Quote: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.Actually, I think that the Boskone war was a good idea.
Sure, there are elements that might not really make sense, but it creates relatively straightforward good guy against the bad guys direct conflict. It's the darker part of the playground, to be sure, but it's hard to have a hero without a villain sometimes.
Plus, it helped establish a core 'law' to fenspace. Sure, you had the Convention before that, but this was a concentrated effort by everyone to enforce law and order across the setting. A centralized effort to stamp out piracy, of the rape and pillage variety.
If we could go back and do it again, we'd definitely do things differently. But, that's the nature of hindsight.
Anyway, onto the whole 'dystopia' topic.
I'm with Dartz on this one. Fenspace can have dark moments and violence. It's when we take pages out of 40K that we start having serious problems. Grimderp is, as the name implies, kinda derpy. Fenspace, while entirely capable of derp, at least tries to avoid the grim.
It's a neat place, where sci-fi finds the magic balance between power level number crunching and 'oooh, shiny'.
I am not nearly as smart as I like to act most days, but Fenspace at least broadens my imagination and makes me speculate. Sure, there are explanations about programming that I don't get, but Dartz's stuff has honestly made wonder more about what having cybernetic technology really means than any thing else I've ever read. It can be dark and eery, but then we have a story about breaking the land motorcycle speed record. Again, bits went over my head, but it's a hell of a ride.
To reiterate an almost forgotten point, violence isn't dystopic.
And I'm not just saying this because one of my only story ideas is centered around a single parent raising a child.