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[Wild Idea] Should we sneak Fenspace into "Infinite Worlds" through the back door?
02-02-2010, 04:20 AM
Blue-sky wild-idea time here... Pyramid Magazine has a http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/wishlist.html, describing what themes they want to devote issues to. One of those themes is "Infinite Worlds". I recall Mal thinking it would be cool if Fenspace actually became Gernsback-2. I've already introduced http://www.fenspace.net/index.php5?title=Maico_Tange who can easily be retconned into being an Infinity agent-in-place.
Here's the wild idea: Write up Maico as an example Infinity agent-in-place, presenting enough of Gernsback-2 in her background to establish it in Infinite Worlds canon.
If I was to write her up as an agent-in-place, would anybody mind at all if I submitted her writeup, with appropriate notes, for publication? Any veto kills the project.
If this is okay... I'd have to file off the setting's accumulated trademarks and copyrights, which will be trivial in some cases (e.g. the Soviet Air Force can remain as-is, save for renaming Sora and GlaDOS), relatively easy in others (e.g. Stellvia becomes "Stella Via" and gets a major crew renaming), and rather difficult in a few cases (e.g. the Trekkies, Warsies, and Wizards probably won't be mentioned as individual factions, and Haruhi has to go hide in a deep, dark hole). More importantly, I'd also have to make the time to actually write the article.
Thoughts? Complaints? Suggestions? Anybody sufficiently opposed to this to save me from my folly... er, kill the project?
--
Rob Kelk
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them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
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Save you? Fuck, I'm tempted to join you!
More serious? Right.
The one thing I would insist on is that we all get some sort of credit attributed in the final article. I'm not asking for a cut of the royalties or anything - you're doing the heavy lifting here, so to the victor go the spoils - but I want there to be something. Even if it's just a footnote, there needs to be a "Based on the shared-world project (link to the wiki here would be nice) created by Sean Breen, Rob Kelk, Bob Schroeck, etc. The Collective must stand together!
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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That's one reason why I said "any veto kills the project". If I'm doing this, I fully intend to raid the entire FenWiki for ideas that get buried in a single sentence, so anybody's work might show up in the article. And I'm a big believer in attribution of sources.
--
Rob Kelk
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Captain Corcoran, the Pinafore, the Dobbses, and the Main AI, Buttercup are based off of Public Domain sources anyway, and they and de Leon are free to use under an attribution Creative Commons. You might have to spell our bottled city as "Candor" though. Hotel Bradbury might be a fun bit of setup though... Hmmm.
Don't forget some space ship called the "Kelvin 506" or similar. 
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them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
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I've got no objections.
--
...computers *still* are profoundly brittle and stupid,
they are simply vastly more subtle in their stupidity and
brittleness. (Bruce Sterling, "The Hacker Crackdown)
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Do it. They have a huge word budget left for Infinite Worlds, which gives a lot of room to work in.
You are welcome to use the Corners, although we should probably change the names of the folk therein.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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"Marsden" isn't my real name anyway; and Rei is the only copyrighted character to have made a significant appearance in any Rockhounds stuff. (There are a few in Carcharadon Megalodontis, though.) Most of what I've built off of from there is more 'in the spirit of' than directly importing bits.
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I hate to be a spoilsport, but how much of Fenspace will actually exist in this after trimming the obvious copyrighted sources?
On a more technical note, how much leeway would the people here think we'd get if when describing Gernsback-2 something like the following was mentioned:
"Through accident, design, or both, several in Fenspace have used Handwavium to acquire certain physical resemblances to various fictional characters. Any resemblances to personality that follow on may be construed as them acting the part (or it may not, Handwavium being as unpredictable as it is). This is especially true of the various inducted sapients in Fenspace."
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Quote:I hate to be a spoilsport, but how much of Fenspace will actually exist in this after trimming the obvious copyrighted sources?
Quite a bit, I hope. Especially since we don't have to trim the public-domain stuff, so Helium gets to show up almost intact. (The Lensmen might get to play, too. SJGames does or did have a licence for that series, after all.)
But, yes, this will be a case of "based on an original story". I'll aim at Adaptation Distillation, not Adaptation Decay or Adaptation Expansion.
Quote:On a more technical note, how much leeway would the people here think we'd get if when describing Gernsback-2 something like the following was mentioned:
"Through accident, design, or both, several in Fenspace have used Handwavium to acquire certain physical resemblances to various fictional characters. Any resemblances to personality that follow on may be construed as them acting the part (or it may not, Handwavium being as unpredictable as it is). This is especially true of the various inducted sapients in Fenspace."
I think that should be good enough, as long as we don't actually name any of the characters.
--
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We need to find a way to encourage the "These are science fiction fans" vibe so it doesn't just come across as a Gernsback/Transhuman Space crossover/fusion.
Oblique references to, say, a LARGE SPHERICAL construction that at first glance is mistaken for a moon or various other "obvious but legal" references.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
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There are good ways and bad ways to mention various fandoms without being obvious about it. Mentioning Miranda's sixty-month mission to explore strange worlds should identify it as a Trekkie ship without actually invoking Roddenberry's ghost, for example.
Likewise, the Potterites are going to become "modern-magic" fans. J.k. Rowling doesn't have a monopoly on the concept, as Charles de Lint could attest.
Obviously, I'm not writing this article today, or even this week. I'll have a (short) while to come up with something...
--
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Go ahead and use the Roughriders. You'll have to give Fenspace!Ben a new name, but I imagine that the rest of it will fly quite well with a few appropriate changes.
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Since I'm too ill to go to work, I've spent the morning jotting a few things down in a work file... including an opening vignette.
Quote:"... and since I'm not an artist, I used a liberal application of wondergoop to bridge the Uncanny Valley and make my executive assistant look completely human - or at least as human as a ten-inch-tall android can look."
As the android in question smiled and bowed, the reporter raised an eyebrow. "Wondergoop?"
Mr. Scott grinned. "I know that nobody else uses that term any more, Ms. Tange, but I still like it better than 'handwavium.'"
"Yes, of course," Maico replied, while mentally cursing the briefing officers back on Homeline who hadn't told her that the substance Paralabs most wanted from this timeline had more than one name. If Stella Via's owner hadn't misunderstood her question, her cover might have been blown then and there.
And some footer text:
Quote:Gernsback-2 is based on Fenspace, a shared world created by Sean Breen and described at http://www.fenspace.net/ This adaptation of Fenspace to Gernsback-2 was authorized – and encouraged – by Sean Breen.
Quote:The Fenspace Collective includes Sean Breen, Rob Kelk, Robert M. Schroeck, Brian Webb, Logan Goodhue, Ben Rhodes, and many others. Any of these writers' work included in this article are used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
--
Rob Kelk
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*snrk* Yeah, that's classic Infinity right there.
And it occurs to me, just to make life *that* much more interesting, we ought to come up with Maico's counterpart from Centrum. I can see the two of them in a bar somewhere complaining about their respective Home Offices.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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Make her try to fit in as a Whovian or a Trekkie, given Centrum's "ENGLISH ONLY!" global society. She might come across as a little strange for NOT having random "fangirl Japanese" in her speech.
There IS however, the potential for there to be no Centrum operative [Due to Gernsbeck-2's quantum level] and instead a Reich-5 Refugee/Mule-jumper/Advance scout...
*shudder* the ONLY thing to be worse than a Boskone or even a Turnerite... Space Nazi. >
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I'm thinking that Gernsback-2 should be on Q6. Other than handwavium, it's pretty straight, and normal physics does work there. And I like the old-style one-front Infinity War.
As for the Centran, I'm thinking Trekkie. Probably "Vulcan", because of their "rational" worldview, but often getting it wrong... That's assuming I have room to describe the Centran agent-in-place, of course.
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*kerbump*
Was thinking about this t'other day; any forward progress?
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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I took two days off work to write... and ended up rebuilding my PC instead.
I begin to think the universe won't let me write to a deadline.
Anybody else want the project? All I've got written down so far is what's in this thread, although that text is in a SJGames submission template.
Edit: And, no, I haven't submitted a query letter yet. If things went the way they did go, then Pyramid wouldn't be expecting my article; and if I actually managed to write the article and they don't want it, it could go into the FenWiki.
--
Rob Kelk
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the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
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robkelk Wrote:Since I'm too ill to go to work, I've spent the morning jotting a few things down in a work file... including an opening vignette.
Quote:"... and since I'm not an artist, I used a liberal application of wondergoop to bridge the Uncanny Valley and make my executive assistant look completely human - or at least as human as a ten-inch-tall android can look."
As the android in question smiled and bowed, the reporter raised an eyebrow. "Wondergoop?"
Mr. Scott grinned. "I know that nobody else uses that term any more, Ms. Tange, but I still like it better than 'handwavium.'"
"Yes, of course," Maico replied, while mentally cursing the briefing officers back on Homeline who hadn't told her that the substance Paralabs most wanted from this timeline had more than one name. If Stella Via's owner hadn't misunderstood her question, her cover might have been blown then and there.
This was too good a bit not to use somewhere... http://www.fenspace.net/index.php5?titl ... ing_stats)]so I've statted up Maico as an Infinity Penetration Service agent-in-place.
Edit: I just noticed that I posted stats for a conspiracy agent on 23/5. Fnord. (not Mal.)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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