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Charlie Stross on Twitter: I have no intention of ever writing a Merchant Princes/Laundry Files crossover. So that one’s free for fanfic projects …
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Author: u/ArgentStonecutter Emergency Mustelid Hologram*
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Score: 8
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Created: 2015-10-03T22:27:45
Post:
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (30 minutes later)
The way I see it, there are two obvious approaches:
The Merchant Princes' Prime Earth is one where the Laundry (or a parallel version of it) is active. Following the events of the last Merchant Princes book (or possibly contiguous with it) the Laundry (or since it's primarily in America, Black Chamber) makes contact with the world-walkers. Possible reasons include wanting to recruit someone with that ability, trying to prevent the massive deaths associated with Merchant Princes spoiler and the resultant psychic bleedback, or trying to devise an exit strategy from Earth.
The world where the Laundry takes place is encountered by the world-walkers during their exploration. This leads to the sort of cock-up that one might expect.
Of course, you'd probably want to reskin the world-walkers as being related to something Cthuloid so there's less of a border between the continuities.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+3] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (42 minutes later)
The world walker's ability seems to be purely materialistic, since the military can build matching neural nets. You could make it an extremely primitive version of the same kind of neural nets that infovores etc are made out of.
Would #2 be Case Nightmare Red, or doesn't it count if the alien invaders are human?
u/GlueBoy [+1] anti-skub (2 hours later)
This is one of the few things I had a problem with when reading the series. I can understand and fully support the idea of anything being replicable by science, but the way it happened seemed way too straightforward, almost inevitable.
That said, I really enjoyed the series, particularly the final book.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (11 hours later)
I thought it was a nice bit of trope inversion myself. I was more annoyed by the fact that they didn't leave their shoes behind when they shifted worlds. If you can take your shoes along, what's the big deal about having to lift the cargo off the ground when you shift?
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (34 minutes later)
That's a phrase I never want to hear, and one that I imagine would come quite easily from mouth.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (45 minutes later)
It's up there with the Posleen war spoiler John Ringo came up with.
u/derleth [+1] (3 hours later)
He hasn't said he or his publisher wouldn't legally prosecute people who create derivative works of his intellectual property without prior written authorization, though, so it isn't really free for fanfic authors.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)
u/derleth [+2] (4 hours later)
Alrighty then. It's important to realize that fanfic isn't always legally permissible: even if most fanfic authors are never prosecuted, it's a Sword of Damocles that a lot of them aren't even aware of.
In this world where some people think "no copyright infringement intended" (or even "no copyright intended"!) means something, any little bit to help clear the waters is needed.