Sooo Yuletide

[petronia]

Title: Lyonnesse
Fandom: The Bigend Trilogy, by William Gibson
Characters: The Curfew (proportionately to canon)
Spoilers: character stuff through the end of Zero History, but peripheral to the plot of the books
Rating: PG13 for Heidi's language
Wordcount: 3183 words

So yes, I wrote a story about the fake reunion of a fake indie band while faking William Gibson's style. XD; This got a great comment-to-hit ratio for AO3, though the fandom's a minority interest even for Yuletide.

The ridic long end notes I just added:

According to William Gibson, works of fiction in the Google era come trailing a nebulous cloud of search terms, whereby clunky infodumping within the actual text becomes unnecessary (at least, if one's readership consists solely of tech-literate William Gibson fans, so this must work for him). Thank goodness for that, because I've never been to Berlin.

The Propeller Island City Lodge: is real, though I never found out if Cabinet was. The photos are worth a gander.

Colonel Sebastian Moran: from Conan Doyle's The Empty House, wherein he tries to snipe Sherlock Holmes with a state-of-the-art steampunk gun. My only excuse is that Hollis and Milgrim are both kind of Holmes nerds, and even Dan 'Potter' Radcliffe uses "beekeeping" as a shorthand.

The bands, record labels, music festivals, phone apps, etc.: all real, except for the ones Gibson made up. (By "the Swedes" I suspect Inchmale meant The Knife.) I wanted to know what this universe would look like with them in, Gibson depicting the minutiae of real-world brands with the obsessive attention of an Old Master painting wispy hair curls on a Madonna, except for this one sphere - presumably so he can be zeitgeist-y without committing RPF. I bet he got Corbijn's permission for the namecheck, even. Personally, I have zero qualms about committing RPF, so the tape-binning studio anecdote is based on a blog post by Stephen Street, and the boat anecdote is based on an epic tale of Joan Jett, Sid Vicious, and Sandy West of The Runaways. Let me tell you, I'm gutted that didn't make it into this year's movie.

The Curfew: my favorite 90s indie band who happen to be fictional. They seem to have approximately the cultural cachet of My Bloody Valentine, i.e. the biggest un-lampshaded plot hole in ZH is why, in 2010, people are not shoving suitcases of cash in their general direction hoping for a reunion tour. It's gotta be a better gig than working for Bigend! This story could have gone on nigh indefinitely, what with the NME sending in Pennie Smith, one of Heidi's ex-groupies cybersquatting their MySpace, Inchmale making full albums on his iPad and upping them as pay-what-you-want downloads on Bandcamp, the fuckyeahthecurfew Tumblr reblogging Pitchfork Reviews Reviews' review of Pitchfork's review of The Curfew reissue, and Hollis having an existentialist crisis when her old miniskirt turns up as an unlockable item in Rock Band 4. And a buttzillion unauthorized dubstep remixes on Soundcloud, forever.

My sincerest thanks to Subdee and Aya, who betaed; Mike, from whom I stole the bit about information being like rocks; Bladderwrack, who's not in this fandom that I know of, but whose return address brought Cornwall to top of mind; and Dashakay, for loving these characters enough to request more of them, and let me do what I always kind of wanted to anyway. I am so glad you enjoyed it!

This was interesting as a writing exercise for two reasons: the characters turned out to be indivisible from Gibson's prose style, and I had to dial back my own process to get it right. Gibson is a lazier writer than I am!