I started the wikifiction blog on April 4th, 2009. At that time, I had survived a few years of experimentation with collaborative fiction writing. I say "survived" because it is not easy to find collaborators who want to write in the same direction at the same time. I had also been experimenting with fan-fiction, which can be viewed as a kind of collaboration. Ꝗ: What might be accomplished with a blog that was devoted to science fiction writing?
April 2009 - April 2019
To celebrate 10 years of the wikifiction blog, I'm going to partake in one of my self-indulgent navel gazing disquisitions...
Investigational Fiction
Cellular Civilization
About one year after starting this blog, I was scheming how to write a story that would allow me to investigate the hidden mysteries of what I call Genesaunt Society, a galactic civilization that I had begun to explore in my alternate history novel Exodemic. My initial strategy was to pursue this investigation by making use of an existing character from Cellular Civilization (Charlie Parker) as an example of an Earthling who would travel through the galaxy and explore Genesaunt Society. However, at that time, I became very busy at work and I was forced to put my fiction writing on hold for a time. 😢
Parthney's family tree.
Hana
When I was once again able to think seriously about fiction writing, I switched directions and began exploring the life of a newly created character named Hana and that quickly led to my discovery of the Interventionist agent who would remove Hana from Earth, Parthney.
Hana was to have become the focus of my fiction writing, but quite unexpectedly Parthney became the center of my story telling world for a while.
One of the reasons for this was the fact that Parthney grew up on a distant world in the Galactic Core: Hemmal. I imagined that Hemmal had an artificially constructed surface with some geological features that match those of Earth. In fact, Hemmal had been crafted (by the pek) as a world where the Prelands could be designed and evolved, with the ultimate goal of replacing we Earthlings with Prelands when the time was right.
Asterothropes: the females
are larger than
the hermaphrodites.
After getting to know him, I discovered that Parthney has a rather unusual genetic background. His genetic mother was Trysta Iwedon, an Asterothrope from the far future. Pathney's father was Ekcolir, the special Interventionist agent who was sent to Earth on a mission designed to end the Time Travel War. Parthney is actually a clone of Trysta's son, Thomas.
An Argument with Asimov
My character Trysta Iwedon originated as Isaac Asimov's character Noÿs Lambent. In his novel, The End of Eternity, Asimov imagined that due to the existence of the Eternity time travel system, further evolution of the human species was halted. However, Noÿs was from about 10,000,000 years in our future, a time beyond the influence of Eternity (within the Hidden Centuries).
Asimov creates Noÿs
Asimov might not have agreed with my view, but by reading between the lines of The End of Eternity and extrapolating, I believe that Noÿs actually had some limited telepathic abilities and we should think of her as being a special primate variant created by R. Gohrlay and her cadre of positronic robots. I also assume that Noÿs had command of some advanced technologies including infites.
Either by means of telepathy or by using infites, Noÿs was able to transfer ideas into the mind of her lover, Andrew Harlan. In that way, Noÿs was able to make use of Harlan as her tool and bring Eternity to an end. Together, Noÿs and Harlan traveled into the past (to the 1930s) and helped bring into existence a new Reality: the Foundation Reality.
I assume that the Asterothropes provided R. Gohrlay with a proof of concept, a demonstration that a primate brain could achieve telastid-mediated telepathy at nearly the level attained by positronic robots. In the Foundation Reality, R. Daneel took on the task of creating Galaxia as a defense against the Huaoshy. This may have involved using the children of Noÿs and Harlan as a source of needed gene combinations that allowed for the development of humans who could function as the telepathic components of the Galaxia group mind.
Recursive Fiction
Another important element of the wikifiction blog has been the development of the idea that science fiction novels can include shorter science fiction stories. The first such story-within-a-story was the Legend of Uvadekoto. This move into recursive fiction came soon after I decided to make Isaac Asimov appear as a character in Foundations of Eternity.
Eventually, I realized that it is great fun to include well-known authors as characters inside my own stories. Thus, Jack Vance, Arthur Clarke, Carl Sagan and even Jack London have found their way into the Exode Saga. After that, it was an easy step to write myself (as the Editor) and several members of my family (such as Rylla) into the story as well. Sometimes I write stories that are set in past Realities and the characters are the analogues of famous science fiction story tellers such as Stanley Grauman Weinbaum. Imaginary Collaborators
After I began including myself in the Exode Saga, several imaginary collaborators stepped forward to help write the story. Among the most important of these has been Ivory Fersoni. There are many imaginary books that I have attributed to Ivory and her sisters. Ivory has been a particularly useful collaborator because her sister Angela was able to access hidden information about the past Realities of Earth.
More recently, two clones of Gohrlay named Zeta and Yōd have been valuable collaborators. Most recently, my grand-daughter Rylla has begun writing accounts of the Secret History of Humanity.
During the past ten years, the Exode Saga has grown to become my major fiction writing obsession. However, there are some other elements of the wikifiction blog that don't directly involve my own story writing. Back in 2012 I started my annual Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens (SIHA). So far, I have done one retro-SIHA for the year 2009.
When 2016 came around, I was still mourning the loss of Jack Vance, who was born in 1916. Since 2016, I try to celebrate the stories of Jack Vance in both May and August. Other anniversaries also get recognition in the wikifiction blog... examples: Asimov, John Boyd, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur Clark and Asimov again. I also did a series of blog posts for the 50th anniversary of Star Trek. The only other television show that gets similar amounts of attention at the wikifiction blog is The X-Files.
Sometimes I blog about software, particularly Blogger and Twitter. Last year I had a series of blog posts about one particular science fiction-oriented computer game. In my experience, science fiction-oriented books, films, television programs, blogs, tweets and even computer games can all provide stimulation to my own story writing.
After playing Beyond Earth and blogging about that game, I wrote some fan-fiction incorporating some elements of that game. Of course, my story was set in my own Exodemic Fictional Universe, but that exercise helped me think through the ultimate fate of Ivory and also led me to make an adjustment to the Bimanoid Interface.
The first image that I displayed on the wikifiction blog was an illustration of a space elevator for Mars (image to the left). All of the images uploaded to this blog have been automatically archived:
April 2, 2009 to Mar 24, 2013 Mar 24, 2013 to Sep 16, 2014 Sep 16, 2014 to Dec 26, 2015 Dec 26, 2015 to Jan 15, 2017 Jan 15, 2017 to current 2019 Originally the images from Blogger blogs were archived by the Picasa web service. In 2013 I made an archive for a Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers. Google eventually destroyed Picasa, but I was able to transfer my book covers archive and my Posters archive to their Photos system.
One of the features of Google Photos is that it tries to label particular people in your stored images (see the images to the right). Google is sometimes able to recognize famous people like Gillian Anderson in an uploaded image, but their facial recognition system sometimes mis-identifies other people as being Gillian. I often make illustrations for human variants such as the Kac'hin. I told Photos that one such "person" is my character Grean. Other such images automatically get labels such as "alien humanoid".
The wikifiction blog began as my diary, a place where I could think about collaborative fiction writing and software tools that support story telling. Eventually, I began posting my fiction on blog pages. My first movement in that direction was in early 2012 when I sketched out a story idea.
Soon I blogged about my ideas for a Contact television show. My fan-fiction addiction quickly led me to start thinking about how to place the science fiction stories of Jack Vance into the Exodemic Fictional universe. Eventually I would realize that if the stories of Isaac Asimov explained the Mallansohn Reality and the Foundation Reality, then Vance's fiction might be set in the Asimov Reality. This idea eventually had a major impact on the shape of the Exode Saga.
Exode
By September 2012 I began blogging about my new story called Exode. At that time, I decided that I should put the Exode story on its own website. I imagined that I could keep my commentary about Exode here on the wikifiction blog.
The years 2014 - 2016 were the Golden Age for this blog. Here are hypertext links to some past blog posts that summarize my blogging during that golden era: Year in Review: 2014 2015 in Review 2016 in Review
During those years, I out-grew the Exode Trilogy and the Exode Saga became a set of 5 linked novels, including The First Reality and A Search Beyond. Important events in this blog during 2017 and 2018 were summarized here.
Reduced color palette animated GIF (above). See the full 1080p Exode Saga video near the bottom of this page.
I've created an animated cover image for the entire Exode Saga (above). That's Rylla under the light of a full moon, at a time when she was in the process of learning about her grandfather's investigations of the Secret History of Humanity. In the image, she has fallen asleep while reading Exode. At the same time, Rylla is being watched by an alien Observer.
Much effort has gone into making Earthlings (such a me) imagine that Observer Base is located on the Moon. Actually, Observer Base is inside the Hierion Domain.
In some sense, Rylla has replaced Hana as the "star" of the Exode Saga. I'm now imagining that readers can be introduced to the Exode Saga through the eyes of Rylla as she learns about the past efforts of her grandfather to tell the Exode story to the people of Earth.
Twitter-versary.
Twitzone
Ten years ago, I began experimenting with both Twitter and blogging about my interests in science fiction. At one time, I would announce my wikifiction blog posts on social media shortly after the time when I would create a new blog post. Eventually I discovered that there is a period of time after creating a new blog post that I continue to edit it and link it to other pages of my blogs.
Twitter
Illustrated tweets ("Media")
Currently, I am 4 months behind in announcing wikifiction blog posts on Twitter.
Future Fiction
Who is this?
Blog posts such as this one allow me to reflect on the past and think about the possible future direction of this blog. I did not have any particular Kac'hin in mind when I created the image shown to the right. I need to settle my thinking about exactly who remains at Observer Base, so maybe there is still a Kac'hin hermaphrodite at Observer Base.
As discussed here, the Kac'hin carry sophisticated endosymbionts that endow them with the ability to perform genetic engineering. Rylla must come to realize that R. Nyrtia provided humans with a Phari endosymbiont that could ensure the sort of temporal momentum that was invented by Isaac Asimov in his time travel novel, The End of Eternity. What is special about the Ka'chin is that they can take conscious control of their ability to perform genetic engineering and Rylla must confront the fact that her own genome was designed by a Kac'hin agent at Observer Base. Here is the Exode Saga teaser video:
Future SIHA Plans. This blog is my playground, so I don't like to make work for myself here, but maybe during the next ten years I will be able to award a retro-SIHA for both the year 2010 and 2011. (update: 2001 retro-SIHA) Related Reading: the most visited wikifiction blog page.
- top 10 blog posts - And: the end of Twitter. Next: Searching for Interesting Hollywood Aliens in 2019
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