Magnum Opus Wiki



Welcome to the Magnum Opus Wiki
I am currently writing a story that I feel is way too complicated for me to depend on written notes to keep track of things. I hope that this wiki will make it much easier for me to keep all my shit straight and perhaps get some good advice from those who might happen upon it. If you don't know where to begin, try starting from my Table of Contents to get a quick rundown of topics.

About My Project
I have been trying to create an original science fiction story for a very, very long time. Though I have written tons of short and unfinished stories, there has been one that I have started and trashed a million times. Each time I have returned to the setting, it changes drastically. Though there have been key elements and themes that I hold dear to the setting, the actually story and specifics have changed often. I decided that the main reason for not being able to make a constructive story is that its scope was far too large to try and keep track of on paper. I have an aging art book that is falling to pieces that contains a heap of random information that has at one time or another been part of this story. I even went so far as to make an "analog wiki" by referencing the pages to each other. Though this worked at first, in the long run it still got me nowhere. I had always envied wikipedia's ability to link information and for a long time had wanted to use that power to congregate my work. Recently I got the nerve up to try and take on a wiki myself. This wiki is not (at the moment) intended for people to edit my work but is instead a tool I will use so that I can keep my massive world I am building in order. Hopefully I will not only be able to finally do something constructive with my efforts, but I will also get some feedback on it and refine it. As of the actual story itself, well, that's a little too big for me to explain. You'll just have to start reading my wiki and try to figure it out yourself.

Inspiration and Mindset
I have a number of major influences for this work, both conceptually and visually. Perhaps first and foremost, I am most inspired by Frank Herbert and Edgar Rice Burroughs. I grew up on the Dune universe, first through David Lynch's film and then later through Herbert's books. The grand scope, detailed world and characters, and the religious/political implications will forever be a mainstay in my imagination. I later became a huge fan of Burroughs's work, specifically his Mars/Barsoom books. Despite their age, these stories told of incredible adventure and a massive world simultaneously so similar and yet so alien from our own.

In both cases there were two main ideas that I took away. The first is world building. Here on Earth we take for granted how massive and interconnected every bit of detail is. The simplest things in life are actually built on the back of a complex system beyond our understanding. When we look out our windows, we ignore this complexity. When I read or watch films, one of the greatest feelings I could ever have is the sense that these fictional worlds are actually living and breathing whether we notice it or not. In a more tactile sense, I also saw this often with the works of the Jim Henson. With the help of the artist Brain Froud, Henson gave us the worlds of Labyrinth and the Dark Crystal; worlds teaming with life, crawling out of every nook and cranny. Henson also gave us Fraggle Rock. At its core, Fraggle Rock showed us that at every step of magnification, there is always more to see and explore, and we are usually ignorant of these gradients.

The second theme I grew to love is how we perceive and interpret the world. Each culture, with its religions, politics, ideologies, etc, has two modes of understanding. There is the understanding of the senses. We are living organisms that sense the world around us and use that data to construct our reality. But after we "see" the world, we must determine what it means to us on a personal level. Though I do not subscribe to any religion myself, I fully understand the reason why we create beliefs to handle the unknown. I see science as being the greatest human achievement and endeavour, but even still science at its core admits that it does not and cannot actually know anything with certainty. This unknown and lack of meaning in turn necessitates some kind of belief or religion. Being critical and skeptical of religious "facts", I rarely agree with what any one religion believes in. However, to think that their beliefs are completely baseless is naive. In truth, everything in the natural world is caused and exists for a reason, and in the case of systems and evolution, these particles are situated in a world of function and survivability. Instead of dismissing religious ideas, we need to be asking ourselves "Why do they think this way" and "hows does this function serve and effect this meme".

Aside from the more abstract ideas, I also have taken some more direct visual and conceptual influences from mostly Japanese anime and manga. Some of these greats would include Masamune Shirow, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, Yoshiyuki Tomino, and Yukito Kishiro. All of these artists and writers also did their fair share of world building. Shirow's mechs and cyborgs of Appleseed, the questions of humanity in a cyber age from Ghost in the Shell, and the bizarre blurring of science and magic in Orion are all deeply realized and thought provoking. Shirow's own take on what it means to be a human in a world of cybernetics takes so many tropes and spins them on their heads. There is also an immense sense of grandeur as its main character travels to ever greater expanses of the world, seeing that life is far more complex and massive than it appears. Perhaps most important is Yasuhiko's Venus Wars and Tomino's Gundam. Not only are these settings powerful in their own right, they perhaps have the most direct influence on one of the major aspects of my story. Though there are plenty of differences between my human society and theirs, the idea of man moving into space and then other worlds, as well as how something like that would actually look like, not in a fantastical sense but in a realistic sense, was and still is a huge reason I wish to develop this story. Within my mind's eye, the space colonies, terraforming, and technology are all mirrors of the worlds of Venus Wars and Gundam. There is still a message within these settings that is also very important. There is always a sense that though a reader or viewer may decide who is the protagonist and the antagonist, the truth is that there is rarely such a thing as either. In real life, most people see themselves as righteous and virtuous. Most people believe that they are on the right path and those who oppose are the enemy. I know that some people are easier to portray as good or evil, but those kinds of labels are extremely shallow and limiting characters to such labels is not only unfair, its unrealistic.

I do not own any artwork other than those that I have created myself. I will make every attempt to use original artwork when possible, but there will be many cases in which I do not possess the skill or time to make original artwork.

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