Okay, so… I’ve been getting antsy. I like to write. It keeps me sane. I get twitchy if I’m not writing. And I like to release books. Ideally, I’d like to make money off of it. But here’s the deal. I’m not going to live forever. I might not even live a long time. My parents got cancer when they were only three years older than I am now. Yikes!
I feel this… tension. What do I leave behind? A hard drive containing a lifetime of work that just ends up in electronic waste. A smattering of electrons wiped by a magnetic field, and it’s all gone? Jesus, that’s chilling.
Okay, so if you know me, I was a big fan of LEXX, and cult television shows, Farscape, Starlost, Doctor Who, etc., and cult movies. I love the disrespected, the overlooked, the unappreciated and unloved, the critters around the margins. And I think there’s value in going off the beaten path. I’ve written nonfiction books about these things, and had something worthwhile to say.
Well, a long time ago, a lot longer than I care to remember, I was on Bulletin Boards for LEXX and Farscape. And I started fooling around with this celebrity deathmatch thing. I conceived that God, or the Gods were a trio of cosmic southern rednecks, absolute moral degenerates with no taste, discrimination or impulse control, and they grabbed the crews of the ships and set them against each other.
The idea I played with was to mangle the English language to insane degrees. The Almighty Bobs would butcher the language, running it through a woodchipper, in an explosion of insane metaphors, randomized circumlocutions and phrases that could almost be words if you were drunk enough. It was hilarious, I had a great time writing it. I had a following, even some of the Lexx cast loved the inventive lunacy. Did a handful of chapters, told a story, wrapped it up and left it behind It was just silly stuff.
Then a few years later, when I had the idea to be a writer, to promote myself, I dusted it off and volunteered it on some website as free content. Did it work? Did it promote me? Probably not. Fast forward more years, and on Facebook, someone is talking about a Lexx / Farscape pastiche. I’m going… Hey! I did one of those! But when I went to the links to find it online, it was gone. Well… shit!
So I went poking through my hard drives and saved stuff until I found it, and took a look.
And hey, actually, it was a lot of fun. There’s a demented, relentless quality to the Almighty Bobs. A free wheeling insanity whose insane butchery of the language and relentless pace just carries you. Read enough of it, and you start talking like the Bobs. It’s probably not PC, the Bobs are unapologetically racist, thoroughly repulsive, absolutely amoral, and hypocritically puritanical. But they’re fun.
It’s basically a fanfic, but… It’s a hilarious parody, and too demented to abandon. So I thought I should do something with this. At first, just find some place to drop it. Then I thought, write more funny stuff and include it in the next ‘Drunk Slutty Elf’ collection – that would work. I’d have to explain to my audience, but sure, why not. Then I thought… well, there’s enough here that I could actually float it as a little tiny book. Not full size – say 35,000 or 40,000 words. Have it out there, while I waited to do a real collection. Why not?
Could I even do it though? I did a little research and found that Parody is actually permitted – it’s part of Fair Use under section 107 of the US Copyright Law, and Fair Dealing under section 29 of Canadian Copyright Law. There are exceptions to the Copyright Law that I’ve used – works of review, or commentary or analysis. The LEXX, Starlost, and Who books are all review and commentary. Youtube reviews and written reviews are commentary, and exceptions to the Copyright Act. I poked around and found a lot of parodies – including porn parodies of Avengers, the Big Lebowski, Black Widow that used the actual names and situations, as well as lots of literary and film and television parodies.
So, I thought to myself… Why not? Let’s give it a shot. Get a little more of my life and writing out there, save another little piece of me from the Electronic Waste depot and its supermagnet of oblivion.
There is a risk, just because something is a parody doesn’t mean you don’t get sued. That can happen easily. Weird Al Yankovic makes sure he’s got permission for all his parodies. A lot of parody artists get permission or licenses. It’s probably safer that way.
But just the fact that they’re trying to avoid or minimize risk, on the other hand doesn’t mean that they’re guilty. The Copyright Acts do allow parody, and allow for unlicensed, unauthorized work. The right to commit parody or satire is as fundamental to free dialogue and an open society as the right to comment, criticize and review. So I thought… why not?
Am I really treading on toes here? I don’t think there’s any way to confuse this book with the real thing. I repeatedly state “unauthorized parody.’ And frankly, if you read it, it’s pretty clear. I don’t think I’m offering up any kind of harm to either franchise, they’re both pretty dead, the casts have aged out. Sad to day, they’re both largely forgotten except for a small cult and a slightly larger pool of people with fond but vague memories. Stargate over a decade ago, did a dead on parody of Farscape – kind of inevitable, Ben Browder and Claudia Black from Farscape had transitioned onto the show, and the onscreen comment was “How about we do something that someone has heard of?” If you’re that deep into obscurity… hard to see that a parody is going to cost them money or do damage.
And even if I wanted permission, where would I go? Salter Street, the owner of LEXX was bought out by Alliance Atlantis, which was in turn bought out, divided up, sold off. I have no idea who holds the right to LEXX. Similarly, it’s not at all clear where the corporate ownership of Farscape is. Probably both are in monstrous megacorporations which don’t even know they own it.
I don’t really have any real intent to follow it up with work in kind. I’ve got plenty of projects, that are either advanced, very advanced or in the ‘I really want to do this’ state. The Saga of the Bobs was very much a one off thing, and for me it was the joy of just writing chaos, going so far over the top you saw yourself coming down the other side, being wild and inventive. It’s not like I have a whole raft of fanfics and fanfic parodies to intrude on commercial copyright…. Well, there’s the Time Traveler project with Ewen, but that’s a special case.
Mostly, this book emerges at some fulcrum point between the existential angst in my life, frustration with not writing and having more books out, disappointment that a it of work got orphaned, reminders of past pleasures, joy in the actual work, and studious ethical and legal reflection and study.
So, what the hell? I just decided to go for it. Literally, it was just sitting there, all I had to do was write introductions and explanations, forwards afterwards, edit a bit, tart it up, do the book design and formatting, design a cover, reserve ISBNs, set up a couple of pages of metadata on Amazon, upload files, and there you go. Simple. My twenty-eighth book. Kind of a silly little thing. But I like it.
So that’s what I did yesterday.