Reference Pack Library

Genre advice on the internet is mostly lists. Ten sci-fi tropes to avoid. The seven types of mystery. They’re fine as far as they go, which is about one afternoon. What they never tell you is which examples are actually worth studying, which ones half-work, and which ones will teach you the wrong lesson if you copy them.

The Reference Pack Library is an attempt at the version that’s useful on the hundredth afternoon. Thirteen genre packs, 8,562 entries, every worked example carrying an explicit quality rating so you can tell study this from this is what going wrong looks like.

What’s in a pack

Each pack covers one genre and holds nine to eleven collections — tropes, subgenres, authors, landmark works, craft guidance, genre history, reader psychology, checklists, plus whatever that genre specifically needs. Science Fiction carries a Technologies collection and science primers; Manga carries a collection on the page, the panel and the turn; War/Military carries one on combat, command and friction.

Every worked example is rated on four tiers:

• excellent — best in class. Study this. Kept deliberately rare; it means study this, not pretty good.
• strong — reliable, works well, good reference.
• weak — flawed, incomplete, or only partly successful.
• terrible — actively teaches the wrong lesson. Cautionary.

The bottom two tiers are the point. A library of only good examples tells you what to aim at but nothing about what failure looks like on the way there, and failure is the part you’ll actually be doing.

The packs

Pack	Entries
Science Fiction	1,201
Mystery, Crime & Thriller	617
War / Military	614
Comedy / Humor	614
Superhero	614
Fantasy	613
Horror	613
Romance	613
Historical Fiction	613
Literary Fiction	613
Manga	613
Western	612
TV Formats	612

Science Fiction is the outlier on purpose — it’s the flagship, and the one being used hardest in practice. Erotica and Religious/Inspirational are planned on demand.

The rules it’s built under

Genre is the pack; medium is an attribute. Watchmen sits next to The Left Hand of Darkness without the shape distorting, because a work card carries its medium as a field rather than living in a separate medium-shaped silo. Proposals to branch by medium instead get rejected on sight — that decision was made once and it holds.

Cross-pack duplication is intentional. The same work legitimately appears in several packs, seen differently each time. Packs are self-contained; nothing is ever deduplicated across them.

Published works only. Every citation and worked example is something a reader could go and study. No unpublished manuscripts, no works in progress, no private material — screening for it is a required step in every build and every refresh.

Analysis, not reproduction. Entries are original critical commentary about works. No extended quotation, no plot summary that could substitute for reading the thing. That’s what keeps the licensing clean, and it isn’t negotiable.

Curated, not generated. AI drafts; a human verifies and quality-controls every entry before it merges. The distinction matters more than the label suggests — a good deal of the build effort goes into catching the confident, plausible, wrong.

How it’s kept honest

A library this size fails quietly. An entry that’s internally consistent and externally wrong looks exactly like a correct one, and no amount of re-reading finds it. So the library ships with its own toolchain: a schema validator, a cross-pack identity checker, and — the part that took longest to learn — a harness of fifty-seven deliberately broken test cases whose only job is to prove the checks still fail when they should.

The governing rule is break the instrument before trusting its number. A check that exits without running is not a check that passed, and treating one as the other is the single defect the whole toolchain exists to prevent.

Getting them

Every pack is a plain JSON file. Nothing to install, no account, no API key.

Inside the app. Writer’s Codex has a pack picker — choose a genre and it fetches that pack on demand and stores it locally. You only download the genre you’re working in.

Directly. Clone or download from the repository, or pull a single file off the CDN:

https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/space-divergentfutures/writers-codex-reference-packs@main/manifest.json
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/space-divergentfutures/writers-codex-reference-packs@main/packs/reference-scifi.json

manifest.json is the machine-readable index — version, entry count, size and status for every pack — so a tool can check for updates without downloading anything. Updates are pull, never push.

Licence

Pack data is CC BY 4.0: use it, share it, adapt it, build a product on it, sell that product — just keep the attribution to Divergent Futures attached. The schema and tooling are MIT.

Why it exists

Same reason as everything else on this shelf. It was built to solve a real problem in the making of the work — keeping Cosmos coherent across six books without the genre research living in forty browser tabs — and it’s public because the problem isn’t unique to me. Anyone writing in any of these thirteen genres needs roughly the same shelf.