Niall Teasdale's Blog, page 22
November 14, 2016
Status Update
Aka: The Sanity Report.
Sanity Status: Mild hallucination with some delusions of normality.
I am, to some extent, in my new home. I have internet and all my computers are attached to it now (via a 20m CAT5 cable in one case). I’m about in a position to do some more writing, intermixed with continued unpacking of boxes.
I still aim to have Gunwitch: Rebirth out before Christmas. After that… I think I’m going to do the next Thaumatology book. I know, it’s been said before. I’m going to have a good, hard try at it because I think I’m in the mood. Update on whether that’s working once the Gunwitch book is out.
October 31, 2016
Halloween Witch
It’s that time of year: time for an unconventional witch.
In this case, a Gunwitch in a dress with cobweb patterns on it. More about her when the horror has died down. (Obviously, I mean moving house. Halloween isn’t scary anymore.)
October 29, 2016
Be My Valentine
October 28, 2016
Valentines Day Officially Moved to October!
Okay, not really.
This is an update on my current entropy level, i.e. how much chaos do I have in my system. Current entropy level is: Imminent universal heat death.
Anyway, Be My Valentine will be officially released on Sunday, that’s the 30th. That’s good: vampires just before Halloween. I’m currently working through the edits and I don’t have cover art yet (such is the state of my life). If I can get everything organised sometime tomorrow, then I’ll put the book up early, but I’m only going to promise it’ll be up before midnight on Sunday. As soon as it’s live, I’ll let you all know.
My house move is progressing to the point where I know I’m going to be largely without internet from November 5th to 11th. If anyone’s trying to contact me during that period… Well, I probably won’t know about it. At least I won’t have any distractions to stop me doing moving stuff. However, expect me to be mildly insane on the 12th.
October 23, 2016
Valentine
Be My Valentine, the second in my vampire series, is out for proof reading. You should be seeing it in the shops next weekend (unless you buy from B&N or Apple, that takes a bit longer). I’m probably safe saying that, and in saying that Gunwitch: Rebirth will follow in (mid-)December. Everything else is up in the air right now.
I’m trying to organise my tax for the year and move house. I can’t sleep (hence writing this at 03:35) because I’m worrying over tax documents and completion dates. The only times I can sleep without my brain throwing up every problem in the book are when I’m too tired to think. Annoyingly, this tends to be during the day, when I should be getting stuff done. Writing and plotting I can do more or less any time, but calling my accountant needs office hours.
Gives me some binge-watching time, so it’s not all bad, I guess. I did all of Sleepy Hollow seasons 2 and 3 in about four days. I have a horrible feeling that’s going downhill for season 4, but there you go. Then Blindspot turned up for a reasonable price on Amazon, so I blasted through the first season of that. Of course, I’m probably looking at a year before I can get season 2, which is annoying (probably).
So, my life is chaos, TV, and insomnia, but you should get a new book next week.
September 24, 2016
Time and the Gunwitch
Have I ever mentioned how much I hate time travel stories?
Okay, there’s Doctor Who, but that treats time the same way Star Trek treats space: it’s a way of getting between adventures. And it never really treats its time travel very seriously anyway, and that’s usually the only way I can stomach time travel plots.
It isn’t that time travel makes for bad stories, it’s more that you need a really good writer to avoid turning a time travel story into one, huge, horrible, gaping plot hole. It’s especially bad when TV writers get their hands on the idea. I have never seen time travel done on TV, seriously, in any manner worth watching. It’s kind of annoying. Films don’t generally do better. I think the problem is that it’s really hard to write something involving time travel, that’s the typical kind where the time travellers are changing things, where you don’t need degrees in physics and philosophy to put it all together without making it sound stupid.
Let’s take the classic one as an example. It’s been used in a fair number of books and films, and it’s the basis for many more. Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder. I know, venerable science fiction author, big deal. I shouldn’t be going there, but… it just makes no damn sense. Time travel is used by people with more money than sense to go back in time so that they can hunt dinosaurs. They must be very careful not to change anything important (they hunt dinosaurs which are going to die soon after anyway) because tiny changes can cause unforeseen and massive changes back in the present. Someone steps on a butterfly and the world changes. Frequently the story is represented as bringing the dinosaurs back, but that’s not what actually happens in the original story, just in many of the remakes.
So, what’s the problem? Well, in the original story the changes are too subtle, or too extreme, depending on your point of view. Human society has been changed by the death of a single butterfly. Even assuming large-scale chaos theory-type conditions, changes to human society are too subtle while the probability that humans would be wiped out, along with the time travel system seems both unlikely and yet more realistic. If you switch it and bring the dinosaurs back, well, that’s beyond ludicrous: the dinosaurs were wiped out by large-scale climate change, possibly involving a huge meteorite impact: if you can stop a space rock hitting Earth by stepping on a butterfly… Well, just no.
Other plots tend to leave gaping holes, or be illogical. I’ve been enjoying The Flash recently. Good series, I like it. However, the time travel stuff thus far has had more holes in it than I care to think about. What got me into writing this post was a film I just watched on Netflix called ARQ. That features a Groundhog Day-style time loop, but it’s done very seriously and those only ever work played for laughs. (For the record, Xena and Stargate SG1 have done Groundhog Day episodes that I thoroughly enjoyed, but they were played for laughs, which is the w I like it.) Also, I was discussing time travel stories with a friend recently and I mentioned that I had written a time travel story once and I had reread it very recently…
And that gets me to the Gunwitch. She was a character I created for the Going Rogue supplement to the City of Heroes MMO. As with many of the characters I created for that game, bits of her have made it into my books, but I did a lot of pretty good stuff for Gunny and I was reminded of her recently. She was definitely one of my favourite characters and I decided that I was going to bring her back from video game oblivion. The setting had to change, of course, which does change the character a little, but I can get pretty much all that Gunwitch goodness out. Assuming nothing goes wrong – and it’s going pretty well so far – the first book will be out November/December and will be called Gunwitch: Rebirth for two reasons, one in-continuity and the other because I’m bringing her back for the book.
And one of the Gunwitch stories I won’t be doing again, sadly, is one I called Murder in the Orchard. In that one our plucky heroine is sent back in time to 1927 to investigate a string of mysterious murders which happened in an English country village. They know they have to send her back because (drum roll) they have a picture of her taken in 1927 at one of the crime scenes, so she has already investigated the crimes, she just needs to get there to do it. It was a closed loop time travel story; going back in time was simply fulfilling history which was known to have happened. It’s one of the few kinds of time travel plot I can handle without my teeth itching. Plus… I really wanted to write an English cosy mystery story with a sci-fi element…
Anyway, another wall of text there, I feel you deserve a picture so here’s the latest concept art for the Gunwitch. There will be more about her later, but that’s what you’re getting for now.
August 22, 2016
The Ghost in the Doll
The News in Brief
This is a quick post to let you know what’s happening. It should have been a little longer and had the cover for The Ghost in the Doll in it, but I’m just looking at changing the cover, which is going to take several hours, so…
The Ghost in the Doll, the next Fox Meridian book will be out very soon, probably sometime tonight. My ability to sleep at night appears to have taken a holiday: I’m sleeping all sorts of weird hours and not exactly happy about it. Trying to get back to normal seems to be impossible at the moment (I’ve tried all the methods I know of and it ain’t happening), but it does mean I’ve all night to work on getting the book out.
That leaves me trying hard to get something ready for October. This is proving difficult and the one which is looking like it’s going to make it (currently) is from right out of left field. I’ll tell you more when I know for sure. I’m in the process of trying to move house at the moment, and that isn’t helping matters. I’m not sure when the physical move will happen, but that could provide more disruption. These things are sent to try us, right?
July 29, 2016
Super Depressed
That makes it sound like I’m suicidal, which I’m not… I’m tired and not very productive, but this is more a case of, um, too much of a good thing.
There is an absolute shit-ton (technical term) of superhero stuff flooding in at the moment. The Killing Joke and Suicide Squad movies are both out next week. You Tube is drowning under the stuff coming out of SDCC… Arrrghhhh!
I am just not ready to write more Ultrahumans and I’m being bombarded with superheroes. At least it’s an entertaining form of torture.
I think I need a holiday. Probably somewhere without internet. Like Mars.
The Fox Resolution – Spoilers For Emergence
This post is related to a previous post, The Fox Dilema. It contains spoilers for Emergence, so if you haven’t read that book, stop reading now.
Still with me? Then let’s lay this out in a line…
That previous post described my uncertainty over a course of action I wanted to take with Fox. I left it pretty vague, but some people still managed to work it out (or their comments suggested they did). I dropped a hint in Criminal Minds that the technology was going to be available: Agnus the digital rat. So, now I’ve gone and done it: I digitised Fox. Which means both Fox and Aneka are digital minds in cybernetic bodies, which was what had me bothered about doing it. Someone asked how I came to this decision, so this post is about my reasons, and a bit about the technology.
Uploading. Taking a human brain and building from it a digital entity, an infomorph, which thinks the way the brain did (or does). The processes as described in the Aneka books and in Emergence appear to be about the same, but there are differences. Aneka was always designed to be essentially a human analogue: her mind can only run on a specialised computer, the one in her body, so if that’s destroyed she’s dead. Fox is probably more like what this kind of thing will be if/when we develop the technology. She is a database describing the connections between her neurons, and software which ‘executes’ those encoded neurons. Fox can run on any computer with enough power to handle her software. There is, theoretically, nothing to stop her running several copies of herself. (Each copy would diverge from the original more or less immediately, but it could be done.) Someone could illegally copy her for nefarious purposes.
We’re getting to the point where we can make connection maps rivalling the complexity of a human brain. Rat-brain maps can be generated and emulated already. In the Aneka books, this is technology well in advance of our own, but that is probably wrong. We could be doing this in my lifetime, though I suspect it’ll take a little longer. That’s one reason for going over the same material again, but not one of the biggest.
Fox represents a more likely version of Uploading than Aneka does. The problems she is likely to face are problems we’ll need to look at ourselves. Some of you may have to worry about them, so I think that’s worth looking at. Fox has already been concerned over the rights of AIs and now those problems are of more personal concern. The technology is one thing, but the ethical and political concerns of this technology are, I believe, important. The next book, The Ghost in the Doll, will introduce another fly into the ointment, but with Emergence we already have AI rights, the status of uploads, and the possibility of a ‘singularity-level’ entity making an appearance. We are going to face situations like this in the relatively near future and science fiction has always been a place where this kind of thing is discussed. I might as well put in my tuppence (two cents in dollars).
Then there are a few practical elements, well, plot-related stuff which makes this a good move. I have plots lined up for Mars and Venus, and now Fox can get there in a day instead of weeks or months. She can commute to the Moon to have chats with Fei pretty much whenever she likes. I could have her visit even more distant locations in a timely manner if I wanted to. All useful stuff.
There is also the Church of God’s Mind, mentioned in passing in DeathWeb. This lot believe that they should upload themselves to gain greater communion with God, and now the technology is out there and Fox is the physical representation of it. I could have had someone else go this route, but having Fox be the one makes any plot more immediate. The Church is going to be very interested in Project Akh, and they will likely be wading in on the legal issues.
The alternative considered was a lot more cybernetics, but I think that kind of thing has been pretty heavily covered and it didn’t have a load of advantages that uploading does from a plot perspective. Once I’d decided Grant was going to get his hands on Fox, it was pretty clear that he would make a mess of her. I had to do something fairly drastic or have her sit the next couple of books out while she recovered. Another useful aspect of the upload solution is that we get to skip the nightmares about what Grant did to her: she may dwell on it a bit, given time, but there won’t be nightmares because she doesn’t dream. I think that’s a plus.
And so, there you have it. Why I decided to go down the upload route again in some length. If you’ve made it this far, well done. Now I just have to prove it was worth it.
