Reminds me of when a recent sci-fi author wrote a first person novel with an androgynously named protagonist. They didn’t ever directly refer or allude to the character’s sex in the novel. Fan communities and book clubs spent months realizing they’d subconsciously given the protagonist pronouns in their head. (It’s less awkward than it sounds due to the sci-fi premise.) The author only addressed it months after it came out. They got both Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson to create identical audiobooks for the sequel.
Man I wish I could enjoy Wheaton's narration style but after trying to listen to John Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire and hearing every single character given the same tone deaf voice (literally tone deaf: not like saying racist things but rather had the same sarcastic and smug tone of voice for everyone irrespective of character descriptions or even explicit tones given like "she said morosely") I refuse to buy another book he has narrated.
Amber Benson it is then.
Makes me wonder if Wil Wheaton low-key didn't want to be narrating the book at all, and maybe his sarcastic smug tone was a reflection of how he felt about the whole damn job. Maybe he felt he wasn't getting paid enough etc
Would that be Early Riser by Jasper Fforde? If not, I'm very curious what the book was.
It’s Lock-In by John Scalzi. After a ~weird flu~, a large portion of the population are left paraplegic and can only interact with the world by remotely controlling humanoid robots. It’s still fairly early on in the tech, so most folks are walking around in generic of the shelf units that are only a few generations removed from the Boston Dynamics or Atlas robots.
It was a really weird novel to be reading during the first week of Covid shutdowns.
Probably how Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books were meant to be until the publisher told the author: "Hey listen we can only afford to print one book ten thousand times. Not eleven books nine hundred times."
In reality, with how fast information spreads on the internet, all the different endings would be quickly cataloged. The alleged 11th one would be mentioned, but it would soon be well-known that nobody has seen it. Which ending was best would be an interesting point of discussion.
...Assuming the books were even popular, of course.
Yeah this would work quite well before the internet became popular.
Last February, Undertale creator Toby Fox sent newsletters by e-mail with 3 random banners of Deltarune characters saying something, with various degrees of rarity. They were all collected within 2 days, including one that only appeared 1 out of 1.000.000 times. However, it should be noted that the Deltarune community is fucking crazy (in a good sense).
It would depend on how rare the rarest endings are. If there are only a handful of copies of one of the endings and the handful of people that got it don't engage with the online fan community (not everyone who reads books are online about it), those people might not even know there are different endings, let alone that they have a rare one.
Which would also negate whatever chaos the author was trying to sow.
This is like the pig prank for your school
You release three angry aggressive slop covered pigs into your school and spray paint them #1, #2 and #4
OP generously assumes that not only will people read their books, but also care about the subsequent shenanigans
Books of course do get read. It happens sometimes.
No way
OP generously assumes
Yes, OP used the word 'If'.
And that a book written in such a way to support 10 different endings would be good enough to support online arguments.
Idk, people love mystery boxes
Depends on the type of book and how much of it would be rewritten for each ending i could see the possibility of it being good and supporting enough endings, it would just be a lot of work.
This kind of happened with the last Chris Rock stand-up special. He flubbed the last joke pretty badly, which everyone who saw it within the first few days saw. Then Netflix edited it without making any sort of announcement and made it seem like he nailed it. People were arguing online about him nailing the final joke, not realizing that they were both right in what they saw. It was kind of an interesting study in the power of editing.
You sometimes get this in movies as well where the take that they use in the trailer is different from the take that's in the actual film. Usually it's the same words but with slightly different inflections. It's close enough to always make you wonder.
Pacific Rim is a classic example. The rousing speech in the trailer is so much better than the one in the film.
Would this be possible to do? Publishers would usually use different ISBNs for this, giving it all away, but apparently self-publishing is a thing
Self publish, provide ocr-free pdfs (i.e. images where you can't highlight the text) no epub or mobi because if you can extract the text, it would be easy to diff the text. And there are tools to ocr un ocr'd pdfs with varying degrees of error....maybe take up book binding and mail print bound books with beautiful artwork no one would want to deface....how much work you want to put into this joke?
Assumes their book would be wildly popular despite having to write 10 cohesive plausible endings.
Your press operators would leak the info.
Wasn't this the theatrical run of the movie "Clue"?
I think there were 3 endings that varied by region, but in the pre-internet times this did very little to effect discussion.
Also, the VHS release included all the endings.
And then you actually write 12 endings.
And then keep the 13th in a bank box, and the 14th world shattering ending is kept in one of the 10 boxes of misc note paper in your attic.
And your last words will be: "There is another ending"
Last words are, "I here by canonize any and all endings written by owner of this note"
sadfsdfasfasf
This reminds me of the book Telephone by Percival Everett. No secret extra ending but there were multiple versions of the book, one with a dramatically different ending. I really enjoyed reading it- and then looking up the differences.
A visual novel that's actually a novel? I wouldn't mind that.
For a more subtitle version of this, check out the coverage of the 2014 sci-fi novel :::Lock-In by Jon Scalzi:::. The story is told first person from a paraplegic character who interacts with society via a very early generation generic robot body. The author gave the character an androgynous name that’s frequently used for men and women, and never elaborates further on the character’s sex within the story.
Fan communities and book clubs spent months realizing they had given the protagonist pronouns in their own head. The author stayed quiet in the pre-release of the book and only admitted what they’d done a good while after the release. (And when Tor wrote a piece spoiling it.) When Audible bought exclusive rights to the sequel novel, they got Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson to record identical versions of the book.
not deleted by the creator
Gah. Was struggling with Lemmy’a spoiler tags and just made a whole new comment. Hopefully things don’t get screwy with federation.
