Hûw Steer's Blog, page 38

First Review!

It’s only day one, but the first review of The Blackbird and the Ghost is in – and it’s good!

★★★★★

The Voracious Bibliophile

“a really compelling story… a real page-turner”

My thanks to Pavani Mathur at The Voracious Bibliophile for reading and enjoying!

UNLEASH THE BOOK

It’s out! It is free to wander the Internet, seeking unwary pairs of eyes, it lurks in the darkest corners of Amazon (well, not the darkest…) – The Blackbird and the Ghost is officially released!

You can find its Amazon listing here, on the Novels page, or on pretty much every social media post I’ll be making for the next month or so.

Please do give it a read. If you do, please leave a review – every one helps! – and whether you read it or not, it’d be great if you could share it with someone else you think might enjoy it.

I’m very excited for this one. I hope you are too.

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Release Date

With considerable trepidation, I can finally announce a concrete* release date for The Blackbird and the Ghost!

Friday, June 7th.

Gulp.

*assuming  nothing goes catastrophically wrong…

WANTED: Reviewers!

Finally, finally, The Blackbird and the Ghost is basically ready to go. As in, within two weeks ready to go. All I’m looking for now are a few kindly souls to give it a read and a review for me!

If you’ve got a blog, a website, a carrier pigeon network, or whatever, please drop me a line at huwsteerofficial@gmail.com and tell me about yourself! I’ll send you a copy of the book and we can get going.

New Short Story

Working life has been rather intense of late, but when not writing Salvage 7 (a piece of which I posted last week) I’ve been sifting through other short stories that haven’t yet seen the light of day. Some I’ve been submitting to competitions and the like, but some others I thought should go on here. This is one of them: ‘The Factory of Souls’.

There are plenty of SF stories and movies about sentient, human-like androids; Blade Runner, Humans, Detroit, and more. Usually they focus on how these childlike and idealistic intelligences interact with the real, grimy world – but fewer narratives delve into their construction. This story sort of does.

Download it here, or from the Short Stories page.

Sneak Peek – Something New

As I still can’t offer a proper update on the Boiling Seas, I thought I’d share a snippet of the thing I’ve just started working on.

At work I was reading about the massive salvage and cleanup operation that went on in France after the 1918 Armistice… and I had an idea. Here’s the first bit of it.

There was a trick to disarming the old T-27 ambush drones, a way to circumvent their multiply redundant processors and get straight into their deeper logic centres, without waking the damn thing up and getting eviscerated by its many-bladed, multi-jointed hands. Gideon just wished he could remember what it was.

The circuit probe sparked, and he cursed as the connection fused, his eyes flickering nervously to the drone’s arm, a slender thing festooned with short, sharp blades. He’d seen blades like that tear unsuspecting infantrymen apart when the spherical drones dropped their cloaks and exploded into buzzing life. This one lay limp in the ooze of mud and blood that was the battlefield – and thankfully stayed limp, despite his slip. Gideon withdrew the probe, wiped its grip and his hand on the only clean patch on his filthy fatigues, then bent over the drone’s open casing again. He’d pried it open with his shim – nothing so convenient as screws or bolts on a machine like this – above the spot where the thing’s brain ought to be, and had struck lucky, the circuits laid bare before him. That had only been the start of his troubles.

Slowly, carefully, he went in again, trying to remember a diagram he’d seen once, matching the blurry board in his brain with the ones before him. Don’t touch the capacitors, and don’t connect the base state backup. Whoever had designed the T-27 had invested far too much time, in Gideon’s opinion, on making the things impossible to hack or subvert with electronic means. The armour was lined with lead against wireless hacks, and if you somehow got close enough to try a manual reset or subversion then there were a dozen different false paths to lead you astray, most of which, if triggered, would wake the drone up from its dormant or damaged state and turn its many weapons on the hapless hacker. He tried very hard not to think about Corporal Atwell, the woman who’d told him all of this. She’d been halfway through explaining which board did what when she’d made a connection that she very much shouldn’t have. Gideon tried very hard not to remember her screaming, the impotent roar of his shotgun, the sound of blades in flesh. The drone hadn’t stayed awake long, its power cells failing – but it did enough to force Gideon to aim his next shot at Atwell. What was left of her face had smiled, at the end.

There had never been time or opportunity for anyone else to finish Gideon’s lesson. Now, two battlefields later, he wished he’d at least looked it up on the Net – not that he’d have been able to practice what he’d learned. When you were in Salvage, you weren’t exactly first in line for the simulators.

Something sparked in the drone’s brain, and one of its remaining arms twitched. Gideon froze, but there was no more movement. The drone had looked pretty thoroughly disabled when Gideon had first seen it, picking his way through the hungry mud, already soaked through by the constant, thin drizzle; a plasma burst had carved half of its spindly limbs away and partly melted the inner carapace. It had been enough to keep the drone down for the rest of the battle, maybe for good – but ‘maybe’ wasn’t good enough for Gideon, for any decent man or woman of Salvage. Unlike the grunts whose cooling bodies littered the muddy field, they never left a job half-done.

“Gid, sitrep.” His earpiece crackled; water damage. Part of the tiny fraction of his mind not concentrating on the job at hand made a note to pop his vox open and give it a good clean, as he heard the rest of said fraction reply, “Little busy, boss.” Finally he managed to disconnect the first board, gingerly lifting it free as the voice in his ear spoke again with an irritating static hiss.

“Got something nasty, have you?”

“T-27,” Gideon managed to mutter. The revealed circuit-board was twice as complex as the first, a dozen different intersecting patterns picked out in copper and silver filigree. At least half of those paths, he knew, led to bloody agony.

“Shit.” To her credit – meagre as that might be in Gideon’s book – the sergeant did sound genuinely concerned. “Just you?”

“Just me,” Gideon confirmed. Me and what’s left of the poor bastards who found this thing first. He traced one of the circuit’s paths, not yet touching it, the tip of the circuit probe hovering an inch above the conductive metal.

“Want backup?”

“No.” This was a lie, and both speakers knew it. There was only one thing Gideon wanted more than for one of the others to come rushing over; for a pair of steadier hands to take the probe, to be relieved of responsibility and absolved of whatever failure he was about to make; and that was to down his tools and get the hell off the battlefield altogether. Hellfire, off the planet. He wanted to have never been a soldier, to have settled down with a nice girl and led an ordinary, boring life, to have never seen blood or murder or even heard of a T-27 combat drone.

But he didn’t put his tools down. He didn’t run away. Because for better or, mostly, for worse, he was a salvageman, and this was his job, and he’d be damned if he let Tricia Donoghue, sergeant or no, watch him crack under the pressure. Or I might just be damned anyway, he thought, as he traced another circuit-path to an ominous little black device with a blinking red diode. He cut it free with a portable breaker, set it aside.

“Well, if you do,” said Sergeant Donoghue, “Yaxley’s only a few hundred away.”

“Mines?”

“Yeah, clusters.”

“I’ll head over to help him,” Gideon said with conviction he didn’t feel, “when I’m done.”

He turned off his radio before Donoghue could reply, took a deep breath, wiped his sweaty hands again. He thought he had the right path, was perhaps eighty percent sure that severing that flex connector would short out the thermal regulator in the compact fusion battery and fry the whole brain. That twenty percent of his brain that remained doubtful, however, was screaming about auxiliary capacitors and reverting to highly lethal factory settings, flashing memories of Corporal Atwell’s lack of face.

Fuck it. Sooner or later, there was always a leap of faith to make. He tried to comfort himself with the thought of a quick death at the drone’s razor-sharp hands, but the lie wouldn’t take. He breathed deeply, reassembling Atwell’s face in his mind.

He cut the wire. The T-27’s scarlet eye flared into life, its spindly arms snapping up and into violent life – and then the tidal wave of power from the unregulated battery melted the complex control circuits into a coppery soup, and the serrated blade that had been half an inch from Gideon’s eyeball fell back into the mud with a wet splash.

Gideon let out a shaky breath, long and slow, closing his eyes and concentrating on the sound of rain drumming on his helmet. He thought he might have pissed himself, but he was already soaked to the skin and couldn’t tell. The hand that holstered the circuit probe was shaking like a leaf. He clenched his fist, breathed in, once, and out again. Still alive. He pushed the fear into the back of his mind, into a little tin box that was already bursting at the seams with trauma.

When he opened his hand his fingers were perfectly steady. He turned on his radio.

“Seven-Four to Seven-Actual. T-27 made safe. Flagging for pickup.”

He wiped mud from his PDA screen and tagged the drone’s coordinates. Then he freed himself from the sucking mud, stepped over a severed hand, and went to help Yaxley with his minefield.

Let me know what you think – there’s not much more yet, but there will be soon…

New Job

After many, many moons of constantly editing my CV, after five thousand digests from Indeed, after hundreds of near-identical cover letters and hundreds more rejection emails, I finally, finally, have a job!

Don’t get too excited; it’s part-time, 2 days a week; but it’s something genuinely interesting and, most importantly, not hospitality. Not that I’ll be stopping the hospitality.  It’s something, alright?

From Monday, therefore, I will be permitted to tentatively dub myself a Research Assistant over at Family History Films. Time to dust off my books and get back into history!

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A Walk in Central London

I’ve just spent a pleasant afternoon walking through the city with some like-minded friends.

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I don’t think I want to get overly political on this blog, but I will share some of my favourite placard slogans:

Even IKEA Has Better Cabinets

Git Yam Lass, Nee Yan Likes Ya (loosely translated as Go Away Woman, Nobody Likes You)

And my personal favourite:

I’m Quite Cross.

Something Different

I recently applied for a job with a media agency, and as part of the application I had to write a short essay/article/thought piece on something vaguely media-related. I didn’t get the job, but I thought it would be a shame if the piece went to waste.

It’s about the increasing and, in my opinion, irritating tendency for big media companies to start launching their own streaming services and suchlike, splitting up content and devaluing existing subscriptions. Obviously this is a little different to my usual output, but I hope you enjoy it.

A Place for Everything, and Everything in… a Dozen Places: The Netflix Problem

Disney’s Bob Iger said in 2017 that “the media landscape is increasingly defined by direct relationships between content creators and consumers”. That was his reasoning behind the launch of Disney’s upcoming streaming platform. He’s not wrong; more than ever, across multiple strands of online media, consumers are taking the direct route to getting their content, whether it’s TV, games, or other online videos; and the most successful platforms are those that can amalgamate the greatest proportion of any one kind of media in one place. Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube, Netflix – the days of hundreds of TV channels with their own unique programming aren’t quite gone, but the new kids on the block are definitely dominating the market. Why would any consumer want to sift through dozens of different broadcasters when they can just pay a single subscription and get everything in one place?

But it’s not so simple anymore, because the more profitable these streaming platforms get, the more other companies try to break into the market – and, slowly but surely, the more the hundreds of channels of conventional TV begin to be reflected online.

[image error]RIP Iron Fist/The Defenders.

A few years ago, Netflix dominated the online streaming market. Hulu, despite starting its VOD service around the same time as Netflix, was hamstrung by being US- and Japan-only, and so Netflix held the worldwide market almost unopposed. It’s still the biggest service – but it’s no longer the only competitor. With the rise of Amazon’s Prime Video service, YouTube’s Originals program, and the upcoming Disney streaming service, Netflix is no longer the only place to go for streaming – and, as a result, Netflix is losing shows. The Expanse jumped ship to Amazon for its third season, with the first two being removed from Netflix, and Disney intends to remove Marvel and Star Wars content from the Netflix library once its service launches – a move also partly to blame for the cancellation of Netflix’s Marvel Defenders shows, given that Netflix doesn’t want to “funnel money into the intellectual property of its soon-to-be rival.” Star Wars fans were ecstatic when a seventh season of The Clone Wars was announced – but when it turned out to be confined to Disney rather than being available on Netflix like the rest of the show, many fans lamented the explosion of new streaming platforms – and others decided to simply resort to piracy.

Services like Netflix have always sold themselves on the strength of their massive libraries of content – but the more streaming platforms are created, the further that content is being divided. No consumer wants to pay five subscription fees for the same range of content that was once available on a single service, and, as with everything on the Internet, the harder things are to access legally, the more they’ll be accessed illegally.

[image error]The new – and unpopular – kid on the PC gaming block.

Recently, similar events have upset the world of PC gaming. Valve’s Steam is, without question, the dominant marketplace for PC games, overshadowing EA’s Origin and Ubisoft’s UPlay, among other competitors, almost completely. Apart from the flagship titles of big game studios like EA, essentially every other game could be found on Steam. In late 2018, however, Epic Games launched their own storefront and launcher, the Epic Games Store – and with a more publisher-friendly revenue split and the titanic Fortnite to draw in players they seemed to be muscling in on Steam’s territory. Just as Amazon has siphoned away some of Netflix’s content, so Epic managed to snag big games like The Division 2. But, just as with Netflix, gamers want their games to all be available in one place – and when the developers of Metro: Exodus pulled their game from Steam without warning and moved it to Epic, players were furious. It doesn’t help that the Epic store lacks a lot of Steam’s basic functionality; it doesn’t support reviews, community discussion, or even offline play. At the moment, both Steam and the Epic store are free to use – but if either one decides that they want to charge a subscription fee like their streaming counterparts, piracy rates will almost certainly go through the roof. Game developers might get a better deal – but if their audience aren’t buying their games at all, then what does it matter?

Fifteen years ago in the Internet’s Wild West, games and videos were scattered across hundreds of different sites. Content was free, or at least cheap, but it was all over the place. YouTube’s arrival in 2005 heralded the first of the great centralisations; Netflix and Steam did the same with streaming and gaming respectively – and monetisation swiftly took over almost all online content. We’ll never quite get those old days back, but content is beginning to scatter once more – only this time every site has its eye on your wallet.

 

A True Story

After a good few months, I’ve finished what is essentially a love letter to my dissertations and, more specifically, the man and the book that they’re based around: Lucian and his True History. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it (other than cut out around 10,000 unnecessary words!), but I’m glad it’s done. Given I owe him two degrees, a novel seems the least he deserves.

Be it understood, then that I am writing about things which I have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others – which, in fact, do not exist at all and, in the nature of things, cannot exist. Therefore my readers should on no account believe in them.

– Lucian of Samosata, The True History