Would love to see story where the guy picks women who are open to having themselves changed to look like celebrities. Then the main character deals with the adventures and difficulties of his celebrity harem.
Would love to see story where the guy picks women who are open to having themselves changed to look like celebrities. Then the main character deals with the adventures and difficulties of his celebrity harem.
There wouldn't be any difficulties. Whether the women like it or not, their sponsor can change them any way he likes. Honestly, I'd bet that not only would celebrities by very common (people are very predictable), but certain celebrities would be very common among selectees of given ages.
For example, Marilyn Monroe would be common among the older soldiers, Loni Anderson and Farah Fawcett among the middle aged soldiers, and Reese Witherspoon and Emma Watson among the younger ones.
I also remember that at least one 'cat girl' has been done and one girl was changed from white to black.
I'm pretty sure I also recall one where a male concubine who was either gay or bi was modified into a non-reproductive female, but I may be conflating a Swarm story with something else.
Honestly, I'm really surprised more authors didn't go all out with this stuff. Given the way the technology was described in the early stories and even with the limitations that humans presumably have, there's no reason why there wouldn't be a lot more freaky changes than what's typical in these stories.
For example, a high-CAP research/ tech type selectee could change his harem into elves, dwarfs, tieflings, whatever and act out his sexy D&D fantasies. Or perhaps test G'Kar's theories about the human "pleasure threshold": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCN1vNVJlp8. I can think of any number of fantasy, SF, and cartoon characters (eg, Cheetara) that even the casual geek would love to test.
Is there a correlation between writing fanfiction or in a pre-existing universe and a paucity of imagination?
AJ
An excellent question....
That's why i've been thinking it's easier to name what hasn't been done in a swarm cycle universe.
I think it's more of a problem of stimulation to write and post stories on new and interesting subjects. And the stimulation that does happen are often for niche sexual fetishes.
While I understand why someone might think this, I don't think so. While there's certainly a lot of fan-fiction with very little new content, there's also a lot of non-FF that has very little going on either. By this thinking you could argue that any story which takes place in the real world also lacks imagination.
If anything, I think what fan-fiction might say about an author is that they lack confidence in their writing ability. By writing a story in a pre-existing series or world an author has a built-in audience who is going to judge their work a bit less harshly than the average reader.
Certainly some sites take the "positive comments only" rules a bit too far, but for a new writer fan-fiction can be a very good way to dip their toe in the water and see if anyone actually enjoys their writing before they put too much of themselves into a more personal, original work.
I'll also point out that for professional writers, any form of authorised fan-fiction can be both lucrative and a good way to build name recognition. For that matter, most TV writing could loosely be considered fan-fiction. Any writer who isn't the show's creator is writing stories in another creator's world, but going by that standard we're dismissing some of the best and most memorable episodes of classic series.
To be honest, i think it's harder to say what hasn't been done in various Swarm Cycle universes....