TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Paleo E-books’ Category

By Chris Meadows

George Santayana said “Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” Certainly e-book history has been repeating—the iPhone/iPod Touch and the Kindle are standing in for the Palm PDA and the RocketBook as a new generation discovers e-books just as the early adopters did ten years ago (only a bit more successfully this time).

But the history that people have been forgetting (or perhaps not knowing to begin with) is that there was a thriving electronic fiction community years before even the earliest commercial e-books were around to be adopted.

Over the last four columns, I have looked at a number of the Internet fiction writing circles that made up this community. To wit:

• The Superguy Mailing List
• The Legion of Net.Heroes & rec.arts.comics.creative
• alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, alt.pub.dragons-inn, alt.pub.havens-rest
• Animé fanfic and Undocumented Features

These are the forums, filled mostly with college students, that were producing, distributing, and reading electronic literature in the late 1980s to early 1990s. Years before anyone caviled at the idea of reading from a handheld LCD, hundreds of people were thrilling to these tales on their amber and green CRTs, or those gigantic line printers that printed on green and white paper.

Today I’m going end this series with a look at a number of miscellaneous fiction archives and zines from that same era or even earlier. As the title suggests, I will be starting with some archives of collected fiction and nonfiction material, and closing out with zines.

“Zine” can be an abbreviation of “magazine”—but in the Internet sense, it is usually an abbreviation of “electronic magazine” or “e-zine” instead. E-zines were produced like the amateur “fanzines” that came about when Star Trek galvanized fandom in the 1960s—but using electronic distribution instead of the traditional fanzine mimeographs or photocopies. They could cover a variety of topics, but the ones I will be spotlighting here are mostly for original fiction.

But first, there are a few archives to go through.

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By Chris Meadows

This series, “Paleo E-books,” looks at groups who were writing Internet literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s—well before most people had any idea what an “e-book” was.

Prior “Paleo E-books” columns cover:

• The Superguy Mailing List
• The Legion of Net.Heroes & rec.arts.comics.creative
• alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, alt.pub.dragons-inn, alt.pub.havens-rest

In this entry I will be looking at fan-written fiction, or “fanfic”—and in particular one of the more famous early Internet fanfic series: Undocumented Features.

Today, there is nothing unusual about Internet fanfic; it’s just one of those things that people do on the Internet. It’s gotten so you can barely research Harry Potter without coming across a dozen “Harry + Luna” (or even “Harry + Draco”!) fanfics.

But in the early 1990s, Internet fan fiction was rare enough that those few people writing it became fairly well-known in their fandom communities. There are a number of reasons for this—there was no World Wide Web yet, and the Internet was completely unheard of outside of colleges and big businesses, so there were fewer people to write or read it.

To those familiar with how the Internet grew, it should come as no surprise that some of the first fanfic to appear was based on Japanese animation, or animé. If anything, it should be surprising that it took as long as it did to happen.

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By Chris Meadows

Prior columns in this series:

• The Superguy Mailing List
• The Legion of Net.Heroes & rec.arts.comics.creative

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.

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By Chris Meadows

This is the second in my “Paleo E-books” series looking at Internet writing communities that were producing electronic literature well before “e-books” were first popularized in the late 1990s. In this entry, I will look at the Legion of Net.Heroes (and, to a lesser extent, rec.arts.comics.creative).

Like Superguy, the LNH is a shared universe centering on comic book superhero parody. However, perhaps owing to its different origin, the approach it takes is very different.

The Legion of Net.Heroes

The LNH had its genesis in April, 1992, in one of the free-wheeling discussions that took place on Usenet newsgroups (forums) at the height of its popularity. Usenet has become less active now that its place has largely been usurped by phpBBSes, blogs, and other forums, but back in the ‘90s it was the go-to place for on-line discussion of all kinds of topics—including comic books.

One day, a poster to the rec.arts.comics newsgroup corrected someone else’s spelling, declaring himself “Spelling Boy of the LSH” (Legion of Super-Heroes, a DC title about a hero team by that name). From that post, and the whimsy of other newsgroup regulars, a thread of general silliness was born as various posters created heroic (or villainous) identities patterned after themselves—members (or enemies) of a “Legion of Net.Heroes”.

Although that first thread was more random silliness than story, the seed had been planted, and it ended up germinating into a somewhat more serious system of Internet-based superhero stories—first on rec.arts.comics.misc, then moving to the newly-created alt.comics.lnh after r.a.c.m. posters complained about the story threads getting in the way of their serious discussions. Two years later, after spawning a number of separate LNH-related and non-LNH-related writing universes, the LNH and these universes would move to rec.arts.comics.creative where they continue to this day.

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By Chris Meadows

In the last few years, e-books have stopped being an early adopters’ toy and started attracting more general interest. People are starting to get the idea that perhaps reading off of screens—especially LCD or e-ink screens held in the palm of one’s hand—may not be so bad after all.

But for a small yet active number of people (mostly college students), “reading off the screen” has been going on for as long as twenty-two years. Before the term e-book was in common use, before the World Wide Web was widespread, college students with too much time on their hands were writing stories and sending them over the Internet through various mailing lists and other forums.

Though these forums were all different, what they had in common was the collaborative, shared-universe nature of the projects. As with the published Thieves’ World and Wild Cards projects, authors would write their own separate stories set in the same world, but their characters would occasionally meet with each other, or be affected by events that happened in others’ stories.

Some of these forums are still active; many of them are dead or mostly dead. What  they all have in common is that they have left behind copious archives of material. Some of it is all right, some of it is terrible, but a lot of it still stands up well even today.

In my next few columns, which I’ve decided to call “Paleo E-books,” I will look at some of these forums. I’m going to start with one of the oldest: The Superguy mailing list, which began in 1989 as an offshoot of the SFSTORY list started in 1987. That’s twenty-two years of history—and over twelve and one half million words of archives.

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