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[reohoko]

Actually, celebrities are real people. (Sort of.) Character-based fan fiction is about fictional characters.

The difference between those two types, and straight historical fiction, is that Celebrity fiction is pseudo biographical.

(Right! About as close to reality as 'The Simple Life'.)

Fan fiction is fiction based upon some other (professional) writer's character(s) and setting.

Historical fiction tends to be about fictional characters within a real (historical) setting . . . at least as close as that writer's abilities and research can get him/her.

Alternately, some stories are fictional (or fictionalized) events in a real historical character's life. Again, as good as the writers' talent and research can get him/her.

In this light, the real-life celebrity's story and the fictionalized event in a historical character's (celebrity) life shares similar ground, without really sharing a similar goal.

Celebrity fiction is fantasizing about an actual person's reality.

Historical fiction applies historical fact to fictional events to increase the story's verisimilitude.

Fan fiction tries only to recreate whatever reality was accomplished by the original writer(s).

We already have a number of authors publishing historical stories, and in whichever category they are filed, they are never a comfortable fit. The writer must always feel that some portion of his/her story is not being considered. The reader is also being partially mislead, or failing to be lead, either away from, or toward these stories.

The same kind of nonsupport is true of Celebrity and Fan Fiction; but, only in that way are they similar. It would be equally misleading to consider them each other's equivalent.

Oh, I do hope we get a historical section. I really like reading those books. There is this one author, I can't think of her name. She is an archealogist (or anthropoligist? I forget), she builds entire romantical tales just from odd scientific discoveries they find.

There is this one, based on a mummy they found in an odd place in like England or someplace there-abouts. She turned it into this whole, hmm, a story like Romeo and Juliette (and if I could spell... that would be a miracle).

That would be completely cool to read, more history based stuff.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Aw, I get it. A colleague of Lord of the Flies and The Matrix! (Well, their creators, anyway...)

Sounds like something I wouldn't like very much. Metal, concrete, sunglasses in the rain, computers ruling people's lives - too depressing!

I prefer sugary-sweet stories of people humping in the grass, under the sun, with no greater problems in life than "how will I get the grass stains off my clothes?"

I love the genre. It is so openended so totally up to the writer's imagination. It is difficult to mix with erotica however. And ducedly hard to write a love story in. The world is dark and most cyberpunk ends on a down note. There is a raw edge of sexuality i most of the works, but crossing into actually adding the sex is problematic.

For me it is the ultimate strech of the imagination. What wonders can man have achieved and how can we screw them up? My main character has nano processors in her body that give her reflexs similar to a mongoose. She has cybernetic eyes that can do amazing things. Her lover has an implant that lets her jack into the net and operate on just her mental implulses. Great stuff

I think the story line is pretty strong and that make the sex easier to write. It was so much fun to build a world purely on my imagination and the few things I have read in the genre. Obviously it isn't for everyone, but if you have an interest in good reading ask Raphy to send you one of his non erotic cyberpunk stories. They are pretty short, read very well and are just darned good escapist reading

-Colly

 

[Svenskaflicka]

Life has enough darkness, what with poverty, loneliness, sickness, etc, if I want to escape for a few minutes, I prefer to do so to a nice and sunny place, where people are funny to read about. Woodhouse - that's a man to my liking!

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Life has enough darkness, what with poverty, loneliness, sickness, etc, if I want to escape for a few minutes, I prefer to do so to a nice and sunny place, where people are funny to read about. Woodhouse - that's a man to my liking!

LOL,

I am probably biased. Raphy used me as a character in one of his stories and I have been hooked ever since

-Colly

 

[reohoko]

Not to butt in, but of course, we all know I do that....

Cyberpunk is a lot like a game my hubby and his friends played for awhile - Shadowrun.

Even in darkness there is love, and they had love stories, even hidden ones the gamemaster was not always aware of. Why can't to the two heros (I will not even attempt to spell the female version of that this morning... the embarressment at getting it wrong would simply destroy me )

There are stories of a annoying co-partners.... the ones that didn't want to be partners, and in their attempts to free the world of the chains that bind, find themselves chained by an even stronger one... love.

Or the hero that falls in love with the enemy, torn to decide which is the true evil, and which is the false. Does she run away from the security of her father's business, the safety of the clean dome and it's overbearing laws, to be in his arms? Live a life of crime in the name of freedom... of love?

Or does he die trying to find a way to be with her? Or maybe, even better he overthrows the government and hero gets girl (girl gets girl, guy gets guy, whatever, the sex matters not as much as the SEX... *giggle).

Anyway, just my two or five cents. LOL

 

[Quasimodem]

"Canute began by being a Bad King on the advice of his Courtiers, who informed him (owing to a misunderstanding of the Rule Britannia) that the King of England was entitled to sit on the sea without getting wet."

How old are your Gauche?

I was reading that 1931 classic from Sellar & Yeatman in Grade Five. (10 year-old) The trouble was they wrote so little else.

I soon moved on to Will Cuppy and his books "The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody," "How To Get From January To December," "How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes," "How to Be a Hermit or a Bachelor Keeps House," "How to Attract the Wombat," and "How to Become Extinct."

If you really wish to calibrate the degree to which Western Society is being dumbed down, read a couple, and learn from them, how far satire has fallen.

 

[raphy]

Coming in late here, but my 2 cents..

1) Colly, your C-P story is great. Like others said, I'd put it into sci-fi and besides, most sci-fi fans are gonna like lesbian sex, so you'll get the kinky vote as well as the high-tech/low-life vote.

2) Cyberpunk's depressing 'flicka, don't read it. We're all pawns of big brother, and unless you're in the financial top 1% of society, your life is worthless, meaningless and continues only at someone else's whim.

 

[Lauren Hynde]

What this actually means, in terms of a historical category for Lit., is that all stories posted there would have to be of English History, since that is the only history there actually is.

You are trying to get your ass kicked, aren't you?

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Coming in late here, but my 2 cents..

1) Colly, your C-P story is great. Like others said, I'd put it into sci-fi and besides, most sci-fi fans are gonna like lesbian sex, so you'll get the kinky vote as well as the high-tech/low-life vote.

2) Cyberpunk's depressing 'flicka, don't read it. We're all pawns of big brother, and unless you're in the financial top 1% of society, your life is worthless, meaningless and continues only at someone else's whim.

I submitted it to sci fi raphy, thanks for the vote of confidence

-Colly

 

[Lauren Hynde]

I love the genre. It is so openended so totally up to the writer's imagination. It is difficult to mix with erotica however. And ducedly hard to write a love story in.

I once recommended JG Ballard's Crash to Raph and I think you would love it too, Colly. You might have seen David Cronenberg's movie adaptation, too.

I don't know if many people consider him a cyberpunk author (most of his work isn't) but there are some elements throughout his writings that are too close to ignore. Crash in particular.

It's not declaredly set in the future, although we get that feeling. It's a dark place, at the same time familiar and grotesque, where characters whose lives were in some way changed by car crashes wander amidst highways and shapeless cityscapes, experimenting with their sexuality. It is a pornographic novel. There are no evil computers or Orwellian Big Brother-type corporations, but we witness a blending between sex and technology, shielded by the steelframes of cars, and a tapping of our own modern-day psychopathologies. Ballard's writing style isn't, as you say about yours, exactly cyberpunk norm, but style can't make a genre.

'The ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.'

If that isn't cyberpunk I don't know what is.

 

[sirhugs]

You are trying to get your ass kicked, aren't you?

actually, I bet, he'd rather have it licked!

 

[sirhugs]

Coming in late here, but my 2 cents..

1) Colly, your C-P story is great. Like others said, I'd put it into sci-fi and besides, most sci-fi fans are gonna like lesbian sex, so you'll get the kinky vote as well as the high-tech/low-life vote.

2) Cyberpunk's depressing 'flicka, don't read it. We're all pawns of big brother, and unless you're in the financial top 1% of society, your life is worthless, meaningless and continues only at someone else's whim.

Pattern Recognition was not a total downer. Best book I read in 2003.

Never read Crash but the movie seemed a cauionary tale against something. Just never sure what. Excessive thrill seeking? Falling in with the bad crowd our mothers warned us about? Deborah Kara Unger's hyponoitic eyes?

 

[Colleen Thomas]

I once recommended JG Ballard's Crash to Raph and I think you would love it too, Colly. You might have seen David Cronenberg's movie adaptation, too.

I don't know if many people consider him a cyberpunk author (most of his work isn't) but there are some elements throughout his writings that are too close to ignore. Crash in particular.

It's not declaredly set in the future, although we get that feeling. It's a dark place, at the same time familiar and grotesque, where characters whose lives were in some way changed by car crashes wander amidst highways and shapeless cityscapes, experimenting with their sexuality. It is a pornographic novel. There are no evil computers or Orwellian Big Brother-type corporations, but we witness a blending between sex and technology, shielded by the steelframes of cars, and a tapping of our own modern-day psychopathologies. Ballard's writing style isn't, as you say about yours, exactly cyberpunk norm, but style can't make a genre.

'The ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.'

If that isn't cyberpunk I don't know what is.

I'll have to give it a read Thanks for the suggestion

-Colly

 

[Lauren Hynde]

Never read Crash but the movie seemed a cauionary tale against something. Just never sure what.

I love Cronenberg to bits but admitedly I didn't apreciate the whole complexity of the movie until after reading the book. And between Deborah Unger and James Spader, who cares about that?

 

[sirhugs]

I love Cronenberg to bits but admitedly I didn't apreciate the whole complexity of the movie until after reading the book. And between Deborah Unger and James Spader, who cares about that?

Spader never made sense to me til I saw Secretary. Hew was perfect in that. Unger though is the perfect flawed bombshell.

 

[raphy]

Pattern Recognition was not a total downer. Best book I read in 2003.

Curiously enough, I didn't like Pattern Recognition .. Felt too much like Gibson trying to out-Gibson himself, for my liking.. *smiles and shrugs* .. I read it back-to-back with Richard Morgan's Broken Angels, and I thought ... Angels was much better.

edit - by the way, my previous comments about cyberpunk were mostly satirical, as a proponent (and exponent) of the genre, I'm allowed to poke fun at it

 

[Svenskaflicka]

2) Cyberpunk's depressing 'flicka, don't read it. We're all pawns of big brother, and unless you're in the financial top 1% of society, your life is worthless, meaningless and continues only at someone else's whim.

And the difference between that and real life is..?

 

[raphy]

And the difference between that and real life is..?

Well, not too much.. Hence the terrible accusations of realism that get hurled at cyberpunk authors