Month: December 2010

The technological singularity: a thing of the past?

One of the latest trends in science fiction is the concept of the technological singularity — the point in history at which technological advances occur so rapidly that we can no longer learn the new stuff fast enough to keep up with it.

I hear a lot of people talk about this at cons, and I’ve read/listened to quite a few stories about this concept.  Basically, these stories posit a world where science has become a new magic, and our world has been transformed beyond all intelligible recognition.

However, a recent post on the excellent Rocketpunk Manifesto blog made me wonder if we’ve already passed the point of singularity in our own society.  The post basically asserted that the period 1880 to 1930 saw so many sweeping technological advances that the world in 1930 would have been unrecognizable to a person from 1880, whereas our current society would still be intelligible to a person from 1930.

This made me wonder: how far into the singularity have we already come?  How much of our technological infrastructure has become so advanced that the common man lacks the capacity to comprehend it?

Think about it.  Fish around in your pockets and pull out your phone.  Do you understand how it works well enough to take it apart and put it together again?  To rebuild the device from parts?  Do you own the tools and machinery to construct the parts from which it is made?

How about the building in which you currently find yourself?  Do you possess the knowledge to build a comparable structure that performs the same functions?  That keeps you sheltered and provides the same light, heat, electricity, and internet connection that you now enjoy?

There was a time, not too long ago, when people would move out to the wilderness and homestead land by building their own homes from available natural resources.  If you needed to build your own house, as so many people used to do, could you do it?

How about your means of transportation?  If necessary, could you take apart your car and rebuild it again from the ground up?  Could you perform basic maintenance on it if you needed to?  How many of us can change our own oil–and how many of us are dependent on others for such a simple service?

Or what about the things we take most for granted–our understanding of the way the universe works.  Do you really understand the principles of physics?  Do you comprehend how electricity or magnetism really works, or are you still thinking in overly-simplified terms like electrons flowing through a circuit like water?  Even the most intelligent physicists can’t reconcile electromagnetism with Newtonian physics, so what makes you think you know so much?

How much of what we think we know is really just an illusion, meant to keep us pacified and docile?  To give us a false sense of security–that someone is in control, so we can rest easy?  Does anyone REALLY understand 100% how the economy works?  Do any of us know who or what is really in charge anymore?  Have we unwittingly handed over the reigns of control to some digital algorithm so basic to our newly networked way of life to be practically invisible?

Looking at how few of us are truly self-sufficient, and how much power we’ve ceded to forces beyond our control, our modern society seems so delicate and fragile.  Can anyone REALLY say that our society is not in danger of falling apart?  That our way of life is not an unnatural and unsustainable aberration?

Anyhow, those were some of my initial thoughts.  The more I compare the science fiction of the past with the reality of the present, the more predictions I see coming true in the most unexpected of ways.  The singularity may have less to do with uplinked consciousnesses and more to do with Google’s SEO algorithms than we are comfortable admitting.  And realistically, the light bulb may prove to be more revolutionary than anything Apple has ever or will ever produce.

Slogging through a funk

Just a quick update, since it’s 3 am and I’m kind of in a daze after playing Halo: Reach on Xbox live with my roommate.  Whoa, decompressing…

This whole week, I’ve been in a weird funk.  It sucks to be unemployed, especially since I can’t commit to anything long term because I’m waiting to hear back from the wilderness job.  Man, I really hope I get it–but even if I do, I’ll need to raise some cash to keep me going through January until the paychecks start coming in.  And if I don’t get the job, I have no idea what I’ll do.

But mostly, it has to do with my writing.  I’ve been running through the rough draft of Worlds Away from Home, and…holy crap, it REALLY sucks.  It sucks to the point where I’m not sure exactly how to fix it.

Part of it probably has to do with my initial ambitions for it, which I probably set too high.  I originally wanted to write a science fiction romance that turned the “romance” element on its head by having the sex be the thing pushing the characters apart rather than bringing them together.  I got a little too didactic in the rough draft, though, and failed to tell a story that, at it’s root, is meant to entertain.

That’s probably the most important thing–to tell a story that’s fundamentally entertaining.  So I’ve been looking at that, and I’m finding that there are significantly fewer plot threads here than there were in Mercenary Savior.  That, and there’s considerably less suspense.  The character arcs are still sufficiently complex, I think, but there aren’t nearly as many hooks and cliffhangers as my other work.

This whole week, I’ve been vacillating between “alright, I can do this” to “this novel sucks and I should just throw it out and never work on it again.” In fact, I drew up a chart today of all the novels I’ve started, finished a first draft, and finished a polished draft–and the results are a little stark.

I only just produced a fully polished draft for Genesis Earth, so at 2010 I’ve finally gotten one novel to the point where I think it’s as good as I can make it without an editor/agent to help.  One freaking novel–and that’s after two years of work.  Mercenary Savior, I’m finding, isn’t quite where it needs to be, though it’s close–probably I’ll nail it down in early 2011.  But other than those two?  I’ve got nothing.

I started Worlds Away from Home back in 2008, and I’m wondering whether I was even good enough back then to craft a story that could carry through a complete novel.  Ashes of the Starry Sea was probably a bit too ambitious, and Genesis Earth, while it ended up working out, was so small in scope that it wasn’t that hard to pull off.

Is something fundamentally flawed with Worlds Away from Home? Did I bite off more than I could chew?  Is the story premise so screwed up that I should just abandon it and reuse it occasionally for scraps?

I have no idea.  Maybe I’m just being too angsty–after all, I started Genesis Earth BEFORE I started Worlds Away from Home, and that one turned out great.  It took two years, of course, but it worked out in the end.

So will this one work out?  Probably, I suppose–but only if I can solidly get behind it.  I’m trying to put together a detailed plot outline to figure out what the story needs, but if I can’t find something else–something on par with the cryo scene and the first line of Genesis Earth, which for the longest time were the only two things keeping me from trashing that project–if I can’t find something redeemable like that, I might just drop this monstrosity and let it die.

Blarg.  I hate this.  I might just take a break from things and write a couple short stories.  This whole week, I’ve been writing nothing but outlines and revision notes–I need to do something a little more creative.

Anyhow, that’s what I’m currently slogging through.  Before the end of next week, I’m hoping to find out whether I’ve got that wilderness job or not.  Let’s hope…

Change in direction

Just a quick update on things before I go to bed.

After giving it some thought, I’ve decided to put Into the Nebulous Deep on hold for the time being.  The main reason for this is that it’s a direct sequel to Mercenary Savior, and if the first one doesn’t sell…yeah, not the best business decision.

I figure the best way to do it is to have a series of indirectly linked standalone novels set in the same world.  That way, a publisher could pick up any one of them after rejecting all the others, but if you want to bundle them into a series and sell them together, you can do that too.

That’s my strategy–I like the universe I built for Mercenary Savior, and I’m going to keep it for the foreseeable future, but for now, the trilogies and duologies will have to wait.  In any case, I’ve written down my major ideas for ITND, so I’m sure I’ll be able to pick up where I left off if/when MS sells.

Instead, I’m going to start working through the second draft of Worlds Away from Home. It needs a ton of work, but having finished the rough draft, I know that the story has potential.  At this point, I’m actually very enthusiastic about it, so hopefully that will help drive momentum.

Right now, I’m in the outlining stage.  I’m taking a page from Dan Wells and using his seven point story structure to draw out all the plot lines and character arcs.  When I did this for MS 4.0, I had to outline about fifteen arcs before I felt it was sufficiently tight; it will probably be the same for WAFW 2.0 as well.

Currently, I’m in the middle of outlining chapter six.  If all goes well, I’ll finish outlining and start writing by the end of the week.

In the meantime, I’ve been doing a lot of submitting.  Sent out another short story to Leading Edge–oh, and by the way, they accepted a poem of mine, so expect to see that in a forthcoming issue.  I also submitted the latest draft (5.0) of Genesis Earth to a few agents, so hopefully that will lead to something positive.

In other news, I’m looking for a job again.  Oh joy.  I’m hoping things will work out with the wilderness job, but if not, I still need something to tide me over for the Christmas season.  It’s stressful, but at least I’m not broke yet, which is good.  If I can’t find work and have to buy gear for the wilderness training, however, I just might be.

I’m confident things will work out, however.  I’ve found that they always do, even if not in the way I wanted or expected.  Just keep swimming.

In the meantime, check out this AWESOME 8-bit remix of one of the tracks leaked from Daft Punk’s upcoming album for the movie Tron. Dude…this makes me so incredibly happy.  And the 8-bit art!  I nabbed it and turned it into my avatar for the Quark forums.  In case you want to use it, here’s a copy.

8-bit Daft Punk FTW! The only thing more epic would be if Daft Punk and E.S. Posthumus joined forces–but if that happened, hosts of heavenly angels would descend upon our planet and usher in an era of global peace and universal prosperity. But dude, I would give my firstborn son to acquire that music.

You laugh, but I’m only half joking…

A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin

Almost twenty years have passed since the fall of the Targaryen dynasty–twenty years since the last of the dragons was seen in the Land of the Seven Kingdoms.  Now, the libertine Robert Baratheon sits on the Iron Throne, blind to the conspiracies and secret combinations that surround him.

In this dangerous time, Ser Jon Arryn, the King’s Hand, dies of mysterious causes.  Most of the realm accepts the official story that the death was natural, but when Arryn’s wife Lysa sends a letter to her sister, Catelyn and her husband Ser Eddard Stark immediately suspect that the death was orchestrated by the Lannisters.  Only one thing remains: to travel to King’s Landing and uncover the proof.  Soon, King Robert calls on Ser Eddard to become his new Hand, giving them the perfect opportunity to do this.

Little does Ser Eddard know, the intrigue goes much deeper than any of them realize.  For the Lannisters are gathering an army, and Queen Cersei and her brother, Ser Jaime, harbor a secret that would tear the realm apart.  Meanwhile, the last of the Targaryens bears a child prophesied to rule the world, while far to the North, an ancient evil bides its time, waiting to sweep the seven kingdoms with horror the likes of which has not been seen in a thousand years.

Winter is coming–and the people of the Seven Kingdoms are ill prepared to face it.

Everyone seems to be talking about George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series these days–next to The Wheel of Time, it’s probably the biggest epic fantasy line of the last ten or fifteen years.  Martin is well known for killing off his characters and writing in shades of gray, so I thought it would be good to give this series a try.

As soon as I picked up the book, I was hooked.  Martin knows how to craft a beautiful, engrossing fantasy world.  In order to leave no doubt on that point, observe:

Yeah, that pretty much sums up what Martin did with his Land of the Seven Kingdoms. It’s an awesome fantasy world, and I found myself lost in it from the first page.

I must admit, however, after hearing so much about the Song of Ice and Fire series, I was surprised at how few characters died in this book. That’s not to say everyone survived–in fact, Martin killed my favorite character, which made me feel HORRIBLE–but I was expecting there to be more. However, this is the first book in the series, so I assume that the really crazy stuff happens later.

While overall I loved A Game of Thrones, I admit I did have a few misgivings about the book. Martin really does write in shades of gray, and while that makes the story unpredictable and surprising, it also makes things very dark and austere. Martin seems to have no interest in redeeming his characters, and when any of them try to be noble, he cuts them down at every turn.

Personally, I don’t care for that. Flawed characters may be more relateable, but seriously flawed characters (or characters with no interest in overcoming their flaws) turn me off. In this way, Martin is practically the antithesis of David Gemmell; whereas Gemmell makes you love his characters despite their flaws, Martin keeps you reading in spite of the fact that you hate all his characters.

How does he do it? By creating a beautiful, wondrous world. By crafting a masterful story full of intricate twists and turns. By making you hate some of the characters so #%$^! much that you have to stick around and see how they die. It’s all entertaining and extremely engrossing, but at the end of it all, I didn’t come away with any real love for Martin’s characters–except perhaps for a couple of Eddard’s kids, who are still young enough to be somewhat innocent.

I suppose it’s all a part of this new non-conciliatory movement in fantasy. Don’t get me wrong; A Game of Thrones is an EXCELLENT book, but it’s very…non-conciliatory. If that’s your thing, more power to you, but I personally prefer stories about redemption, where romance still lives and even the most unlikely character can be a True Hero, if only for a few fleeting, glorious moments.