Good question...
I'm thinking that much - not all, but a noticeable fraction - of the SF community already decided to head Up before the crackdowns started. (I could see Baen Books moving their head office to The Island simply because key members of their staff wanted to live in space, for example.)
The SFWA would have to stay in the US; otherwise, they wouldn't be the Science Fiction Writers of America any more. However, the Worldcons are already Up, so the SFWA is a smaller organization than in our timeline. They might become a "target of opportunity" for the loonier parts of the government - the sort of folks who thought having the Secret Service raid Steve Jackson Games was a good idea. ("Are you now, or have you ever been, a SFWA member?")
If Disney can hang a rock over Hawai'i, then Sy-Fy can move into orbit, too. They'd probably do so in order to get a spot in geosynchronous orbit where they could broadcast their signal to all the North America cable companies at lower cost than running landlines between the relevant offices, just like all the other specialty channels.
Meanwhile, the American Fen who made it Up wouldn't be standing still for such behavior. Submitted for your consideration - an email I sent to Mal while he was on the binnacle list:
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
I'm thinking that much - not all, but a noticeable fraction - of the SF community already decided to head Up before the crackdowns started. (I could see Baen Books moving their head office to The Island simply because key members of their staff wanted to live in space, for example.)
The SFWA would have to stay in the US; otherwise, they wouldn't be the Science Fiction Writers of America any more. However, the Worldcons are already Up, so the SFWA is a smaller organization than in our timeline. They might become a "target of opportunity" for the loonier parts of the government - the sort of folks who thought having the Secret Service raid Steve Jackson Games was a good idea. ("Are you now, or have you ever been, a SFWA member?")
If Disney can hang a rock over Hawai'i, then Sy-Fy can move into orbit, too. They'd probably do so in order to get a spot in geosynchronous orbit where they could broadcast their signal to all the North America cable companies at lower cost than running landlines between the relevant offices, just like all the other specialty channels.
Meanwhile, the American Fen who made it Up wouldn't be standing still for such behavior. Submitted for your consideration - an email I sent to Mal while he was on the binnacle list:
Quote:"No one would have believed in the first years of the twenty-first century that this world's information laws were being scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no intellectual property lawyer, up to the very end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have successfully disagreed with the fundamental concepts behind his life.--
"The intellectual side of man already admits that creativity is an incessant struggle for expression, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is barely started in its warming and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regarded as mundane minds. To carry freedom of expression sunward was, indeed, their only escape from the censorship that, year after year, crept outward from our world toward them.
"And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought upon its own creative classes. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
"The Martians seem to have calculated their conceptual assault with amazing precision -- their universities and manufacturing capability were evidently in far greater capacity than our experts believed -- and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instincts permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble in the last years of the twentieth century, but we failed to interpret the discontent as anything other than youthful rebellion."
-- the beginning paragraphs of The War of the Words, by George H. Kipps, self-published March 6, 2021
Yes, the concept is primarily so I can use this line:
"This isn't one of ours," the Apple Store employee explained. "It's an off-world knock-off -- a Martian iPod."
But as I recall, we were looking for a story arc for between the end of Operation Great Justice and the Miranda returning to Earth, and there are enough "information wants to be free" writers on the DW Forums that the idea of a struggle to liberalize copyright and patent laws might be popular. Also, this particular setup would almost force us to flesh out Fenspace's Mars. Opinions, before I post this to the Forums? (Or a veto, in which case it's a "Fenspace Alternates" plotbunny?)
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