Shared Worlds

Today on Twitter a small discussion erupted between myself and @mbranesf, @kaolinfire, @necol66, and @satanspuppet. Yeah, well, you know it was really serious. We struck up the idea of doing a shared world issue at M-Brane SF.

I have a few suggestions regarding the setup for this that the 140 characters tweets just weren't going to convey.

1 -- Open Source the World/Bible for the stories. Give it and all the stories in the issue a Creative Commons Share-alike. attribution, 'yes' for derivatives license. I'm paraphrasing, but bottom line: set the backdrop free to be used by anyone including sequels to the initial stories. Derivitive stories would need to carry the same license.

This will allow creative works based on the world, with few strings attached.

It would also give derivative writers a built-in fan base and mechanism for marketing.

There are a lot of eloquent explanations for why to choose this sort of license. I will update with some links.

2 -- Start out by having a submission period for the world: basically, write the bible for the world to be shared. Submissions to this bible would become licensed in the same way as the stories and could be included with other bible submissions to create something beyond the vision of any one writer. All contributers whose ideas are included in creating the world would recieve attribution for this.

3 -- Last, I think we could all merely list what, at base, makes a great SF world. Beyond that I believe the best ideas for this bible will be those that follow from a few simple rules, defining characteristics of the setting while allowing for a wide range of freedom in specific stories. Think of the Lovecraft Mythos, GRRM's Wildcards, etc.

I am not offering this to be used, but only as an example. I created a world in which several nanotechnology 'plagues' are loose. One makes animals intelligent. Two makes people see in black and white. Three is, essentially, lycanthropy. Four is the inability to act violently. Five makes the carriers ruthlessly logical.

I found after thinking about my plagues that there was a certain sequence in which the plagues became more interesting (and more lethal) until they led to a hugely depopulated earth. Add in a couple undocumented plagues, the failed beginnings of a tech singularity among the human wreckage and I had a backdrop that made for a nice story (I hope).

But the insight I have is that from a paragraph's worth of starting conditions, I was able to create rules that allowed me to write the story. In this same fashion, I think a really cool shared world premise could be created.

Keep an eye on the M-Brane SF blog, where I suspect a post about this proposal may soon be forthcoming. I will submit my own ideas for the M-Brane shared world, if one developes, once the Tower is ready for transmission.

Addendum to the original post.... So watching the above video excites me as to the possibilities in this idea. We could seek out Attribution/commercial=yes type artwork/photos/music, and so forth to accompany this project. (in the case of music, I guess that would only make sense if there were podcast stories involved.)

Maybe a totally CC'ed magazine issue could be included in the next Ubuntu distribution? It's possible, right! :)

B