Rewilding History is a creative writing practice that treats the past as a living habitat rather than a sealed museum case. We step into a historical moment the way you step into a forest: alert, humble, and ready to be surprised by what you do not control.
The aim is not to “roleplay accuracy” or to cosplay nostalgia, but to restore the messy biodiversity of human experience that gets flattened into timelines, summaries, and famous quotes.
The basic move is simple: imagine what it was like to be a specific historical character, then write from inside that life. But we do it with a discipline that borrows from “hard” genres. If hard science fiction respects physics.
Rewilding History respects the constraints of the archive: geography, climate, food, disease, class, gender norms, available tools, communications speed, and what could plausibly be known on that day. The arrow of time is reversed: we are not forecasting futures from the present, we are forecasting presents from the past, without smuggling in modern knowledge as secret superpowers.
# A Guide to History
A Guide in this method is not a biography and not a novel. It is a bundle of first-person accounts written by many individual authors, each account trying to be a credible “field report” from within one life.
These reports are collected as Perspective layers that orbit a living Core, while a separate outer ring of Hard History holds the contested “hard” material: transcripts, court records, dates, places, and primary sources, each forked from its counterpart in the Anarchive.
Unlike normal historical method, which often collapses evidence and interpretation into a single authoritative voice, Rewilding History keeps the rings visibly distinct and navigable: you can jump from an empathetic scene outwards to the contested fact it leans on, and from any fact inwards to multiple plausible lived readings. The reader moves deliberately between what can be pointed to and argued over, and what can only be inhabited with care.
This is how Rewilding History becomes the hard science fiction of the past. In hard SF, you get wonder by obeying constraints and then pushing them creatively. Here, you get wonder by obeying the past. The constraints are not a cage, they are a power source. You discover drama in the slowness of information, the tyranny of weather, the friction of travel, the social risk of speaking out of turn, the strange intimacy of handwriting, the cost of candles, the meaning of shoes, the smell of streets, the politics of bread.
# Chorus A practical collection can be structured like a documentary with a chorus. Each character gets a Facts page and a set of Perspectives pages, each written by a different author. The editorial craft is in arrangement: not “which version is correct”, but “which sequence of voices reveals the richest truth”. Contradictions are allowed when they are plausible differences of perception, while contradictions become contestations with regard to fact. The reader sees how a single moment can hold multiple realities, like light through leaves.
A Guide Writer in this practice is both storyteller and historian’s apprentice. They do enough research to build a believable constraint system, then they write as if they have no Wikipedia tab open, no hindsight, and no guarantee that tomorrow will make sense. They aim for lived specificity: not “the French Revolution”, but the taste of cheap wine, the ache of a tooth, the fear of a knock on the door, the sound of a crowd turning.
A Field Researcher supports the Guide by gathering the raw ingredients: primary sources, local maps, period slang, diaries, court records, shipping manifests, weather reports, prices, and the ordinary objects a person would touch daily. The goal is not to drown the writing in detail, but to give it a soil that can actually grow something.
Rewilding History is also a social art. Because the accounts are written by many authors, the collection becomes a community memory experiment: we discover how different minds inhabit the same constraint space, what patterns repeat, and what blind spots persist. Over time, the project builds a library of characters-as-ecosystems, where each new Perspective is a new species in the habitat.
In a Hitchhiker spirit, the tone can be playful without becoming careless. Comedy is historically plausible. People joked, flirted, complained, and made petty decisions inside world-historical events. The method simply insists that the jokes be period-possible, and that the playfulness does not erase the stakes. Rewilding is not romanticising. It is restoring complexity.
# See - Living History - Guide, Guide Writer and Field Researcher - Perspective and Facts - Hard Science Fiction - Historical Method and Primary Source - Rewilding Doc Holliday