Maybe I’m the last person to have heard of Amazon.com’s fanfic venue, Kindle Worlds. I find it both horribly wrong and wonderfully fascinating. On the one hand, there’s quite a lot of drivel fanfic out there. But, on the other hand, there’s the possibility for as-good or better stories than what the original author wrote to continue fan’s love of a fictional universe. Once a book, book series, movie, or television series fizzles out, those characters and places are still able to live on and don’t merely become silent trees falling in forests where nobody can hear.
I only discovered Kindle Worlds this morning when eReader IQ suggested that I might like a bargain Kindle book set in Hugh Howey’s world of Wool … only … it wasn’t written by Hugh Howey. No. This book is Silo Saga: Great Fall: The Complete Silo Novel (Kindle Worlds) by Jason Gurley.
What makes this really intriguing to me is that I read the Wool series and liked the premise quite a lot. The world has been annihilated with the only remaining humans left in underground silos created to sustain humanity for countless generations. We assume there was a nuclear holocaust, but it’s never made 100% clear. So depending on what exactly happened and its effect on nature, it could be hundreds or thousands of years before the earth is safely habitable again. This opens up quite a lot of opportunity for fanfic for all those countless generations.
Even though I liked the premise of the novel, I found that the author was lacking in basic common sense knowledge for creating believable story lines. For example, it shouldn’t take 2 days to go down 100 floors of stairs. People who have been dead for 30 years would no longer look like “bodies” and would not be smelly anymore. Emergency lights aren’t going to last for 30 years, especially if they’re submerged under water. A random body is not going to float past you in the water after 30 years dead. And you cannot hide a whole passel of babies and/or children in silence for 15 years. And let’s just forget altogether about the lifespan of computers, machinery, and clothing over hundreds or thousands of years without raw materials. So, I’d like to see how a fresh author would write another book in the series without making such grievous mistakes.
Amazon has secured the rights to several titles for fanfic within Kindle Worlds:
- Gossip Girl
- Pretty Little Liars
- The Vampire Diaries
- Archer & Armstrong
- Bloodshot
- Harbinger
- Shadowman
- X-O Manowar
- Hugh Howey’s Silo Saga
- Barry Eisler’s John Rain novels
- Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines series (inspired by Twin Peaks … interesting … wishlisted)
- The Foreworld Saga by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Mark Teppo, Eric Bear, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, and Cooper Moo
- The World of Kurt Vonnegut
- The Dead Man
Admittedly, I’ve not heard of most of these. But what a brave and daring venture for these authors. There’s the chance for people to write something horrendous in the world you created and there’s the chance that someone’s going to come along and write your world even better than you did. But, I think what would bother me most would be someone misunderstanding the world I’d created or my characters and having them veer too far off the path I’d set them on.
Anyhow, I continue to be impressed by Amazon.com’s forward-thinking business model. They’ve got people in their company with ideas that work, and they’re not afraid to try something new. Another item I’m impressed with is their Whispersyncing that even syncs with Audible to allow you to continue the book you were reading on your Kindle last night before bed as an audiobook in your car on the way to work the next morning. Unfortunately, some of the Audible versions cost more than I’d like to pay: sometimes the same or more than the original book price. But I might not mind paying a couple of dollars to be able to listen to a free Kindle classic in the car to supplement my limited night time reading time. I might be doing that quite a lot in the future since I have a feeling there are going to be quite a lot of Thomas Hardy novels in my future (that’s a story for another blog altogether).
evanescent epiphany 