Subject: *pokes head over wall*
Author:
Posted on: 2019-09-28 22:42:00 UTC
*drops recent, coincidentally apt quote*
“My people didn’t ‘do’ writing. Given how much trouble it causes, I think they had the right idea.” —a Scythian warrior hailing from the fifth century BCE
Also, can you imagine the sci-fi PPC around 1930-1970? {= D
*subsides back into the morass of partially-finished writing projects*
~Neshomeh
If no one's written one already, I have a couple suggestions.
Option 1: Robin Hood AU. In a multiverse ruled by the tyrannical League of Mary Sue Factories, a group of outlaws led by the mysterious and elusive Flowers rises to fight the League and defend canon.
Option 2: High fantasy AU. Knights, castles, wizards, dragons, and all that.
I just think it would be fun to have everyone in the PPC talk like they're from Middle-Earth or Narnia.
As usual, Huinesoron has--
--actually not quite. There is of course the Protectorate of Plort, Konti-Nyuum, but that's a PPC community AU, not a PPC canon AU.
For alternates of the PPC itself, the furthest back I've gone is Shakespeare. The Duke of Sparta and Dragonfly his fairy servant do most nobly defend the Stage Worlds in the Army of the Emperor Louis, but Tudor England is not medieval.
The inaugral issue of the Journal of Investigating Veracity by Experimentation features a paper mapping the known PPC multiverses, which links to the ones I know of. The Volatile Multiverse has been seen a bunch of times, showing up as a universe in which everything is themed around one canon - we've had Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars, and Doctor Who show up. The theory is that it's all the same 'verse, it just occasionally shifts without warning.
(I'm sorry - bringing up alternate PPCs is a surefire way to get me talking.)
One last point: the Steampunk PPC community refers to our PPC as 'electropunk'. It all goes both ways...
hS
Recently we've been watching Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, which (aside from being extraordinarily tongue-in-cheek) plays with the idea that there have been multiple similar teams over time. I've also been reading The Wicked + The Divine, where 'every ninety years, twelve gods return as young people'. It's no exaggeration to say I really like this whole concept, and I'm wondering: can it be applied to the PPC?
(This post will use my timelines and histories; obviously if you choose not to accept those into your own understanding of PPC canon, that's your lookout.)
The Protectors of the Plot Continuum was founded in 1973, at the close of the Civil War on Origin. But... what if there were other organisations with a similar purpose, founded before the Flowers ever Awakened?
-The Plot Protection Agency follows many Noir film tropes. Those films seem to be set in the 1920s-40s; could it be that a detective agency, run by Flowers and with an alarming level of 'coincidentally' similar agents, protected the canon worlds in this timeframe?
-The Transfictional Canonical Defence Authority seems to have been active in the mid-1800s; its characters seem familiar, but that might simply be human pattern-seeking at work. It had its own community of writers, too. (It should be noted that the TCDA has explicitly crossed into the current PPC, which was assumed to be trans-multiverse travel... but could have just been time travel.)
-The Army for Protecting the Stage Worlds existed in the late 1500s, at the time of Shakespeare. Rather than narrative reports, its authors seem to have used spoken word to convey their message.
-Going in the opposite direction: the post-Sundering PPC was once explicitly a part of our PPC's future, but has been relegated to an abandoned timeline. That isn't to say that a remarkably similar organisation might not come into existence sometime in the 2060s.
-The tragically briefly-described Solarpunk PPC makes use of technology and attitudes that seem to be some way ahead of our own: I've always pictured Solarpunk as a whole fitting into a period after massive sea level rises, as a kind of recovery period. Could they spring up in the early 22nd century? It's entirely plausible.
This seems to be settling into a pattern of two 'PPC-esque' organisations appearing every century, with our current PPC semi-breaking the cycle by turning away from becoming the House of Rhodes. This opens up a whole lot of interesting possibilities - how about a Puritan PPC under Cromwell? A 1700s incarnation protecting the likes of Gulliver and Crusoe? - but the biggest one is this:
Where did it come from? All these organisations are too alike for coincidence: lots of them have Flowers, usually with the same or similar names, and there's a whole bunch of obvious-copy agents out there. Is there some ur-PPC that somehow managed to get its very nature imprinted on the Multiverse, and if so, how far back were they?
The Sunflower Official // supernal soul
Looked at the land // of the Lord of Fate
Decreed that domain // too dark, undetermined
And considered his capacity // to create a new World.
--from The Lore of Origin, a myth of the PPC's creation
I'm just saying... ^_~
hS
Yeah, I can't stop thinking about this.
So, it's obviously ludicrous to try and break (Western) literature down into easily-identifiable periods, and therefore that's exactly what I'm going to do.
Obviously all periods are... kind of loose, but that's the way these things go.
-Early 2000s: the Era of Diversity. While non cishetwhitemen have always written and published, this is the era when their works have finally managed to break into the limelight. Currently very little PPC coverage of this - we're working mostly in fiction from:
-Mid to late 1900s: the Geekdom. From Tolkien to Rowling to comic movies, this is the period when geeky stuff went mainstream and became acceptable. Very much the playground of the PPC.
-Early 1900s: the Golden Age of Hollywood. Is it coincidence that a lot of what we remember from this period is detective fiction (Agatha Christie, loads of crime films, the entire Noir genre)? Maybe, maybe not. This is where the Noir PPC would slot in.
-Late 1800s: Escapism. This is the era of Wells and Verne, of Kipling and Twain and Conan Doyle. They took the seriousness of the previous era (see below) and threw in some seriously weird fantasy. This is probably the spot for the Steampunk PPC.
-Mid 1800s: Literary Realism. The Brontes, Austen, Dickens - during this period, a whole bunch of people thought that what we really wanted was a well-researched depiction of real life. I'm imagining a PPC equivalent set in a stately home.
-Early 1800s: Gothic Emo. Hello, Mary Shelley, have you met Lord Byron? Mr. Poe introduced us. The PPC of this era dresses in black and is prone to dramatic fits and torrid romances. Basically a whole bunch of horror-loving Byrons.
-Early to mid 1700s: The Uncensored Years. This period saw the rise of both satire - Jonathan Swift and Voltaire - and smut - Fanny Hill and (I believe) Tristram Shandy. Gods only know what their PPC would like like, though I imagine they wouldn't be very happy with the association with gods. There would be a small contingent trying to do things seriously, working fields like Robinson Crusoe, but they'd be a very small minority.
-Late 1600s: The Puritan Reign. Starting with the Commonwealth of England in 1649, and continuing with the Puritan domination of North America, this was I think a very religious era for literature. I'm not sure what the Puritans themselves thought of Milton's Paradise Lost, but a village of PPCers in daft hats musing on religion and condemning literary heresy would work.
-Late 1500s to early 1600s: The High Days of Theatre. Shakespeare, Marlowe, and their contemporaries. The Army for Protecting the Stage Worlds had a lot of work to do.
-Late 1400s to early 1500s: The Age of Printing. I don't know what this PPC would have been like, but I'm imagining them being founded right before the printing press was created, and being utterly overwhelmed thereafter.
Prior to this point I think things break down. You'd have a Chivalric Age when the Arthur stories were being written (which extends down to the Age of Printing and the Morte d'Arthur), probably contemporary with the Charlemagne stories and the Matter of France. That's your PPC Knights and archers, though how much they'd have to work with I don't know. Prior to that I suspect it's going to be a bunch of monks dealing with quirky visionaries claiming the Blessed Virgin told them she was really a lizard person.
Then, of course, we hit the Romans. I bet there's a lot of time periods we could break down in there, but I'll leave that for another day. ;) They segue into the Greeks, still playing with mythology, and ultimately I think we have to get back to the Epic of Gilgamesh. We know there were variant accounts of that story, so perhaps the earliest PPC was a group of Babylonian scribes scribbling brief tales of Gilgamesh and Enkidu killing off fake versions of themselves from then-current tablets.
hS
*drops recent, coincidentally apt quote*
“My people didn’t ‘do’ writing. Given how much trouble it causes, I think they had the right idea.” —a Scythian warrior hailing from the fifth century BCE
Also, can you imagine the sci-fi PPC around 1930-1970? {= D
*subsides back into the morass of partially-finished writing projects*
~Neshomeh
The idea of a Golden Age Scifi, slide-rules & vacuum-tubes powered PPC is definitely appealing, particularly having recently read Mary Robinette Kowal's 'punchpunk' Calculating Stars. But I'm not sure how well it fits with my theme here.
The premise I'm working from is that the PPC equivalent is modelled on the dominant form of pop culture. Was scifi a dominant cultural force at that time, or was it kind of niche and weird? Not having been around I can't say for sure, but my instinct is that reading Heinlein or Asimov was a pretty nerdy thing to do, whereas nowaways, watching Star Wars or Lord of the Rings is pretty much expected.
If that era did occur, then my guess is that it folded in 1966 with the launch of Star Trek. Their old-fashioned technology wouldn't be able to keep up with the sleek, shiny Enterprise, and the fanfic explosion would have taken them completely off-guard.
(This dating, incidentally, would coincide almost exactly with the Flowers of Origin opening their first interplanetary plothole. One might almost detect the hand of fate...)
One interesting trivium is that there may be vestiges of the old PPCs in our own. Lofty Skies Chapter 5 features the secretaries of DAVD, who for unspecified reasons prefer to run their files off Babbage Engines. That sounds like they might be a group who came over from the TCDA - except that one of them is named Frock, and is implied to be a Vulcan. So perhaps they're a collection of refugees from various old PPCs - one from the Steampunk era, one from Noir, Frock from the tail end of the Scifi period, and maybe even a couple from further back.
Of course, then the Mysterious Somebody drove them all insane and/or killed them. Could this even have been his plan? To cut off that continuity and reshape the PPC as the Sole Guardians of Canon for Ever More, under his sole guidance?
I mean... probably not. But it's a fun thought.
hS
I'm honestly not sure. I know there was definitely a subculture there, and I feel like Trek may have actually ended up appealing to that group (although I have no actual evidence for that). The subculture part is provable: Someone had to pay for all those copies of Astounding, didn't they? ^^
Used to actually play for a monthly issue of Analog... but enough about me!
What is worth remembering is that Star Trek was not an immediate smash hit. It certainly wasn't mainstream. It barely even made it to a third season. Nobody was watching until the reruns started to air.
Okay, Martin Luther King was watching. But most of the country was not.
Anyways, the bit about Babbage Engines did make me think about the PPC as a nexus for a moment.
See, when usually spend time thinking of a PPC as a nexus, it's as a nexus between worlds of fiction -- a place where a dragonrider and a Space Marine can be on even terms (is shameless self-promotion that bad if you're at least honest about it? ^^). The thing is, especially in the pre-internet era, the PPC would also be a nexus for World 1 nerd-dom. There would be (and still are) World 1 agents who were recruited out of radically different cultures from each other, from opposite corners of fandom. Which is interesting in and of itself, especially from the international perspective -- I mean, if you think Japan's cultural scene is an isolated ecosystem now, it's waaay more open than it used to be. This was a band of fans who were not only being introduced to strange, novel, imported western works but also Japanese works, many of which are still obscure here in the west today. Just go cameo-hunting in Daicon IV if you don't believe me. And Japan isn't the international country with its own fandom scene by a long shot...
But all of this is hampered by the fact that I know nothing about international communities. It's still interesting...
Where was I going with this? Ah, nevermind, it probably wasn't important...
((Hawkelf references are awesome. Don't deny me this.))
Ummm, and I think your point has brought me back to the point I'd wandered away from: the PPC isn't concerned with what people are watching(/reading/listening to); it's concerned with what people are writing fanfic of.
So: what is the history of fanfic? Wikipedia tells me that it really took off with Star Trek in the '60s, starting as early as 1967 (with the delightfully-named Spockanalia). But it also tells me that there's a citation as far back as 1939, and that it referred to amateur scifi.
So yes, there's actually more likely to be a Scifi PPC than a Noir PPC. But you know me - I need more information.
Vice provides an article about fanfic in the early days of the Web. It talks about Usenet fanfic communities in the... well, it doesn't actually specify, probably the early '90s? So it looks like that would have been the context of our current PPC. A previous incarnation, from the '60s to the '90s, would have been the Fanzine PPC. It would have focussed strongly on Star Trek, and I assume on the rest of the TV/Movie Scifi worlds. This appears to be when slash took on a major role.
Before that? Tech Times expands on the Wikipedia entry slightly; it suggests that fan science fiction meant any old story in a fan magazine, some of which were 'bringing in some famous characters'. It also talks about injecting fiction into purportedly factual accounts of fan activities, which I certainly know nothing about.
Before that? The Guardian ran an article a few years back which mentions Jane Austen fanfic from 1913, and Sherlock Holmes self-inserts from the 1920s. Fanlore described J.M. Barrie writing Holmes pastiches in 1891. So I think we've got those incarnations locked in.
Fanlore also points out that Louisa May Alcott's Little Women has its protagonists set up a fanfic club of Dickens, which is a hilarious fact. That was written in 1868 and set in the early 1860s, with the subject of the fanfic dating some 30 years earlier. It does seem that fanfic of 19th century fiction was prevalent throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, though whether we can divide that up any further I'm really not sure.
Going back further? Apparently Daniel Defoe sometimes complained that his work was being 'kidnapped', which suggests an early 18th century iteration. Beyond that... well, one of those links told me that someone wrote an unauthorised sequel to Don Quixote before the original was even finished. ^_^ Shakespeare was obviously a fanficcer. And of course the Romans delighted in making new spins on old tales.
hS
That is a good point. And you're right: Those old SF scenes didn't really have so much fanfic as Trek did. Probably because there was less on a pure lore level to be invested in in a lot of those settings. If I'm writing, it's trivial to borrow from Asimov without dragging the US Robotics Corporation along for the ride. So... people didn't. At least, not often, as far as I can tell.
Trek, Tolkien, the Sci-fi/Fantasy wave of that era changed that. There were a lot more settings that you could get invested in as places, and a lot more characters you might want to write about. And yeah, that was definitely around the time it tends to be widespread. Before that, it tended to have smaller circulation, sometimes only between authors (like, real, published authors, writing fanfic of each other's works. This happend. I think. I forget the source).
>Usenet fanfic communities in the... well, it doesn't actually specify, probably the early '90s?
Aaah, and now we arrive firmly in my wheelhouse. And you're probably dead on, actually (well, you would be... you probably lived a little of it). The mid-90s was when the Usenet hit its peak (although it was still well active into the 2000s—which we shouldn't forget, seeing as we were founded in the 2000s by self-acknowleged alt.fan.pratchett readers). Specifically, Usenet hit it big after September of 1993, when AOL and CompuServe users (and all the rest of the Common People who didn't work for large computing companies or inhabit universities) were given network access—or as the old-timers call it, "The September that Never Ended," which some may cite as the dawn of users complaining about a bunch newbies ruining everything, but that discounts all the TENEX/TWENEX/ITS/et al. users who were probably complaining about all the usenet users when they were the newbies.
Sorry, pointless digression. Anyways...
What's really fascinating is the state of "online" fandom pre-1993. Because it wasn't a uniform thing. If you were a Mere Mortal in the 80s, what you had (if you were lucky) was an IBM PC or an Apple II or a Commodore 64 and a slow modem. That was your lot. And what you could do was call other (often beefier) microcomputers sitting on people's desks somewhere in your vicinity (long distance? Oof, that'd be expensive...). These are BBSes, or Bulletin Board Systems. And they played host to their own strange cultures and quirky characters. Some of them even wrote fanfiction, although zines were probably more popular. Jason Scott's textfiles.com is a repository of files from these systems and this period.
But if you were one of the Chosen Few, and could dial into a university (or maybe even went to one...), you might have Usenet access, with all the powers (the ability to talk to people across the nation) and responsibilities (if you didn't toe the line local or remote administrators would disable your ability to post...) thereof. If you want to find out about the fan scene of the era here... oh man do you have a goldmine of text. Henry Spencer and others recorded over a decade of usenet posts back in the day and Google grabbed the lot of it. A simple search of Google Groups can grab you usenet content going back decades. Of course, these archives are messy and incomplete... so it's faaar from perfect. But it's better than some have.
But the reeeaally lucky ones were they ones who had internet access. Or... well, ARPAnet, probably. Either because they were at a university or similar... or because they could dial into MIT or similar (MIT's AI Laboratory would let literally anybody log into their computers and use them for free... which would lead to a lot of people spinning up MUD servers that MIT people would have to kill before they did Real Work). These users not only could probably access usenet, they had access to real-time communication–Real-time chat with other users (and by the end of the 80s, IRC, essentially as it is today), and other interesting distractions.
And by "other interesting distractions," I mean MUDs. Multi-User-Dungeons. Effectively, text-based MMOs, frequently with user-generated content. By the mid-80s, some of these had trickled down to the compute-poor BBS users, they'd really take off in the early-to-mid 90s (well, inasmuch as something like this could ever take off, even in those days), with several offered by services like AOL in addition to those hosted on the broader internet (usually on University computers, without the administration's knowledge or consent).
MUDs live on to this day, with several dedicated to roleplaying in prominent or not-so-prominent fandoms, such as RedwallMUCK. Indeed, fandom-based-roleplaying servers (or fandom-inspired sections of larger MUDs) were prominent from the start. As were MUDs dedicated to the furry fandom. Those are still popular as well.
And of course, having just finished talking about Masterharper of Pern sort of kind of, I can't leave Pern out when talking about MUDs. Because Pern is actually kind of a big deal in MUDs. Why? Because Pern fans couldn't write fanfic. But they could roleplay. Which they took full advantage of. PernMUSH was founded in 1991 and (after several careful negotiations with McCaffrey) only closed down more than 20 years later—unfortunately, I don't think they left any database dumps behind, so we can't even see the empty weyrs.
What is the relevance of any of this? Oh, there isn't any. I just wanted an excuse to ramble about internet history for a bit and the fandom connection was too good to pass up.
((I have nothing to contribute, but I highly appreciate this thread. Discussions of historical fandoms and their complexities FTW!))
I agree with S.M.F. - this sort of thread is great fun. ^_^
Thoth - I was alive but not around. I know we got a computer before we moved house in 1997, but I only really got online around 2000. I have run into some of the Google Group Usenet archives before - they're fascinating stuff!
So! It looks like (allowing for the vagaries of timelines), our PPC sprang up at the same time as the first online fanfic, through the BBSes. The Mysterious Somebody took over about the time Usenet came in, and left when things transitioned to websites.
One overlooked fact about the Reorganisation is that it coincides with the launch of Fanfiction.net, which the various histories peg as the end of the Great Schism and the first giant archive. Does this mean the MS and his League of Mary-Sue Factories had a hand in the massive growth of FFn? I couldn't possibly comment. ;) But I can imagine it led to some changes around HQ.
In fact... I'm wondering if the BBS/Usenet/Schism era had low enough fanfic throughput that the old three agent teams were usually the only team in their division. So Anya, Josie, and Suzie were the DBS: Star Wars team. The fact that there were three of them meant that they didn't all have to go out together - one could be ill, or on holiday, or pinched for addressing a crossover.
They would have had their own dedicated Intelligence support, who would have trawled the 'net (in whatever form it took at the time) for stories to send them. Everything would have been contained, so that different teams barely had to talk to each other.
Then FFn arose, and the Fanfic Explosion hit, and there was no time for that personal touch. Intel created the Sorting Room purely to sift through FFn, the divisions expanded, agents started working outside their single canons... it was an exciting and infuriating time.
The last vestige of the Personal Touch would have been the DCPS, founded by ex-Tolkien agent Tween to try and get back to the ultra-specialised feel. Since its full absorption by the PPC, the Board have been doing their level best to tone that element down, usually by giving Caseworkers other jobs as well.
...This all leads my to a different subject:
Consoles.
Going by the grand tradition of taking one-off lines from TOS and taking them far too seriously, we know that by the mid-1990s consoles were comparable to the rapidly-advancing computers of the era. We know this because before the Fanfic Explosion, agents would play Quake on the consoles in the downtine between missions (as per Acacia's statements).
In the grand DoSAT tradition, it's safe to assume that PPC consoles in any era a) look like no other computer in the multiverse, and b) are built from a set of radically different technologies, held together with chewing gum and duct tape.
But while it's possible that consoles were so advanced to begin with that they weren't altered at all as the 90s rolled in, it's much more interesting to assume they didn't (and lets me think about designs more in line with the popular imagination of the 70s and 80s).
Being a computer nerd, my natural instinct is that in prior decades consoles were literally that: consoles, monochrome text monstrosities with extra weird gibbons and bobbins and bits, all wired wired up to some mainframe deep inside DoSAT (which is presumably part Difference Engine, part Supercomputer, part potato, two-thirds sentient, and literally eats punchcards for breakfast).
But it's just as likely that these old consoles were just printers that spit out ticker-take mission assignments. Or that agents would get paper mail...
I can't speak for the other periods but what you've just said makes me certain beyond doubt that the Victorian PPC's consoles are, in fact, the demonic lovechild of a Difference Engine and a linotype machine.
For those who don't have a relative in the print trade, a linotype machine is basically what they used to set type for printing back in the day, by which I mean up until the late 1980s. They squirted molten metal into moulds set by a typesetter that were selected by pressing down levers. The individual letters, called keys, were cast from harder metals and kept in a box, from which the typesetter selected them and built up a line of text. Metal spacers were used to put gaps between words, and upon completing a line, you pushed a big lever to enter the type into the machine, whereupon it was used to cast a mould and print the result.
If you wanted to use a different kind of letter, you could use a different set that came from a different type foundry. Capital letters were kept in a separate box. So basically:-
You pressed in keys and used a space bar to make words, you could choose between upper and lower case letters, and you could change your font.
Y'all done learned a thing! =]
Given the dominance of Dickens in Victorian fiction (I think I already posted that Little Women features honest-to-goodness Dickens fanfic), the linotype machine makes absolute sense. The Difference Engine... is actually essential, because you need to translate telegraph messages into linotype instructions.
One presumes that the bosses would much prefer to just call everyone up on the electric telephone, but that would take far too much time. Much more sensible to tap the messages out one Morse letter at a time, what?
hS
It just needs, er...
A better ending.
And for something more to happen in the plot.
=]
I found the whole concept utterly adorable (and heh, 'Guardens', that's pretty good). Though I'm not sure whether 'things happening' is kind of against the whole ethos... ;)
hS
There's a criticism of solarpunk that runs something along the lines of "the solution to the environmental crises against which [solarpunk] pushes appears to be... farmer's markets", which is a slightly roundabout way of saying that the majority of solarpunk stories are a whole lot of pacifist worldbuilding and a whole not-very-much of stories where anything interesting takes place.
Basically, the plan going forward is to build the world organically (badum, and furthermore, tish)around a compelling narrative. Which, well... I'mma do my best. =]