AETHER AGE progress report

If anyone's interested, there's a new post at The Region Between with some my thoughts and reflections at this stage of editing The Aether Age. It contains links to the book's TOC on the AeA blog and links to some of the other creative folks who are working with us on it.

AETHER AGE announcement soon

Yesterday, we settled a few remaining details and finalized the table of contents for The Aether Age. We will be announcing it very soon at the Aether Age blog.

This is a bigger and more complex project than I had imagined it would be be when we started, and, because of the shared-world nature of the book, a lot different than compiling an anthology of unrelated short stories or even a themed collection. The stories selected for The Aether Age will comprise much more than a theme--they will open windows into an astonishing new world. This is going to be a very cool book.

AETHER AGE guidelines posted!

I have posted the most current version of the Aether Age writers guidelines. Click here to visit our Issuu  page where the guidelines document can be downloaded or read online. We'll start looking at submissions on November 15, with the deadline being January 30.

Soon there will be a separate page dedicated to Aether Age affairs, and I will post notice of it here when it's online.

Aether Age update

I have fallen so far behind in recent days on business that I have been wanting to discuss on this blog, that I will need to dispense with some of it as outdated already and then deal with the rest of it in what will probably be a flurry of short posts over today and tomorrow.

I've officially decided that the first Aether Age shared world project will be a stand-alone anthology, produced under a model similar to Things We Are Not, with the biggest emphasis on trying to sell a print book, rather than as a special issue of M-Brane. I was waiting to get a sense of whether Things We Are Not was going to work out at all from a money standpoint. The pre-order period has gone well enough (not great,  but well enough) that I feel good that we won't lose money on it. I think such can be achieved with Aether Age as well.  Soon, probably within a week, I will have a couple of announcements regarding this project, including a revision of the guidelines, dates for a reading period, and some clarification of what we are doing copyright-wise.  This is going to be released under a Creative Commons license, which means that the universe itself will be available for anyone to use with due acknowledgement. It also means that the "furniture" that writers add to the universe with their own stories will be become part of that shared property. I'll explain this in more detail in the next iteration of the guidelines. It's quite different than a traditional copyright situation, but I think the end result will be terrific for everyone.

Announcing the AETHER AGE

I finally make good on a promise that I have been making for weeks: we are resuscitating the "Shared World" scheme. As regular readers of this page may be aware, this is a plan to create a fictional milieu which will be open to any writer for the creation of new stories. We will be putting together some sort of special issue of M-Brane of such work eventually.

After some consultation with Brandon Bell, who came up with the idea to have a shared world in the first place and who suggested many of its key characteristics, we have decided to call it The Aether Age. I have posted at issuu.com the first draft of what will eventually be formal guidelines for working within this universe. The document can be downloaded or read online there. If you are interested in creating something within this new realm, please check it out. Also, all the past posts related to this project can be called together here using the "shared world" label.

Updates on current affairs...

1. Please note that the GreenPunk website has launched. It's brand new and rather sparse still, but it already has a little bit of interesting content on it, and it is very, very open to much, much more. It's easy to interact with founder Matt Staggs via that site and also at Enter the Octopus. Also, I have admin access to the GreenPunk site as well, and am happy to review and pass along or post content if anyone wants to hit me up with anything from over here. It's a new Movement, so have fun throwing in on it at the the beginning if it appeals to you (see previous post on the this page, which links to Matt's original call to action).

2. Speaking of fresh new things, note also that the Outer Alliance, just a few days old, expands rapidly. Hit that little Alliance badge at the top of the right-hand column of this page and visit the main site. From there you can join the group if you wish. You can even get your own badge (it was designed by Mari Kurisato, naturally).

3. A few months ago, I announced with great confidence and self-satisfaction a Grand New Vision for M-Brane SF in which I vowed to take the zine into professional status and huge (by sf zine standards) circulation by a year from the date of that proclamation. As the months have passed, and as I have not gotten a whole lot closer to completing that vision yet, I wonder if I need to push back the deadline a bit. On the other hand, I have a strange and rather pleasant sense of movement in some direction, and I still think that the Vision could be realized. I can't discuss in detail right now some of the plans that I am kicking around, but I will say that I envision a number of new book projects following after Things We Are Not which should help solidify M-Brane as a growing presence in the world and shore up the zine itself.

4. Writers: You have a few more days to submit for Rick Novy's special issue (M-Brane #12). Deadline is 8/31. After that deadline passes, Rick will make his decisions and then I will resume normal reading for submissions (I will actually be backtracking a bit and acquiring a few more things for #1o and #11). Once those issues are all filled, there may be a reading hiatus for a little while, but I'll make sure I update guidelines promptly if that happens.

5. Shared World: Bear with me guys. I know I've been promising a re-boot of the Shared World discussion for a while now. It's coming. In the meantime, interested parties may want to review posts here and at Brandon Bell's page under the "Shared World" label at both sites.

SHARED WORLD: Getting back to work

This is the week that I swore that I would start some new work on the Shared World project. Since it's Wednesday and I've done nothing on it yet, it's a great thing that Brandon Bell has had some inspiration and focus and offered this great post on his site. I think he's on target as far as identifying some general time frames of events in the World and suggesting a historical progression from one to the next. Also, after reading his remarks, I'd agree that we don't need to have quite as much detail worked out in advance as I thought might be needed. What we're working on is really more general guidelines, broad-stroke type stuff. So...I am, as always, welcoming new comments and ideas from anyone who has participated in this discussion before or who would like to get in on it. The whole run of Shared World-related posts can be called up using the Shared World label below (and one of those contains a link to download a document summarizing most of what has been discussed in those posts and their many comments).

Brief updates: Shared World and queer antho

I am heading into a deadly eight-day stretch of long days at the evil day job. I will, however, be making time during the evenings for M-Brane projects, such as getting issue #7 put together, considering the contents of the queer anthology and probably doing some brainstorming on the Shared World project.

Regarding the queer anthology: As I suspected, some writers have been working right up to the deadline. I received a bunch of new submissions just today. The deadline is tomorrow, July 15...but I will probably consider anything that has arrived by the time I check mail after work on the 16th to have been submitted on time. I'm ahead of my own schedule on reading for this, and have already selected for certain five stories (and even notified two of their authors already), and based on these selections alone, this book is going to be very, very good. We may end up with perhaps fifteen to eighteen stories in the final table of contents, depending somewhat on length. I have two or three long novelette/almost-novella length pieces that I think are probably going to make the cut (which together will amount to a lot of pages), but I also have in hand some pretty great items at much shorter lengths. I think it's going to be a very fine anthology, and also very diverse in its content. I was concerned when I first planned this project that I'd end up with too many male-oriented stories, but that worry has proven unfounded since I have been receiving quite a high percentage of female-oriented stories and also stories of various types by female writers.

My blog posts may be infrequent for a few days, but feel free to continue adding thoughts on the Shared World Project in the comments, and I will add to it as I can. I think an important thing to think about some more is the alien involvement and the nature of the alien beings. I think we settled on the idea that the aliens aren't necessarily in the forefront of affairs, but that their influence lingers, and we need to know something about them anyway. So any weird, wild ideas in that realm would be a welcome addition. (If you're a new reader of this blog, you can find out more about the shared world by clicking the Shared World label at the end of this post).

Shared World: some cultural considerations

I am considering compiling in one place a timeline of real-world events from the ancient histories of our shared world's major civilizations (to build on what Brandon suggested in an earlier post) and invite the group to brainstorm about some of the points of historical divergence in each one, so we can start getting our timeline together.

I found one possible glitch with our plan of including a Mesoamerican civilization in the mix: if it's to be one that exists roughly concurrent with Ancient Egypt, then we may need to abandon the Aztecs and go all the way back to the Olmecs. This should be fine, since what little is known about the Olmecs seems to indicate that a lot of their culture was carried forward into the culture of later groups like the Aztecs. I'll read up on it some more later.

It's occurred to me that this whole universe is going to be, almost by definition, full of non-white people, which I think is great. One thing we might consider when handling Egypt is that something of a controversy exists regarding the race of the ancient Egyptians. The prevailing scholarly consensus seems to be that its anachronistic to talk about race in the black versus white terms we have now when discussing the Egyptians, as they were probably neither. Many people adhere, however, to an Afrocentric approach to the topic and insist that the Egyptians were black people in the same way that most sub-Saharan Africans are now. This point of view is understandable as a reaction to old-style racist European treatments of history which tended to assume that any people who had an impressive civilization must have been more or less white and the result of Indo-European immigration. The historical evidence seems to support neither extreme but offers a lot of indication that there were both black and olive-complected people in ancient Egypt. Just something to consider when we get to the point of imagining ancient Egyptian characters.

Status updates: various projects

Shortly after Rick Novy and I came up with the plan for him to guest edit M-Brane #12, I realized a couple of fortuitous things about the timing of it: the submission period coincides with the weeks that I will have the most work to do on the GLBT anthology; and I'm sure I can find a few extra minutes here and there to keep compiling and coordinating information on the Shared World project as that accumulates.

Those of you interested in the Shared World may have already looked over the summary document that I posted on Box a few days ago. If not, you can grab it from the previous shared world post. We've gotten a lot happening with it already, so I think it might be reasonable for us to strive toward having the universe in fairly "ready to use" in a few weeks, and then by perhaps the end of August be ready to start to thinking about some actual fiction for it.  Though a couple other topics are covered in this post, I will label it as a Shared World post so that its recallable with the rest of them, and if you want to make Shared World comments here, that's fine (or they can still go on the previous one, too--I'll re-summarize as needed). 

Some time remains before 7/15, so any writers who still wish to submit to the queer antho have a few days to get their stories in. Once the deadline passes, I expect to fairly quickly finish selecting the stories and then get to work on the editing and production of the book. I'm considering trying to hit up a "celeb" of some sort to contribute an introduction or essay, but haven't decided on that yet.

As to my personal writing projects, not a lot has changed since my last post on that topic, but I have polished a bit on the all the short fiction items, and they are looking a little shinier. I also started a new short story, but I have no idea what it's about yet: a beginning basically wrote itself using my fingers to operate the keyboard, but I have no idea where it's going yet. I have done a lot more staring at Shame (my novel) but no appreciable new writing on it yet. I spend a lot of time daydreaming about it while I am at the day job and thinking up all kinds of good solutions to the many missing scenes and good revisions of existing ones, but once I get home and actually face the page, I slow to a crawl. I think I will use the 8/31 end of the #12 submission period as an arbitrary deadline on myself to have the first draft completed. It would only amount to maybe 3 or 4K new words a week which should be easily doable. So I say now.  I also have another idea cooking that I think calls for novel-length treatment, but I may defer any work on that one for a few months. I am considering doing National Novel Writing Month in November (which confirms that I am crazy), and maybe it will be the project for that.

SHARED WORLD: Summary document online

We are still making great progress on developing the shared world. Anyone new to this topic who would like the details, please call up all the related posts using the "Shared World" label at the bottom of this post. They each have extensive, interesting comments on them as well.

In an effort to get our main ideas so far about the Shared World project into a single place, I have made what I think is a reasonably easy document to look at. I'm not sure how useful it will really be, and there may be some stuff missing from it, but it seems like backtracking through all of our comments on the posts is getting rather cumbersome. Everyone involved in the shared world already, or anyone else who like to get in on it, is welcome to download this document from Box and look it over. (The document is a two-page PDF, with four columns that each run from one page to the next. That's not a great design, since I could have just made it one giant page, but it occurred to me that if someone wanted to print it, then it would work better split onto normal size pages.)

Then let's continue the discussion in comments with attention to some of the areas that need it most, like, perhaps, aliens.

Then, as we make more decisions and refine some of the details, I will do additional updates to the main document and eventually use that as the basis for "official" writers guidelines for this universe. We've done so much so quickly that I suspect within a few weeks we will have a very well-imagined background and people can start thinking about what sort of stories they may want to tell.

SHARED WORLD update

Things ran late today, and I guess I am not doing any kind of big re-cap or synthesis of this discussion with this post, as I had planned.  More than anything else right now, I am trying to start another sequence of comments before the previous thread gets too long to read. For reminders of what we have discussed and what it's all about (especially for anyone who is just joining the discussion), refer back to the earlier posts. This one and those can be called up together using the "Shared World" tag at the end of this post. I will eventually start compiling a more orderly guide to what has been put forth for discussion.

Some major developments have happened, however, that I think can be declared to be Established Facts about our shared world:  

1) The timeline begins somewhere when Egypt is a major civilization, and so other civs will be determined with reference to that, though Greece and China are almost certainly in it. We also like Aztecs or at least some kind of meso-American civ. Does anyone know offhand where their dates fall in?  A topic for more research for sure; 

2) Over time, these people become space-faring, multi-world civs; the Moon, Mars and Venus are all inhabited at some point (with the Moon certainly first, but also due to the "ether" situation (see item 4 below));

3) The technological divergence happens in large part due to some some level or manner of alien influence, though the details need to be discussed more; 3a) These people may have just somehow had some tech earlier than what happened in the real world, such as the printing press, even without alien help; we like this because mass-literacy is aided by it;

4) their physical space is different than what we know: a cloud of gas, which we have been referring to as "ether," hangs around the immediate neighborhood of Earth, at least in the earlier centuries of the timeline. Its properties are rather amazing and cool: something like air pressure, it's breathable, and is also a zero-g environment once you get away from Earth's gravity well. It has been proposed and decided that this is a local phenomenon that does not exist very far beyond the Earth-Moon area and is somehow attached to the Earth, so that it moves through space with it as the Earth orbits the Sun. It could be a thing of originally alien origin, or not. As I write this there is another line of ether-related thought cropping up on the  previous post (see Rick and Derek and Brandon's remarks re: "proto-planet"). Also it has been proposed and probably generally agreed to that this ether phenomenon dissipates gradually for some reason as the centuries pass, possibly necessitating climate control measure on the Moon.

5) We seem to be in agreement, or at least with a majority opinion, moving against famous historical figures being aliens. We're still early in the discussion of exactly what the alien deal is, but seem to all agree that there is an alien factor that is important.

So maybe let's talk some more about aliens. Also, any kind of society-related thoughts might be good.

Shared World Project: Summary so far

I’d like to try to gather together what we have so far in a more organized fashion and then continue the discussion. The previous post ran almost to almost 40 comments and is getting somewhat unwieldy. If you have just come upon this shared world discussion and would like to join it from the beginning, skip down a couple posts and read the first one (which also links to a post on Brandon Bell’s blog—the idea of doing a shared world was his initially). This post and the original one can be called up together using the “shared world” label at the bottom of the post. You’ll also find another post related to this at Clifford Green’s blog (which is fun to read generally) in which he points out quite correctly that some of us largely ignored/forgot about what he and Kaolin Fire were saying during the initial Twitter discussion on this topic (they are @SatansPuppet and @kaolinfire on Twitter). We certainly did not intend to ignore anyone’s input, and everyone is welcome to come right here and get involved.

So I will summarize what I think we have so far, and then we will continue discussing ideas. Also, I may miss some major points here, so add/correct as needed in the comments. Keep in mind that this summary is only of what we have so far, resulting from the comments on the original post. It’s not to say that any or all of it is set in stone yet. If anybody has new or different ideas, please express them. Anyone at all who may want to write in this shared universe or possibly create other art based on it is welcome to join in the discussion.

THE PROJECT: Create a shared world as the setting for a group of short stories that will fill a future issue of M-Brane. The world itself will be made available under a Creative Commons license for anyone to create in, and hopefully this will inspire a lot of good work in a lot of venues in the future.

THE WORLD: Alternate historical Earth where a technological divergence (possibly/probably influenced or accelerated by extraterrestrial contact) from what happened in our real history enables ancient civilizations to rapidly advance into the space age. The cultures we are considering using include, so far: Egypt, Greece, China, Aztec or some meso-American civilization. Others that have been suggested include Indians, Romans, Moors and some sort of sub-Saharan African civilization. They can’t all exist in the same timeframe, so nailing that down will answer some of these questions.

THE SOCIETY: We have said little about this yet, but these suggestions have come up:
1. Ancient social/governmental structures persist into the space-faring era. Egypt has a Pharaoh, China still has its dynasty, etc.
2. A plethora of different cultures exist on Earth and the inhabited off-world areas, some of them more and some of them less under the sway of the major Earth powers; possibly the Great Powers don’t necessarily rule the whole Earth or all the off-world places directly; a possibility that there exist enormous technological gaps between the Great Powers and less powerful cultures.

TECHNOLOGY: We’ve said more about this so far than some other things. Everyone in the discussion so far seems to agree that this alternate Earth is a space-faring world with settlements off world, perhaps fully inhabited long-established other planets. Whether this is a “recent” or “long ago” development is unclear. Also, one contributor has proposed establishing a canonical time-lime spread over centuries, so possibly some stories will be set in pre-space flight times, some during (for example) the colonization of Mars, some centuries after, etc. We seem to like these technological things so far:

1. A general sense of the old and new and weird existing side-by-side, possibly with a good deal of steampunk vibe. One contributor suggested such things as dangerous, unreliable space travel methods, states armed with nuclear weapons that are carried around by zeppelins, steam tech co-existing with nuclear/computer age stuff, maybe some radically different direction for computers than what happened in the real world.

2. Everyone appears to agree that the Moon, Mars and Venus are inhabited, and possibly some other locations as well. There may also be artificial structures in space. So these places need to be inhabitable somehow. Here is a summary of what’s been said on this, and keep in mind that these are only ideas, they are not necessarily all mutually compatible:

a) The other planets have been terraformed with the aid of giant heaters to maintain temperature and gas generators that need to constantly pump out an atmosphere (this idea seems to be gaining ground in the group);

b) some sort of breathable “ether” encompasses the Earth/Moon neighborhood and it’s possible to travel between them in rickety, non-pressurized vehicles; this idea seems to be losing traction, and perhaps wouldn’t be applicable to the further away worlds anyway;

c) A third idea: The other planets such as Mars and Venus were “living” all along in this universe and never required massive terraforming to make them inhabitable; if so, did they have any kind of important native life already?

3. Other items that may or may not exist include: space stations, space elevators; we need to also consider what the method of space travel itself is like, but that may resolve itself when we decide some more stuff about the planet issues above.

4. A lot more consideration needs to be given to how the technological revolution happens. The discussion so far seems to be heading toward a combo of real historically plausible innovations that are then impacted by humans gaining knowledge of (and perhaps direct intervention by) something extraterrestrial (see Brandon’s proposed timeline toward the end—about the 34th comment—of the comments on the original post).

BASIC RULES: It seems we have settled on a more or less rational/scientific world as opposed to a fantastical/magical one, so we’ll assume that anything that is proposed in stories ought to be explainable by science, or at least in a way that is in-universe consistent scientifically. Once the world is fleshed out, we’ll have it be a rule that major structure of it can’t be destroyed (like it won’t be “canonical” if a story depicts the complete annihilation of one of the great powers, etc.). That’s about it for the rules so far, unless I missed something.

That seems to be most of the major elements from the conversation so far. I would like to note that Brandon, near the start of the comments on the earlier post, proposed an entirely other scenario that we didn’t pursue any further after the alternate history thing got going. I wonder, however, if there aren’t some useful elements there that could be transplanted—it has a lot of freaky weirdness that might be worth another look.

Let’s contemplate all this and keep throwing out ideas, perhaps with special attention to technological matters (how the other planets get settled, what sort of computers these people have, what travel on Earth is like) and the what/if details of the alien intervention. Also we may want to settle more firmly on when exactly in history this alternate world spins off so we know who we’re talking about as far as major players (as I said before, Egypt seems the popular favorite, so maybe we’ll continue to plan around that).

Shared World project

Today on Twitter, Brandon Bell (@nithska) made a suggestion that I think is terrific: that some future issue of M-Brane be devoted to tales set in a shared world, the nature of which will be determined collaboratively by whoever wants to get involved in it. The world itself would be an open-source, Creative Commons-license thing that anyone could work in. Go read Brandon’s blog post about this and then come back here. I’ll wait for you…

…So, what do you think? I like this idea a lot, and I am inclined to reserve the complete space in an M-Brane issue for the results of this. Perhaps #12 (January 1 2010) would be a good time for it. I have nothing already booked that far out, and it would leave a few months for the world-building and story-writing.

At this very early stage, maybe a good way to proceed is for people to start thinking about what kind of interesting, fun, weird, compelling traits that a new world could have and start posting some thoughts in the comments here. My guess is that some natural conversation will develop and people will play off each other’s ideas and, after a week or two, we might have the beginnings of something. We might even want to think about some questions that need to be answered about the new world and use those as starting points. I will label this post and any future posts related to this project with the label “Shared World” so that it will be easy to recall them together if it eventually gets to where there are a lot of posts about this spread out over a long time. I could easily set up another page just for this, but I’ll let it get started here and over at Brandon’s page and we’ll see how it goes.

One other thing: if this special Shared World issue of M-Brane happens, I will not act as the editor of it in the sense of personally selecting its content in the way that I normally do for a regular issue. We’ll instead arrive at some other way to put it together—don’t know what yet, but it will get figured out. I can also imagine doing a lot of promotion of the issue by posting stories or story teasers on everyone’s blogs and maybe coming up with some stuff in other media like podcasts, visual art, videos, operas, whatever.