= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
MugaSofer comments on September 2013 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (70)
For some reason, this appears to be among the only - two? three? - pieces of Culture fanfiction ever written. I have no idea why.
How would you know, given that you are not on Usenet or plugged into the SF fanzines of the '80s or '90s when Banks was huge?
So are there in fact lots?
My point here is more that you aren't looking under the proverbial lamppost, so the absence of evidence is not very strong evidence of absence.
Mm, I was mostly just hopeful. I've just been actually looking online and accumulating a list, fwiw. I'll post it here later.
There doesn't seem to be much of a fanfic tradition for literary SF. I'm not sure why; there's plenty of shared universe action going on, but it seems to be more a professional than an amateur phenomenon.
The obvious answer would probably be that literary SF doesn't have enough long-term focus on characters to be appealing to fanfic writers, but there's enough setting- or conceit-based fic in other genres that I'm not sure how seriously to take that. People usually don't write Lovecraft fic because they want to read more about Randolph Carter, for example.
Iain M Banks' Culture fanfic I could find
This is, literally, the lot. Additions welcomed.
-- and apparently there was one here which didn't make it into archive.org.
Why on earth did I think making a sweeping statement like that in the middle of LessWrong was a good idea? I am dumb, that's why. Thanks for all the counterexamples, folks! I only knew that in the first place because I wanted to read some a while back.
I still think the Culture fandom is unusually bereft of fanfic? Maybe I'm just spoiled by mega-popular stuff, though.
There's a fairly obnoxious Culture / WH40K fanfic going on right now in the GiantITP Media sub-forum, and it seems that the Banks fans there are eating it up so there's a decent chance it emulates his style well. Supposedly the author is going to collect and repost it to some Fan-Fic site in the next 20,000 years but don't count on it.
I never had the stomach to read much of it; the tone is pretty jarring for a 40K fan, the ideology of the Culture has always struck me as heinous and it led out of a flame-war which almost got me banned, so there were some emotions there. You might be interested though.
Link to page-o-links for story: http://sync.in/ep/pad/view/ro.f7Ii2bq8IM01rFxsOm/latest
Ah, it's been a while since I did that "find some damn Culture fanfiction, it has to exist" project. Thanks for the link
Yeah, me too. Still, the sheer number of the books I've read attests to the fact that they were astoundingly well-written, even so.
Of course, "we're evil but also kinda the good guys" seems like it would fit right into the 40k universe, eh? People always claim that's the theme of the Imperium, after all...
Yes, even taking into account that "enemies of the Culture always resemble modern Earth conservatives" seems to be a law of physics in the Culture universe. Must be the same parallel evolution that produces all those humanoid species.
One of the Doctor Who novelisations, The Also People, features the seventh Doctor visiting a civilisation, The People, that's pretty much the Culture with the serial numbers filed off. The People are so technologically advanced that they have a non-aggression treaty with the Time Lords (which the Doctor helped negotiate).
I'd expect writing the Culture is tricky to pull off. Banks has a pretty distinctive voice and reasonably solid worldbuilding that's is a lot less likely to make people go "ehh, I could write better" than JK Rowling's stuff for example. Also the part where it subverts most of the whole drama from conflict thing by being people with their shit together wielding superior technology makes finding a plot that works a bit harder.
You may be right, at that. Banks is an intimidatingly skilled writer. Although surely you would expect less-impressive "me too"s? Fanfic writers are usually fans of some stripe ... um, aren't they? I guess I don't really know much about fanfiction author demographics, at that.
Well, the novels mostly focus on "outsiders" looking inward at the Culture, such as those from other civs and Special Circumstances, right? They have plenty of conflict.
Just a reminder that he no longer exists.
Yeah, I guess I meant his skill is still intimidating, rather than he is still skilled. Or something. You got me.