Subject: Running some numbers.
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Posted on: 2022-11-28 22:20:08 UTC

A skim of the Fanzine Archive shows there were very roughly the same number of fanzines per month in 1984, 1992, and 1999. Let's take that to mean there were the same number of zine fanfic. My notes for A&O randomly guessed that half of all fanfic was online in '99, which means there must be half as much fanfic being created in '92. (An average of 30 new stories a day, was my figure.)

My '99 notes peg the PPC "breaking even" at ca. 250 Action agents, supported by 20 Spies and 100 other Infrastructure agents. That puts the 1992 figure at 120 Action agents - 40 trios, which is a nice tidy number. Let's say half of that is in the Big Three, giving DMS, DBS, and DIC roughly 6 trios each. The remaining 20-odd are split between a bunch of small departments - DAVD, Despatch, Emergencies, Godplayers, and the like. A lot of them are probably just one trio. Divisions, unless I've said differently in Lofty Skies, probably don't exist - or rather, each trio specialises. There are still Flower agents, some of them as part of trios with humans.

To give the '92 a different feel, perhaps most Infrastructure roles are still held by Flowers. The exception is the Spies, of which there are (relatively) a lot - probably that same 20 figure from '99. The key difference is that they have to acquire the zines themselves to check, so it's a much more out-and-about role.

Various Department Heads will be different, of course. A possible retcon would be to make most of the "agents" who went mad in Lofty Skies into Flowers - the Infrastructure Agents. That would pin Skies as the point where the PPC shifted from Flower to human dominated. That depends on what I wrote back in 2013,of course, and I'm not checking tonight.

So, 1992: a small, busy PPC, where agents and Flowers work side by side under the leadership of the Sunflower Official, First of the Firstborn. It could work.

hS

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