Young Writers Society

So I'm not really sure if this is in the right section or not. So if this needs to be moved someplace else, feel free to do so.


So in December 2009, a friend of mine had an idea: "Hey, my favorite musician Bjorn Lynne once made music albums based on a fantasy novel trilogy. Let's do the other way round and write a story based on his music!"

The favorite album by that favorite musician is "Beneath Another Sky". So the initial idea was to write a nice little story whose flow is based on, and whose chapters are named after, the titles (and are following the moods) of the 10 album songs.

As time went by and the first two chapters were done, more and more ideas came and started growing. The previous plan to have the story's main characters visit a derelict foreign world, just to get a quick pointer back to Earth where their adventure was supposed to continue, was replaced by serious "world-building".

The small idea kept growing and growing, and we're now desperately looking for enthusiastic people who wish to help us and become authors, plot-planners, puzzle designers (for the intended interactive fiction game part) and world designers!

What had started with the 10 BAS chapters has become a projected 30-40 chapters meanwhile, all from different Lynne albums.

What had started with some quick and small ideas to fill up the "visiting the foreign world" chapters has turned into detailed elaboration of the plot and background aspects of that world and story -- to the level that we are actually conceiving a language for the inhabitants of that world, which will be nothing short of what the Cameron guys did for the Na'vi. The aim is to create a complex universe, fit for more stories, roleplaying and other related activities.

The primary story is based on the plot of the Pixar movie "WALL-E", and additionally on the back-plot elements and some characters introduced by the fan-fiction story "Binary Uplift". It takes place in a setting about a millennium after the movie's end, where the starliner "Axiom" returned to Earth, bringing the (apparent) remainder of the human race along with it. Unfortunate chains of events lead to new troubles of widespread consequences - among others to a cleft between the human factions of the Axiomers, the Citizens and the Villagers, and an even bigger cleft, to the point of outright hatred and ostracism - between humans and the sentient robots.

When things go from bad to worse, and disaster is on the doorstep, it falls to a couple to save the day that no one would have thought possible given the circumstances - a young human male and an EVE probe robot. Actually, more than the day, for their ensuing adventure leads them to a place that also no one would have thought possible.

The future of the human and robot races - and that of that fantastic foreign world - depends on whether that one human and his robotic companion will be able to cope with the situation they find themselves in, draw the right conclusions from what they witness, and make the right decision about what to do in the end.

In addition to the main story, a side project titled "The Narayan Chronicles" is in the making, covering the high level of detail that is going into its back-plot. The Chronicles will be a series of short episodic stories, each dealing with a specific aspect of the main plot's background. That background starts in the times of the "Trash Crisis" in Binary Uplift. It forks from the "Prototype One" narration during the "Food Crisis". The background spans the humans' Exodus from Earth, it deals with what happens there during the 700 years the Axiom spends in space, and it tells about their accomplishments and setbacks. It encompasses the events surrounding the Axiom's return and the new colony's development afterwards, up to the point when it flows into the main story.

The world-building that is being done for the backplot, summarized in what we call the Narayan universe, centers around a small moon that circles a gas giant in the Vega solar system. Initiated by a unique composition of the moon's mass during formation, instigated by cosmic events that link it to Earth's early development, and expanded by human intrusion during the story's back-plot, an amazing ecosystem of interconnected beings - flora, fauna and sentience - formed on a world so small that you can wander around its circumference in a matter of few days and which has atmospheric and geological properties found nowhere else in this galaxy.

And that's the basic rundown of where this project has been and what it's about. Like stated before, the project is in the hands of way too few people (seeing how big it is), and at the moment we need some people that are able to do a bit of worldbuilding and stuff.

If anyone is interested in helping out with this massive project, we have further details at the project's Wiki at http://narayapedia.tiahost.de. You can contact the lead author via e-mail to locutus@narayapedia.tiahost.de!