Science, fantasy, fiction, tech, and all the worlds I can imagine
I’ve encountered everything from the shortest of flash (check out this mastodon account!) to series and epics spanning over a dozen volumes. The same story can be told in a sentence or two (“After the Trojan War, Odysseus traveled the seas for ten years to get home to his family”) or spun into an epic. Which […]
It took me a while to get around to reading Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir. I was put off by the descriptions of the initial problem (the sun is dying!) which, sadly, set off my “oh, no, it says it’s hard SF, but isn’t really at all” hackles. It’s actually quite good, so long as you […]
I’ve talked a bit about how the Tetrive, our friendly not-local benevolent hive mind, would work physically, in terms of how they connect to each other. How does a naturally-evolved, generally-not-evil hive mind operate at scale? How do they coordinate as the population grows? What if parts get separated? And so on. They’re going to have an entirely different […]
Permit me to regale you with my very niche pet peeve: circular, two-dimensional wormhole entrances in science fiction. (Fantasy gets a pass; unless you’re trying to do science-y magic, the magic portal works however you want.) Usually combined with the problem where the inside of the wormhole looks like… well, a hole dug by a worm. Why […]
Last time, I showed an old doodle with the tree of life for Tetrat, the home planet for our friendly hive mind. What was harder to see was that there’s some more plotting on the back side, plus an ominous quote at the bottom: “Your safety regs were written in blood; ours, in inconvenience.” But […]
Publisher’s Weekly recently produced an article in which the Author’s Guild notes decreasing writer income and, somehow, concludes that the reason for this decline is… libraries? And here’s the study. <cracks knuckles> Let’s go after them. Friendly reminder: my day job is data scientist/machine learning engineer/whatever the popular title is nowadays. I can do numbers. Claim: Only 25% of […]
I’m not a big fan of horror. I don’t like gratuitous gore, characters making such poor life decisions that you don’t mind when they kick the bucket due to their own hubris, characters I like dying off because of other characters’ hubris, or anything involving body horror. (I can read body horror, up to a point. Watch? No.) Jump scares are […]
And… the first of the short stories I plan to share is available (if you sign up for my newsletter). It’s called “Breaking the Ice,” and it’s about a pair of Profundel (sentient siphonophores) exploring the boundaries of the world they know. So! Please do sign up! (Dollar cost is $0, and I don’t send […]
So: we’ve got a basic design for a sentient, mostly-friendly hive mind. Where do they come from? In other words, let’s do a little evolutionary reverse-engineering. Plants Let’s talk plants first. I’m not going to bother with microbes much here; while they’re certainly fascinating, we want stuff we can see without a microscope and interact […]
Marketing: that thing you have to do to make people know your book exists. This isn’t sales – it’s not “please buy my book right now” (though that may show up), it’s more “here, I wrote a book, tell your friends! Maybe leave a review, pretty please!” And then doing that a lot, because it can take […]