What is The Maker's Mark?
Opinions differ on the nature of The Maker's Mark. One of its creators calls it 'surreal science fiction', the other says it's 'a space Western without the space travel'. It could be either, or both, or something else entirely. What can be agreed on, though, is this:
THE WORLD
The world of The Maker's Mark is a vast, seemingly endless desert. In the centre is a giant construction that its robotic inhabitants - droids - call the City. The droids don't know when it was first built, or by whom, but it seems to be the place they came from, and for time out of mind it was where they worked, existing as a collective without individual minds, working eternally to expand the City.
Then there came defects. Some newly-built droids did not belong; they were broken in some way. Their difference provoked new ways of thinking, and as the number of defective droids increased, so they eventually sought change and left the City in a great journey known as the Migration. They moved out into the desert in their thousands, inhabiting the towns they found lying empty there.
For generations the droids lived in these towns, existing as individuals, enjoying the pleasures of freedom and struggling against adversity. But the dark City remained always, a shadow on the horizon. Years passed. Now droids, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original defects, began a new migration, returning to the City: but some stay behind.
The first book in the series - Remnants - begins here, and tells some of their stories.
THE PROJECT
The Maker's Mark is a world-building experiment. Rather than developing a canonical reality with a think-tank, and having writers and artists produce work that fits that mould, the idea with TMM was that the writers would generate the canon through their stories. For the first book in the series, Remnants, the writers were given a minimal specification for what the world would be like, and a vague history leading up to the time during which the book was set. As the stories came in they were edited to avoid inconsistencies and standardise the scientific basis - how droids could get drunk, have sex and do all the other things people do in Westerns without just becoming metal humans - but beyond that the writers were given free reign to create what they wanted for the world.
As Remnants reaches its final stages of preparation before publication, the ideas conceived in its stories are being gathered together into one freely-available PDF manual: The Maker's Mark: Canon. Anything not explored or answered in Remnants, or in coming web-exclusive fiction, will be left open to be explored in later works. And in this way The Maker's Mark will be a truly collaborative development; one where any person with a good idea and the talent to convey it will can have a say in how this universe works.
