At The Bright Empire....

shadar wrote: Brantley has done more to grow the AU than any other writer, given that he approaches it both from an intellectual point of view (everything is linked and everything must at least internally make sense) and from a world-building perspective. His seeded worlds correctly have archaic cultures that reflect their point of abduction from Earth. His approach is more rigorous and self-consistent than mine ever was. As you can tell from the entry Points document, he's an archivist as well, where I'm happy to throw old stuff away. A very bad habit of mine.

shadar wrote: I started this off with the conceptual goal of creating a non-infringing race of "Kryptonians" who didn't violate DC Comics properties, and to try to provide a more plausible SF origin to my characters. During the bulletin board period (and also for a while after the infancy of Internet web sites), DC was going after a lot of web sites and authors who portrayed its characters in unapproved ways. DC eventually relented and let alternate culture overwhelm them for the most part. That when I made the critical mistake of blending aspects of both Kryptonians and my Velorians together in the mid to late 90's.

Instead, I should have gone the way Brantley eventually did and focused more rigorously on writing true SF. But by that time I had a huge audience and they liked what I was doing and resisted change. I went with the flow.

Brantley's AU3 is a testament to what can be done when discipline is introduced into the writing process. My stuff was (and is) a bit wild, fragmented and overly sexualized by some estimates, with thin conceptual world-building. But I continue to enjoy the spontaneity of running with a new idea (most of which come to me in dreams), and of then getting a bit carried away. My idea of creativity is throwing off constraints rather than living within them, which is perhaps a symptom of my "excessive consumption of weed", to paraphrase Saruman's critique of Radagast the Brown in Tolkein's LOTR and Peter Jackson's highly-tweaked versions of the Hobbit. I'm a bit more Radagast, both in appearance and behavior, and Brantley's more Gandalf.

Gloria, whose third and final episode is in the works, is my latest attempt. It appears only on SWM and not on any AU site. It was written for SWM as a companion piece to Anonxyzus Kiraling series.

Now I'm off to read Brantley's latest contribution, Empress III. He tells an AU story like no one else.

Shadar

brantley wrote:

Woodclaw wrote: In "Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story" Ernest Mandel observed that those same mistakes and naivety, which could be excused in Poe or Conan Doyle's novel, were unacceptable by later authors and that the more disciplined approach of some of them (especially S.S. Van Dine) actually ruined the genre.
Lucky for us this is not the case with Brantley

Just looked up Mandel, and it turns out he was a Marxist. Yet I gather he took a sympathetic approach to the detective story. The kind of Marxists who write about sf these days seem to be a dour lot, their critical works to clichéd and jargon-ridden that they come off as a constipation of thought and a diarrhea of words. Anyway, I'm also a fan of mystery novels, my recent faves including the Peculiar Crimes Unit series of Christopher Fowler. And there are delightful sf/mystery crossovers iike Robert J. Sawyer's RED PLANET BLUES. Of interest to SWM readers should be Christopher L. Bennett's ONLY SUPERHUMAN, which has to do with genetically engineered superheroes.

--Brantley

brantley wrote: Now if only somebody would read and comment on the story....

--Brantley

brantley wrote:

Woodclaw wrote:

brantley wrote: Now if only somebody would read and comment on the story....

--Brantley

Well, give me time to read it at least

Reaction doesn't seem to be good so far, based on stats and off-the-boards comments. I'm going to have to rework the story again.

--Brantley

brantley wrote:

brantley wrote: Plus, it has a neat illustration by Vagabond Eye (What ever became of him?).
--Brantley

Well, my face is red -- I see he's still very active at Deviant Art, and he's a better artist than a lot of the people working for DC or Marvel.

--Brantley