06-01-2008, 04:48 AM
Since the question has come up... Here's a few notes, offered as a starting point for discussion. Feedback and dissenting opinions are not only welcome, they're encouraged.
Occasionally a Fenspace writer may wonder whether something in a story violates the boundaries of what the Fenspace Collective have agreed is good for the setting or welcome in the current scheme of things, even if it's within The Rules. These guidelines may help writers in this predicament.
The easiest case is when the story element is grounded in real life and agrees with the Genre Directive. If the story element is something that makes things better or easier for people (that means everybody, not just your favourite character) and it's a cautious extrapolation of real-life technology, then go ahead and introduce it. Nobody's going to raise an eyebrow at a DVD that holds two terabyes of data, since that's a reasonable extrapolation of current technology as adapted by handwavium. (However, some things simply aren't available for lack of raw materials. It's been established that one of the First Fen grabbed all the easily-available fissionable materials in Fenspace before most folks made it Up, for example.)
If the story element is grounded in real life, but doesn't agree with the Genre Directive, there's a problem. This isn't necessarily a story-breaker, but it requires a lot of work and the agrement and support of the Fenspace Collective to pull off successfully. An example of how to do this is Cobalt Greywalker's Paving the road to Hell - it's a dark, almost dystopian, story, but it serves as the beginning of a story arc describing the "redemption" of the story's lead character. An example of how not to do this is murmur the fallen's FTL Newsfeed #235 - it's equally dark, but in its original form it didn't give any way for the characters to come back into the light. Paving the road to Hell and its sequels make up one of the better story arcs in the Fenspace setting, while FTL Newsfeed #235 is barely mentioned by the Collective even after its substantial re-write. (It may be important that Cobalt Greywalker was willing to listen to criticism about his story and work with the other writers to make the story fit into the setting, while murmur the fallen was not.)
Now we get into the trickier cases.
Does the story element exist to make one character as good as (or better than) other Fenspace characters in their own field of expertise? This can work, but is very tricky to pull off, and it's best if you don't trump the other character's specialization. For example, the Soviet Air Force (introduced by Mal Fnord and company nearly at Fenspace's Day 1) is very good at space exploration. That didn't stop Rob Kelk from later introducing Project Artemis, another group that's very good at space exploration but in a noticeably different way. However, Rob got Mal's help in defining Project Artemis before the group was fully introduced into Fenspace, and both writers have been part of the Fenspace Collective for a long time.
If the story element ignores established continuity, then it would be best to re-write the story to remove or revise the element. There's plenty of Fenspace history and social dynamics still unwritten; there's no reason to ignore what little has been defined. Especially since the timeline is available on the FenWiki.
...there must be more cases, but it's past my bedtime...fill in the blanks and continue the list, please, folks...
--
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
Occasionally a Fenspace writer may wonder whether something in a story violates the boundaries of what the Fenspace Collective have agreed is good for the setting or welcome in the current scheme of things, even if it's within The Rules. These guidelines may help writers in this predicament.
The easiest case is when the story element is grounded in real life and agrees with the Genre Directive. If the story element is something that makes things better or easier for people (that means everybody, not just your favourite character) and it's a cautious extrapolation of real-life technology, then go ahead and introduce it. Nobody's going to raise an eyebrow at a DVD that holds two terabyes of data, since that's a reasonable extrapolation of current technology as adapted by handwavium. (However, some things simply aren't available for lack of raw materials. It's been established that one of the First Fen grabbed all the easily-available fissionable materials in Fenspace before most folks made it Up, for example.)
If the story element is grounded in real life, but doesn't agree with the Genre Directive, there's a problem. This isn't necessarily a story-breaker, but it requires a lot of work and the agrement and support of the Fenspace Collective to pull off successfully. An example of how to do this is Cobalt Greywalker's Paving the road to Hell - it's a dark, almost dystopian, story, but it serves as the beginning of a story arc describing the "redemption" of the story's lead character. An example of how not to do this is murmur the fallen's FTL Newsfeed #235 - it's equally dark, but in its original form it didn't give any way for the characters to come back into the light. Paving the road to Hell and its sequels make up one of the better story arcs in the Fenspace setting, while FTL Newsfeed #235 is barely mentioned by the Collective even after its substantial re-write. (It may be important that Cobalt Greywalker was willing to listen to criticism about his story and work with the other writers to make the story fit into the setting, while murmur the fallen was not.)
Now we get into the trickier cases.
Does the story element exist to make one character as good as (or better than) other Fenspace characters in their own field of expertise? This can work, but is very tricky to pull off, and it's best if you don't trump the other character's specialization. For example, the Soviet Air Force (introduced by Mal Fnord and company nearly at Fenspace's Day 1) is very good at space exploration. That didn't stop Rob Kelk from later introducing Project Artemis, another group that's very good at space exploration but in a noticeably different way. However, Rob got Mal's help in defining Project Artemis before the group was fully introduced into Fenspace, and both writers have been part of the Fenspace Collective for a long time.
If the story element ignores established continuity, then it would be best to re-write the story to remove or revise the element. There's plenty of Fenspace history and social dynamics still unwritten; there's no reason to ignore what little has been defined. Especially since the timeline is available on the FenWiki.
...there must be more cases, but it's past my bedtime...fill in the blanks and continue the list, please, folks...
--
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