UnBooks:About
UnBooks is a project of the Uncyclomedia Foundation. Initially a parody of Wikibooks, with many categories for different texts like guides or cook books, it has since become the top dumping ground for some of Uncyclopedia's most daring, surreal, absurd, grotesque and moving works of creative fiction.
How do I write an UnBooks story?[edit | edit source]
Required reading (unskippable!)[edit | edit source]
To write well, first you must read. Obviously, the touchstone for much of Uncyclopedia's sardonicism comes from Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, although (as everybody knows), more advanced Uncyclopedia writers draw comic inspiration from John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Obviously, you've already read Swift and Voltaire, so there's no need to condescend, although brushing up on your Fielding and Pope is a must: Il Ricciolo Rapito in its original Italian, is recommended. To those who say you must read The Good Soldier Švejk, tell them to take a hike! It's in Czech anyway.
Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary is an obvious precursor, although not quite necessary for UnBooks. Mark Twain is foundational! You already know about Wilde, Coward, et. al. The short stories of O'Henry and Carver are a must, O'Connor and Hemingway goes without saying. Saunders and Franzen for the contemporary types, and of course, the entire works of Delilo and Pynchon. For genre pastiche, rather than go through mountains of doorstoppers by the likes of R. R. Martin or Goodkind, Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun should be a simple, light read, perhaps you can supplement that with the oeuvre of Tolkien in the afternoon.
As for women, you must sleep with at least seven of them, and five men: you need a free mind, but don't go full Pasolini! If you're a woman (statistically unlikely), seven men, five women. If you meant women writers, a little bit of Dorothy Parker in your life, maybe a little Sue Townsend by your side, a little bit of Nancy Mitford's all you really need. And Willa Cather. You can't sleep with an English major without reading Cather.
Write your own UnBooks story[edit | edit source]
Only after you've read the entire recommended list are you able to write a story here. Otherwise, your face will explode from the nanites.
Rules about editing[edit | edit source]
Rules on existing stories[edit | edit source]
Fixing a typo, cleaning up the formatting, revising a particularly mangled sentence grammatically, or maybe adding a nice image to an existing story is generally okay. But substantially changing a person's work, hijacking a narrative to make the characters all have giant boobs or fly to Mars or revert to Islam is a big no-no. It's not so much a formal rule as a social norm, but unless you're explicitly collaborating on a story, making narrative changes—even a sentence or two if they're narratively load-bearing—is typically considered a dick move. If you don't want it done to your stories, don't do it to others!