Tales From Progress City

TLDR: I’m officially inviting artists of all media to begin creating stories and making work (via my Creative Commons license) within my fictional universe known as Progress City, a fake US Midwestern metropolis with a funhouse-mirror version of Chicago’s history

#jasonpettus #experimental #literary #mediamedia #project #storytelling #citybuilding #universebuilding #cityplanner #metafiction #fictitious #city #metropolis #usa #us #america #midwest #winnemac #sinclairlewis #creativecommons #collaborative #community #shareduniverse

First, let me get you up to speed on what we’re talking about, in case you’ve never been by before. My name is Jason Pettus, a book editor based out of Chicago, and just for fun over the last few years, I’ve been building out an incredibly detailed 200-year history of a fake American city (in fact, an entire fake American metropolitan area). It’s set in the Midwest, and is supposed to mirror the real-life histories of such places as Detroit, Cleveland, Indianapolis, St. Louis, etc. In particular it’s supposed to be a sister city of sorts to the real-life Chicago, where I myself have lived for 30 years now, a way to look at many real events from this actual city’s history but through a funhouse mirror of sorts. I’m writing the whole thing as a Google Doc, which I share online for anyone who’d like to read through whatever amount is currently written of it; I expect the whole thing to eventually get well in excess of 150,000 words.

This is the main form I plan on sharing this fictional universe as, this plain text form, perhaps to publish as a traditional 500-page book, or maybe to publish online as the actual fake wiki I’m writing it as, by setting up a WordPress account and then installing one of the many wiki themes that exist for it. But at the very dawn of AI, for fun I started experimenting with generating LLM images of various moments from Progress’s history and neighborhoods; and that’s when and why I originally set up this blog, to share those images with the public, along with more detailed and narrative-style looks at particular neighborhoods in the metro area, or particular events.

But I quickly grew dissatisfied with AI, for the same reason everyone’s grown dissatisfied with AI; and even more passionately, I grew dissatisfied with the companies and people behind the AIs. So I stopped updating this blog and also stopped promoting it on my social media, and had been planning on just shutting it down in the future.

But after a winter of not thinking about the Progressverse, I’m finally here in summer noodling around with adding a brand-new big element to the overall mythos, something that will aid tremendously in filling out the city’s history during the Mid-Century-Modernist years of the late 1940s to late 1960s; and I find myself wanting to write a whole narrative overview of it to share here at the blog, like I’ve done with such other topics as Turtle Bay, Harvester South, Olympic Park, Lake Winnemac, Trout Alley, and even more.

So instead of getting rid of the blog, I’m just getting rid of the AI, and will be scrubbing past entries of all their LLM images in the coming months, and editing the accompanying text to scrub it of references to these images. (This will take the rest of the summer, so feel free to peek through the archives if you want to get one last look at the images.) I’ve decided instead to open up early what my plan has been all along for this, and to release the mythos under a Creative Commons license for artists to set stories, films, comics, roleplaying games, visual art, and anything else in.

How it works in plain language is that you have the right to make derivative work out of anything I’ve written about the Progress universe, and you also have the right to sell that work for money and keep all of the money, just as long as you credit me, Jason Pettus, as the original creator of the overall Progress City concept. That’s it; there’s no catch, I promise. I’m simply creating Progress City for fun, just a middle-aged hobby from someone who still likes doing creative things; put simply, my interest is in building Gotham City, and now I want all of you to come and set your own Batman stories there (or romance stories, or horror stories, or indie character dramas, or cyberpunk, or erotica, or cyberpunk erotica, or whatever other kind of story you want to write).

I wasn’t going to start offering this until I had more of the overall Progress project written out (in fact, I don’t even have the actual Creative Commons license set up yet and ready to share); but if I’m going to give up AI illustrations, I thought maybe I’d go ahead and start soliciting from human artists if they maybe want to help me spruce up my various pages here at this blog, taking a deeper diver into one specific area of the Progressverse mythos. If so, please inform me, either of your interest, questions, or finished projects, at ilikejason@gmail.com. I’ll be getting the blog archives cleaned up over the rest of this summer of 2025, and of course you can turn to the full wiki at Google Docs anytime you’d like, which has an insane amount more content (and is in the process of becoming a fully clickable interactive wiki itself, thanks to persistent bookmarks for each entry; that should be done by the end of this summer too). I look forward to seeing and hearing what you have to say about it all.

Oh, and that new idea I wanted to share? Here it is, below!

Karlsson Broadcasting System (KBS). An early television network in the late 1940s (one of the first ever to broadcast nationally), which eventually went out of business in the late 1960s, but is especially well-known because of being one of the only early TV networks to keep and archive 100% of their film and video footage from the first day onward. Originally created as a marketing tool for one of the Swedish fisheries that first became hugely successful in Progress in the early Victorian Age. Eventually many different subthreads in the wiki will hang off this, such as the location of the studios, famous early shows, the celebrity culture that formed in Progress in those years, the network's decline and closure during the period in the late 1960s when budgets got bigger and more Hollywood in nature, etc. The network's history is also a portrait of the Mid-Century-Modernist years.

One focus will be to play around with the real history of Hugh Hefner's early years in Chicago, except coming at it from a different direction. Our Hef stand-in hosts a live Saturday night show from Progress, broadcast nationally, that becomes the epitome of cool, featuring jazz musicians, beat poets, subversive comedians and public intellectuals. And since the network was one of the only ones back then to wisely save 100% of their broadcast footage, both film and video, it's a veritable treasure trove of historic recordings of the greatest artists of the Mid-Century-Modernist years. He too fell out of favor at the same time as the network itself, because of being hip for the early '60s but unable to transition into the looser and hairier countercultural years. Esquire Magazine vibes.

The network's history is intricately entwined with the Turtle Bay and Emerald Coast neighborhoods, located next door to each other. It was one of the first big complexes in the 1950s to knock down a big portion of rotting old abandoned Art Deco buildings in the Emerald Coast from the 1920s, which went out of business during the Great Depression in the 1930s and then sat vacant during World War Two in the 1940s; in their place got built a series of gleaming glass and steel Euclidean skyscrapers, including a complex for the network's studios with shades of the real world's Rockefeller Center, except constructed in the Eisenhower era. Meanwhile, all the famous on-air personalities, and the people who wrote and directed at the network, all lived next door in the Turtle Bay neighborhood, going through a 50th-anniversary renaissance among the hep cats of the Mid-Century-Modernist period, and with the delicate 1910s Art Nouveau-meets-Prairie Style organic forms back in style again. The wholesale destruction seen in the Emerald Coast in these years was a blessing and curse — the rise of a sleek new post-war neighborhood, but at the expense of a potentially historic previous one. The complex feelings it evoked led to the rise of the architectural preservation movement in these years, with their first big success being in Turtle Bay before anyone had even started thinking of knocking anything down.

The high point of KBS's history was its extensive coverage at the 1966 Progress World's Fair, itself considered by many to be the high point of the city's “Golden Age” (which officially began in 1947 with the opening of the futuristic Henry David Thoreau International Airport, and its soon to be famous monorail into the city). Although broadcasts themselves ceased from Progress in 1969 (right after the Moon landing, right before Woodstock), the area's focus as the subject of national media attention continued into the late 1980s with the early FOX hit Olympic Park, a family drama featuring a cast of good-looking late teens, set in the bland suburb located next to the gigantic sports park that hosted the 1986 Progress Olympics. (All of these things mentioned in this paragraph can be read about in more detail at the main Google Doc!)