the structure of this station is being added to continually. The process of keeping the orbit stable is automatic. We would not have noticed the adjustment.”  In fact I had noticed two adjustments since we had met in this office, but only a seasoned resident would be aware of them.

“Right.”  Neutske stood up. “Of course you’ll have a report on each disappearance?”

“All filed in the history of History,” I said.

“I’ll need to see them.”

“I’ll arrange to have them delivered to your room,” I said. “All except this one, which you may have now.”  I handed him the report that I had just finished writing. “And I hope that your own research doesn’t go the same way.”

He laughed, a bellowing, wholly unpleasant sound that appeared to be boasting of, rather than expressing, his amusement. “There’s another set of files I’m going to need,” he said.

“As you wish,” I said. “Callisto’s files will also be delivered to you. Personal files, my investigation into her disappearance, and all reports of sightings.”

“Sightings?”

I was surprised at the Professor’s surprise. “She still turns up from time to time, but never where she should be. This is the worst problem of all. It’s bad enough when a paper gets misfiled. When it happens to a human, it’s big trouble.”

 

There was a small vibration beneath my feet, and I knew that the station had adjusted its orbit once more. Originally, History had been a single long cylinder. Now the most arcane branches of topology and mathematics hadn’t come up with a word for its shape. At one point it was wider than its original length, but it had been built up in all directions. Each addition had been grafted on on an ad hoc basis, with no grand design or masterplan. It was my dream to redesign the station, move everything into good order, and just give everything a good shape. But it was a hopeless dream. Even if I found time to make a start, the incoming material would make a mockery of my design.

I thought a little about the Professor, and how he was thrusting himself irrevocably into this chaos. Then I turned to my terminal and ran a search on him. He was in one of the more recent miscellaneous rooms.

I switched to the camera feed. He was on the floor in the middle of the room, surrounded by his papers, sobbing. Baffled, I turned to another machine, and used it to find the original contents of the room.

I cursed: how had I missed this?  Letters from Doctor Ludmilla Wargrave, a lecturer at a University in Amsterdam. The letters were of a personal nature, and were addressed to Jan Marie Neutske.

Doctor Wargrave had died three years ago. Her papers were all that remained.

Had remained. These letters had turned into random garbage, and Neutske had come to face to face with the true horror of information destruction.

I turned to my original terminal and ran a diagnostic test. It was as I had expected. Neutske had installed a Trojan Horse in the system. It would fail to tell him the location of the index, but I deleted it anyway. Then, knowing he was vulnerable, I summoned him to call him to account.

He seemed recovered as he entered my office. He had no choice but to stand as I had removed the other chair. He tried to look proud but was unable to avoid a certain deference for authority that he had probably had since school.

“I have found your silly attempt at invading our system,” I said. “Such interference with the running of the station is utterly forbidden.”

“You won’t find the others,” he said petulantly. I almost told him to take his hands out of his pockets.

“Professor, this entire station is a Trojan Horse. Somehow it got through the defences of the planet to cast an unhealthy pall over its affairs. There’s no point trying to subvert it. I will find any rogue code you have introduced to the system, and it wouldn’t matter anyway because they won’t find the index.”

“I am trying to save this station,” he said.

“The index is the station,” I said. “It is not bait. Under the powers granted to me in our initial charter, I must now banish you from this station. If you do not leave in twelve hours, I am permitted to use force.”

The Professor smiled at me, then brought a small device from his pocket. It was unfamiliar to me, but I guessed that it was what telephones had evolved into, and presumed (as it would have been useless otherwise) that it was in contact with the Earth.

“Before you make your decision, I have a call waiting for you,” he said, grinning, and handed me the device. “I got my audience.”

The voice on the line did not wait to be introduced. “Curator, I believe you have Professor Neutske with you.”

“That is correct, Home Secretary,” I said.

“Please be aware that he has the full backing of all the relevant authorities on Earth. He is to be given full co-operation in all his research. Is that understood?”

“You must be aware that he is risking the existence of the index.”

“Full co-operation. That is an order, Curator.”

“I understand, Home Secretary,” I said, and the line was cut off.

I returned the device to Neutske, trying not to look perturbed. “Well, Curator?” he said.

“Surely you realise I have no intention of complying with that order,” I said.

“Of course. But I don’t think that will be much of a hindrance. And you wouldn’t dare send me home. Now, if I might be permitted to return to my studies?”

I dismissed him with an ugly wave.

 

After this I avoided the Professor whenever possible. I was usually able to find out where he was, and ensure that I was elsewhere. So long as the index was safe, he was a harmless irritant. I offered him no help, and he asked for none.

But another case of miscellany occurred during routine business of my own, and this time I intruded before the process was fully completed. I believe there was no longer any original, ordered material in the room, but papers still floated in air currents that seemed to come from nowhere, a pile of coins in the corner was subsiding, and -

And there was a strange light in the corner of the room. It was A3 sized when I first noticed it, although not with such sharp corners, or in fact such sharp edges, and it was already shrinking to nothing. It was as if it were a burning cuboid of gas which extinguished as it used up its fuel; but I was also reminded of a four-dimensional being passing through three-dimensional space, like a solid passing through a newspaper.

The experience shook me, and I didn’t mention it to Neutske, although I told him of the room, so as to distract him from anything genuinely useful. Another encounter shook me far more. Walking between my office and the Professor’s quarters, I was startled to find another being in the corridor.

“Callisto!” I called, but my predecessor fled before I had finished her name. I remained transfixed by her after-image, though. Far from being pleased to see me, her face showed only terror. Her body was gaunt, her face scarcely stretched round her bones and I imagined that some of the shadows were in fact rips. If we were to save her, time was short.

 

At night, I do one of two things. Either I dream that I walk the corridors of the past, seizing records and volumes to create a random history of a random subject: or, unable to sleep, I do so for real. I like it in the midpoint of the night, where fatigue engulfs me so completely that I can no longer distinguish between the two states. Then I read documents and diaries, unsure if they are real deposits or subconscious inventions. In the morning, I am faced with knowledge that may not be real, and when one lives one’s life surrounded by the facts of humanity, it is a holiday to leap into ambiguity.

But tonight I was busy. I had met Neutske this morning, and after guarded greetings he had told me that he would be out of my hands soon. I needed to know what he was up to.

Of course, Neutske’s studies were being stored in a database which he was helpless to prevent. Every item that he removed from the shelves, even only for a second, was recorded and inserted in this database. From this, our computers were able to make suggestions about which other records might help him. Neutske had turned this option off, but he had not prevented the compilation of the database.

I was therefore able to spy on him with ease. Some of his studies were random - he was unable to stop himself from browsing through our collections out of interest, even where it wasn’t relevant. But his real research was easy to find. The Professor had inspected every instance of miscellany on the station, and was busy cataloguing them all. I snorted at this - where was the sense of bringing order to something that was disordered by definition?  But then I saw what else he had been doing. He was virtually camped in the history of History, and had looked at almost every item in the section on security. This would not help him - there were no clues to the index’s location there. But his research here had stopped four days ago.

Since then, he had concerned himself with one set of records only - the reports on how I had seized control of the station when we lost Callisto.

It was four o’clock, the time when I had difficulty distinguishing reality. And yet, I saw, Neutske was still working. Some project had kept him up into the night. And then I swore out loud when I saw what he was doing, and I ran to the history of History, not even stopping to check if my weapon was charged.

 

I tried to burst through the door, but I am not a man of action, and fumbled it. Neutske was waiting for me when I finally entered, pointing a weapon of his own.

“Stop the program,” I shouted, aiming at him. Guns were not standard equipment for Historians, but I had confiscated it from a crazed Nazi researcher, and suspected I’d need it sooner or later.

“I’m probably the better shot,” he shrugged, although I could see he was nervous. “Besides, you might damage some of the acquisitions.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Yes,” he said. “Report me to the Home Secretary.”

“You will be filed with the others.”

His hand was steadier than mine, I saw. “Don’t make me shoot,” he said. “I have nothing but respect and admiration for you. Which has grown, by the way, since I found out where the index was.”

I said nothing, knowing that we were nearing the point where I would have to kill him.

“It was actually coded into the collection itself, in compressed form of course,” he said. “Every section of this station is arranged in such a way as to form an index of another section. That’s why you’re so scared of miscellany. Every instance not only disorders a room, but damages another section of the index.”

“Stop the program,” I said.

“But now I’ve found your code, I can compile the index, or rather tell your computer to do it. And no, I won’t stop it. Now I have the index, I’ll soon have the beings. I’ll be able to cure miscellany. So, Curator, what are you going to do?”

I knew that I would have to shoot, and I also knew that Neutske was right, that I would probably miss, and he wouldn’t. This was probably the last act of my life, and it would be a failure.

Neutske saw in my eyes what I was about to do. He looked saddened. “No hard feelings, Curator?”

The alarm went off. Neutske looked immediately at the computer, and I knew that a better man would have disarmed him while he was distracted.

“It’s starting!” he shouted. “There’s a miscellany!”

“But it’s not here,” I said, puzzled. I walked to the terminal and typed in a few keys, still pointing my gun unconvincingly at his chest. The Professor watched me closely, but I was too busy to bother with our stand-off.

“It’s in your quarters, Professor. Your own room is becoming misfiled. Now, what do you have in your quarters that might interest a dataphage?  A spare index, hidden under the mattress -”

We both realised at the same time. “An index of miscellanea,” he said. “I catalogued it all. But the miscellanea isn’t real information - it’s just their waste.”

“But the catalogue is a real document,” I said.

And then our duel was forgotten as we raced through the door.

 

We were close to his quarters, only two blocks away and as many levels below. The Professor leapt on a bike before I could get to it and sped away, leaving me to chase him on foot. By the time I arrived he was crouching in front of his room, staring at the door in indecision. I reached for the handle, but he stopped me.

“You have no way of knowing what’s in there,” he said.

“I need to find out,” I said.

“What if the same thing happens to you that happened to Callisto?”

I looked at him in disgust, and pulled the door open.

Slowly I walked in. The volumes of the index were lying on the floor, opened, creased, torn. Already I guessed that half of them were missing, food for the creature sprawled on the floor, feasting.

That creature was Callisto. A look more approaching harmony was on her face, and she looked less skeletal, more fleshy. She was no longer the Callisto that I knew, and was probably not even human.

“What are you doing?” I breathed. She paused, pages of index hanging from her mouth. Slowly it fell, and landed in her lap.

She smiled. Then she opened her mouth.

As I stared at her, I realised that there was a much more appealing document in the room than the fake index. There was a record of a whole lifetime. In this document, there was knowledge that could fill a whole space station. More, there were secondary records, rememberings of items that lay scattered throughout the whole of History.

This document contained the next best thing to the index, I realised. This document had an intuitive grasp of the whole layout of the station, and without knowing why, could guess the location of anything. It could even remember seeing the real index.

She opened her mouth wider. At first it was only inches wide. Then it grew until it was larger than her face, her body even. In front of me all I could see was the black void that was enclosed by Callisto’s lips.

And in one gulp, she swallowed me.

 

When I woke, I was misfiled. And hungry.

I had no business being where I was, in archaeological reports on the Palaeolithic. I picked one up. It looked dull but filling. I nibbled one corner. I could keep it down, I decided, and ate several.

But it would not satisfy me on its own, I knew. Only one thing could do that.

Moving quickly, I aimed for the centre of the station. Before I knew it, I was in the middle of an archive of Beatles concert recordings. It seemed to be the wrong direction, and yet in a crazy way I knew I was homing in on my goal.

I knew this station back to front. I knew where I was going, and I may yet have access. Callisto’s mistake had been to act too slowly. When she’d first gone miscellaneous, I had been able to seize control of the station before she had attained her goal. Now, I knew, the Professor would be doing likewise, utterly aware of what had happened, and how urgent was the situation.

In no time, I was devouring Lyndon B Johnson’s official correspondence. I could see the pattern of History’s layout before me, the logic of how the documents were filed, and as I turned the Presidential records into disorder, my hunger grew.

Without being aware of the change, I realised that I had again moved to another part of the station, and my heart soared when I identified the taste of what I was eating. It was Jan Marie Neutske’s account of the robbery he had witnessed when he was seven. I savoured every morsel of it. The boy had been terrified, but determined to please the police officers. I destroyed these facts, and saw that I had turned them into a peace treaty that had never been signed.

I was close now, I knew. Everything I had eaten only increased my need for more. I had to reach the index before Neutske blocked my access. I began to salivate at the very thought of it. Each entry was like a ripe fruit, full of flavour and goodness.

And it’s not as if I needed the whole index. I wasn’t greedy.

I would share it with Callisto.

Neil James Hudson is a UK writer who lives in the middle of nowhere and works in a charity shop.  He studies Latin and Greek for no reason and has too many cats.  He is possibly about to write a novel based on the ideas in "The History Eaters".  You can read more about him on http://www.neilhudson.livejournal.com.