Planiverse surfing
Jul. 5th, 2002 06:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unbibiumI decided to ask Google what the man on the street was saying about A.K. Dewdney's The Planiverse.
First, I entered the name of the main character, Yendred. I found no Planiverse fanfic, which is probably a good thing. I did find a lot of posts in French and German from a man who had taken Yendred as an alias. The other most common meme was people realizing how close Yendred's name was to a reversal of Dewdney's. And I found a few angry people who seemed genuinely upset that the book was "a hoax". I think the lengthiest discussion of it was on sci.physics, in response to an inquiry about whether it was real. In this thread, active kibologist Matt McIrvin praises his trolling ability. I also found Yendred mentioned in a biology-related post in a thread on alt.fan.cecil-adams.
Searching again for "Planiverse", I discovered that being taken too seriously was a problem for Dewdney as early as 1984; apparently Douglas Adams wanted in on the troll. I also found a rather good review from someone who couldn't crack the clue behind Yendred's name, falling for the "systematic bit error" red herring.
Especially in the pre-AOL days, I found many people wondering whether the 2DWORLD program really existed, so I googled the web for that. Unfortunately, %2D seems to be a common URL substitution for a hyphen, so I got a lot of URLs containing things like headlines%2Dworld. Refining my search a little, I found a program that might come close.
I've got to figure out what the newsgroup it.fan.dewdney is about...
First, I entered the name of the main character, Yendred. I found no Planiverse fanfic, which is probably a good thing. I did find a lot of posts in French and German from a man who had taken Yendred as an alias. The other most common meme was people realizing how close Yendred's name was to a reversal of Dewdney's. And I found a few angry people who seemed genuinely upset that the book was "a hoax". I think the lengthiest discussion of it was on sci.physics, in response to an inquiry about whether it was real. In this thread, active kibologist Matt McIrvin praises his trolling ability. I also found Yendred mentioned in a biology-related post in a thread on alt.fan.cecil-adams.
Searching again for "Planiverse", I discovered that being taken too seriously was a problem for Dewdney as early as 1984; apparently Douglas Adams wanted in on the troll. I also found a rather good review from someone who couldn't crack the clue behind Yendred's name, falling for the "systematic bit error" red herring.
Especially in the pre-AOL days, I found many people wondering whether the 2DWORLD program really existed, so I googled the web for that. Unfortunately, %2D seems to be a common URL substitution for a hyphen, so I got a lot of URLs containing things like headlines%2Dworld. Refining my search a little, I found a program that might come close.
I've got to figure out what the newsgroup it.fan.dewdney is about...
