Yesterday evening while participating in my first Brin-L chat I had a small realization. If you've ever competed in a sport, you know that rules determine play. In karate, for instance, the fighting competition in no way resembles the self-defense techniques one learns because the entire premise and rules of competition (a duel, essentially) are different from a situation of true self-defense (being assaulted unawares).
That said, one of the differences between chat-conversation and list-conversation is that chat is a bad medium for heavy arguments. I'm not saying it can't or hasn't been done (I've chatted in other contexts), but it's unwieldy to say the least. Chat promotes the kind of interaction where people riff off one another, building to a crescendo, whereas list-based conversation is ideal for mulling a thought over and coming up with just the right thing to say, etc. Anyway, participating in the chat made me think, how can we create opportunities for the list to get a little more of that positive, mutually-reinforcing riffing off one another, to complement the heavy arguments that also go on? Then this lunatic idea hit me: fan fiction. Now, wait a minute. Stop screaming and clawing the walls...hear me out. Once upon a time before the age of electricity there were these things called parlor games. One of these games was a form of community storytelling. One person would write a paragraph, or a page, and then pass the story to the next person. (This is something that used to be done with great success in the days of BBS's when text was king; there's no reason it wouldn't work now.) So here's the thing. Tom Orley is lost in space with some interesting companions and a lot of Bug Eyed Monsters and recycled bodily fluids between him and home. It's going to be a while before Dr. Brin takes care of him, so I think we should have some fun in the meantime. I propose that we (perhaps after refreshing our memories of the first Uplift trilogy) compose some serial adventures for Tom Orley in the tradition of classic pulp sci-fi. Silliness is encouraged, but not so much that we lose our focus. Is anyone game for a challenge like this? I'm not talking about writing novels or even short-stories. Just loosely linked, brief, episodic vignettes in which each person builds on what was written by the last. Maybe it will crescendo into something grand. Please let me know what you think. Marvin Long Austin, Texas
