Oh my, my name has been *Mentioned*.  I should respond, somehow.  Let's see...

At 02:58 AM 7/31/99 -0400, you wrote:

Brian Payne wrote:

Well, this one has been revised a bit since it was posted
over a year ago.
Writing sharpened up, a couple of scenes with changed
dialogue. Hope you
enjoy it.

Actually, I did, which surprised me in a fashion.

We aim to please. ^_^

And hit the target squarely, IMHO.

Usually, I don't
care too much for fics like this,

I think Bob Barnes dubbed the genre 'Conspiracy Fics' (That makes this an
official, 'Blame it on Bob Barnes Production,' btw.)

No no... you shouldn't talk openly about my secret plan to change the
course of fanfiction writing and reshape the entire anime esthetic.  

but this one was both serious enough and
funny enough (in some respects) that it seemed more than somewhat

plausible.

Good work.

Thank you. Like most fics of this kind, you can poke holes in it easily
enough. One has to suspend at least a little disbelief to enjoy it.

Yep, yep.  "Willing suspension of disbelief."  That's the ticket.  The
author's main job is to make this easy to do.

Needless to say, this was inspired by 'The Masks We Must Wear' by Bob
Barnes and 'Tangled Web' by Gary Kleppe, as well as the other
spin-off's
that were done.

Never read 'em... now I think I'll have to. :)

Barnes was the first to come up with this sort of thing, I believe. Gary's
is on his page, not sure of Barnes has a page or not.

Dave Eddy kindly hosts my stories at:

http://nabiki.newberry.edu/DEddy/fanfic/bob_barnes/index.html

I don't know if I should rightly claim to have invented the genre.... "The
Masks We Must Wear" may have been the first among Ranma fanfictions, but I
doubt it was the first of its type in fanfictions in general.  The first
story of this sort that I ever read was _The Illuminatus Trilogy_ by Robert
Anton Wilson and Robert Shea.  (dating myself rather badly here) In the
decade or so after JFK was assasinated in Dallas a whole slew of conspiracy
theories relating to the assasination surfaced in the underground press of
the day.  Whole issues of papers like The Villiage Voice were devoted to
these theories.  Wilson and Shea decided to cowrite a large SF novel which
had as its central thesis the idea that _all_ of the conspiracy theories
were true.  Every single one of them.  I highly recommend this book for
setting up the proper state of mind to _really _ appreciate this sort of
story.  Note: not recommended for folks with paranoiac tendencies.

Best,





Bob Barnes 
rbarnes@moscow.com 
Moscow, Idaho 

"Absent some moment of clarity that none of us can imagine
coming along, we'll enter the millennium at warp speed with
our culture continuing to crumble just as our mainframes go
kablooey trying to figure out what day it is."

-- Robert X. Cringely