The Story Economy is a fabulous machine for creative exchange, where stories, scenes, and characters flow between many authors while each writer keeps control of their own canon and books. Instead of a single, fixed novel, the Story Economy treats a world as a multi-authored living guide, like a hard-science remix of the Hitchhikers Guide Economy, where anyone can add entries, side quests, interviews, and scenes as long as they respect the shared rules of licensing and attribution. In this model, The Guide is the living document, while “the novel” is your personal line through that shared universe, carved out of commons material plus your own private work.
# Hitchhikers Guide Economy The Hitchhikers Guide Economy is a non-commercial, social-purpose publisher of guides, zines, and living documents. It exists to host the shared Story Economy: the interviews, in-world articles, travel guides, scientific explainers, and meta-commentary that orbit around many different books and authors. Revenue comes from attention, cross-promotion, and downstream paid works (novels, audio dramas, games, live events), not from paywalling the Guide itself.
# Hard Science Fiction Story Forge In a hard science fiction Story Economy, we split the work into different layers. The “hard science substrate” is built collaboratively, with help from AI, scientific sources, and reference works like Wikipedia, then checked and signed off by human authors. This layer includes orbital mechanics, climate models, plausible biotech, timelines, and technical constraints for ships, habitats, and societies. Once fact-checked, this scientific substrate is released under a free culture license so that all participating authors (and future readers) can reuse and remix it in new guides, worlds, and stories without friction.
On top of that substrate, authors build specific plots, characters, and emotional arcs. The world remains a commons; your story through it remains yours.
# Character Exchange Exercises A signature feature of the Story Economy is character exchange: my characters can visit your world, and yours can interrogate mine. We imagine creative writing exercises where characters from your novel interview characters from mine, inside the shared Guide. A grumpy space engineer from my book might be grilled by a curious post-human historian from yours, both arguing about which version of the Mars rebellion really happened. These dialogues are written as scenes in the Guide, with authorship clearly recorded, and licensed into the H2G2 commons (co-licensed with Creative Commons) so they can be quoted, referenced, and remixed in later Guide entries together with appropriate attribution. You can choose to keep these crossover moments non-canonical for your novel while still letting them breathe inside the shared universe.
# Licensing Flows
The Story Economy works because different layers of the work use different, intentional licenses.
The hard science substrate is licensed as free culture (for example, CC BY or CC BY-SA), so anyone can reuse the technical scaffolding in new guides, books, or games, including commercial works, as long as they respect attribution and share-alike where required. - creativecommons.org 
The shared creative fiction layer (H2G2 dialogues, crossover scenes, meta-entries, in-world interviews) is licensed to H2G2 under Creative Commons Non-Commercial terms, allowing non-commercial reuse, weaving, and republication across the Hitchhikers Guide Economy’s non-profit publishing projects.
Your individual novels, novellas, and core series canon remain fully under your chosen terms (often traditional “all rights reserved”), with only selected scenes, characters, or side stories donated or adapted into the Guide.
The result is a three-layer structure. - Free Culture Substrate: science, timelines, maps, hard facts and constraints. - H2G2 Commons: playful scenes, character interviews, in-world documents, mostly CC NC and Guide-friendly. - Private Canon: your book or series, sold commercially, with curated bridges into the commons.
# Rights, Attribution, and Respect Every contribution to the Guide is tagged with its authors, licenses, and links back to the originating works. Authors retain exclusive rights to their core novels while granting limited, clear rights to specific snippets, scenes, and characters inside the Story Economy. Attribution is not just legal boilerplate, but a discovery system: readers encounter a scene they love in the Guide, follow the attribution trail, and land on your book.
# Critique as a Service The Story Economy is also a critique engine. When you publish a scene or character sketch into the H2G2 layer, you invite other authors (and selected readers) to respond in-world. Their characters can argue with yours, poke holes in your physics, or propose alternate interpretations of an event. Some forms this can take. - In-world peer review: a xenobiologist from another book questions your alien ecology, leading to a back-and-forth that strengthens both of your worlds. - Cross-series workshops: a scheduled “Guide session” where everyone brings a short scene; other authors respond only in-character, surfacing inconsistencies or missed opportunities. - Scene upgrades: you publish an early “Guide edition” of a scene, gather in-world critiques, then upgrade the version that will appear in your novel. The social norm is that critique should leave your work stronger, not diluted, and that any reuse of your material beyond the agreed license needs an explicit yes.
# Fun, Not Just Formality The Story Economy only works if it is fun. Character interviews can be absurd, mischievous, and deeply affectionate: think of a Hitchhiker-style guide entry where a sarcastic AI rates all known starship coffee machines, including ones from four different authors’ universes. Collaborative prompts keep things lively. - “My villain, your courtroom”: one author donates a villain; another provides a legal system. We play out the trial in the Guide. - “Three ways it could have happened”: three parallel scenes from three authors describe the same event differently, framed as competing in-world histories. - “Ask the Guide”: readers submit questions about the shared universe; different characters answer, sometimes contradicting each other. These playful exercises constantly generate new Guide entries while pointing back to the books they came from.
# Attention as Currency In the Story Economy, attention replaces money as the primary day-to-day currency. Authors gain attention when their characters are invited into other scenes, when their science substrate is reused, or when their Guide entries get cited as authoritative (or entertainingly wrong). The Hitchhikers Guide Economy, as a non-commercial publisher, focuses on amplifying the best Guide material, producing anthologies, podcasts, or live readings that highlight both the commons and the underlying books. Commercial value then flows indirectly: more readers discover your work through the Guide, buy your novels, invite you to speak, or commission adaptations.
# Next Steps and Future Pages This page can be expanded through linked concepts. Future pages might include Free Culture Substrate, H2G2 Commons Licensing, Character Interview Exercises, Hard SF Fact Checking, and Hitchhikers Guide Workshop Formats. From here, we can start sketching a first shared hard-SF setting, define its scientific substrate, and then open the doors for our characters to step through and start interviewing each other.