But the history that people have been forgetting (or perhaps not knowing to begin with) is that there was a thriving electronic fiction community years before even the earliest commercial e-books were around to be adopted.

Over the last four columns, I have looked at a number of the Internet fiction writing circles that made up this community. To wit:

• The Superguy Mailing List
• The Legion of Net.Heroes & rec.arts.comics.creative
• alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, alt.pub.dragons-inn, alt.pub.havens-rest
• Animé fanfic and Undocumented Features

These are the forums, filled mostly with college students, that were producing, distributing, and reading electronic literature in the late 1980s to early 1990s. Years before anyone caviled at the idea of reading from a handheld LCD, hundreds of people were thrilling to these tales on their amber and green CRTs, or those gigantic line printers that printed on green and white paper.

Today I’m going end this series with a look at a number of miscellaneous fiction archives and zines from that same era or even earlier. As the title suggests, I will be starting with some archives of collected fiction and nonfiction material, and closing out with zines.

“Zine” can be an abbreviation of “magazine”—but in the Internet sense, it is usually an abbreviation of “electronic magazine” or “e-zine” instead. E-zines were produced like the amateur “fanzines” that came about when Star Trek galvanized fandom in the 1960s—but using electronic distribution instead of the traditional fanzine mimeographs or photocopies. They could cover a variety of topics, but the ones I will be spotlighting here are mostly for original fiction.

But first, there are a few archives to go through.

Transformation Stories Archive

When the World Wide Web came about, people saw it as a great way to aggregate stories based on common themes into theme-based archives. (Gopher and WAIS had been used for this in the past, but neither was as widespread or user-friendly as the web was becoming.)

According to the Wikipedia writeup, the Transformation Stories Archive was founded in 1995 to collect stories relating to physical and mental transformation of all kinds. These stories were taken from a Transformation Stories Archive mailing list, or collected from other areas of the web such as alt.sex.stories (see below).

The site divides the stories up into several categories, such as “Animals,” “Mythical Beasts,” or “The Other Sex,” and there is also a section for some transformation-themed shared worlds. The stories are reformatted into HTML, so can easily be converted for device reading.

Stories that the archivist felt were particularly good are marked with three stars, while stories with prurient content are marked with three Xs. The quality of writing varies, as one would expect from amateur fiction—and some of the stories (especially the X-marked stories) veer into strange territory (such as transformation-as-fetish, or even vorarephilia).

Due to disruptions caused by a server change, the TSA has not been updated with new material since 2003. However, members of the Transformation Stories Archive mailing list have created a successor site to host new stories at shifti.org.

alt.sex.stories and the a.s.s. Text Repository

When college students—young men and women at the peak of their hormonal activity—encounter a textual medium for communicating with other people, some of the results are predictable. According to Wikipedia, the newsgroup alt.sex.stories was created in 1992. A few years later, it spawned a moderated newsgroup so that those seeking higher-quality erotic stories would have a better source of material.

The kinds of stories that appeared on the a.s.s. groups are exactly what you would expect—but given that “erotica-related titles […] are among the hottest sellers at some major e-bookstores” it should not be surprising that “e-rotica” was popular even before e-books came around. A number of notable erotica writers such as Elf Sternberg (whose Pendorwright series is a noteworthy erotica archive in and of itself) and Mary Anne Mohanraj got their start there.

Over 250,000 tales from alt.sex.stories are collected on the alt.sex.stories Text Repository. (Given that even the entry page is not remotely worksafe, I have elected to leave the link out to prevent unhappy accidents. It may be found through the Wikipedia link above.) The stories are presented in the same hard-wrapped ASCII text form in which they were posted to the group.

Textfiles.com

Even though this series has been concentrating mostly on the Internet in the early ‘90s, screen reading and writing did not start there. If anything, it started at the same time as the PC revolution in the early ‘80s, when there was a thriving dial-up bulletin board culture that was used by computer hobbyists. Instead of BITNET and the Internet, they had FidoNet, a relay system of computers connected by periodical modem dialing. Instead of newsgroups or forums, they had FidoNet relays and file servers.

Back in those days, a lot of text files were written and circulated from relay to relay, file server to file server. People transcribed old humor sources, documents, or books and passed them on, or wrote stories of their own, in order to increase their upload-to-download ratio on file servers so they would be allowed to download more of the other files there.

Textfiles.com is a comprehensive repository for as many of those files and stories and electronic zines as the archivist could find—which is quite a lot of them. Both files from the golden age of FidoNet, and files from the early days of the Internet are represented.

For people like me, who got in on the tail end of BBS culture and the beginning of Internet culture, this is a major trip down memory lane. There is a lot of original historical material here, things that people back in the day thought was important to get down. Instructions on how to use the Internet, humor files about 50 ways to confuse your roommate, lists of “warez” FTP sites (long defunct by now)—it’s all here.

There is also a fairly lengthy list of electronic magazines, or e-zines, that were being circulated at the time. There are dozens of them, devoted to all different subjects—humor, fiction, hacking. (Lots of them about hacking.) Of special interest to me was the archive of M00se Droppings, a humor zine founded by some of the same people who launched the Superguy mailing list I covered in my first column.

All the text files are presented in their original hard-wrapped ASCII text format. The design of the site itself, green text on black background, is meant to evoke the green screens of the old ASCII text terminal days. It can be a little wearing on the eyes after a while, but fortunately the designer has made a black on white color scheme available as well for the file lists. Nonetheless, Readability may be a good bet for the rest of the site.

Another archive of history and miscellaneous material from the early days of the Internet can be found on nethistory.dumbentia.com.

DargonZine

Apart from all the zines listed at textfiles.com, there are a number of e-zines worth mentioning on their own. The first of these is Dargon, which is about the only still-active shared-universe project with a legitimate claim to being older than the SFStory/Superguy list that started in 1987—Dargon started in 1984 as a more general fantasy and science-fiction related zine called FSFnet (for Fantasy and Science Fiction on the Internet—no relation to the Free Software Foundation).

In 1985, some of the FSF writers decided they wanted to get together to create a shared fantasy setting, called Dargon. Over the next few years, the setting gradually took over the magazine until it was renamed to DargonZine in 1988. It has continued, publishing several issues a year, to this day.

Dargon has an archive of back-issues available in both HTML and text formats. The HTML versions should not be hard at all to convert to device e-readable format. Recent DargonZine issues are also available for the Kindle for 99 cents each.

Intertext, Quanta

Another pair of notable fiction zines are Intertext and Quanta. Intertext ran for 57 issues from 1991 through 2004—a remarkable run for an Internet publication. The archives are available, formatted in HTML.

Quanta was slightly earlier, and ran from 1989 to 1995. HTML formatted stories from it can be found in an archive.org archive of the defunct etext.org site. It contained fiction, but also some nonfiction articles such as this rant from Peter A. David about the studio inconsistencies that plagued his work on Star Trek tie-in properties.

Other Zines

There are many more e-zines than I could cover in this column. Apart from the zine archives at textfile.com, John Labovitz’s E-Zine List also offers links that can lead to many hours of interesting browsing through the history of the net.

In Conclusion

Thus ends my look back at the fiction and other writings from the golden era of the Internet, BITNET, and FidoNet. Of course, no column could cover all of the writing lists and forums and zines that were around back in the day, but I think I at least hit the high points.

So next time you’re looking for something interesting to read, consider visiting some of the sites I’ve mentioned in these columns and checking out some “Paleo E-books”.

Prior “Paleo E-books” columns cover:

• The Superguy Mailing List
• The Legion of Net.Heroes & rec.arts.comics.creative
• alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, alt.pub.dragons-inn, alt.pub.havens-rest

In this entry I will be looking at fan-written fiction, or “fanfic”—and in particular one of the more famous early Internet fanfic series: Undocumented Features.

Today, there is nothing unusual about Internet fanfic; it’s just one of those things that people do on the Internet. It’s gotten so you can barely research Harry Potter without coming across a dozen “Harry + Luna” (or even “Harry + Draco”!) fanfics.

But in the early 1990s, Internet fan fiction was rare enough that those few people writing it became fairly well-known in their fandom communities. There are a number of reasons for this—there was no World Wide Web yet, and the Internet was completely unheard of outside of colleges and big businesses, so there were fewer people to write or read it.

To those familiar with how the Internet grew, it should come as no surprise that some of the first fanfic to appear was based on Japanese animation, or animé. If anything, it should be surprising that it took as long as it did to happen.

Anime and the Internet

The history of animé fandom and the Internet in the ‘80s and ‘90s parallel each other. Both began primarily on college campuses—students passing around grainy nth-generation unsubtitled and fansubbed VHS tapes of Japanese animation; students accessing the Internet (text-based e-mail, Usenet, and Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs)) via amber or green-screened terminals. There was a rec.arts.anime Usenet newsgroup at least as early as 1988 (which is as far back as Google Groups records of it go).

In the 1990s, as the Internet spread to more and more institutions and Gopher and WAIS gave way to the World Wide Web, still more people were exposed to animé—and the college students who had been early to catch the bug started founding animé subtitling and dubbing businesses to broaden its availability. And in December 1990 to January 1991, a student named Ryan Mathews posted a Dirty Pair fanfic called “Big Bang” to rec.arts.anime.

Although it may not have been the first animé fanfic on the Internet (Mathews himself notes that you could find other, earlier fanfics if you poked around on FTP sites), it was the first to receive the visibility of a Usenet posting. And it inspired more, both by Mathews himself and by others—including me.

Undocumented Features

Late in 1991, a trio of students at the Worcester (pronounced “wooster”) Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts kicked off what became one of the best-known animé fanfic series, not to mention shared universes. Ben “Gryphon” Hutchins, Brian “MegaZone” Bikowicz (who would later legally change his name to “MegaZone”), and Rob “ReRob” Mandeville wrote a story called “Undocumented Features”.

It was originally intended as a private joke, set on the campus of WPI and starring the three of them and their campus friends, as well as Kei and Yuri from the Dirty Pair animé. The trio had not particularly planned to show it to anybody outside their circle of friends—but all of the friends to whom they did show it were unanimous in their insistence that Gryphon, MegaZone, and ReRob should post it to the Internet. And so they did. Gryphon writes:

When we put the story on r.a.a. (no hierarchy yet!), everybody wanted to know what happened next. The response to the story that came to our mailboxes from the readers of rec.arts.anime was astonishing. We thought we’d told a pretty good joke—most of the people who wrote to us (and they numbered in their hundreds!) thought we had begun a pretty good story.

And so over the following years they wrote three more “core” stories, and they and others of their friends wrote a number of short stories and other tie-ins—creating an epic saga that spanned hundreds of years of history. UF became so popular that it reached a point that few other animé fanfics ever did: it spawned its own fanfic imitators. Some of them (myself included) were brought on board to write stories set within the UF continuity; others were disavowed.

L-R: Ben “Gryphon” Hutchins, me (circa 1995)

A Shared Universe

Thanks to the participation of the original trio, their friends, and the fanfic imitators, Undocumented Features grew into a shared, collaborative writing circle called Eyrie Productions—though this one was considerably less free-form than the other groups I’ve covered in this series of columns. Everything had to be cleared through Gryphon, who was the one with the overall vision for the universe. (I remember spending evenings in IRC chat arguing endlessly with Gryphon over the most trivial things. Those were the days.)

The Undocumented Features universe is a little hard to describe. It is not technically a “crossover,” since crossover stories generally don’t change the backstory of the participants. Undocumented Features liberally borrowed characters, mecha, and vehicles from practically every animé and science-fiction property the authors had ever seen, throwing them together into a single universe without much concern for the original backstories.

It’s easy to see the appeal of such a broadly-inclusive fanfic mega-universe: no matter what series you liked, if Gryphon didn’t object and you could come up with some way to tie it in, you could work with a bunch of other creative animé fans to create something exciting together. It was a way to be a part of the very thing you were writing fanfic of—the next best thing to working on the original animé yourself.

One strong element running through Undocumented Features is self-insertion—all or most of the authors wrote stories featuring a version of themselves as one of the main characters. However, these author-characters were not portrayed as the sort of ultra-competent wish-fulfillment characters (or “Mary Sues”) who haunt poorly-written fanfic, but as flawed human beings who made mistakes, argued with their friends, and often had bad things happen to them.

As for the quality of the writing…well, every writer tends to cringe when looking back at his own early work, and I am no exception. It is hard for me now to read the UF stuff I wrote then. But on the other hand, I feel like the other writers’ stuff still holds up well even now—especially the “core” work by Gryphon, MegaZone, and ReRob. It may be a little silly here and there, but it’s supposed to be—it started out as a joke, after all. Certainly, the presence of a “gatekeeper” in the form of Gryphon served to keep the quality consistent—people couldn’t just write anything and throw it out there.

Although I long since lost interest in writing in it (my last, half-finished UF tale is mouldering somewhere on some long-forgotten floppy disk) and have largely lost touch with the other participants, I gather that the Undocumented Features universe (and other fanfic universes that the Eyrie Productions crew has spun off) continues to be written to this day—a bit slower than in the “good old days” but still producing new works every now and then.

However, unlike the other groups I’ve covered, Eyrie is not looking for new writers for the UF universe. As a disclaimer on the UF page notes, Gryphon doesn’t have the time or resources to screen new submissions to make sure they fit established continuity, or bring new writers up to speed—the universe is too big already. So participation in the stories is by invitation only (though the Eyrie Productions website does include discussion forums that are open to all).

The archives of all completed Eyrie Productions works, UF and otherwise, are hosted on the Eyrie Productions website. Most of the stories from the old days are still in their original hard-wrapped ASCII text form (which will have to be unwrapped before they can be converted to e-book formats); some stories are in more-easily-converted HTML.

Some of the ASCII stories will require more special attention for conversion. A convention that some authors used was to feature “end titles” or soundtracked action sequences like movies, divided into two columns—the actual credits or text in one column, and the lyrics of the song that would be playing in the other. (I was informed by one reader who was blind and used speech-synthesis software that this made things a bit harder to “read” for her. Oops.)

Other Fanfic

Of course, Undocumented Features was far from the only animé fanfic to come out of the early 1990s. Ryan Mathews and his writing partner Larry Mann would create several more Dirty Pair and other animé fanfics, such as “Experiment 101-E”. Another well-known early fanfic writer is Stephen “Twoflower” Gagne, whose name was synonymous with quality in animé fanfic circles. And, of course, I wrote a few things myself.

The burgeoning quantity of animé fanfic led to the formation of a separate rec.arts.anime newsgroup, rec.arts.anime.stories (later renamed rec.arts.anime.creative), when rec.arts.anime split into several newsgroups in the mid-90s. Other fanfic groups followed (in fact, searching on “fanfic” or “creative” turns up quite a number of Usenet groups across a number of genres and TV series), and websites to archive it such as fanfic.net.

Entire books could be written about how fanfic grew as the Internet expanded from college students only to the general public, and that’s really not the purpose of this column. Suffice it to say that, when looking at the electronic fiction that came before the “e-book,” fanfic (especially animé fanfic) made up a pretty significant chunk.

• The Superguy Mailing List
• The Legion of Net.Heroes & rec.arts.comics.creative

The Legion of Net.Heroes might be the oldest Usenet-based shared-world fiction setting still alive and kicking—but there are some defunct settings that pre-date it. Identifying them by the names of their newsgroups, these are mainly alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, alt.pub.dragons-inn, and alt.pub.havens-rest. Today we will look briefly at these groups where people were writing “e-books” before anybody ever knew what an “e-book” was.

The Chatsubo and the Pubs

When these groups are mentioned, they are often mentioned together, because they share more similarities than differences. Though they are based in different genres, all three of them are centered around a bar or pub—a place where characters can meet before heading on adventures, or simply hang out and pass the time. They all feature writers who control their own characters but share certain “non-player characters” in common.

The writing style was generally more serious than Superguy or the LNH, given that these were settings for writing original stories, not parodying something else. There were occasional touches of humor, however, such as a Dragon’s Inn character named Enn Piecy (after “NPC,” for “non-player character”—a roleplaying game term).

These fiction groups share their pub-based setting in common with a couple of non-fiction groups: alt.callahans and alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst. alt.callahans was the first pub-based chat group, founded in 1989, inspired by the Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon books by Spider Robinson.

alt.callahans is the Usenet equivalent of a chatroom: people would post about what they were doing and what was going on in their lives, and others would reply in kind. alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst (FAQ) came later, and was like an attempt to cross Callahan’s and the Chatsubo: a cyberpunk-themed meeting place, but for real people instead of fictitious characters.

Of all these groups, alt.callahans is the only one still going strong after all these years.

alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo

Some accounts (such as the alt.callahans FAQ and even Spider Robinson himself) incorrectly trace Chatsubo’s origin to “meiosis” from alt.callahans. But according to the person who originally created it, this is actually not the case.

alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo (FAQ) was created in November, 1990 by Liralen Li. When I checked with her about it, she explained that she had started writing some third-person posts in the discussion newsgroup alt.cyberpunk, interested in the possibilities the medium had to offer for storytelling.

But just as with the Legion of Net.Heroes stories, the denizens of alt.cyberpunk preferred their discussion of the cyberpunk genre unencumbered by fiction posts, and so alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo (and subsequently, a separate group for discussion of Chatsubo posts, alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo.d) was created. (The name “Chatsubo” was taken from a bar featured in William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer.)

As one might expect from the name, alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo was created for telling stories in the cyberpunk genre popularized by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and others. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, cyberpunk was a really popular genre, but in the end it fizzled, and so did Chatsubo. There’s nothing but spam in the newsgroup now. (A successor LiveJournal community exists—but it has only ever gotten 4 entries since it was created in 2005, and none of them are stories.)

However, Chatsubo did accomplish something that none of the other shared-world settings I’ve covered has ever managed: it published two print anthologies of stories from its writers. They were published via print-on-demand—but still, they’re carried on Amazon (Anthology 1, Anthology 2). Ironically, neither of them is available in e-book format.

Apart from the anthologies, the principal archives of the Chatsubo are in the form of Google Groups, or user archive pages such as The Tea Bowl.

alt.pub.dragons-inn

The Dragon’s Inn (FAQ) was established in May, 1992—after the silly thread that spawned the LNH, but before the actual LNH stories came about later that year. According to Liralen, Dragon’s Inn and Haven’s Rest were established by people who liked the idea of writing in a shared environment, but weren’t crazy about the cyberpunk genre.

Dragon’s Inn was set in the city of “Generica,” a “generic” fantasy setting inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game and its ilk. Characters would congregate at the Dragon’s Inn before going on adventures—though not all adventures were necessarily set around the Inn.

Dragon’s Inn was the first Internet writing circle in which I was involved when I got to college, and it was an experience that has stayed with me. Though I would be the first to tell you that my earliest stories were pretty lousy, other people seemed to like them and I soon improved—and I made a number of friends whom I still have to this day.

There were a couple of other alt.pub groups related to Dragon’s Inn. One, alt.dragons-inn, came out of a misguided attempt to create the group that became alt.pub.dragons-inn. Another, alt.pub.cloven-shield, was meant for writing fantasy stories like the Dragon’s Inn, but was never as popular. Both these groups were eventually abandoned; around 2000 a group of people claimed alt.pub.cloven-shield as a Callahans-like real-life chat forum, and they continue to chat there to this day.

Dragon’s Inn is the only pub group to have archives on Eyrie.org; they are simply every post made to the group, not organized except in chronological order, and run from the group’s inception in May, 1992 to October 25th, 1996. There are also individual authors who have story archive pages of their own work, such as me, Kelly J. Cooper, Liralen Li, and Steve Hutchison. As with the other such groups I’ve covered, these are generally all in hard-wrapped ASCII.

As with the other alt.pub groups, Dragon’s Inn is generally dead—all the original writers have moved on to other things. Every so often, someone comes in and attempts to start a new story—but with nobody to respond, the stories invariably go nowhere.

alt.pub.havens-rest

Haven’s Rest (FAQ) was created about the same time as Dragon’s Inn. It was a science fiction setting, set on a world in a pocket dimension full of rifts in space that brought space ships of various kinds to visit. The pub in this case was the Haven’s Rest, and it was very much like Dragon’s Inn except science-fictional.

I wrote two different story threads—a mecha-based series, and a RIFTS role-playing game fanfic series—but they both petered out before they could go anywhere. Still, I met some interesting people there, and polished my writing skills considerably.

One writing technique I found in Haven’s Rest but did not see much elsewhere, even in Dragon’s Inn, was the “cascade”. Someone would write a post with his own lines of dialogue or actions, then someone would follow up, quote the previous post, and insert other dialogue or actions between those lines. I thought it was a clever method of real-time collaboration, kind of like roleplaying by mail. (Now, of course, we would just use EtherPad.)

There don’t seem to be many references to Haven’s Rest on the web, and no story archives that I could find apart from my own. The group can, of course, be read via Google Groups.

As with Dragon’s Inn, the group has been abandoned by its former regulars, and only sees the occasional story start attempt.

That about covers the dead alt.pub.* forums. In the next installment of this column, I will look at some pre-e-book e-books that have exploded in popularity over the years.

Like Superguy, the LNH is a shared universe centering on comic book superhero parody. However, perhaps owing to its different origin, the approach it takes is very different.

The Legion of Net.Heroes

The LNH had its genesis in April, 1992, in one of the free-wheeling discussions that took place on Usenet newsgroups (forums) at the height of its popularity. Usenet has become less active now that its place has largely been usurped by phpBBSes, blogs, and other forums, but back in the ‘90s it was the go-to place for on-line discussion of all kinds of topics—including comic books.

One day, a poster to the rec.arts.comics newsgroup corrected someone else’s spelling, declaring himself “Spelling Boy of the LSH” (Legion of Super-Heroes, a DC title about a hero team by that name). From that post, and the whimsy of other newsgroup regulars, a thread of general silliness was born as various posters created heroic (or villainous) identities patterned after themselves—members (or enemies) of a “Legion of Net.Heroes”.

Although that first thread was more random silliness than story, the seed had been planted, and it ended up germinating into a somewhat more serious system of Internet-based superhero stories—first on rec.arts.comics.misc, then moving to the newly-created alt.comics.lnh after r.a.c.m. posters complained about the story threads getting in the way of their serious discussions. Two years later, after spawning a number of separate LNH-related and non-LNH-related writing universes, the LNH and these universes would move to rec.arts.comics.creative where they continue to this day.

The Nature of the Looniverse

The LNH and Superguy have some similarities, but a number of interesting differences. I suspect these differences arise from the different way the groups were formed. The LNH grew out of a discussion between hard-core comic book fans, while Superguy (like its SFSTORY predecessor) drew members from the various, unrelated mailing lists on the BITNET network—some of whom might never have even read comic books.

The most obvious difference is that Superguy takes place in a somewhat realistic setting, modeled after the real world. However, the LNH is a more broad parody universe, in which characters are often aware of the fourth wall, dramatic conventions, and their places within the stories. It also tends to feature more direct use of comic book conventions, such as “cover pages” or “splash pages” that are described textually rather than drawn.

The LNH is set in a stylized “Looniverse”, loosely modeled after the real world but with “Internetized” names for everything—”New York” becomes “Net.York” and so on. Characters often embody some aspect of the Internet in addition to comic book tropes (for example, the first LNH villain called himself “Dr. Killfile,” after the function some Usenet reading applications have of deleting selected articles before displaying the ones the reader wants to see). Cross-dimensional journeys can sometimes take characters into some other newsgroup altogether.

I have not directly written any LNH stories (though I did have one of my Superguy series cross over with them as part of a “Grand Tour”), but I have read a number of them in the archives. As with Superguy, LNH has the same tendency to range from broad humor to serious (or at least, as serious as they can get in a “Looniverse”), and the same range in quality from nearly-incoherent to pretty good.

As they are written on the more free-form Usenet rather than a mailing list, the LNH has always seemed to me to have a more anarchic nature than Superguy in terms of series continuity relative to other series, but that could just be my outsider’s perspective. But it does seem safe to suggest that in its heyday, the LNH probably had a broader reader and writership than Superguy—a Usenet newsgroup was a lot more visible than a mailing list, especially back before use of the Web became widespread.

Other Universes

There are several different “universes” within rec.arts.comics.creative now, apart from LNH. Some of them started out on alt.comics.lnh along with the LNH, since there was no other place to post that kind of story on Usenet at the time; others sprang up once the newsgroup was formed.

Stories in different universes are usually indicated by tags at the beginning of the post’s subject line, such as [LNH], [ASH], or even [SG] for some Superguy crossposts. The different universes will have their own conventions; some are humorous, some serious, some even meant specifically for “mature” audiences (the “Acraphobe” (sic) imprint, spoofing DC’s “Vertigo” comics). They may also have their own websites or FAQs independent of LNH’s (here’s a page listing several).

As with Superguy, LNH and rec.arts.comics.creative have had some attrition as original writers found their free time taken up by other things. But there are still enough people contributing new things to keep the group alive, and more are always welcome.

Official Sites and Archives

The LNH has an official site at lnhq.info, which includes a wiki and links to archives. There is also an older information page at eyrie.org, where the archives of LNH and other fiction universes are hosted. As with Superguy, the LNH welcomes new writers as long as they are willing to spend time learning about the universe before jumping in—and these sites are where they can do just that.

The LNH’s archives are not as easily-accessible as Superguy’s; there’s no “autocollector” to pull out specific issues. They are kept organized into several categories in the LNH FTP directory on eyrie.org, rather than chronologically. And since they were posted to Usenet, all or most of the posts can be seen in their original contexts by searching on the Google Groups Usenet archive.

As with Superguy, LNH hails from the unadorned, non-graphical, ASCII-terminal era before the World Wide Web—monospace text files that hard-wrap at the end of the line. As mentioned in the Superguy post, you can use these perl scripts to unwrap them for e-book conversion (if you know how to run perl scripts). If anyone has an easier-to-use solution for people who aren’t computer geeks, it would be welcome.

The LNH/rec.arts.comics.creative is the only shared-universe Usenet group that I know of that has survived to the present day, but it was not the only one active way back when. In another installment, I will look at other Usenet writing groups from back in the day that have since mostly faded away.

But for a small yet active number of people (mostly college students), “reading off the screen” has been going on for as long as twenty-two years. Before the term e-book was in common use, before the World Wide Web was widespread, college students with too much time on their hands were writing stories and sending them over the Internet through various mailing lists and other forums.

Though these forums were all different, what they had in common was the collaborative, shared-universe nature of the projects. As with the published Thieves’ World and Wild Cards projects, authors would write their own separate stories set in the same world, but their characters would occasionally meet with each other, or be affected by events that happened in others’ stories.

Some of these forums are still active; many of them are dead or mostly dead. What  they all have in common is that they have left behind copious archives of material. Some of it is all right, some of it is terrible, but a lot of it still stands up well even today.

In my next few columns, which I’ve decided to call “Paleo E-books,” I will look at some of these forums. I’m going to start with one of the oldest: The Superguy mailing list, which began in 1989 as an offshoot of the SFSTORY list started in 1987. That’s twenty-two years of history—and over twelve and one half million words of archives.

Superguy

The Superguy mailing list was started as a parody of the conventions and characters of comic books (and superhero stories in general). (SFSTORY, which was later incorporated into the SG list, was similar but for science-fiction stories.) In its heyday, some of the more popular characters included Dangerousman (a man who could create nuclear blasts by stomping his foot), Rad (a California valley surfer dude with the power to fly and fire psychokinetic blasts), and Ramrod (a trenchcoat-wearing, bat-toting anti-heroic vigilante).

Although there was some fanfic or near-fanfic writing (including some of the writing I did for Superguy myself), most of the writing consisted of original characters combined with parody or satire. (Rad’s stories featured parodies of Lum from the animé Urusei Yatsura and Kei and Yuri from Dirty Pair, for instance.) The setting started out largely humorous, but over time a number of more serious storylines crept in.

The writing quality started out fairly uneven—and stayed fairly uneven, but the average quality level improved over time as less serious writers dropped out and the ones who stuck around got better. The collaborative nature of the list and the writing process meant that writers could get feedback from other writers and readers, and improve their storytelling ability.

Still, looking back it sometimes seems that what the list gained in quality it lost in energy. Unpolished as it is, the early stuff has a kind of spark to it where you can tell the writers are just plain having fun with it, banging the keys like mad for the sheer unholy joy of participating in the mass craziness. (But on the other hand, the series that have been posted to the list over the last couple of years are easily as well-written as anything you would pay money for, so it balances out.)

Eric Burns, one of the writers, described it thus:

Most of all, we were convinced we were on the cusp of something amazing—a whole new way of looking at fiction, of storytelling, of distribution without editors and without men in suits deciding if our schlock was commercial enough. If four of the more experienced Authors wanted to post an incoherent story about Weasel-based superheroes, they just did. If I wanted to write a story about a lead character who got shot in the stomach as a running gag, I just did.

And yeah, going back and rereading my old Superguy stories, I can see a whole lot of unmitigated garbage. […] But every so often, I see something really good. And I remember how proud I was of it.

And I would tend to agree. When I look back at my early writing for the Superguy mailing list, I often groan—but just as often, I find a surprising number of clever bits (if I do say so myself) that I had entirely forgotten about. And, of course, many of the other writers’ stuff tends to be far better than my own. Through my writing for Superguy, I met a circle of friends with whom I continue to hang out on-line to this day.

Some of the Superguy writers went on to professional publication or fame as webcomic artists or bloggers. One Superguy writer who contributed only a handful of episodes, Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, would later co-found Wikipedia. (It takes all kinds.)

Superguy’s heyday was in the early- to mid-1990s, when there were several hundred subscribed readers and over a dozen active writers. By the late 1990s, many of the original writers had moved on to other projects, or graduated from college and found their day jobs took up so much of their creative energy that they did not have enough to spare to continue writing for Superguy. However, a handful of writers continue to update their stories, and new authors are always welcome—Superguy is far from dead.

Archives

One of the things that sets Superguy apart from other collaborative fiction projects is the completeness and organization of its archives. Somehow, they survived all the way from their original posting to the present day, and they have been organized for search and retrieval using an “autocollector” CGI script. (Episodes too new to have been archived there can be retrieved from the mailing list’s automatic archive site.)

Fun series to try reading include Dangerousman by Bill Dickson and Rad by Gary Olson. However, given how the stories tend to cross over with each other, a more rewarding experience might simply be to start reading the archives as a whole in chronological order. But there’s one slight problem.

Superguy was born in the age of terminal-based, monospace-font, ASCII-text-only e-mail, before the advent of Gmail and other rich-text-based email systems. Hence, Superguy episodes are hard-wrapped at around 65 to 72 character margins. This means that, to modern word processing (and e-book creation) software, each line counts as its own individual “paragraph”—and reading it on anything except a big-screen web browser can be an ugly experience.

There are ways around this, of course. Some word processors can do re-wrapping of wrapped text, as can the emacs text editor. And a friend wrote some perl scripts that can also unwrap indented or space-separated text. If you are capable of running perl scripts, you can use “unfoldindented” to unwrap indentation-separated texts, and “unfoldblank” to unwrap blank-line-separated texts. (You may also wish to search and replace two spaces with one, since the typographical conventions for monospace and proportional fonts are different.)

Once the text is unwrapped, it can be run through the text-to-e-book converter of your choice and loaded into your e-book reading app or device. (I use txt2pdbdoc, myself—since it’s ASCII text anyway, it does not need the advanced formatting options from more recent converters.)

All the same, this is an imperfect solution. It requires a pretty decent amount of computer expertise to be able to run perl scripts, and the unique formatting or ASCII art in some of the episodes may show up strangely in the conversion. But if there is a better way, I’d like to hear what it is, as this is a common problem with ASCII-based writing forums, including email and Usenet. In fact, just about every every different forum I will be covering has this same problem to some extent, and a better solution would be welcome.

So, next time you think about whether you like “reading off of a screen,” consider that a bunch of college students (and their fans) were doing it over twenty years ago. And they’ve left behind them a legacy of seriously good and funny stuff. (And, to be fair, also some pretty lousy stuff. But finding the good makes wading through the bad worthwhile.)