Someone just got a phony scientific paper published about the effects of reaching warp 10
- Thread starter hxclespaulplayer
- Start date
This reminds me of something scifi writers did to a predatory book publisher.
What happened was, some scifi writer made a public statement along the lines of "A real publisher is one that takes the financial risk and doesn't pass it on to the writer, you should avoid these kinds of publishers". The guy running the publisher then made a statement bashing scifi writers saying "Generally, the bar is lower for scifi writers. Most scifi writers couldn't write a story about normal people with normal problems and find it a home."
So the scifi writers wrote an intentionally terrible novel about normal people with normal problems. Basically one of them came up with names and vague description of characters, randomly generated which characters appeared in which chapters then formed a vague story outline around that. They then sent these vague descriptions to SF writers who signed up, and each wrote a chapter of it independently. One chapter was added twice, one chapter was generated from Markov chains of all the other chapters. They sent it into the publisher, and they accepted it. They found out what the SF writers had done and canceled their acceptance so they never actually published it, but initially, the SF writers successfully wrote a story about normal people and normal situations and found it a home.
It was eventually published by some online retailer under the name "Atlanta Nights" by "Travis Tea".
What happened was, some scifi writer made a public statement along the lines of "A real publisher is one that takes the financial risk and doesn't pass it on to the writer, you should avoid these kinds of publishers". The guy running the publisher then made a statement bashing scifi writers saying "Generally, the bar is lower for scifi writers. Most scifi writers couldn't write a story about normal people with normal problems and find it a home."
So the scifi writers wrote an intentionally terrible novel about normal people with normal problems. Basically one of them came up with names and vague description of characters, randomly generated which characters appeared in which chapters then formed a vague story outline around that. They then sent these vague descriptions to SF writers who signed up, and each wrote a chapter of it independently. One chapter was added twice, one chapter was generated from Markov chains of all the other chapters. They sent it into the publisher, and they accepted it. They found out what the SF writers had done and canceled their acceptance so they never actually published it, but initially, the SF writers successfully wrote a story about normal people and normal situations and found it a home.
It was eventually published by some online retailer under the name "Atlanta Nights" by "Travis Tea".
