robkelk Wrote:in short, they're not really in conformance with the Genre Directive ("This is not a dystopia"). They're too heavy on the violence.
I think part of the problem here is your take on the Genre Directive is different from my take, or the intent behind setting up the directive in the first place.
The Genre Directive, when I first wrote it and how I've applied it, was a preemptive strike against grimderp. The general tone of cynicism and misanthropy in science fiction, particularly in American science fiction, is something I have strong opinions about and it's something I didn't want to infiltrate Fenspace as a project - because I knew, eventually, it would happen. And it did, and we dealt with it and it went away. The Genre Directive is our shield against some smug nerd waltzing in here and saying "heh, you silly babies don't realize that X is impossible because people suck and life on Earth would be extinguished in six weeks if it happened."
That said, the Genre Directive is not and shouldn't be a shield against conflict. We're not building a dystopia, but at the same time we're not building a utopia either. Fenspace as a world was intended to be space opera and adventure fantasy. Think of it like Star Trek, the original unreconstructed stuff: for every episode where the crew solved things nonviolently, there was an episode where the solution required Kirk to punch a dude. Conflict is part of the genre, we can't just toss it aside.
Quote:Now, this may be a problem with how we decided to approach telling stories in fenspace at the very beginning. We set up a world where people who really wanted to go out into space and explore and colonize could do so, and the very first thing we did in this not-a-dystopia was have a war. Oops.
The Boskone War was a bad decision, or a series of bad decisions made worse by the fact that I was completely unprepared for how Fenspace took off and didn't for the life of me have a plot to actually hang off the original enigmatic email from Haruhi. The war was a bad thing yes, not because dystopia but because shitty editorial decisions. Same goes for South is Rising, really, which is why that one's pretty much died on the vine.
(Regrets? Oh you bet your ass I have regrets...)
Quote:It's too late to change that,
It's not, really. It would be utter madness to do, involving scrapping 90% of everything and starting as fresh as possible, but it's not too late. It's never too late to change things. But that's a discussion that's better suited for off the forum.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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