Adam Christopher is the author of Empire State (Angry Robot, 2012). He has been nominated for the British Science Fiction Association, British Fantasy Society, and Parsec awards. In 2010, as an editor, Adam won a Sir Julius Vogel award, New Zealand’s highest science fiction honor. Adam’s home on the web is adamchristopher.co.uk, and he can be found on Twitter as @ghostfinder.
For more information on the Empire State and the Worldbuilder project, please visit empirestate.cc.
Welcome to the World of Empire State
I like fandom – in fact, I’m part of it.
I started writing when I was seven, and what wrote was inspired by – copied from – what I loved the most. And what I loved the most in 1985 was Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Who. Somehow, magically, I still have a couple of exercise books from that year at primary school, and they are full to the brim of the best Doctor Who fan fiction an enthusiastic seven-year-old could muster. Okay, so maybe my mash-up of Spearhead from Space and Inferno (with added giant spiders from whoknowswhere) doesn’t quite work, but this, my young self knew, was “it”. Twenty years later, my first published fiction was – you guessed it – Doctor Who fan fiction; a few pieces written for TSV and Timestreams, the magazines of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club. I even ended up editing TSV for a few years, winning a Sir Julius Vogel award in the process.
Empire State, my debut novel, came out from Angry Robot in January this year. It’s not fan fiction, that’s for sure, but a few months after I sold it, I got another call from my editor. Angry Robot had a plan, and they wanted to use my book.
That plan was Worldbuilder, a open, expanded universe under a creative commons license which would allow anybody to create their own work, using Empire State as the foundation. And not just fiction – art, music, comic strips, absolutely anything is possible. Empire State itself is a superhero science fiction noir about a private detective in an alternate universe New York City; thanks to the setting and the mechanics, fan creators can work in almost any genre – crime, SF, fantasy, horror, superhero fiction, time travel, you name it.
And it’s a lot of fun. The best fan creations will be selected to appear alongside commissioned work from professionals – already we’ve got a short story from James Patrick Kelly, a set of film still from photographer JR Blackwell, and an RPG from game designer David Wendt, while Hugo-award winning author and professional puppeteer Mary Robinette Kowal is building a toy theatre. And that’s just the start of it.
The number one question I get asked is how I feel about people using Empire State to create new work – and I think the answer surprises people. Am I terrified of what people will do to my world and characters? Isn’t it brave to allow people into my universe?
The answer to both is no. Worldbuilder is tremendously exciting – the idea that people are working with my novel to create something new is, in my mind, completely brilliant.
I can’t wait to see what happens!
[...] Suvudu (Adam Christopher) on Welcome to the World of Empire State. [...]
That’s a very interesting idea that Angry Robot has launched, and the end results will be fascinating to watch.
From a nerdy point of view: Would you consider stories selected for the anthology to be canonical? I could see that going either way. I think if you canonize the commissioned work, it’s only fair to canonize the winning fanfiction. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter, but if the IP has a lifespan of say 10 years it might.
From an fledgling author’s POV: I totally agree with your attitude towards people creating fanfiction. I mean, if they love it they’re going to do it anyway–why not officially sanction it, and thus engender good will between the author and their audience? It’s like the music industry allowing mashups. It only creates more space for the original work to be digested.
Then again, like you I wrote quite a bit of fanfic in my early days (Star Trek, Hercules, Final Fantasy Tactics). It’s kind of funny how easily it can date your childhood.