Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's Blog, page 7

Why I Love the Expanse

I’m in love with the Expanse. Ty Frank and the [slightly more reclusive] Daniel Abraham, writing as James SA Corey, seem to have built a media empire out of space opera, and brought back to SyFy something it’s been sorely lacking – characters blown slightly out of proportion, battles stretching from the Earth to the Belt, and – most importantly – politics.

Science fiction has always such a fruitful battleground for political conversation, but for some reason we haven’t had a lot of political...

A Brief Conversation With Gentry Race, digital artist-slash-author

Where a VFX artist discusses science fiction and his journey through writing it.

Gentry Race Davidson is a VFX artist from Portland, Oregon. He writes science fiction – post-cyberpunk, which, in his own words, is Gattaca meets X-men meets Ghost in the Shell/Akira –  a mashup that makes any self-respecting cyberpunk fan drool a little.

But back to Gentry. Gentry, as it turns out, is a massive movie and anime fan (if that wasn’t already obvious)  and worked at DreamWorks, Evil Eye, and at Laik...

Journal: On doing the right things

Monday, May 15, 2017. Yesterday I got on a call with a friend of mine and waited with bated breath on his verdict on Numbercaste. After a whole lot of very enlightening back-and-forth, I asked him the big one: would he pay good money for the book?

Yes, he said, yes he would.

There are no words for the kind of relief I felt. If there are I haven’t found them yet. Two years of scribbling has not gone to waste.

It’s been a pretty interesting month. On the 11h of April I published my first book...

An Author’s Review of Pronoun

Pronoun is the newest self-publishing platform on the Internet. Think Smashwords 2.0 – a single central place where you can prepare an ebook, add covers, titles, keywords, bios, and, with a few clicks, have it blasted out to Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Google Play and Apple’s iBooks. Pronoun was recently bought by Macmillan, one of the Big Five*.

I tried out Pronoun with my self-publishing debut: The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne, a hard sci-fi novella about an alcoholic and a blac...

Two incredible 1800’s-era scifi books – including Mary Shelley’s other novel

I do this thing where I share (or try to share) free scifi with the folks on my mailing list – and not just free stuff from Amazon, either, but stuff that I read and find genuinely intriguing.

One of these is Flatland . Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is like the Gulliver’s Travels of scifi. Written by ‘A Square’, it uses the two-dimensional world of Flatland as a satire on hierarchy in Victorian society. It’s a difficult read but it’s both an excellent study of dimensions and society....

Justin Sloan (Interview): the road to 150,000 words a month

Justin Sloan is a pretty prolific guy. As of the time I did this interview, he had 40 books on Amazon with his name on them, and was fresh out of Telltale Games, the game studio known for the Walking Dead. He writes science fiction and fantasy, and has worked on everything from pretty large series to screenplays. Most importantly, he’s making enough from his writing that he quit his day job – which is something every writer dreams of, but very few actually achieve.



Justin writes often; 30-45 minutes a day, an hour or two on weekend days – and that adds up to a staggering 50-60k words a month. I’ve always been fascinated by writers like this – Anthony Trollope and Stephen King are two good examples a couple of centuries apart – who basically just sit down and regularly turn out an extraordinary output.

So when Justin’s name showed up on a writer’s group I’d been skulking in, I immediately resumed my quest to learn the science of writing and reached out to this guy to find out how he maintains such a prolific output. Here’s my Q&A with him.

So, Justin, you’re pretty prolific – there’s 40 books on Amazon with your name on them; you podcast, you write for Military.com, and not do you write only write science fiction and fantasy, but you also author books on writing. What’s it like to be you, producing all this work? What kind of schedule are you on? How do you maintain your output? What do you use to write, and what tools or habits have really impacted how you work? 

I love writing. It never feels like a job, and the moment it does I know I’ve overcommitted or gotten involved with a project I shouldn’t be involved in. Writing is a passion, and if an author out there says otherwise, I can’t possibly understand why they would be doing it. For me it’s just fun, and happens to now be paying my bills – a dream come true!

I am straight up with MS Word. I tried Scrivener, and didn’t like it. I also had Final Draft and all that for screenwriting, but honestly prefer the Amazon Story Writer tool (it’s free!).

For me, output is all about knowing what I’m going to write. I keep a healthy mix of outlining, research, and staying motivated by playing video games or watching movies (related, so it’s also research). Some of the best storytelling nowadays is in video games, so if you’re trying to write but don’t play games, you’re missing out. Go play Oxenfree — you’ll be amazed.

What made you become a writer? And specifically, a self-published indie author? 

I started writing when I had finished the first four Game of Thrones books (A Song of Ice and Fire series) and Harry Potter, and I wanted more amazing stories to read and inspire me, but was having a hard time finding ones on that level. So while I searched, ideas just started popping into my mind. “What if there was a book like this, or about that,” I would think and started jotting them down. Then I started writing, and fell in love with the prices.

Self-publishing? I think that was all about the freedom. I just had too many horror stories from friends about the traditional route, whether it was time it took with the big ones, or mistakes from the indie presses. I had heard great things bout self-publishing while at the San Francisco Writers Conference, and decided to give it a try. I love it!

What were your first successes as an author, and your biggest mistakes? What did you learn from them?

My biggest success came when I finally partnered with Michael Anderle. Since then the writing life has been great. My ideas are flowing, the pages seem to write themselves, and I’m making enough to quit my day job and go full-time. The right collaboration can make all the difference. I think a mistake has been to take a break from the successful series to try writing one of my other ones, which didn’t do as well. If you have a successful series, write it hard!

You’ve worked on a lot of pretty big properties and Telltale. What’s in like in the games industry? What did you have to do?

Writing for games is amazing. Imagine just sitting around coming up with awesome ideas for stories and characters all day, and then writing them? And not by yourself, but with a bunch of other amazing creatives. That’s what writing for games is like. At Telltale I was a writer, which meant story, action, dialogue, everything.

What were the biggest successes you had building up your personal brand across all these media properties?

A big moment came for me when I was able to work on the Game of Thrones game at Telltale. As I mentioned above, one of the reasons I started writing was because of the Game of Thrones books, so this was a dream come true. Now I write fantasy, and am about to release a new fantasy series in the Age of Magic books, also with Michael Anderle, which I’m sure will do amazingly well. I hope…

Now that you’ve left your job at Telltale to pursue the author journey full time, what goals and deadlines keep you ticking? Where do you see yourself?

Oh, it’s on! Haha. I plan on writing six hours a day, with breaks for working out, a quick lunch, and a weekly podcast. My goal is 150,000 words a month, and I think that should be easy, based on the math. And that’s 2.5 books for me, so I think I can easily say that 2017 will be an amazing year.

What are your top ten favorite books? 

Top ten? That’s tough… Let’s go with the Song of Ice and Fire books first, then Harry Potter. Name of the Wind, Elantris, Way of Kings, the Mistborn trilogy. Time bound. The Princess Bride. The Zane Halloway series, and the Travelers Gate trilogy.

A shout out to Justin for sparing the time to answer my questions. He lives at www.justinsloanauthor.com. As of the time of writing, he’s got a new audiobook out for Land of Gods and a new book release in the Kutherian universe called the Angel of Reckoning.

Would you like to know when the next interview comes out? Drop me your email below and I’ll ping you as soon as it does.

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The Missing 90% of the Space Colonization Problem

a guest post by @AlanSE, in which he discusses three things really holding us back from space colonization – things that few of us bother to question.

Saturday night, what are you doing? Perhaps going out to the movies? If you were a permanent resident of space in a substantially-sized colony, you might be doing the same thing.

This night-on-the-town was written about by Thomas A. Heppenheimer in Colonies in Space. Read the chapter here:

Colonies in Space: Chapter 11 – What’s to Do on Saturday Night?

These vans will also serve for family outings or excursions. People will want to go out a few miles and see the colony…www.nss.org

To be fair, this might be the least accurate and least supported chapter in the book; overall. it’s an incredible work. But from a modern perspective, it’s also the most fascinating to dig into. Reading it, you really start to think. Not because the book had anything right, but because of the myriad of ways in which it will be wrong.

The Material Basis of Existence
Image from the Martian, of course.

The fundamental physical quality of our civilization is the most important thing to consider about a space-faring civilization. Just as farming was almost definitional for the first rise of civilization, the interactions between production and life will define space society.

Even space “faring” is something like a misnomer. It matters more that that we live in space than that we “explore” space. Travel is important, but somewhat less important than what we do. The majority of our productivity on Earth is not consumed with travel, but satisfying our needs and wants.

Our view of the future in space is currently biased toward the view of travel, because a self-sufficient presence has not yet come close to materializing. If a mission to Mars is the currently the holy-grail of space in the public psyche, then a mission to our neighbor star seems like the logical desire of a civilization that fully inhabits the inner solar system.

However, with a physical presence established in the inner solar system, rudimentary trips to the asteroids and outer plants will fall into place at a relatively trivial level of effort with limited benefit. All the while, the true industrial revolution of micro-gravity will have a character unfamiliar to us today.

Travel as exploration is order-of-magnitudes less important than travel as connectivity. Economic connectivity, specifically. While speed matters, so does volume transported. Ultimately, what matters are the experiences and lifestyle that our infrastructure enables. Transportation is a component of putting all the necessary pieces in-place.

Artificial Gravity and its Mass Awkwardness

I have a very specific infrastructure that I refer to as the “O’Neilan vision”. Large rotating tubes or cylinders orbit around the L4 or L5 in cislunar space. Basically all the material to build these structures were provided by lunar material.

Rock from the moon is launched from a mass driver, which is stationary on the moon’s surface. Due to tidal locking, there are 2 fixed surface facilities which target L4 and L5 respectively. These space stations orbit in basically formation flying around each others, and all have similar specs. If a spaceship wants to dock, they have to actively approach the axis of rotation and even match the rotation of the station.

This is an elegant vision, but it leaves out a few components, and is probably somewhat out of favor in modern times. One issue is that the mass requirements would require truly enormous amounts of energy throughput, while the modern knowledge of Near Earth Asteroids obviates the need for it. Moving mountains at astronomical velocities is problematic when you could just go to the mountain.

As the O’Neil designs evolved, they developed certain adornments, which are to be used for farming, and other things like that. I don’t know if these included a stationary (non-rotating) space port, but it should have. However, it seems to be entirely without the most important components — the components used to manufacture it in the first place. I believe there was a certain kind of assumption that this would be a smaller part of the whole, and could rotate between construction sites. But if you think hard about it, transforming moon rock into structural steel would involve the entire process chain from crude milling to extruding the steel cables. Between, there may be a multitude of chemical and physical process, all of which spawn their own network of supply activities.

I’m not even finished here. A network of formation-flying space colonies would have a need to accelerate and catch payloads. The original idea was that moon rock would be tossed to them. Hand-waving that off to say that rockets would be built on the moon is preposterous and wasteful. It is better for the station to do the catching itself at somewhat small relatively velocities. Once again, this is a voracious industrial creature that requires all matter of tracking, adjustment, and contingency equipment that spans far beyond the obvious physical reach of the rotating space station.

The Superstructure

The most glaring component that is missing in the vision is a glue to hold all these components together.

One option is for a trivial rigid structure, but in space tether materials will be more important for a host of reasons. There will be suspension parts, like how we have suspension bridges. Bending moments are better avoided than outright dealt with. The local gravitational environment will factor heavily into the design, and the ‘tug’ or ‘pinch’ along various axis will be incorporated into the design to help keep it rigid and form a universal “source of truth” about directionality for operations within its physical domain.

Once you start thinking this way, its easy to come up with more demands

The superstructure needs to support large surfaces held in-place in a highly serviceable way for solar energy collection
While we’re at it, a broad envelope for micrometeorite shielding would be nice
Even the ephemeral atmosphere could use some additional conditioning, because this is known to have impacts on surfaces of vehicles in space, particularly eliminating hazardous Oxygen ion damage by deionizing molecules with some amount of space
It’s even possible to dangle tentacles with counterweights in various directions for attitude control, even better if you can have some control over them

I want to see these coalesce into its own kind of vision.

The Cellular Analogy

How should we think of an orbital space city? Probably like a pudding with recognizable components inside of it, in other words, like a biological cell. Overall, it is a lazy structure, but some components may have relatively high-energy activities going on inside of them. The pudding is surrounded, and contains internally, several permeable boundaries that demarcate different regions that have a particular unique quality to them.

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13th April, 2017: Lessons Learned from releasing Rohan Wijeratne

Tuesday, 11th April. I released The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne. It’s about an alcoholic from Colombo who signs up to be shot into a rare rotating black hole. Edit: It hit the Amazon top 10 for Short Stories (Single Author). 

I wrote this story over a weekend – two days writing back-to-back with research crammed in between, mostly to a mix of Beethoven, Muse and Zack Hemsey. For me it was three things:

a) A promise I made to my girlfriend about writing a story for her (I didn’t think she’d like the story, but she seems to)

b) A really fun way of researching black hole physics

c) A useful way of figuring out the stuff I need to know for the novel. Like formatting things into ebooks. Cover art. Font selection. Spacing. Filesizes. And how to read mobi code to make sure it’s clean and renders well.

d) Also a way to experiment with writing style without shooting myself in the foot.

Well, that’s four.

Reception has been incredibly positive. I posted the thing at 1 AM on my Facebook and went off to sleep. When I woke up I had a hundred or so people who’d like the post and signed up to the read the story. Roughly 24 hours later, it’s really taking off and spreading to friends of friends by word of mouth.

A few reviews:

‘I found it concise and funny and also very beautiful in parts (without being excessively ornate and descriptive). It felt like a pretty tightly written story – very compelling arc, the not likeable yet likeable character and it felt like beginning middle and end all came together so nicely it seemed effortless.‘

– Shruthi Mathews, YAMU

‘Holy shit, this is really good. The lack of quotation marks threw me at first, but I’m reading it as a Pynchon / Palahniuk / stylist thing and it’s working very well. Page 15 already. I know what I’m doing tonight.’

– Joe Malik, author of Dragon’s Trail

‘Bloody fantastic. Was in the middle of something else, but couldn’t stop reading it. Last time I was this happy with some writing was when I discovered Liu Cixin’s story where they move the Earth, in 2015.’

– Navin Weeratne, author of Burning Eagle and the Hundred Gram Mission

‘It’s a very Clarkian short story in its structure IMO. Circa the middle of Clarke’s career when he started to really find a balance between the soft narrative/philosophy and the hard science in his stories. I loved the hell out of this. It’s one of the best things I’ve read in Sri Lankan English literature. Ever. It’s definitely one of the best science fiction short stories I’ve read from anywhere. Get a Goodreads profile already so I can add this to my favourites pile.‘

– Dilina Pathirage, writer and huge sci-fi fan

Lessons learned:

a) I need to proofread things properly. Quite a few typos, and people who were kind enough to message me with what they thought pointed this out. Typos break reader immersion.

b) Average production time for this kind of thing is a week, for me. Say two days to write. One day for supplementary research. One day for cover design, proofreading. The rest for spreading the word and marketing it properly. I’ve spent a lot more time than I expected reaching out to people and sending them copies through email and chat. Not to mention smoking excessively. Actual writing is only half the work.

c) Research is its own reward. I’ve been praised for the realism of the physics, the use of pre-seeded Bussard Ramjets, the presentation of black hole physics, even the correct usage of the word ‘taqwa’ in the context of prayer. It adds a lot of credibility to a story even when your premise is strange (a Sri Lankan alcoholic sent into a black hole) and you have a typo per page.

d) A good cover doesn’t have to be very expensive. ‘Don’t judge the book by the cover’ is completely false when it comes to getting people to click on a link online and read your stuff. At the same time, I used Canva and GIMP and about three hours of my time to create this cover for free. A certain balance can be struck.

e) I need better tooling to export to Kindle and PDF. Since I don’t use Microsoft Word, I went with Scrivener (writing + ePub and Mobi) and LibreOffice (for the PDF).

Bad idea. They produced stuff that won’t be accepted by most stores (I had Pronoun check for me). This meant I had to manually check the Mobi for bad code – I really need to find better tooling.

Going forward, I think I’m going to explore the short story / novelette format more. It’s wonderful because it brings economy to writing – I really had to think about what was important to drive the story here and chop out all the useless bits.

Because of the fast crafting time, I can also experiment with ideas that don’t quite have enough meat to become full novels and I can experiment with writing styles. This will definitely be a thing.

Thank you for reading. Fancy being notified when I release something worth your time? Give me your email and I’ll add you to my list of people to send good stuff to.

 

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Vehicles As A Service: where Uber, Lyft and the ridesharing economy are driving us

Depending on who you talk to, Uber’s either the devil or the disruptive darling. And, to a lesser extent, so is Lyft, Curb, Grab, Ola and what have you. These are applications that have taken the promise of ‘freeing up underutilized transport resources’ and turned that into ‘running a taxi business’, undercutting the old model in ways that don’t quite seem ethical. By turning drivers into contractors, Uber’s washed its hands of employer ethics – while at the same time using complex psychological trickery to keep those contractors working as much as humanly possible.

At the same time, it’s also investing heavily in self-driving technology, which promises to remove humans from the equation altogether. Why invest in something that destroys the basis of your own business?

One of our long lunchtime conversations at LIRNEasia (where I work) revolved around this.

On a very fundamental level, Uber’s mission to serve its customers is directly counter to the driver’s need for a sane lifestyle with plenty of rest in between. As the Nytimes article I’ve linked above shows, the more vehicles Uber fields constantly, the shorter passengers have to wait. What Uber appears to be doing is

a) building up an ecosystem where using an app to hail transport becomes second nature to anyone with a smartphone

b) running its drivers as ragged as they can to ensure users keep using the ecosystem, because of its constant uptime and low wait times

c) and at some point, removing the human element and putting entire automated fleets of vehicles on the ground.

This doesn’t solve the problem they claim to target (freeing up underutilized transport resource) but it seems to be the most logical step for them to take. We’re looking at a future where public transport is actually private transport – owned by large corporates, dominated by self-driving fleets that can show up whenever you need them. Human drivers, like seed stage funding, are the just the initial capital needed to get this show on the road.

Interestingly, Uber’s not the only one heading this way. Tesla is doing it in reverse. Tesla’s building the self-driving cars first. The cars will then link to the Tesla Network, which will have them drive around. It’s the exact opposite of Uber’s approach.

Image from TechCrunch

Personally, I’m more a fan of Tesla’s approach. It’s also easy to imagine large companies like Google, which already offer transport to their employees, deploying their own internal fleets of employee transport that can be summoned with Uber-esque apps. I’m pretty sure that this is fairly easy for Google to manage.

Physics is fond of pursuing a unified equation for everything. In that spirity, I must ask: how soon before we, the public, have a single unified app for all our transport needs?

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JK Rowling on art and perseverance

I’ve always considered  JK Rowling an outlier. Not only because HP was such an incredible success, but also because it’s a brilliant, deeply human story told over so many years, set in a world so full of life and detail, that you know it took incredible talent and effort to write these stories.

JKR spotted a comment on Twitter that clearly struck a chord: “HEY! YOU! You’re working on something and you’re thinking ‘Nobody’s gonna watch, read, listen’. Finish it anyway.”

And she went into advice mode.

There were so many times in the early 90s when I needed somebody to say this to me. It’s great advice for many reasons.

Even if it isn’t the piece of work that finds an audience, it will teach you things you could have learned no other way. (And by the way, just because it didn’t find an audience, that doesn’t mean it’s bad work.)

The discipline involved in finishing a piece of creative work is something on which you can truly pride yourself. You’ll have turned yourself from somebody who’s ‘thinking of’, who ‘might’, who’s ‘trying’, to someone who DID. And once you’ve done it…you’ll know you can do it again. That is an extraordinarily empowering piece of knowledge. So do not ever quit out of fear of rejection.

Maybe your third, fourth, fiftieth song/novel/painting will be the one that ‘makes it’, that wins the plaudits…but you’d never have got there without finishing the others (all of which will now be of more interest to your audience.)

I’ve shown this to quite a few friends this week, and some of them argued that JKR has had it easy: she didn’t have to wait for her fiftieth novel to break out. Nevertheless, if there ever was a case for creating something for the sake of creating it, then I submit that JKR has made it. Onward, and keep making good art.

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