M Fnord Wrote:The thoughts behind the gate network... well, there were a couple reasons for doing it.
First of all, I wanted to spread some deeper weirdness and mysteries into the Fenspace galaxy. The Gatebuilders were always going to be just the beginning of it; I had an incomplete (& honestly awful) piece about a gate expedition coming across a wrecked Byzantine starship somewhere in the further-flung reaches of the network, which would then serve as a lead-in to one of the crazier bits of lore I was hoping to use.
Second, I wanted to give the writers the opportunity to get out of the solar system and go somewhere they wanted to go. Clearly the frontier-as-developed, which interesting in a worldbuilding sense just doesn't generate stories the same way that running across, oh I don't know, let's say Westeros in the gate network would. If nobody wants to go write about Little-House-On-The-Prairie shit in the Alpha Centauri system well fine, we can background that and set up a way for troubleshooters to go shoot trouble elsewhere in the galaxy.
But apparently I misjudged. So, yeah, um, sorry.
Well, like I said, it could still partially be salvaged if you immediately limited it off again like I suggested, which would deepen the mystery in a non-Lost way. Would the gate system be shutting the fen out from most of those gates because they think the fen are hackers? Or is it because the gatebuilders are going Clint Eastwood and telling us to get off their lawn? Or is it a prime directive flavor? Is it even an intelligence instead of a really smart dumb computer making judgement calls? I was going to suggest leaving one or two gates open because the system is trying to get us to retreat the remaining researchers across (because whatever locked the fen back out doesn't want us trying to throw super-AIs at it to break the network?) and lets the guys on the other side call up a gate connection that people from our side exploit to send more through. And maybe shunting the fen towards the squiddies as a time-buying measure (or so the theories go).
If you're wanting more frontier stories, there kind of needs to be more people Up in order to generate the pressures to go Out. Or maybe some kind of crazy Pandora-world where a lot of Boskonians ran to after they got their pants and socks knocked off by the combined military operations.
It could still work, it just needs to be thought out more.
If you're wanting more frontier stories, there kind of needs to be more people Up in order to generate the pressures to go Out. Or maybe some kind of crazy Pandora-world where a lot of Boskonians ran to after they got their pants and socks knocked off by the combined military operations.
It could still work, it just needs to be thought out more.