For those who are interested, “The Great Book of Everything” project has begun to evolve legs, so I’ve reorganized the pages a little so that each posted chapter appears in a list linked directly to the parent page. Overnight the bare bones of the tale has grown to just over 2000 words, and the characters are beginning to flesh out.
Parent page off top menu.
Rough text of Part 1 here.
Other parts will follow as they are written.
While trudging away on the ‘A Falling of Angels’ manuscript, Angie and I took a little time out. We’ve been working every day of the week solidly for the last two years and are trying to reclaim our weekends. As part of this process we were out discovering some of the more interesting places in Victoria on foot and I had a little flash of inspiration which has turned into a minor project overnight.
With the working title ‘The Great Book of Everything’, I came up with the framework for a comic novel about a boy, his sarcastic pet Hamster and the Quantum nature of everything. And Squirrels. As soon as I get the web pages organised, I’ll post what I write online. This site needs reorganisation.
Today is my birthday. 12th March. I had no idea that Tim Berners-Lee first submitted his proposal for the World Wide Web today, twenty five years. A quarter of a century ago. Although the technology itself didn’t go public until 1993.
So short a time. Back in 1995 I recall penning a thousand word piece called ‘Cybermarket – the future of retailing’. Just a speculative PR article for the trade press. I believe I managed to place it in one of the trade technology journals of the time, although have no idea where it was printed. In the article there were predictions about Supermarket chains like Tesco’s getting into Financial Services and having online stores. Reference was made to the amount of bandwidth necessary to create an interactive online 3-D model of a Superstore, and how it might come about. Now Supermarkets provide online banking and financial services, the world and its wife provide on line shopping, and I think the fully interactive 3-D catalogue is not that far away. Certainly Internet driven home deliveries have been popular for some time now, and the graphics of certain game engines might be adapted to provide a better interface. Maybe the next iteration of online shopping will be a sort of World of Warcraft meets Second Life meets the retail sector.
Didn’t foresee the rise of eBay or Amazon, but those were then outside the scope of the article.
Anyway. Happy birthday World Wide Web. Well I never. So far so fast.
I’m sitting in our front room, looking out towards the islands, watching a very fine first snow fall. Tiny, uncertain flakes wending their way to the ground. Wandering with air currents, mostly down, sometimes up, but down they come, settling in small crystalline spots, lining up like migrating birds on top of the deck rail, blanketing windscreens in translucent white, but as yet not braving the ground.
Our local Ravens don’t seem to mind the extra crowded air. They sit on the wires as if critically examining each flake, discussing the merits of each ghostly crystal. “That one settle?”, “Nah, won’t last long.” before arguing and clumsily flapping off to some new perch.
So here I sit, dog at my feet, watching the visibility crowd slowly in, daydreaming of sunnier times before I finish my tea and start work.
Not much writing done today. Spent a good chunk of this morning sitting waiting while my car was being serviced. As I was leaving the house I grabbed my proof copy of ‘Head of the beast’ to pass the time. It’s a little wordy in places, but the dialogues fairly snappy, and as reads go, its as pleasant a walk in the dark as most places. I was so engrossed, the three hours at the dealership just flew by. Seeing as I wrote it, I’m quite pleased with the end result.
‘Head of the beast’ is a dark little story which speaks about how mundane the horrors can be, how those who are paid to cope with the darkness manage it, and how seemingly lofty motives can lead to appalling outcomes. As far as my sci-fi writings are concerned, it’s fairly typical. A mixture of the horrific and mundane. Rather like real life, really.
Ergo I’ve changed the header tagline from the rather anodyne ‘A science fiction writers web site and blog’, to the mildly blasé ‘A walk in the dark’. Which, I feel, is a little more me, and far more representative.
Have picked up the thread with ‘a falling of angels’ and am busy piling on the words as well as tidying up a loose end from ‘Head of the Beast’. Well I like it. Perhaps that’s all that matters.
The nature of science fiction is all about how a change in scientific knowledge or technology can alter human society. To play the ‘what if?’ game with a vengeance. It is a literary tree with many branches. From the ‘hard’, based on an extrapolation of historical understanding, real life human psychology and proposed technologies, to space opera and sword and sorcery fantasies. It’s a prophesy game, which is the key dark art of the genre.
Most of the early prophets, like H G Wells in “War of the Worlds” and “The shape of things to come” had elements which have been since come to pass; substitute lasers for ‘heat rays’, mass airborne bombardment, poison gas. Wells saw all these things in humanities future. Jules Vern’s “Voyage to the moon” and “20,000 leagues under the sea” foresaw moonshots and submarine warfare, but not in quite the way he surmised. Arthur C Clarke is credited with predicting communication satellites, and in one short story the widespread availability of pornography via satellite TV. In Clarke’s version, his protagonist was going to use the technology to subvert Western society. Forget the title or what collection it’s in. Either “The Nine Billion names of God” or “Tales of Ten Worlds” I think. Used to have copies, but they either got read to death, or lost in one of many house moves.
Today I finished a dark, ironic, even cautionary little story about the misuse of satellite technology. What starts out as the ultimate weapon against individual terrorists gets hijacked by a couple of bored slacker programmers, who inadvertently create devastation by tinkering with what they think is a ‘simulator’ package. The premise and outcome are fairly straightforward, the mechanics of the story not so much.
At six thousand, six hundred and sixty six words I find myself, for my own perverse reasons, liking both length and content. What gives the story punch is the proposed technology is one of those ‘on the horizon’ things. Just on the cusp of possibility. To be honest, I’ll be surprised if something very similar hasn’t already crossed some defence analysts desk as a serious weapon systems proposal.
Without giving too much away, I drew heavily on my knowledge of computer networking and security, wide area networks, orbital mechanics and ablation in order to tie various elements into a plausible, dramatic whole intended to both amuse and stimulate. For some it might prove a bit too geeky, for others overly simplistic, but that’s the fine line walked when you’re trying to mix in complex story elements with the cynicism of experience. What can a character do when their carefully defended world is going to hell, and everything that happens seems to make matters worse? Simply because they’ve been pushed into making a beta level system fully operational.
When I have another few of these stories completed, at present I’ve half a dozen as ‘works in progress’, I’ll put them into a little eBook collection and give it a punt into the great nowhere. See what happens. In the meantime it’s back to working on ‘Darkness’ and ‘A falling of Angels’.
This morning I’m busily rounding off a 3000 word short story. Essentially it’s about a brand new anti-terrorist technology so good it not only eliminates individual threats, but also cannot be traced back to its source. Just another tale set in the not so distant future. Called ‘Keyhole’ it’s not part of my main story timelines, just one of those oddball tales that pop out of the woodwork between my ears every now and then.
Don’t know what I’m going to do with the story once finished. Despite what I think is rather a deft and savage twist in the plot, I don’t really think it’s that commercial a piece of work. Maybe I’ll do nothing. Perhaps lump it with a few others as part of a short story collection eBook at some stage.
Angie has long complained that my current online profile picture “Doesn’t do you justice.” So during a keyboard break I decided to borrow her iPad, which has a rather good camera setup, and had a bit of a play. Then decided to try a picture using a mirror. After a few tries, which should probably be best buried on an obscure hard drive at midnight with a stake through its casing, I came up with this. Which for once meets with her approval, and as a writer of science fiction, the ‘infinity effect’ using the iPad camera also amuses. Good grief, I’m even smiling and don’t look as much like a crazed axe murderer as I usually do.
The more I get to play with it, the cooler I think her iPad is.
While researching the ‘Freemen on the land’ movement for ‘A Falling of Angels’, I’m beginning to see where they derive their philosophy. This is an incredibly complex world, both politically and financially, and I don’t really think that anyone outside of a few obsessive actuaries and lawyers really understand how and why it works, and exactly how fragile our western socio-economic structure actually is. And how dependent we are on it from a global perspective.
I also appreciate that there are people who can ‘game’ the system to increase their wealth, and use their subsequent economic leverage to obtain even greater power. It has always been thus. This competitive urge is part of human nature, hard wired, so to speak. Likewise, there will always be those who resent domination. This too is part of the human condition.
Therefore todays random story direction came from noting that arch economic manipulator George Soros is getting married, and how the guest list was going to be packed with the ‘great and good’. This kicked the ‘What-if?’ generator in my head into gear, and out popped a story idea. What if ultra high definition ‘Keyhole’ satellite coverage was available like in the movies, and ‘what if’ there was a weapons package that could be dropped from Low Earth Orbit into a guided trajectory which could hit and destroy a target within a centimetre? A system specifically created to eliminate specific ‘Terrorist’ threats without the bad publicity created by massive collateral damage. Too small and fast to be detected or intercepted. A literal ‘Sword of Damocles‘ to be used to eliminate threats to the greater public. Now let’s extend this conceit. What if said technology was hijacked? What if an event like a high society wedding, packed to the rafters with high level politicians and the ultra rich, was targeted? What if, despite multiple layers of protection, the great and powerful became as vulnerable as the rest of humanity? Their own weapon systems turned against them?
Oh, I’m going to have a lot of fun with this one. Amazing what random story ideas a little research kicks off.
Just as an aside, I first used a variant of this concept in ‘Falling Through the Stars‘ where a President who tries to tries to buck the ‘system’ is targeted by an anti aircraft missile meant to protect Washington DC from an airborne attack. This concept has a similar flavour. In ‘Falling’ this protagonist isn’t a rather mindless Terminator like ‘Skynet’, set to destroy all of humanity, but a non-human intelligence which is simply selectively protecting itself and the philosophy it is programmed with.
Woke up this morning with the Casino Royale theme running through my head.
Yeah, a James Bond day. Why not?
Of all the best Science Fiction series, not movies or one off specials ever aired on TV, I have five firm favourites which I can watch again and again. Presented, like in all contest formats should be, in reverse order;
Fifth: A tie between ‘StarGate SG-1‘ and ‘Enterprise‘. Two worthy franchises.
Fourth: Red Dwarf (But not ‘Back to Earth’ – A shockingly bad end to a fantastic belly laugh of a series.) A small cast forever on fine form. A perennial.
Third: Farscape. Not so much for the Jim Henson creature creations as for what was done with them by the writing, direction team, and the actors.
Second: Babylon 5 (Series 2-5) Michael J Straczinski’s epic. Great story arc.
First: Firefly. Joss Whedons magnificent writing shines through. Great character development, smart stories, and snappy dialogue. Possibly the best Sci-Fi TV show of all time. Until something better comes along.
1. Don’t waste your energy.
Decide what you’re going to write about and stick with it. Experimentation is fine, but these should always be left for tinkering at weekends, like a mechanic might work on restoring vintage cars as a hobby. Keep the day job until the big bucks come your way.
2. Work at it.
Determination be thy friend. Don’t give up on a project. Finish it. All it requires is an act of will. Nothing else will do the trick.
3. Ignore naysayers.
What might matter to a professional literary Critic might not be the view of the public at large. In fact this is probably axiomatic. Same for family and friends. Everyone has a different agenda, and they all want your attention right this minute. Our lives are bombarded by trivial little voices who simply can’t wait to start wagging their mouths. These little voices are sappers of karma, time vampires who sink their attention seeking little canines into your creative neck and insist, without bothering to read more than a couple of paragraphs that you’ve written that “You’re wasting your time.” They will almost always be wrong.
4. Don’t rush it.
Great. You’ve finished it. Your great work. Now put your magnum opus aside for a week before reading it like a reader would. Tighten up sentence structure. Eradicate those excess articles. Punish those pleonasms. And spell check, spell check, spell check. Take your time. Get it right. This is important.
5. Don’t worry about publisher rejections.
Everyone gets rejected. You, me, everyone. Publishers will take on what they think they can sell and make money on. They, like you and me are mere mortals and therefore subject to the immutable cosmic laws of cock-up. They guess, go with their gut instinct, or are simply too busy or hard up to plough through a ‘slush pile’ of unknowns. This provides a very large rabbit hole for your literary tour de force to fall through. Simply tidy and reformat your work, then resubmit after a year. By then it is likely that they will have hired different readers, have actually drunk coffee that morning, or decided to look for new markets. Well, enough to get the story you’re trying to tell. We all have off days. Some more than others. And even closed minds open occasionally.
6. Believe, but not too much.
So you have a cause. Whoop-te-do. So have half the idiots on the planet. People with ’causes’ are at the root of half the world’s evils. They believe hard and too much. So don’t be one of them.
7. Read primary sources.
Not newspaper reports based on press releases. Dig deep for the scholarly papers on your subject and read carefully. Trust but verify. If you’re going to write about it, research. Read more than one source. It will pay off, eventually.
8. Remember that people like drama.
Drama fulfils a deep human need for stimulation. The thirst for the new, the immediacy of novelty. Everyone, apart from autistic souls who can’t connect with others.
9. Learn the ‘rules’ of writing.
Mainly to learn how to break them properly. Always remember that ‘rules’ are sometimes only guidelines. “For the guidance of the wise, and the adherence of fools.”
10. Make time for yourself.
Time outs are important. Chill, step away from the day to day craziness. Stop reading the news and blogs that drive you nuts. Make friends and spend quality time with them. Drink coffee, watch the birds. Do whatever makes you most relaxed. Whatever form that takes.
11. Ease up on the illicit substances.
Getting drunk or stoned is human. We all do it. Well, most of us. Either to celebrate or decerebrate, maybe both. Sometimes we need a little chemical assistance to soften the blows of life. Have a session, a binge to ease the pain. The trick is not to let intake take over.
12. Don’t forget family.
Even if they are…. well, let’s not go there. Remember birthdays, send a card or message. Stay in touch and be civil at the very least. When the chips are down, they’ll be there for you. Even if you behave like an idiot most of the time.
13. Learn the power of ‘No’.
Sometimes, no matter how much you care about or respect someone, you are going to have to refuse them. Learn to do it gently.
Here endeth the lesson.
Just another day in the ‘Office’. Although you can’t see the Deer, Raccoon or Rabbits from here. The odd passing truck or car. Out on the water there’s just sail boats and the occasional Gin Palace passing through. Day job later, but only a six hour shift, then back here for half past five. Which after supper gives me two more writing hours until sunset.
Working more on ‘Darkness’ than any other project at the moment, as the story thread I’m following is quite robust. Nine thousand words in the past five days. Not bad, could be doing more, but at least the ideas are flowing.
Martyn K Jones 