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)