Manituana: crowdsourcing a world

I come back on Manituana, the new novel by Wu Ming about which I reported earlier. The book is presented as "a story from the wrong side of history", "when everything was still possible".

A rough translation of the book home page:1775, the dawn of the revolution that generated the United States of America. Loyalist and rebels compete for the alleance of the
Six iroquois nations, the most powerful indian community,
strong with their many centuries old Constitution.

In the Mowawk valley, indians and colonists live together from generations. Lacerant choices sweep away the future of a multirace comunity: the journey must start, up to the Empire's capital, and the trip back is a war path".

A good introduction to the book is here.

Up to now, no crowdsourcing. But "collective writing", as Wu Ming is a group of five Italian writers working together.

But once you have read the book, you can get access to the level 2 in Manituana site. It is required to answer a question about the book, in order to be sure that the content in leves 2 will not spoil your reading, revealing surprises about the plot and characters of the novel.

In level 2, you will find how the creation of the novel proceeded, the mails exchanged between the authors and registrations in mp3 of the discusions during the writing. And complete chapters that were eliminated in the final version.

And all the documentation that Wu Ming gathered during the five years of historical research about the American Revolution, that was the base to build the Manituana story. And here comes crowdsourcing: the author explicitely invite to write new stories based in those documents and facts, and publish it in the level 2.

Level 2 represents a posibility to interact, an oportunity to work together in the cration of Manituana's world, of which our novel is surely the core, but not the entire architecture"

In a recent presentation of the book at Milan, one of the members of Wu Ming said: "The story is like a mountain to excavate, and our novel is only a tiny path in it. We would like many ropes to climb that mountain in different ways". "For example", he said, "somebody could re write a chapter of the book from the point of view of a personage different that the one we choose". Another could write a chapter about secondary characters and transform them in protagonists.

The level 2 also hosts music inspired by the story, illustrations, comments, questions. It's an "open dimension, whose full definition is still running. A place designed to answer some questions and create new ones, satisfy curiosities and to spread the communitary narrationsthrough hybridization, crossroads, comparisons, visions and divisions.

It is not a crowdsourced book, but it's a book that serves as a starting point to cowdsource the narration of a whole, wider story.