Paleo E-books: alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo and alt.pub.*
Prior columns in this series:
The Legion of Net.Heroes might be the oldest Usenet-based shared-world fiction setting still alive and kicking—but there are some defunct settings that pre-date it. Identifying them by the names of their newsgroups, these are mainly alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, alt.pub.dragons-inn, and alt.pub.havens-rest. Today we will look briefly at these groups where people were writing “e-books” before anybody ever knew what an “e-book” was.
The Chatsubo and the Pubs
When these groups are mentioned, they are often mentioned together, because they share more similarities than differences. Though they are based in different genres, all three of them are centered around a bar or pub—a place where characters can meet before heading on adventures, or simply hang out and pass the time. They all feature writers who control their own characters but share certain “non-player characters” in common.
The writing style was generally more serious than Superguy or the LNH, given that these were settings for writing original stories, not parodying something else. There were occasional touches of humor, however, such as a Dragon’s Inn character named Enn Piecy (after “NPC,” for “non-player character”—a roleplaying game term).
These fiction groups share their pub-based setting in common with a couple of non-fiction groups: alt.callahans and alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst. alt.callahans was the first pub-based chat group, founded in 1989, inspired by the Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon books by Spider Robinson.
alt.callahans is the Usenet equivalent of a chatroom: people would post about what they were doing and what was going on in their lives, and others would reply in kind. alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst (FAQ) came later, and was like an attempt to cross Callahan’s and the Chatsubo: a cyberpunk-themed meeting place, but for real people instead of fictitious characters.
Of all these groups, alt.callahans is the only one still going strong after all these years.
alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo
Some accounts (such as the alt.callahans FAQ and even Spider Robinson himself) incorrectly trace Chatsubo’s origin to “meiosis” from alt.callahans. But according to the person who originally created it, this is actually not the case.
alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo (FAQ) was created in November, 1990 by Liralen Li. When I checked with her about it, she explained that she had started writing some third-person posts in the discussion newsgroup alt.cyberpunk, interested in the possibilities the medium had to offer for storytelling.
But just as with the Legion of Net.Heroes stories, the denizens of alt.cyberpunk preferred their discussion of the cyberpunk genre unencumbered by fiction posts, and so alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo (and subsequently, a separate group for discussion of Chatsubo posts, alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo.d) was created. (The name “Chatsubo” was taken from a bar featured in William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer.)
As one might expect from the name, alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo was created for telling stories in the cyberpunk genre popularized by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and others. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, cyberpunk was a really popular genre, but in the end it fizzled, and so did Chatsubo. There’s nothing but spam in the newsgroup now. (A successor LiveJournal community exists—but it has only ever gotten 4 entries since it was created in 2005, and none of them are stories.)
However, Chatsubo did accomplish something that none of the other shared-world settings I’ve covered has ever managed: it published two print anthologies of stories from its writers. They were published via print-on-demand—but still, they’re carried on Amazon (Anthology 1, Anthology 2). Ironically, neither of them is available in e-book format.
Apart from the anthologies, the principal archives of the Chatsubo are in the form of Google Groups, or user archive pages such as The Tea Bowl.
alt.pub.dragons-inn
The Dragon’s Inn (FAQ) was established in May, 1992—after the silly thread that spawned the LNH, but before the actual LNH stories came about later that year. According to Liralen, Dragon’s Inn and Haven’s Rest were established by people who liked the idea of writing in a shared environment, but weren’t crazy about the cyberpunk genre.
Dragon’s Inn was set in the city of “Generica,” a “generic” fantasy setting inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game and its ilk. Characters would congregate at the Dragon’s Inn before going on adventures—though not all adventures were necessarily set around the Inn.
Dragon’s Inn was the first Internet writing circle in which I was involved when I got to college, and it was an experience that has stayed with me. Though I would be the first to tell you that my earliest stories were pretty lousy, other people seemed to like them and I soon improved—and I made a number of friends whom I still have to this day.
There were a couple of other alt.pub groups related to Dragon’s Inn. One, alt.dragons-inn, came out of a misguided attempt to create the group that became alt.pub.dragons-inn. Another, alt.pub.cloven-shield, was meant for writing fantasy stories like the Dragon’s Inn, but was never as popular. Both these groups were eventually abandoned; around 2000 a group of people claimed alt.pub.cloven-shield as a Callahans-like real-life chat forum, and they continue to chat there to this day.
Dragon’s Inn is the only pub group to have archives on Eyrie.org; they are simply every post made to the group, not organized except in chronological order, and run from the group’s inception in May, 1992 to October 25th, 1996. There are also individual authors who have story archive pages of their own work, such as me, Kelly J. Cooper, Liralen Li, and Steve Hutchison. As with the other such groups I’ve covered, these are generally all in hard-wrapped ASCII.
As with the other alt.pub groups, Dragon’s Inn is generally dead—all the original writers have moved on to other things. Every so often, someone comes in and attempts to start a new story—but with nobody to respond, the stories invariably go nowhere.
alt.pub.havens-rest
Haven’s Rest (FAQ) was created about the same time as Dragon’s Inn. It was a science fiction setting, set on a world in a pocket dimension full of rifts in space that brought space ships of various kinds to visit. The pub in this case was the Haven’s Rest, and it was very much like Dragon’s Inn except science-fictional.
I wrote two different story threads—a mecha-based series, and a RIFTS role-playing game fanfic series—but they both petered out before they could go anywhere. Still, I met some interesting people there, and polished my writing skills considerably.
One writing technique I found in Haven’s Rest but did not see much elsewhere, even in Dragon’s Inn, was the “cascade”. Someone would write a post with his own lines of dialogue or actions, then someone would follow up, quote the previous post, and insert other dialogue or actions between those lines. I thought it was a clever method of real-time collaboration, kind of like roleplaying by mail. (Now, of course, we would just use EtherPad.)
There don’t seem to be many references to Haven’s Rest on the web, and no story archives that I could find apart from my own. The group can, of course, be read via Google Groups.
As with Dragon’s Inn, the group has been abandoned by its former regulars, and only sees the occasional story start attempt.
That about covers the dead alt.pub.* forums. In the next installment of this column, I will look at some pre-e-book e-books that have exploded in popularity over the years.
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