Playing in other people's sandboxes...

[agilebrit]

I recently picked up Vols 1-5 of "The Man-Kzin Wars" at a swap meet for about a buck apiece. I've read Vol 1 and am eagerly diving into Vol 2. What's really fun about this is that here you have a bunch of pro-fic writers delving unapologetically into someone else's universe...and the creator of that universe is not only okay with that, but enthusiastic.

Larry Niven, who is a creative genius, isn't threatened by others writing Known Universe stories. Lee Goldberg, who *cough* isn't much of a creative genius, is. Granted, the people playing in Larry's sandbox are well-respected authors in their own right and not a bunch of amateurs like me...but somehow it gives me warm fuzzies to realize that, as long as I don't butcher the KU, Larry probably wouldn't have much of a problem if I decided to write fic in it.

Comments

[nodrogg.livejournal.com]

Coincidentally, he probably wouldn't - but not for the reason you think. Man-Kzin Wars put a pretty penny in his pocket... because he sold the rights to it. Have you seen any other stories by Niven in that setting, published since?

Chaosium bought the rights to Ringworld pursuant to publishing the eponymous role-playing game. As a courtesy - and because, after all, they'd wanted what they paid for - they made no substantive changes to the setting they'd purchased - but it was theirs to do with as they wished, as he freely acknowledged.

[I presume he then bought it back at fire-sale prices after the RPG tanked, so he could write his own gawd-please-just-stop "sequels."]

It's never going to be an issue - but technically, if you try to have a Man-Kzin War story published, Niven might not much care, but fer dang sure Baen Books would...

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

Heh, I'd send it to Baen for publication, if I thought I could do the 'verse justice. I'd have to do more than just skim it the way I've been doing, though. I haven't delved into the KU for over fifteen years. Getting the names and the history and the terminology just right would be a real chore.

Baen is an atypical publisher anyway. I think they have a LOT of their books online, free for the reading. Which is very cool, but I'm not sure it benefits them as a business.

I was pleased to rediscover this.

[nodrogg.livejournal.com]

http://nodrogg.livejournal.com/16376.html

[nodrogg.livejournal.com]

This is why, for example, one of those authors blows even the physical description of the Kzinti - apparently looking at his housecat as he wrote, he describes their bushy, furry tails. Niven would have caught that - along with the other piece of goofiness in the story, that female Kzinti are a) turning up sentient, and b) naturally, preferred thus by the ever-so-PC modern-day Kzinti, in direct violation of established Kzin biology and culture.

Niven would have red-lighted all that nonsense - but he had signed away his command of the material, and Jim Baen didn't really know or much care about such geeky details...

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

If it's the Ing story in the first book, wasn't it just the females that had furry tails? The protagonist in that story calls the males "rat-tails" a couple of times. In that same story, the male Kzin had very little choice in the matter of sentient females if he ever wanted to mate, since he was stuck on the planet and that's all that were available. He might be horrified and disgusted at first, but I think he might be intrigued too...a matter of curiosity killing the cat. :-)

[nodrogg.livejournal.com]

I think they have a LOT of their books online, free for the reading

They do (http://baen.com/library/home.htm).

Well enough, though I was severely annoyed to see that Andre Norton's marvelous Cold War SF-thriller The Time Traders had been "rectified," clumsily re-edited to remove all mention of "the Reds," replacing them with "Russians" to try to "update" it. The result was as dreadful and insulting as the horrocious A Wrinkle in Time (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290382/) travesty [the IMDb user comments there are enlightening: Even those who wish it well, damn it with faint praise].

So now I don't trust any of the contents of that "free library."