Further Reading: Ghost Targets

Isaiah 65:24

I will answer them before they even call to me. While they are still talking about their needs, I will go ahead and answer their prayers!

I'm just saying.

Further Reading: Ghost Targets

This article from Ars Technica talks about the personally-identifying information available in large corporate databases, the efforts these corporations make to conceal identities when they do share their (incredibly valuable) datasets to researchers, and the ineffectiveness of those efforts.

The article ends with a call-to-arms for legislation to handle these things, and preserve privacy, which seems to me like a strange cap on an article all about the futility of such efforts. People cling to that old idea, though.

Anyway, the part I find most fascinating (and the real focus of the article) is the remarkably simple process of correlating readily available information from vastly different datasets to create a useful connection. That's fundamental to Hathor, but for my novels I posited an imaginary, universal database architecture to make it happen. Turns out you can match spreadsheets against text lists and get the same effect today. That's impressive.

Project Report: Taming Fire (and The Dragonswarm)

This is one of those promised catch-up posts.

Taming Fire is easily my longest-running project. I've conceivably put more time (by which I mean both thinking about it and writing about it) into Sleeping Kings as a whole, but I've put more years into Taming Fire.

The summer before I went to college I was living in Little Rock with my parents, and they had a dinner party so we could all get to know some people from the new church, and in order to get out of socializing I spent the evening buried in my new scribblebook. That was my first scribblebook, and I filled its first pages with the story of a bright spring morning when the Dwarf chieftain's wife, Elsa, walked into her living room to find her toddler riding on the back of a baby dragon. And then, moment's later, the dragon's mama came looking for it.

That became the prologue to Taming Fire, a novel set in my fantasy world during a time known as the dragonswarm, when the long-dormant dragons and wyverns and sea serpents and all the Elder Wyrms all woke at once, to burn civilization to cinders and drive humanity back into the wilderness.

When I got to college, the story got its hero -- a young man who wanted nothing more in life than to be a soldier, who was recruited by a wizard who wanted to turn a swordsman into a wizard. Originally, the predominant theme of the novel was the important of cross-training.

Thankfully, it became its own story. It began with the story of Daven trying desperately to find his place in the world, as the wizard dragged him from a life of near slavery to a life of privilege where he was ridiculed and hated. He tried to learn the wizard's magic, tried to fight a dragon, tried to enlist in the army, and ultimately found his own destiny. And a hot chick, to boot.

Then the king went and ruined it, and the long-anticipated dragonswarm really got going, and the world fell into Chaos and it took Daven to save the day. The whole story, start to finish, came in around 180,000 words, but there's such a perfect breaking point in the middle that I've long since decided to make it two novels -- one the story of Daven's search for purpose, and the other the story of Daven's victory over the dragonswarm. I've made that decision (and it's easy enough to split the Word file into two Word files), but I haven't done any work on it yet.

I have done several rewrites on the text as a single volume -- one so significant that I rewrote the whole thing from scratch, to make the mood more grown-up and serious. Even so, I've come so far in my writing in the years since I did that last rewrite that the whole thing feels like rough draft.

There was also a planned sequel (which is now the third book in a trilogy), and I'd done an opening chapter for that, but never any more. I'd still like to get that tale told, though. So, yeah, it's been a while since I did anything with it, and I don't really plan to work on it soon, but I do consider Taming Fire (and the whole Dragonprince trilogy) an active project.

Status (Taming Fire): Rough Draft
Status (The Dragonswarm): Rough Draft
Status (The Long Road to Peace): Prewriting

Project Report: Ghost Targets: Restraint

There's not a lot I can say about the plot of Restraint without spoiling the ending of Gods Tomorrow (for the two people I know who I haven't made read it). However, by way of brief synopsis, Restraint picks up the Ghost Targets story three months after the events of Expectation. When new blackouts begin appearing in the Hathor database, Katie is forced to deal with an old nemesis to find out how to stop it. Along the way, she finds herself immersed in the shady world of private prisons, where exemption from Hathor monitoring leaves the world's worst offenders out of sight -- and their keepers unaccountable.

I've been working on Restraint for several months now -- since about three weeks after I completed Expectation. All my prewriting is done, including a scene-by-scene detailed outline, and I've got about 15,000 words into the actual novel.

In addition to the plot elements listed above, Restraint introduces us to another member of the Ghost Targets team: Phillips, whose name we heard mentioned in Gods Tomorrow. I've had a lot of fun developing Phillips's character and getting to see him behave badly on the page. That's really been the highlight of the novel so far.

I hope to have Restraint finished in time to start on Burn Jump for National Novel Writing Month, but I've got a busy fall coming up. Still, I'll keep you posted.

Status: Writing

Project Report: King Jason's War

King Jason's War is one of the most complicated books I've ever written. It started its life with the title Majesty and was intended to depict, to a doubtful American audience, what we've all forgotten about the nature of kings and courts. That was never actually a story though, and every time I tried to put words on paper, it twisted away and became something different.

In the process of writing Taming Fire, though, I figured out what happened at Gath-upon-Brennes, and why it matters, and just sort of stumbled across a really amazing story. Majesty became King Jason's War, a novel about a nation torn by war, exhausted by occupation, and subjected by greedy politicians. It's also the story of a young man, honest and intelligent, walking into the bitter cynicism of life at court and rejecting it in favor of idealism and hope.

I started King Jason's War right after I finished my last major rewrite of Taming Fire (so, 2003). I wrote an opening scene, and then cut to a flash-forward (for no real reason) to set the stage for the novel, and ended up liking that so much that I built an almost Zelazny level corrupted chronology for my story. I outlined -- not in a plot synopsis, but in a two-column chart, and the pieces of the story were rigorously defined: alternating chronological backstory scenes of two thousand words each, and present-day vignettes of no more than 300 words that spliced together the ten-year story arc of the backstory and drove the whole thing toward its dramatic conclusion.

It worked, far better than I expected it to. I really thought the final novel would be a dry Rand-ish philosophical debate, but it's high adventure and court drama and romance and war. I was really amazed with what I came up with.

Long-time readers of my personal blog will know I finished King Jason's War in July of '07, the same month that I finished the first volume in the Sleeping Kings series. Like Josh's story, King Jason's War took me four years to write. I shared it with my dad and sisters at last year's Pogue Family Writer's Conference, and got some really great feedback at that time. I haven't done any work on it since, though -- mostly because Gods Tomorrow took over, and that series has been my focus ever since.

King Jason's War is currently in a rough draft form. It needs a major rewrite, particularly concerning the first sixty pages (which aren't really Jason's story at all, but that of the ill-fated Captain Tandon, who disappears completely for the rest of the book). It won't be a monumental task to rewrite those ten scenes from Jason's POV, and after that it's just a matter of cleaning up the wording a little bit for the rest of the book. It's maybe thirty hours of work, but there's a couple scenes that could prove trickier than expected and maybe double that estimate. Either way, I don't know when I'll get to it.

Status: Rewriting, rough draft

Project Report: MaskedFox.com

Ever since I started this blog, I've been working toward a professional website where I can display and promote these projects -- with a heavy emphasis on my books, of course.

I finally settled on a clear design a couple months ago, and I've been putting it together as I found the time. I'm now ready to call it done (in the sense that it's open to the public), although by its nature I'll be adding to it and editing it on a pretty regular basis.

You can check it out here:
www.MaskedFox.com

As I dove into the site design, it ultimately occurred to me that I'm not the only person in my social group with projects that could benefit from such a display, and it seemed like presenting a multi-faceted and talented creative team might offer more punch than just a website describing wonderful, magical me.

Thus was born the Masked Fox Team, which currently consists of my little sister, my much-talented friend Julie, and Toby and Kris. I haven't had a chance to work with them much yet so their presence on the website is pretty minimal so far, but we hope to beef that up in the next six months or so.

I've used the website as a one-stop personal profile (complete with resume, autobiography, writing credentials, and a link back to my blog), as a custom display site for my finished novels (something to share with editors and agents in my query letter), and as a general clearinghouse of all my assorted distractions.

As you may have seen (depending how many of those links you clicked on), the individual project pages all link back to this site, so I can use the simple Blogger interface to make news posts and quick status updates that will be accessible to anyone visiting my website. Since I just got that working, you can now expect a slew of project reports from my big ol' backlog of projects -- things like King Jason's War and Sleeping Kings: The Wolf (novels that I finished two years ago). Once those are out of the way, though, it should be back to business as usual. And, in case you were curious where all those old projects stood, now you'll know.

Status: In development

Further Reading: Ghost Targets

Via Digg, just read this article from the New York Times concerning the terrifying future of AI.

What threw me is the focus on lost jobs to robots. I can certainly understand an individual worrying about losing his job (especially if he's old, and it's a highly specialized job, and that's all he knows how to do), but what's the point of a society doing so?

This is something I've thought about a lot for the Ghost Targets series. In the books, I make casual reference to the twenty-hour work week, but the direction of the series is toward less and less, and that seems to me like the direction of the future, anyway. We develop better and better technology so that we can get more results from less effort. Ultimately, that should mean more and more free time. Ultimately, that should mean lives of leisure for most of the populace.

I realize that the people who lose jobs to robots won't be the CEOs and magnates of industry, but the poor and the scrabbling. Actually, that's been going on for most of a century now. I assume the concern of the scientists in this article is that it'll reach up into the middle class, too. But let's say that happens, let's say a significant portion of the lower and middle class are unemployed now, because their efforts aren't needed to make the things the corporations want to sell....

Those corporations still have to sell the things. With the help of computers they can make the things for cheaper (else why fire the people?), and the now the people in aggregate have less money to spend, so the things can and must cost less. You divide what work people are needed for across a much larger pool of available employees, and so the time-worked-per-person-per-day drops. You can inflate currency so people get paid the same for a twenty-hour work week, or you can drop prices of goods so that all these people getting paid half wages can still afford to buy them. Either way, people are working half as much and enjoying the exact same standard of living.

We did this already, when we went from an agrarian society to an industrialized one, and then (to a lesser extent) when our production went from manufacturing- to service-based. Employ machines to increase leisure. It's why we made plows, it's why we made assembly lines, and it's why we made the assembly language. When I'm sitting at home and write a Python script to rename a bunch of computer files for me (a boring task) so that I can spend that time playing a video game, that's the point of it. We'll do that on a large scale, and next thing you know half of the world is entertainers, and the other half is audience, and everything else is an afterthought.

Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow

Yesterday I submitted Gods Tomorrow with this as its introductory description of the book:

Gods Tomorrow is a 60,000-word sci-fi thriller set in a near-future where people have traded the concept of privacy for the convenience of total information awareness. It's like 1984, but happy.

Then today I was reading through Courtney's old blog posts and came across a link to this article, which puts forth the argument that justifies my "but happy." I recommend it. Especially for D--.

Project Report: The MaskedFox Memory Game

A couple months ago, Toby and I started talking about making a learning game for AB that would teach her how to use maps. That project (like so many of ours) fell apart when we ran into a need for 3D models, but while I was still thinking in terms of writing an educational game, we started playing a card-matching memory game with AB that was a lot of work to set up.

One day over lunch I talked with Toby about the possibility of writing a computerized version of the same game, and he had a working prototype of it for me by the next morning. I spent a couple days gathering some Creative Commons art and sound effects and then polishing the framework - and then parts of the next month tweaking settings here and there - but the whole project probably took less than a hundred hours of total programming time.

It's a fully functional Memory game (complete with a settings panel to let you tweak which card set you want to use, and how easy/difficult you want the game to be), with a surprisingly robust matching system that allows Flash Cards (that is, non-identical pairs) and easy importing of custom card sets.

I'm not completely done with it. Most notably, I'd like to add support for audio cards, with a simple interface to create new ones. Still, the whole game is there with this release, so I'm prepared to call it complete.

You can find the game (as well as installation instructions) on the website.

Status: Stable, v. 1.0

Project Report: Poetry

I started writing poetry in fourth grade. It was, of course, terrible.

I've kept at it, though, and I've gotten a lot better over time. Unfortunately, I've done a poor job of collecting and maintaining my work through the years. T-- gave me a notebook packed with my poems that she had saved, years ago, and at three different times I've pulled together collections of my stuff, but there are big gaps in the fossil record, as it were.

Anyway, I recently spent some time crawling through all the stuff I have, trying to put together a strong archive of my poetry. I talked about the process some in my journal, but the end result is a collection of individual files built on a standard Word template and tagged with some useful metadata.

My goal is to write a quick Python script to upload those files to Google Docs for a more reliable archive, so I won't have to go through the collection and verification process ever again. First I need to collect the poems I don't have in digital form from a handful of sources (most of which are my old scribblebooks), and do my best to get accurate dates on the poems I have.

I don't really have any ambitions to get my poetry professionally published, so I'll probably put together a website to showcase it once I have everything cleaned up and in place.

Status: In development

Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow

This is the transcript of a keynote speech in which an IT guy gives his prediction of the near future.

He's got handhelds (and, essentially, Hathor) fully functional by 2030, and really doesn't consider that a very significant thing. He also throws some funky glasses into the mix, which might make their way into my novels, but probably not.

I've known all along that people shouldn't have to look at their handhelds to get visual data, but there's no way to describe everybody walking around with visors that sounds cool to people who live in a world without them. In other words, I set aside the reality of the situation for the sake of the movie adaptation.

Project Report: Ghost Targets: Expectation

I'm posting this late but backdating it, so I have no idea how it will show up in your RSS reader.

But it was big news that I missed. Ghost Targets: Expectation is finished. I finished the first draft on Monday, April 27th, then finished it again on Tuesday, April 28th, by inserting a key missing scene back in chapter seven.

T-- was reading it in pieces as I went along, so I got some immediate feedback from her, and I have a handful of other readers all working on the first revision now. If you're interested in reading it, let me know. If you haven't read Gods Tomorrow yet, you should do that first. That one is in a pretty stable state already, and I'd be glad to get you a copy.

I don't think this one will require as drastic a rewrite as Gods Tomorrow needed, but I could learn otherwise as the feedback rolls in. Regardless, I still need to develop the promotional materials (synopsis, cover letter, and blurb), and get it to my agent, along with Gods Tomorrow.

I don't have any immediate plans to start on the next book, but I've got a basic plot worked out for it and I think it'll move the story along in a really satisfying way. I had some concerns on that topic for this book, but everyone who's read it so far has said it's good. That's a relief.

Status: Complete, first draft

Further Reading: Ghost Targets: Expectation

*Minor spoiler warning*

But, seriously, are you kidding me? This article basically endorses the fundamental premise behind my latest plot. They say in the article, "I know this sounds a bit woo-wooey," which I was really using as my defense. The novel's premise involves a rigorously scientific medical clinic that becomes subverted by the efforts of a kook who basically believes the sort of nonsense that I do.

And then this article in Newsweek backs it up. It's eerie.

Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow

And this was another comment in the same thread, that followed right after. I only include it because it, in a silly way, references a technology I've just been assuming for my Ghost Targets future.

131 comments, and no one has picked up on PZ's cow singularity and its implications.

The thing is, I can easily imagine a cow singularity within my lifetime (assuming I adopt a healthier lifestyle and medical care improves at the same rate). I expect that within a hundred years, it will be entirely possible to slice a piece of tender beef filet off of a substrate of connective tissues on a conveyor belt. That really doesn't seem too terribly far-fetched. From a human perspective, that situation represents the cow singularity.

But from a cow's perspective, such a situation is trivial, and has nothing to do with being a cow. It's likely a cow wouldn't notice that people were slicing filets off of a cow cell culture, nor would the cow recognize any kinship with the flesh thus obtained.

In the event all the beef we needed were obtained from cow cell cultures, I suspect cows would go back to being big, shaggy, forest-dwelling ungulates, and would forget about us, to the degree the environment allows.

If, in some fantastic world that violates everything we know about history, Kurzweil's human singularity were to occur, I doubt that it would include us, or that we would recognize it as anything to do with humanity. If the singularity occurs, the primary beneficiaries will be them, and we will revert to being savannah-dwelling bipedal social primates, same as always.

Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow

After posting that last one, I ended up clicking through several links on various comments pages, to one that was extremely critical of Kurzweil. (He is often called nothing more than a mystical kook by the hard science types.)

But in the process of reading many pages of comments, I came upon this discussing the nature of consciousness, the concept of "self," and the transfer of that from a biological body into a machine:

Tulse said most of what I was going to say. If a reasonable duplicate of me can be created (which is a big 'if' I'll grant) then that will be me, by any test that you can bring to bear. He will love the same people I do, he will hate the same as I do, he will find the same things funny or annoying that I do. He will know the number of my Swiss bank account and all my passwords. If the process leaves a dead me behind, then the duplicate will probably owe the same money that I do, and be guilty of the same crimes that I am. (In such a world, just try using death as an excuse to get out of debts and criminal sentences. The law-makers will close that escape route very firmly, I'm sure.)

That the new me will not be the same as the old me by philosphical hair-splitting is an interesting point, or not interesting at all, depending on your temperament. But it would be irrelevent to both of us, one being dead, and the other demonstrably me. Why would I worry about it?

Is it the break in continuity of consciousness I should be worried about? That breaks every day when I sleep. It's been broken once in my life when I was anesthetised for an operation. One more break won't make a lot of difference.

Is it the silent scream of my genes being snuffed out if I am copied into a shiny carbon-fibre and metal body that should worry me? I am more than my genes.

Is it the worry that during the process some little part of me may get copied wrong, or left out? I suffer greater losses of memory everyday. In five minutes' time I won't remember very much about this moment, the immediacy of the experience of tapping the keys, the sound of the rain falling outside, the creation of the words being typed; all of it will be gone, except for a very vague, fuzzy little seed which I might use to recreate the memory using bits of other memories. A day or two, and I'll vaguely remember this comment. A week might pass and I might forget it altogether. This moment that was so bright and clear, gone.

This me isn't the me of five minutes ago, and the me that will awake in eight hours or so will be even less like the me now. Why should I care if one day I might awake in a new body?

Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow

Ray Kurzweil is a futurist with an impressive track record. In this interview, he talks about the future of travel and discusses some specific timelines for some pretty cool technologies.

A lot of it is stuff I've thought about for my sequel to the Ghost Targets series, Gods Before Men, but his timeline actually puts the techonology in place prior to Gods Tomorrow, which could invalidate a lot of the cool stuff going on in my series.

I'm not going to go changing anything yet, but it's still cool to see the sort of predictions getting thrown out there.

Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow

I definitely considered the ramifications for matchmaking when I thought through the various database services Hathor would make possible. Luckily, when I outlined my 25-novel series, I didn't decide to center any of my major plot lines around the idea, because Dreamworks is currently developing exactly that as a movie. (Thanks to D-- for sharing that link on Google Docs.)

Of course, they don't use Hathor, but Hathor is just a logical extension of the sort of ubiquitous monitoring already done by the UK, which was the direct inspiration for the new movie.

Project Report: Burn Jump

(working title)

I've begun prewriting on a new pure sci-fi novel set in a space-faring future. Similar to the wormhole travel shown in Stargate, our advanced scientists have discovered how to teleport between star systems by flying ships into the hearts of stars, and using the intense gravity there to warp local relative spacetime.

Obviously, that's not an easy process, but the payoffs make it worthwhile. And as corporations and governments begin pouring money into research, constantly trying to improve the safety, reliability, and efficiency of these new starships, a sports league arises featuring the enterprising test pilots who fly into the hearts of stars.

The novel follows the story of a famous Sun Sports Optimization League pilot who gives up racing to enlist in the military following a treacherous terrorist attack by the Separatists. He's teamed up with a navy pilot and put into use as a scout, jumping ahead of military convoys to check for ambushes or other signs of the enemy.

When a traitor within his own squad opens fire on him, the pilot's ship dives into the heart of a star, and the world believes him slain in a senseless incident of friendly fire. The pilot survives, though, and knows the true motivation behind the attack, so he lays low, trapped in Separatist territory, and looks for his opportunity to right the wrongs done to him, and save his nation from a mounting insurrection that threatens to topple the Intergalactic Union.

Or something along those lines.

Status: Prewriting

Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow

Hunch initially struck me as something very similar to the database services in Gods Tomorrow, but as I read more, I'm not so sure.

It's essentially a search engine (or maybe something more like Yahoo! Answers), where you ask a question specific to you (like "Who should I vote for?") and it asks you a series of related, more concrete questions that should be easy for you to answer, then proposes a customized answer to your general question.

That's essentially what I assume the database services are doing constantly, only instead of asking you questions, they would be crawling through your recorded history finding the answers from your past actions and decisions.

Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow

Back when I was first writing Gods Tomorrow I came across an Ars Technica book review for a couple books about the people collect data about us today, and they way they're going to use that data to shape our future. Obviously, that's a direct predecessor of the Hathor in my story, so it caught my interest. I ended up ordering both books through Amazon.

Last night, I cracked open the first of them, The Numerati by Steve Baker. It's amazing. He's a journalist and this book is the result of his dedicated research into several fields that are trying to generate predictive mathematical models of real people (specifically, us). He presents it as a relatively casual narrative to a general audience, though (again, us).

I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the themes that inspired the Gods Tomorrow future. It's fascinating, and probably incredibly useful information for all of us going forward.