Hi all. Behind on updates again, but just wanted to get in a quick update. More posts coming soon, including a Smeagol update -- he has a vet re-visit next Saturday. Overall, he's doing much better -- more details soon. :) Much travel ahead... NYC this weekend, Seattle next month (for LOGIN Conference, where erikbethke and I will be discussing BetterEULA's second year), NYC again in June for State of Play, TNEO in July, and of course many trips to LA in between... I've given up updating my Dopplr account.

So, writing stuff!

Here are some links:

• "Stormchaser, Stormshaper", in today's issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies
  
  
• "No Signal" and "Bag Man" in issue 10 of Farrago's Wainscot.

In Beneath Ceaseless Skies, also check out Marie Brennan's "Driftwood", and, if so inclined, her wonderful post about the magazine on her LJ. If podcasts are your thing, also check out the mag's audio fiction.

In Farrago's Wainscot, also check out other great stories by Bruce Boston & Lee Ballentine, Toiya Kristen Finley, Jason Fischer, Jason Heller, S. J. Hirons, and Matthew Kressel, poetry by Miranda Gaw, and a very interesting experimental word piece by Jeffrey Barnes.

Go forth and read!

I finally recovered, somewhat the worse for wear, my copy of Jan Morris’ Last Letters from Hav. I got to finish the last twenty pages, and now I get to talk about how Morris uses dialogue.

Like I said in that other post, the object is to understand how dialogue is used in fiction not driven exclusively by plot and character.

Letters from Hav is a travel narrative about a fictional city located somewhere along the south Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor. My edition includes a two-page spread of kickass high fantasy style maps of the city. In terms of content, I would say the book is about 80% worldbuilding, 15% character, 5% plot. Stylistically, it is beautiful, deceptively simple. Here’s the opening:

I did what Tolstoy did, and jumped out of the train when it stopped in the evening at the old frontier. Far up at the front the engine desultorily gasped, and wan faces watched me through crusted windows as I walked all alone down the platform to the gate. There was no pony trap awaiting me of course (Tolstoy’s reminded him sadly of picnics at Yasnaya Polyana), but a smart enough green Fiat stood in the station yard, a young man in sunglasses and a blue blazer beckoned me from the wheel, and in no time we were off along the rutted track towards the ridge.

Characterwise, we get the slightly fictionalized, nearly-transparent POV of Morris herself, functioning, as in the best travel writing, largely as a vessel for the eye. Gradually one acquires the impression of a quiet escapist struggling to drown her own questions of identity and self through immersion in alien experience. She rarely speaks except to ask questions; often she will opt to narrate her own part in a conversation while delivering explicitly the dialogue of others. This emphasizes that the focus is meant to be on the city and its inhabitants, rather than on herself–without every quite managing to divert us from the fact that there is no such place as Hav, allowing us, through implication, to come eventually to an understanding of the city as a metaphor for Morris herself.

The denizens of Hav, in their mode of speech and purpose, fall into three categories: outspoken intellectuals, opinionated, idle people in positions of power, and those of the working class. From the working class people we get the flavor of the dialect. Morris is referred to almost universally as “Dirleddy”–a mashing-together of “Dear lady”. These characters appear fleetingly, often in crowds, and speak briefly and to the point–often with jocular good humor.

I wore my toweling hat from Australia to go to the Serai. “Başinda kavak yelleri esiyor,” a passer-by said without pausing, which being translated from the Turkish means “There is the springtime in your hat!”

Both the intellectuals and people in power are prone to long, not-very-plausible speeches relating anecdotes about Hav’s history, politics and culture. Hav has a complicated history of colonization and occupation by many of the world’s military powers: Ottoman, French, British, German, Russian. Each culture maintains a presence in modern Hav, and each is represented by at least one eloquent mouthpiece. In this way, Morris creates an impression of overwhelming diversity and cultural complexity contained within one city. As I’ve said, some of these diatribes are long and not very believable as anything an individual could spontaneously rattle off—even from an intellectual or politician. She does make an effort to break them up with narration, granting some impression of a more spontaneous, realistic conversation recounted from notes. But it’s certainly not the kind of dialogue that would generally be considered “good” from the perspective of ye plot-oriented genre writer. But it’s not like all these people are just convenient mouthpieces for info dumps either: every one of them has a discernible agenda to get across and a personality that shows through in the details they choose to provide. On the other hand, the style of speech doesn’t actually change much from diatribe to diatribe. Intellectuals can be distinguished from political figures in that they’re more willing to break from formality and more open about inserting their opinions into the story they’re telling. Other than that, sentence structure and delivery remain surprisingly consistent among representatives of the three categories. And yet somehow it works.

Coffee arrived, flavored with camomile, together with biscuits on little scallop-edged plates, and the Caliph asked if I would like to see something of the house.

“You know its history, I dare say? Count Kolchok built it for his mistress, the dancer Olga Naratlova, who came to Hav with Diaghilev. Everything was taken from the house when Kolchok died, but I have had her portrait painted in memoriam“—and he showed me on the wall above our sofa a large and sickly representation, doubtless taken from a photograph, of a dark turn-of-the-century beuaty, full length, leaning in a dress of satiny red against a truncated column.

“What became of her?”

“Ah, you must ask the Bolsheviks. She went home to Russia in 1918, and was never heard of again.”

Poor Olga. She sounds a lonely figure, hidden away here in such secluded luxury, and she is lonely still, for hers is the only portrait in the whole of the Caliph’s house—”and just think what the Ikhwan would say, if they knew I had her!”

Well, I meant to write something today about Jan Morris’ Last Letters from Hav, which is a phenomenal book with a strange and challenging structure that holds all kinds of lessons for somebody like me who would absolutely love to sell fiction on the merits of weirdness and style alone. But, big turkey that I am, I took the book with me to Boston this weekend and forgot it somewhere, so cannot accurately quote examples.

Instead I thought I would just try laying out the bones of the argument I would have tried to make.

This year’s Never-Ending Odyssey workshop master class focused on dialogue. I consider myself not so hot at dialogue, so was looking forward to an opportunity to learn why and what I could do about it. But as lecture after lecture rolled off me like water off a duck, I began to realize that part of what makes me do poorly at dialogue is that I don’t enjoy writing it, and maybe what stops me from enjoying it is the fact that good dialogue, at least in the sense that it was being taught here (by genre writers, for genre writers) doesn’t serve the same purposes in the kind of stories I like to write (those with atypical structure and nontraditional plot).

I came home from TNEO with the idea of looking through great examples of the kinds of fiction I do like to write and figuring out where and how their use of dialogue diverges from, say, the snappy repartee of a Raymond Chandler detective, and where (if at all) it follows the same rules. Last Letters from Hav would have made a great case study (and still will if I can figure out where my copy went), because not only does it lack a traditional plot structure, but it’s designed not to read like a work of fiction at all. It’s fiction masquerading as nonfiction. So its characters aren’t required to further any plot, but rather are expected to act like real people: random, arbitrary, at times even dull, driven by their own purposes rather than the author’s, yet in reality just as constructed and unreal. Especially since one of Morris’ strengths is the style of her prose, so in order for us to believe Letters from Hav as a continuation of her actual nonfiction writings, we have to experience the “real” residents of Hav as filtered through the author’s erudition and wry commentary.

Which, of course, I can’t really do, because I haven’t got the book.

But the idea is to do a similar thing with a variety of atypical fiction. Borges and Lucius Shepard immediately come to mind, but I’ll throw in any other idea/theme-driven (rather than plot-driven) prose stylists I can come up with. Poe? Ray Bradbury? Vonnegut? Ken Kesey? Umberto Eco possibly. Maybe even Dostoevsky.

Obviously this is going to be a long-term undertaking.

These were the rites of morning by a low concrete
parapet under the copper spears of the palms,
since men sought fame as centaurs, or with their own feet,

or wrestlers circling with pincer-extended arms,
or oblong silhouettes racing round a white vase
of scalloped sand, when a boy on a pounding horse

divided the wrestlers with their lowering claws
like crabs. As in your day, so with ours, Omeros,
as it is with islands and men, so with our games.

A horse is skittering spray with rope for its rein.
Only silhouettes last. No one remembers the names
of foam-sprinters. Time halts the arc of a javelin.

—Derek Walcott, Omeros

Another brief, sublime sojourn in my chaotic odyssey through modern epic poetry in English. Derek Walcott is a Caribbean author born in St. Lucia, who now apparently teaches writing at Boston University. Omeros is a novel-length epic about two fishermen, Hector and Achille, whose friendship is broken over a woman, Helen. It has inspired me to no end. Not only does its verse follow a fairly strict meter, it adheres to this three-line structure throughout, and even actually rhymes not infrequently, yet without coming across as singsongy or stilted. It’s certainly the most unpretentious and accessible epic poem I’ve ever encountered. And it was published, I was surprised to discover, in 1990—long after the advent of the contemporary poetic taboo on metrical rigidity and rhyme, at least as I understood it. I am constantly amazed at the mileage he gets, in terms of variety and stylistic weight, out of little innovations in rhythm. The shortening of “Achilles” to “Achille”, for example. Or the way he interchanges the words “canoe” and “pirogue” to put the accent where it needs to be in a sentence. Often he will seamlessly digress into French or Caribbean patois for a line or a word, conveying both a rich sense of this cobbled-together post-colonial culture and a lesson in the versatility of verse. There’s still a certain amount of overhead, which I encounter whenever I read poetry, where I have to re-learn how to read both for meaning and sound—but in most cases, I end up having to reread at least once in order to get both senses. Here, I can actually do both at once. Which isn’t to say I haven’t been going back to reread—but I’m doing it out of desire rather than necessity.

The other astonishing thing is the way the influences of these disparate cultures combine to make the epic form feel new—and to make it applicable and relevant to events in the lives of a couple of poor, modern-day fishermen. At one point (which I’m not going to be able to find now) he compares a tropical storm to a fete thrown by the gods, invoking Zeus and Ogun in the same sentence. He equates the waning influence of the British empire with that of Rome, the exoticism of tourists with history’s reification of flawed human beings to the status of heroes. Hector ferries tourists around the island in a beat-up nine-passenger van with leopard-print seat covers, and somehow it feels completely natural for us to be reading about it in free verse.

I got onto this epic poetry kick because I was trying to write some of my own, and looking only at translations of Ovid and Sophocles and Homer wasn’t helping. In the end I think it was Omeros that really convinced me I could do it.

Then, one by one, he lifted the beautiful conchs,
weighed each in his palm, considering the deep pain
of their silence, their palates arched like the sunrise,

delicate as vulvas when their petals open,
and as the fisherman drowned them he closed his eyes,
because they sank to the sand without any cries

from their parted, bubbling mouths. They were not his
property any more than Helen’s, but the sea’s.
The thought was noble. It did not bring him any peace.

I couldn’t resist sharing a little bit more of Miguel Ángel Asturias’ The President, which, yes, I am still reading after all this time, partly because of all the TNEO crits piling up on the floor around my desk, but mostly because of the astonishing, cerebellum-like convolutions of the novel’s structure, characters and prose. Each chapter is a unit unto itself, more often than not with its own point-of-view character and its own unique conceit. I have been restricting myself to a chapter a night, often flipping back for multiple re-readings.

The following nocturne comes as a married couple, newly wedded almost by coercion and as a result facing political disfavor and the immanent threat of execution, settle into separate beds in separate rooms and try desperately to sleep:

The moon went in and out of floating niches in the clouds. The road flowed like a river of white bones under bridges of shadow. Now and again everything grew indistinct, with the patina of some old religious relic, only to reappear brightened with gold thread. A vast black eyelid intervened, and cut off this vision seen through flickering eyelids. Its enormous lashes seemed to come from the highest of the volcanoes and spread like a huge spider over the skeleton of the town, plunging it in mourning shadow. The dogs shook their ears like door-knockers, night birds flew through the sky, a moan passed from cypress to cypress and there was a sound of clocks being wound and set. The moon disappeared completely behind the tall summit of a crater and a mist like a bride’s veil came to rest among the houses. Angel Face shut the window.

Asturias spends the first half of the novel establishing his namesake character, Miguel Angel Face, as a left-hand-of-God figure, the eponymous dictator’s personal equivalent to an Archangel Gabriel: beautiful, frigid, fickle and cruel. But by the point of the above excerpt (nearing the end), we see him transformed, a half-redeemed and now entirely sympathetic antihero, more akin to Milton’s Satan. In an astonishing and damning feat of postmodernist cheek, Asturias has written himself into a scathing criticism of a dictatorial government which he himself had served and would continue to serve in the future. He finished El Señor Presidente in 1933, but because of the reigning political climate in Guatemala and his personal implication, it wasn’t published until 1946.

I’ve been thinking of Asturias lately as the originator of the magic realist genre, though, like most originators, he doesn’t actually fit into that genre himself. He was apparently the first to apply the term to fiction (rather than to art), but his own writing is far bleaker, less romantic, less accessible, and more abstract than the flagship works of magic realism’s current market share. All of which tendencies I find myself tempted to strive for in my own writing.

I notice a lot of contemporary writers—Lucius Shepard (in this Strange Horizons interview), Angelica Gorodischer (this interview at Fantastic Metropolis), Alberto Fuguet ((in an essay at Salon.com)—trying deliberately to extricate themselves from the entangling spines of the magic realist umbrella, even as more crossover titles with magic realist leanings (The Shadow of the Wind, Murakami) keep popping up in the bestseller lists. The term having been appropriated and standardized by the publishing industry, I think, deprives the style of some of its impact. Which shouldn’t really come as a surprise; it’s not like it hasn’t happened before, with everything from grunge to hip hop to the co-opting of Che Guevara iconography, etc. A year ago, the implication that nothing truly innovative or vibrant could be done anymore with magic realism would have and did piss me off to no end. Now, though, I have to admit I am coming around to the side of the scrappy heroes of the fringe. Not that I’m quite ready to abandon the term altogether. I still do get mildly annoyed when I see some new and bitter initiate of the ivory tower taking attention-begging potshots at magic realism as a whole rather than at any of the actual human beings who perpetrate it. But I do begin to think that Theodora Goss was doing me a favor when she lumped “The Utter Proximity of God” with the surrealists instead.

Which doesn’t exactly bring me back around to Asturias, except in that his authorial mindset and storytelling style were developed entirely out of the influence of the twenty-first century publishing conglomerate climate, but rather squarely under that of European surrealists like Paul Valéry. And so perhaps I do ok for myself by choosing to obsess about him instead of García Marquez for awhile.

‘Master,’ said the lion, looking at the boy with glowing eyes. ‘You who bear the emblem of the Childlike Empress, can you tell me this: Why must I always die at nightfall?’

‘So that Perilin, the Night Forest, can grow in the Desert of Colors,’ said Bastian.

‘Perilin?’ said the lion. ‘What’s that?’

Then Bastian told him about the miraculous jungle that consisted of living light. While Grograman listened in fascinated amazement, Bastian described the diversity and beauty of the glimmering phosphorescent plants, their silent, irresistible growth, their dream-like beauty and incredible size. His enthusiasm grew as he spoke and Grograman’s eyes glowed more and more brightly. ‘All that,’ Bastian concluded, ‘can happen only when you are turned to stone. But Perilin would swallow up everything else and stifle itself if it didn’t have to die and crumble into dust when you wake up. You and Perilin need each other.’

—Michael Ende, The Neverending Story

I visited Montreal for the first time this past weekend, on the event of my sister’s graduation. Had an enjoyable time drinking fine French Canadian beers, pretending to speak French and struggling valiantly to hold my own with idealistic, new-minted Canadian intellectuals. Also spent a fair amount of time wandering the streets presenting my country-boy fish-out-of-water colors to the absurdly thin and fashionable Quebecois in my unhip hick flannels and wool and silly aussie hat. It rained a lot. I stood under a lot of awnings in zen contemplation of clouds, hid out in bookstores (found a nice used copy of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler) and the Musee des Beaux Arts (viewed ghostly panoramic tintypes of the Bay of Havana, glorious hyperbolic propaganda posters of the Cuban revolution), stepped in a lot of puddles and got a lot of drenched. Like I said, an enjoyable time. But I am a simple man, and I have to admit, the best part of the weekend was last night at 11 after the long car ride home, standing in my garden with the stars and the seedlings and the dregs of a half-pint of homebrewed kolsch.

It’s the contrasts that make meaning.

Through the magnanimity of Ellen Datlow I received a copy of Inferno in the mail just before Christmas. As I told Ellen at the time, I was primarily interested in the book for thehollowbox, who had been chomping at the bit to get his hands on it for months. So it will be a less-than-surprising Christmas present, and as per the agreement on Ellen's blog, pre-read. ;)

I am not what you'd call an experienced reader of horror by any means, and I know that a lot of you who read my journal aren't, either. Some of this stuff is heavy, and I say that having read Gary Braunbeck's In Silent Graves (The Indifference of Heaven in the UK), and greatly enjoyed it, even though "enjoyed" always feels like a strange word to use with Gary's work. It is an intense ride through areas of the psyche that most reasonable people generally try to avoid.

So I came to Inferno trusting in The Datlow (which, after Salon Fantastique and SCIFICTION, I did) and that the book had received several glowing reviews and knowing not much else. The trust was worthwhile, and I concur with Publisher's Weekly that this is some of the best SF/F of the year, assuming that it is okay with you that a story make a transition into "fucked up beyond all reason", as several of these do.

I knew a handful of the names in the collection -- Lucius Shepard, Jeffrey Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, P. D. Cacek (one of our guest instructors at Odyssey), Pat Cadigan -- but only a handful. And I'm pleased to have read the collection if only to be introduced to so many other amazing writers. Shepard and Ford delivered as they tend to -- Shepard's "The Ease with Which We Freed the Beast" is carefully crafted and as vivid as it is unsettling, which is a difficult juxtaposition to achieve. But some of the most memorable stories out of the collection come from writers I'd never read before -- Nathan Ballingrad's "The Monsters of Heaven", Laird Barron's "The Forest" (this will not surprise justinhowe or thehollowbox, I'm sure -- I'd heard of Barron and wanted to read him but this was my first introduction), and Lee Thomas's "An Apiary of White Bees".

The writing here is just solid to the point of being instantaneously classic. I will pull, mostly at random, from Thomas's story, one of many passages in the collection that made me pause with appreciation:

Oliver didn't care much for the Cortland. It was a landmark, decorated with extravagance and taste, but without a single concession to warmth. His wife Amanda wanted it, so he bought it, and they lived here because she wanted that too, but it was hardly a home. A home should be filled with personal belongings and intimate, happy memories. And at least one person in that place should love you.

Simple, solid, and masterful -- like most of the stories in this collection. With the caveat that there are a couple of stories in the collection I have not yet read -- I've been mostly catching them late at night, trading reading for sleep during the pell-mell craziness of this particular holiday season (I am currently writing this from a hotel room in West Palm Beach, Florida -- my brother is getting married tomorrow) -- Pat Cadigan's "Stilled Life" stands apart from the rest for me. This certainly is no judgment of the quality of the other stories -- the nice thing about a well constructed anthology is that there will be, hopefully, something for everyone. And this one was something for me. But I also think that it is one of the finest stories I've read this year, and among the best short stories I've ever read. A study in friendship and the frantic way that we can attempt to escape the human condition, it is smart and funny and intense and beautiful and unnerving all at the same time. I am not, generally, a Cadigan fan -- again, no judgment here, just my taste, aka what the hell do I know -- but I will follow her work more closely from here on out.

So in closing, there are a number of stories here that are individually or as a group worth the price of the collection, which, aesthetically, is also very fine -- it's a much more handsome book than I was expecting, in a world of increasing trade paperbacks. I do maintain that I would prefer, if possible, to do the majority of my reading on a medium that does not kill trees, but if books should exist (and they should), I think they should look and feel like this.

So that's my synopsis of Inferno, and thanks to Ms. Datlow for sending it my way via the fine folks at Tor. Though I will never be primarily a horror reader or writer, I do enjoy reading widely, and it helps to be able to put my trust in an editor that will provide a prime expreience of the genre being sampled. I do think that the experience of horror is an individual peak in a reading experience -- really fine horror is an unmatchable phenomenon. I owe my openness to its basic symbolic function to Jeanne Cavelos (and Odyssey), whose explanation of the heart of horror led me to write "The Bearer" while at the workshop -- and it has been an element of my writing consciousness ever since. These are important parts of the human condition to be aware of, important dimensions of experience -- and if you're curious, Inferno would be a good way to open that door.

With Naomi Novik's recent announcement about the Organization for Transformative Works there's been a renewed energy in discussion of fanfiction and its impact on the specluative fiction community. I'm not really going to comment on the OTW -- I tend to concur with John Scalzi on its feasibility and potential danger to the fanfiction community itself. But particularly given my involvement with the BetterEULA project and interactive elements in storytelling in general, the discussion got me thinking about the intersection of reader participation and speculative fiction, and, of course, virtual world and video game space. No, video games can't solve all your problems. Just most of them.

I have to get this out of the way first: I don't generally like fanfiction. I don't read it, I don't write it, and when someone promising devotes a disproportionate amount of their time to writing fanfiction rather than creating their own worlds (and especially characters) I tend to get a little bit sad.

Further, I could not write about Harry Potter. Harry Potter is not mine. I think that characters are almost always foils of their authors in some intrinsic way, and I would no sooner march around with someone else's character -- especially uninvited -- than I would try on another person's skin. It is creepy to me on that level and I can honestly say always has been. I must be a freak, but I have simply never had the inclination to puppet someone else's creation.

I have, however, participated in shared worlds, in small doses. And I fully recognize that whether or not fanfiction tweaks my particular melon, its sheer proliferation indicates that there is a powerful human drive at work here, and smart authors and publishers are wise to ride that wave rather than trying to push it back in the bottle.

But here's the thing. I do think that unbridled fanfiction is actually harmful to an IP. Here's why.

1. Fictional worlds and fictional characters have themes and trajectories that fanfiction writers do not know about. Any author participating in even cursory worldbuilding has notes and copious information that doesn't make it into the main stage -- it is backstory in its simplest terms. By ignoring or operating without these background rules a derivative work is attempting to redefine a character or place in their own terms; they are inherently attempting to alter the IP without the owner's knowledge or, often, express agreement.

2. The more you let someone do something illegal, the more they will start to feel entitled to do so. Turning a blind eye will only work for so long before you start getting major problems, and by then there's no way to correct the situation without royally pissing off some of your most devoted fans. When you allow someone to spend a significant amount of time creating something, you are allowing them to invest, and if you spontaneously take away that investment, they are, pretty rightfully, going to be ticked off and never buy your work again.

3. Fanfiction dilutes an IP. It is not, as some have postulated, simply "expanding" a universe. It is not "transforming" anything. It is creating a myriad parallel universes in which things the original author did not intend happen all over the place. This is not immediately and inherently harmful, but when someone starts to invest in reading these parallel universes, they are storing up situations that did not happen. It's very similar to using cheat codes in a video game. A little bit of it isn't going to hurt anyone, but when it is systemic and sustained eventually you are going to lose the entire concept of what the original game was, because a game, like a world, is defined by its limitations or parameters, which fanfiction and cheat codes generally exist to remove.

All of these considerations are purely in terms of the integrity of the story itself, and don't even take into consideration the potential and historic legal pitfalls that exist when you allow fans free rein over your world.

But I assert that by looking closely at what fans are getting out of the fanfiction experience -- and it appears to be an awful lot (what do they want? A sandbox! when do they want it? Yesterday!) -- it is possible to provide them those advantages and satisfactions without falling victim to the many dangerous pits surrounding the relinquishing of IP. Video games allow interactivity every day without surrendering their creative rights. If you play your cards right, with a little sensitive attention you can turn fanfiction energy into an engine that drives a fanbase, builds a community, and satisfies your readers when you're not laying a book in front of them.

Containing fanfiction has already been attempted. In fact, a year ago someone caught on to monetizing it in a serious way. How it's working out for them monetarily I have no idea, but I tend to concur with those on Making Light who said they would likely burn through their cash and then pop like a soap bubble. It looks like they've made a soldiering attempt to build some community there, but it looks like trying to build a community around a mall, which has never panned out very well.

Outside of video game territory, the primary shared world I participated in was Pern fandom. Anne McCaffrey, way ahead of the curve (because, like new models for online magazines, I believe that interactivity in fiction is ultimately the wave of the future, and that includes derivative work), saw what her fans were doing and gave them some guidelines to behave by if they were sharing her world. It wasn't handled perfectly, through little fault of hers, but it was a hell of a lot better than anything else of its kind that I've seen.

Here are, in my opinion, the critical things that Pern fandom did:

1. It split the universe, deliberately creating a definably separate parallel universe for the Pern world where specific world-altering events did or did not happen. This separated the sandboxes of McCaffrey's Pern and her fans' Pern without changing major sensory features such as landscape, world mechanics, or environmental feel. This was a stroke of genius that prevented Pern from going the way of Darkover. Bulletproof? No, but close enough.

2. It gave fans rules by which to create their characters, even employing some basic random number generation. This is like pouring a nice fat dish of agar for your community. Using some very simple game mechanics, it ensured that participants had an even field and some baselines to play by -- and also an achievement ladder that they could climb. The Pern fangroup also provided an entire system by which new fangroups, or "Weyrs", could be created. This egalitarian mindset helped ensure that Pern was, for the most part, an amazingly peaceful, pleasant place to be.

3. It allowed participants a huge degree of freedom in their choice of expressive media, whether that was text storytelling, live (text) roleplay, craft-making, textile-art, or even game creation (MU*s). There was very little in terms of expression you could request permission for from the fandom and be told "no". And resultingly some players created some amazing things -- cookbooks, sculptures, costumes, and more.

4. It actually grew the world by requiring that players created their own characters rather than manipulating the characters of the author. "Canon" characters were off limits and could not be given dialogue or represented in more than a passing reference fashion. This kept McCaffrey's novels further distinct and commoditized while presenting a very reasonable and acceptable alternative for fans that encouraged them to have personal investment and engage creatively with the world.

The cohesiveness of this system meant that fans were provided a clear, sanctioned, fun playground to exercise their creativity in. Not only was McCaffrey protecting her IP, she was encouraging some amazing creativity amongst her fans. She was having them engage in some of the most compelling elements that would later feed the explosion of massively multiplayer online games -- in a simple, clear way and in her own world, encouraging them to create characters to which they would form indelible lasting attachments.

Could players break the rules? Sure. And they did. There were a few major kerfluffles in the fandom that I was aware of, and all of them resulted in lack of maintenance from McCaffrey directly on the system. Fan systems do need to be maintained and at large capacities become organisms that need attention if they are to avoid going feral. Some Weyrs did go feral, and a few of them were even put down for it -- all stemming from the groups engaging in activities for long periods of time (years) that the original creator did not know about. Once McCaffrey did know, she felt that her world theme was compromised, and felt compelled to take action to correct it. This drove away a not insignificant number of fans, as their investments were taken -- and illustrates the importance of maintaining a communication line between the IP originator and the major arteries of the fan groups.

But despite these hiccups, relatively few people actually deliberately ignored McCaffrey's wishes. Why would they? She'd given them the core of what they wanted. And if anyone did piss in the sandbox by defying her, the entire community would typically rise up and smite them down -- McCaffrey didn't even have to lift a finger. Fans generally have a great deal of respect for the creators of the works they wish to occupy; if they are treated with respect in return, they'll do tremendous things for you.

Authors and owners of secondary worlds have started to crawl their way onto the Internet, some of them kicking and screaming. The next step is for them to give some focused, competent attention to their fans and the careful growth of community. I think it is no coincidence at all that some of the most prolific fangroups concern worlds created by women. Fan groups need to be nurtured and understood -- while still treated with firmness when they go astray.

Would I build on McCaffrey's foundation? Sure. In lots of ways. But that foundation does exist and, rather than allowing the fan community to run wild and untended, it behooves the owners of IP to take a proactive role in letting them into their worlds. Reader creativity and participation is here to stay, and, properly leveraged, it can be one way that books can effectively compete with live media. As usual, the solution exists in looking for potential rather than burying our heads in the sand until the explosion comes.