Talk:The Book of the Enemy (anthology)

Linking material

The Book of the Enemy is full of material besides the short stories currently mentioned on this page, and I've been thinking for a bit about the best way to cover it. I think I've come up with a plan, and I was just going to move forward with it, but I decided to post it here in case anyone wants the chance to air an objection before I make the decisions.

• The four "Subjective Interlocks" (numbered Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Omega) are the closest thing BotE has to "linking material", so, like what we did with Playing for Time in Liberating Earth, I plan to create the page Subjective Interlock to cover those four bits. This should be fairly uncontroversial.

• The 19 "Pre-narrative Briefings", labelled A-S, are much trickier to deal with. But note that each one is designed as a prequel or introduction to the story that follows. (There are only 17 stories, but briefings D&E and N&O are grouped together, so the math works out.) I'd be inclined to give them their own pages, but they're in no way "stories": they're just quotes, closest to the excerpts at the start of each chapter in Weapons Grade Snake Oil. Similarly, combining them onto one page wouldn't do justice to how they act as prequels to the anthology's short stories. So I've decided to try to incorporate them into the pages of the short stories they accompany. I initially rejected this idea as too difficult to implement, but I think it's really the best solution, and when I tried it out on The Short Briefing Sergeant's Tale it seemed to work quite well. The information from the short biographies accompanying each briefing will also be incorporated onto the pages of the accompanying short story.

If no one has any disagreements, I'll move ahead with this change. – N8 ☎ 16:13, March 15, 2018 (UTC)

Ok, first of all, a disclaimer: I know nothing of the stories you've mentioned aside from what you've posted. But I do have a suggestion, which you are free to ignore if it doesn't seem to fit.

When I was doing the stories for Life During Wartime, I came across the four Lockdown Conversations. These are four stories that have their own titles and are only a page or two long. Instead of making them linking material, I gave them individual pages. I think if your Subjective Interlock stories have individual titles (the Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Omega?), you could make individual pages for each one. Especially if they feature different characters, as the Lockdown Conversations do. Like I said, it's just a suggestion, and you may not feel like they are separate enough for their own pages.

Your last suggestion for the Pre-narrative Briefings is probably the best - include each one at the beginning of the story it accompanies. It really doesn't sound like we should have 19 individual pages for these, and if you feel it would be too hard to combine them, then that wouldn't be the way to go either.

Hope this helps, Shambala108 ☎ 00:40, March 16, 2018 (UTC)

I'm actually super glad to have your input, since I really admire all the work you did handling linking material for earlier anthologies. Happy to have your support for the approach on the pre-narrative briefings.

The Subjective Interlock bits are all told from the first-person perspective of a single anonymous character, and they tell a pretty unified story, so I'm still inclined to group them together ... but I just noticed that the last one is actually titled "Subjective Injection Omega". Bugger.

Thanks again for your thoughts! – N8 ☎ 04:51, March 16, 2018 (UTC)

I'm going ahead and implementing this suggestion. – N8 ☎ 13:20, March 27, 2018 (UTC)

PS: I'm going to cite the fictional Author's Biographies as part of Subjective Interlock. – N8 ☎ 08:48, May 6, 2018 (UTC)

PPS: This was a short-sighted and bad idea! – N8 (☎/👁️) 18:29, October 4, 2020 (UTC)

Author Biographies

So I recognize that currently biographies of authors are being cited as part of the Pre Narrative Briefings, but I'm not certain this is appropriate. The briefings as a whole have a goal in the narrative, which the biographies aren't a part of (enemy identification), which you can see from Initial Briefing/The Screens. Rather, Author Biographies strikes me as a separate non-narrative prose piece, that should have its own section/entry, and be considered invalid until we re-examine the validity rules concerning non-narrative works, or another inclusion debate considers it valid. (And do I ever want it to be valid, there's some juicy stuff in here.) Najawin ☎ 05:51, October 1, 2020 (UTC)

Er, Subjective Interlock, not Pre-Narrative. Even worse issue, that's even more narrative and doing a specific thing. Najawin ☎ 05:51, October 1, 2020 (UTC)

Yes, the fictional author biographies are tricky. They are clearly narrative, in that each one briefly tells the story of a character's life, and moreover they are part of the narratives of their authors, as is made obvious in several cases via explicit footnotes and references etc. As you can see in the prior section on this page, it was a nightmare to figure out how to cover the The Book of the Enemy; compared to that mess, the fictional bios were an afterthought, so I followed the ebook formatting in including them as an appendix to the final Subjective Interlock Injection. But the only thing presently tying them to that placement in terms of the wiki's coverage is a footnote on Subjective Interlock (short story), so if you have an alternate suggestion for their placement — perhaps on the pages for each accompanying story? — I invite you to suggest it, and I'll do my best to help make the change! – N8 (☎/👁️) 16:26, October 1, 2020 (UTC)

Annoying distinction here. Author Biographies as a whole isn't narrative, each of the biographies individually is. I'm not sure how we cover an anthology within an anthology. I was interpreting Author Biographies as the relevant prose piece, which would be non-narrative. I agree that each individual biography would be narrative if they'd be taken as the prose pieces. Najawin ☎ 17:11, October 1, 2020 (UTC)

That's a bit… weird. How can the whole be less narrative than the sum of its parts, if it's made up of individual "chapters" that are unquestionedly narrative? Also, see Doctor Who and the Daleks as a precedent for giving a single, valid page to several narratively-unrelated short stories released as one package under one single title. (Granted, just two, in that case, but still.) --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 17:14, October 1, 2020 (UTC)

That seems like all the precedent needed then. (As for the reasoning, the events stop being related? Regardless, the hangup on "narrative" here is a bit misleading. Rule 1 is not "only things that are narrative count" it's "only stories count". Author Biographies would not be a story but a collection of stories, so if it's taken as the relevant prose piece it's not obviously valid. But the precedent works.) Najawin ☎ 17:27, October 1, 2020 (UTC)

I mean, if we're playing with words like that, the rule is "only stories count" rather than "only a story counts". Author Biographies taken as a whole is not "a story", but it is, literally, "stories". And if anything, the Dr Who and the Daleks precedent is proof of that.

Although also: the events of each story are connected, thematically if nothing else (and it's not nothing else; all these stories are, in one way or the other, related to the War in Heaven, after all). It does sometimes happen that what is presented as a single story contains multiple narratives which don't really interact with one another directly. The most obvious example that comes to mind is Ascension of the Cybermen — yes, The Timeless Children ultimately established the Brendan story to actually have been experienced by the Thirteenth Doctor through "mental flashes" during the Cyberman story, but for the week where we didn't know that, we didn't start worrying about whether Ascension counted as "a story". --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 17:42, October 1, 2020 (UTC)

The author biographies are not all connected to the War in Heaven, no, unless we postulate that Nate is the enemy as well. :>

Look, the precedent is fine for me. Someone in the future might get annoyed that author biographies are being taken to be an in universe prose piece, and we can have an inclusion debate about that then. But as it stands what you've found is fine. The question now is more if we split off Author Biographies into its own thing or leave it as part of Subjective Interlock. (Also, don't get me started on how the tv show gets preferential treatment even though it violates NPOV.)

In my ebook the table of contents goes "Title Page, Narratives and Briefings, The Screens, The Book of the Enemy, Awake, Author Biographies", having it as a distinct thing. Similarly, the drop down menu for easy scrolling has it as a distinct item. Najawin ☎ 17:54, October 1, 2020 (UTC)

Hmm. Wouldn't be the first time the publisher reformatted an online release!

It seems that from Talk:Doctor Who (N-Space) that your plan is to make all of the Author Biographies in The Book of the Enemy valid? I'm very against this; speaking for myself, my author bio was definitely not intended to be a valid source for anything beyond my author page. As an alternative, a compromise meant I once again propose that each in-universe biography -- that is to say, each biography which describes a character who is credited or appears as a point-of-view in a story or briefing -- be treated as an appendix, addendum, or footnote to the corresponding text (or, for those listed as authors of multiple stories, the first text for which they alone are credited). This shouldn't be a problem, especially since the table of contents makes it very easy to match the fictional author biographies with the corresponding stories:

Fictional biography	Corresponding story
Alain Chartier	Pre-narrative Briefing J
Irma Ebbinghaus	Pre-narrative Briefing A
Entaradora	Pre-narrative Briefing E
Wilhelm Liebknecht	The Map and the Spiders
Marko Marz	Pre-narrative Briefing L
Robert Scarratt	Pre-narrative Briefing F
William Shakespeare	Pre-narrative Briefing B
Gen Volst	Pre-narrative Briefing R
Xenaria Who Survived	Pre-narrative Briefing K
Malachi Yarrow	Pre-narrative Briefing M
Lawrence Burton (arguably?)	We Are the Enemy

Over at User:NateBumber/Sandbox5 I've tossed together an example of what Pre-narrative Briefings would look like with this change; I think it makes a number of the summaries much more coherent. Let me know what you think. – N8 (☎/👁️) 18:29, October 4, 2020 (UTC)

Actually, I'm interpreting them as all currently valid - and just want to finish my coverage of the book by incorporating them into the wiki. I think at this point I've come around to the idea that this bit is messy enough that we need an inclusion debate to sort it out before I do that though. Arguably Michael Simpson and Lesley Drakken should have their biographies included, as they gave a briefing. But this can wait until the forum situation is sorted out. Najawin ☎ 19:33, October 4, 2020 (UTC)