What is Saijo City?

Question: What do the following have in common? The Death Star, Hogwarts, USS Enterprise, Gotham City

Answer: They are locations, settings, backdrops— all part of a larger body of respective work– that are the copyrighted intellectual property of their creators.

Say you wanted to create derivative work, say, a novel or video game or drawing, and place it in those locations, technically you can’t. You *can* if you consider fan fiction (’fanfic’ for short), but don’t ever expect to do anything with it beyond your own personal amusement. Build as little as a fan site, one that celebrates a franchise, and you could be beamed up to the USS Litigation. This has a long history and is certainly not new (flashback: Wired, Dec. 1996).

Enter Saijo City. Saijo exists as a newborn franchise that could be any one of those works of fiction. There are characters and there is the place of the city itself. Saijo’s genre is cyberpunk, set in a near future of maybe 60-100 years out.

What makes Saijo City different and not spectacularly ‘new’, is that it exists as many pieces, both traditional and contemporary, that are simply rearranged. It would be easy to say, “Yes, I’m writing a science fiction book, due out this summer,” and the conversation would be over.

But that’s not how life in my city goes.

Saijo City as a piece of transliterate content, operates on some very simple and familiar principles.

1. The official story of Saijo City and its characters are my creation, my business venture. Without knowing specifics, Saijo will most likely emerge as a novel, a comic book, some form of casual game, or possible animated series… the list goes on. I don’t know exactly what it will be– but I do know that it is no different from Pokemon or Harry Potter from a conceptual point of view. It’s just a story.

2. The split of intellectual property; the ’splintering’ of Creative Commons, is a wild concept at first glance, but not really. Looking back at the examples of Gotham City, Hogwarts and others, I’m turning the city around to be something that everyone can build upon. If you wanted to write a novel, for example, and place its setting in Saijo City (the same way you might set a novel in 1930’s New York, or the way you’d WISH you could with Gotham City), you are allowed. The full ownership of the main characters are currently All Rights Reserved, me. Pretend I’m the creator of Batman. Don’t touch Batman, Robin, Joker, Penguin et al., but have at Gotham City. It’s *our* town.

3. The shared universe. The ultimate responsibility of building and explaining the city (and the state of the world in general) falls on me. That’s for a double greater good. One, it’s part of what I’m already doing, as well it existing as the backdrop for what you might want to create. This shared universe does not end with just the city. I, along with others, create sub-plots, mini-backstories, things that I call ‘constructs’ (because that’s what they are and let’s face it, that term is so techysexyfuture). All of these constructs are shared by all. I can use them, you can use them. I can tell you some basics about a prison facility/military training center called “Six Minute Hill”. I will most likely be referencing it in the official story, and you can base a story in that or even make entire derivative franchise (Six Minute Hill is probably my current darling to see made into a rich spinoff– the place was just awful).

When I look around for ideas, I discover a lot of things I’ve never known about–shared universes, metaseries, metaguilding, transliteracy, etc. All these little things that I might randomly post to various corners of the Web– it’s a learning process in action. Never would I think of myself as some kind of writer, much less, a fiction writer. I still don’t consider myself to be a writer and will most likely be really weird the first time some refers to me as a ’science-fiction writer’. That’s not me, that’s other more important people. But alas, I’m here talking to people who do that kind of thing, and it’s mind-blowing.

One final note is that Saijo City isn’t a simple book project. When I say ’simple book project’, I mean ‘pitch the story, get an advance from a publisher, sell books.’ There’s nothing wrong that at all. My approach looks at the micro-media all around– the things I’ve experimented with and accomplished with new media. Every podcast, every vlog, every blog, every virtual world– it all gets wrapped up into this creative thing so clinically referred to as a ‘franchise’. New meets old, or something like that.

In a few follow-up posts, I’ll introduce you to the inspirations… things like how it got started, and how the idea has existed in my brain for over a decade. You might meet some characters along the way, you might even know some of the people who are taking part in creating parts of the universe.

One final final thing, is that SaijoCity.com is the young, completely under-developed front-end site, and the roll-your-own social network site NING is where I’m hosting the Infocalypse, the out-in-plain-view ‘behind the scenes’ of working through the creative process.

It’s fascinating and terrifying all at once, and I wouldn’t want it to be any other way.