One of my favourite all time books is The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel. I think the book was absolutely brilliant, and as an author myself, I don't think my writing is anywere close to that of this book by Jean M. Auel.
My strength in my writing is lore and world building, and a few dozen readers of my novel Ragnarok Conspiracy suggested I should re-use the universe i created for this novel and write a second book.
There is one thing keeping me from doing just that, and it are the other books in the Earth's Children series. While The Clan of the Cavebear was absolutely brilliant, the sequel to that book, The Valley od The Horses was of significantly lower quality, and the three books following that publication got worse and worse with every book. I've stopped reading at The Shelters of Stone that in my oppinion was close to being an unreadable piece of poorly written caveman erotica.
Jean M. Auel was my first encounter with this pattern, a pattern that I've seen repeated many times by authors of series. The series starts out absolutely brilliant, but then goes down hill pretty fast.
Because of these observations, knowing Jean M. Auel started out as a way better writer than me, knowing where she ended up, and having seen similar patterns again and again, I'm not allowing myself the illusion that I could be able to write a sequel with the same or higher quality as my original novel. I'm not allowing myself to let the Ragnarok Conspiracy lore pull me into creating an Earth's Children style declining quality monstrosity of a series, even if the lore and world building is extensive and powerfull enough to support a whole series.
Apart from writing fiction, I'm also a big fan of the open source approach to content. The first time that I made a piece of foftware open source was in the
1990s. It was a (now) silly CGI script written in Perl that I had actually written as a freelance job, but the company that had contracted me ended up giving me over six months of excuses and promises instead of the agreed upon payment. So when i had grown tired of trying I made TecForm open source. In the decades that followed I've eagerly used, created, and contributed to open source software, and I believe it is a model that works and contributes to a better world.
In the world of fiction there currently barely is such a thing as open source. There are large groups of often really talented authors writing fan fiction, but, maybe not authors, but very much the industry kind of looks at fan-fiction like people in propriatary the software world in the 1980s and 1990s, and to a point maybe even now, looked at patching the binary files of the software running on your PC in order to disable artificial restrictions.
When I published Ragnarok Conspiracy, first on this Web 3.0 platform, and later as an e-book, I made the lore and worldbuilding open world, what basicaly is the term I coined for open sourcing my world building. Except i didn't actually open source my lore and world building.
While working on my novel i kept a few dozen notebooks on different aspects of , next to characters that I'm NOT open sourcing, the lore and the world building. While large parts of the lore and world building shimmer through my writing, it isn't in a complete way, and many details not important to the story never made it to the pages of the book.
So what i'm planning to do now is to finaly make good on my promise and share the source of my world building with the world. The note books are too chaotic to publish as is, so I'm doing to do for my world building and lore what I did for my novel. I'm going to post a large number of posts abouit the lore of Ragnarok Conspiracy on HIVE. I'm going to try and crowd source editing once more, I'm going to link my posts together into a Web 3.0 book, and I'm going to make it into ebook that i'll push to all major ebook channels including Kobo, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Google Play Books.
Any money made by posting on HIVE and selling on ebook channels will go into funding my current main open source project, that was inspired by my novel, CoinZdense.
In this post, I'm not starting this little project yet, but I'm outlining it a bit to give everyone an idea of what is comming.
I've gone through my notes and through my novel, and there seem to be at least ten chunks of lore and world building that I should write about.
- Species
- Astrology
- Intergalactic history
- The hidden history of earth
- Future history
- Post-Copyright-War geopolitics
- Technology
- Martial arts
- Languages
- Biology
The species part will be about a number of terestrial and extraterestrial species relevant to the book. Some of the species correlate to norse mythology. There is an unexpectedly terestrial species called the Hylobo Sapiens and some of the species are from distant galaxies.
The astrology part will look into the relevant parts of our universe, and has a lot of intergalactic references that link the species to the first history part of the lore.
The first of three history sections will be about intergalactic history. Our galaxy and out planet play a small but not insignificant part in this history. Where an unexpected explanation to the fermi paradox explains why our small little planet isn't insignificant in intergalactic history.
The second history section is about the hidden history of earth. We revisit our unexpectedly terestrial species and their role in the hidden history, explore ancient alien invasions and wars, and a lot of alternate explanations for events from norse mythology.
The book plays in the near future. Before the main story starts, there is a bit of future history that is relevant to the story. This section includes the rise of stable-coins, the crypto colapse, the rise of printer-base as new currency after the colapse of the monetary system, and the formation of a debrisphere in a huge conflict called the Copyright Wars.
Then there is the post-war geopolitics, were we look into six major blocks, and how they arose before or during the Copyright Wars.
The next section will be another big one, It is about technology. Much of this will be dominated by quantum trinities, a type of quantum entanglement of three instead of two particles, but there is more. Cerebral implants for drone-swarm control, electro-magnetic warfare, kinetic swarm weapons that destroy all satelite communication, DRM combined with print-everything 3D printers, etc, etc.
Two of the larger factions have developed their own martial arts to counter the cerebral implant enhanced agents of the quants.
Then we come to languages. The lore includes two languages. One, a battle language, that is spoken between different species who need to fight in a type of symbiotic way and require a consise and effective battle language. A second language spoken by debrisphere miners of different nationalities that serves a similar purpose in the dangerous debrisphere.
Finaly there is a small but not insignificant bit about alien biology.
I hope that the series of posts about the lore and world building of Ragnarok Conspiracy will help to truly make my lore and world building open source, and I hope it will find other authors in such a way that (part of) my lore and world building will find its way into their future novels.