Periscope Depth
A minor fiblet for something I’m allowed to talk about. Just to prove that I’m still alive.
More substantive posts, hopefully, to follow.
Lest she backslide into complacency—lest, after so many cycles spent alone, she start to forget that she isn’t―Aki watches those last few moments Viktor recorded before Abaddon vanished into Eriophora’s broken depths. There it was, finally exposed: something that could barely be bothered to imitate, something whose haphazard humanoid shape was more obscenity than accommodation. A plastic slime mold walking on legs that weren’t legs; arms that weren’t arms extending into Eri’s guts like invading mycelia. It watched the approaching ’spores with all the concern of a shark eyeing a minnow, manifested that impenetrable wall of spines far too fast for the eye to follow. It seemed to extrude those needles almost as an afterthought―like someone swatting reflexively at a fly without even consciously registering the fact.
She replays it, a masochistic ritual, whenever she’s about to sleep. This is what you’re up against, she reminds herself. It doesn’t hate you. It doesn’t hunt you. It doesn’t even know you exist, and the truly terrifying thing is it wouldn’t matter if it did. You are nothing to it. It could step on you like a bug without noticing―or, noticing, it wouldn’t bother to scrape you off its heel. This is what Viktor Heinwald has put you up against. Eriophora is nothing but fodder for this thing, an instrument wielded in service to an agenda you can’t begin to understand, and you’re all that stands in its way.
So, hey. Good luck with that.
* * *
She catches Chimp talking to it sometimes. He’s talking to it right now.
It’s possible they converse all the time, of course, exchanging petabytes in the blink of an eye. More likely the monster interrogates and Chimp merely answers like an obedient dog, serving up whatever projections or telemetry Abaddon is interested in at any given moment. They might never stop talking around her, down silent tightbeams, through networks of fiberop infesting the walls like capillary beds.
But sometimes Chimp talks aloud in the darkness, at merely human speeds, in some tongue no human ever spoke. It may have been English in the distant past—now and then Aki catches syllables that might once have been kilopascal or isograv—but if so, it’s long-since metastasized into haunting sibilant gibberish. It echos down unlit corridors where convenient pickups send it upstream to her lampreys. It talks over the hums and hisses of working machinery in parts of the ship finally coming back to life after uncounted centuries offline.
And now—statistically impossible as it may be, that the only two ships in this endless labyrinth might just happen to pass in the night—the Chimp speaks in tongues on one side of a bulkhead while Aki cowers on the other, mere centimeters away.
She crouches frozen, terrified that even the slightest motion might give her away. She breathes small fast breaths that barely touch her diaphragm; she swears her knees are rattling loud as castanets. Telemetry bundled with past recordings has occasionally reported a transient drop in air temperature—a rolling atmospheric chill, as if Chimp were following some frozen ghost drifting through the catacombs―but here, now, the sensors insist the temperature is rock-steady. They must be malfunctioning. Aki’s blood is freezing in her arteries.
Wetness trickles along her thigh.
Eventually the Chimp falls silent. Abaddon does not answer. Aki has never heard Abaddon answer. Maybe Chimp isn’t talking to it after all. Maybe he’s hallucinating. Maybe this isn’t even anything new, maybe it’s how he’s always passed the long lonely ages when no one’s on deck. Maybe Chimp has an imaginary friend.
Maybe he’s just going insane.
Much later—after five or ten kilosecs, when she screws up enough courage to pop the panel a crack and slip a periscope through the grille—of course there’s nothing there at all. She crawls back to her lair and plays Heinwald’s sizzle reel a dozen times over, to atone for her cowardice.
Jesus Tittylickin’ Christ, you’re still alive! In an era of inexorably increasing vapidity and vacuity across the open net, it’s a breath of fresh air to read your thoughts, predictions, and creations here.
Nice to see you still pulling the thread of ineffable cosmic horrors after that gut-punch of a cliffhanger years ago
I, for one, welcome our new spiky goo overlords (they really can’t be worse than the (I hope)-non-spiky-but-probably-still-goo overlords we currently have IRL)
Glad to see you’ve been let out of your cave for a sec!
Haunting. Will this be in the next thing of the Sunflower series?
Also, always great to hear from you. If there’s absolutely nothing them corpo overlords allow you to disclose, and you’re not in the mood to engage with the internet on anything of any import, post cats. Cats are always a safe bet.
Thanks for the proof of life!
Can`t wait to read this
Glad you are still with us. We missed you.
After all this time, seems like we’re heading for happy endings all round. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy. 😉
If you’re into warm and fuzzy try out Ryan Gosling’s vintage curling sweater from Canada. Seventies style. Bold design. Knitting is cool again! The perfect item for when you slip out of your spacesuit. Who said saving the world could be cozy?
(Why do you always describe information as flowing “upstream” from sensors? I noticed it twice during an Echopraxia reread, and you seem to do it consistently.)
You know, that’s a really good point. I used “upstream” because the central system is higher in the hierarchy than the peripherals―further up the mountain, as it were. But now that you’ve pointed it out, the information is flowing towards that point, not away from it. So maybe “downstream” is more appropriate.
It doesn’t feel right in the gut. But technically I think you’re correct.
I always found the upstream/downstream dichotomy a bit confusing myself. And i’m a fucking programmer.
When talking about software sources – this is more or less consistent. Dependencies are upsteam, the changes from them trickle downsteam to the dependent packages and finally to the user-facing binaries, that’s fine by me. Dependencies are in control, downstream is dependent on them and pulls their data into its own codebase without whining.
But with sensors? So, if they send data downstream, let’s say. But that means that control sends commands to sensors upstream. It’s higher hierarchically, but lower conceptually? Should maybe sensors push the data upstream, into the control point, and control point send commands downstream? I doubt there is a stabilised point of view on that one.
I wholeheartedly approve your being-aliveness, and more Sunflower stuff is always great news. It might be just few short, bottled stories, but it feels like there’s still multiple doorstopper tomes worth of potential in this setting.
On completely unrelated note, since everyone and their dog is talking about it, what do you think about Project Hail Mary? On one hand, the book is almost complete spiritual anthitesis of your stuff on pretty much every subject, from hope, through cooperation, to communication and first contact.
But on the other hand, the earth in the background its a setting where any patient enough schizo in the deep woods with a small solar panel setup could easily manufacture a whole lot of direct matter to energy conversion explosive. Multikiloton worth of boom that could be plausibly hidden in a bottlecap, gives no signature other than rather mild thermal one, and is avaiable for everyone who’s angry and patient enough. Ted Kaczynski, eat your heart out…
That sounds like the kind of stuff The Colonel would tackle. Also, the term “Project Hail Satan” popped into my mind.
It is what kids nowadays call “hope slop”.
That thing looks freaky as hell. I like the idea of Chimp losing it like a person would instead of going rogue like other AIs; it matches with his more personable nature.
Oh, and what’s the word on Fold Catastrophes? I saw it pop up on my local bookstore’s pre-order section.
He lives!
Hey Vteam,
Yes, new Sunflowers novella. Gremlin is the title. And I tried to post a cat pic, but I kept getting an error message about “some of the field value is incorrect”. After trying several differents graphics formats and failing at them all, I went to the dashboard and discovered that the wpDiscuz plug-in, which allows graphics and threading and all sorts of cool formatting in comments, needed an update. So I updated it and it completely broke the fucking blog. I had to deactivate and now there are no threads or graphics or anything. My version of WordPress is horribly out of date but every time I try to update it, it tells me I already have the most recent version. Which is bullshit. I can’t even leave a comment on my own blog now without signing in as a general reader. So now this site is operating in the Stone Age, and I’m looking at Christ knows how many days or weeks it’ll take to figure out the problem.
All because you wanted cat pics. I hope you can sleep at night.
It was a really cute cat pic, too.
It’s the new anti-basilisk protection.
ASCII art?
So, essentially… The blog has an OG gremlin?
Essentially yes.
[This comment was a lot funnier before the WP gremlin ate the image.]
>All because you wanted cat pics. I hope you can sleep at night.
>It was a really cute cat pic, too.
So I’m to blame both for the broken blog, and for the kitty not getting her minute of fame. And a cute one as well.
All righty.
On the other hand, you did steal a number of hours of sleep from me with your graphomania, so let’s call it even.
Have you thought of offloading the maintenance of the infrastructure onto someone else? It’s not that I doubt your ability to do it yourself, it’s just that it’s not your job and you are obviously doing more important things, like writing and taking photos of cats.
.
Kitty!
Please tell me you vigorously rubbed that gorgeous and soft tummy!
This forehead needs to be kissed until the owner escapes with an annoyed “Mraawr!”
Call me egyptian I’m worshipping this cat so much.
Don’t know WordPress but any time you need to offload cat maintenance I’m here for you, bud.
Hi, I’m a slutty pussy and I like to lap warm milk, have my tummy tickled and play with feathers.
Yes, I want to see cat pics. There have been a lot of cute and funny cat pics over here, so please keep them coming.
In all seriousness though, I’m glad to hear that it is coming along, and that it is going to be a novella. It’s nice to have a good story to look forward to, even if it is going to be a dark one.
I really hope there is a Sunflower’s omnibus with all short stories and novella’s at the end of this journey.
Before the comments get disabled, let me just say we enjoy your interactions with your lowly fan base and we’d appreciate if you, like, pinged up from time to time. Simple “been moose ridin’ all day” or “been gorging myself on this scrumptious maple syrup – it’s an absolutely magnificent harvest this spring” are enough. Or whatever pastime you Canadians prefer over there.
How about “I’ve been compulsively masturbating to AI porn”?
I mean, sure, okay, yes; but, honestly, at this point in the human race [downward] who among us does not claim that?
Oh, you tease! Now enquiring minds demand to know, what was Peter actually doing before he wrote he was compulsively masturbating to AI porn? (Followed by the best deals on brain bleach.)
Oh, wow. What a scoop. Breaking news.
Do you know how to know if someone is a compulsive AI masturbator nowadays? Check the fucking pulse.
“A Canadian terrorist drove himself into the hyperglycaemic coma with maple syrup” is orders of magnitude juicier headline.
Have you seen that viral comment in which someone observed that human male reactions to AI porn reminded them of male beetles which preferred to try and mate with beer bottles, because the bottles were even shinier than the female beetles?
Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Although I’ll admit those beer bottles are a distressingly tight fit.
Beer mugs, now, they fit perfectly.
Dude. My deepest sympathies on account of your tragic groinal elephantiasis.
Huh. Is there an echo in here?
… Nah, it’s just WordPress UI exhibiting some unfortunate behaviours in Chrome on mobile…
Groinal elephantiasis, or magnapenis squid? (Please god let it not have a 90° elbow)
I’m not a doctor but this thing you mentioned does sound like a health condition manifesting as joint pain at the knees, caused by the daily strain of carrying around an enormously massive literary talent.
“I really hope there is a Sunflower’s omnibus with all short stories and novella’s at the end of this journey.”
I really hope that there’s a series of complementary Sunflowers novels intertwined with sunflowers video games, each emphasising the strengths of their particular format, covering a 15-billion year narrative arc. That’s what I really hope.
Tachyon sent a mail this morning telling me of your new book, Fold Catastrophes. Waiting till September as the world burns… ho fucking ho. But it ain’t called Gremlins
I mean, bought the novels, will buy the collection and will dang well buy any games you manage to get produced. Not sure there’s a way to shop it around to indie studios but it feels like there’s stuff out there that’s been developed within living memory that could vibe with various aspects of the Sunflowers Cycles – games like Signalis, Between Horizons or Duskers all tap into various elements of the premise in one way or another. Heck, one game could be an FTL styled roguelike where you’re playing AS the Chimp trying to optimize gate construction and gealing with increasingly unreliable to hostile crew . . . honestly, if there was a way to drum up the programmer base for it a Sunflower themed gamejam where up and coming gamedevs could result in a sort of game-anthology collection that showcased the different eras and aspects of the cycle. Would be harder to weave a narrative between all the subgames in that case but it’s doable (see the framing narrative in UFO 50 collection, for example?)
Interesting you should suggest that POV: I always thought the player should be the Chimp because Chimp is limited, as current game dialog engines are. It could eavesdrop on all sorts of fluent and eloquent conversations while its own responses would be keeping in line with the state of the video-game art. And as that state improved, future iterations of the franchise could posit Chimp getting an upgrade, so its conversational skills would improve. Basically turn a limitation of the technology into a plot point.
The people I discussed that with were less than enthused, sadly. Apparently Chimp is hard to identify with or something.
The trick is in your pitch: “Five Nights at Freddy’s, but in Space!” (Also a dev budget that’s the size of a napkin. Douglas Adams you are not.)
Burn some hours on itch.io—there’s absolutely no lack of insane game creators making mad stuff for pure love, e.g. search “liminal” for a gentle start. Somewhere between MyHouse and Mouthwashing there surely lies the computer game of your dreams.
Or, “Help us, Tia Carrere, you’re our only hope!”
You might want to look up the game “Observation”. You play as damaged AI on a realistic-ish space station.
Sadly, very few people heard about it. Which is a shame, because it is pretty unique piece of narrative. Not exactly a groundbreaking masterpiece, and certainly flawed in some aspects, but at least it has its own ideas.
Had no idea about Fold Catastrophes. Sounds brilliant.
Oh, MAN!!
Cannot bloody wait!!
Yeah, you probably just heard some lame-ass celebrity was writing the introduction and that’s what you’re interested in. I can see right through you.
Woah, apparently you wizarded the blog problem away. You should do this for a living. Let’s check if the pictures work.
They do not. Oh, well. You can’t always get what you want.
Absolutely the pictures work:
You just have to use the little “add image” link on the toolbar: drag’n’drop turns the image into alphanumeric porridge.
I’m not using drag and drop. I’m using the little picture icon in the lower right corner, with a tooltip “Attach an image to this comment”. It allows to select a file, and that’s that. I think you can attach images because you’re the only registered user, everyone else is a guest and there’s probably a disabled setting “allow guests to post images” somewhere. For example, I’m trying to attach an image to this post as well, without drag and drop.
Try it now. This is me posting under a pseud, and it seems to be working at last.
Nope. Doesn’t seem to work for me. Gotta admit, I can’t test on windows or mac.
This is weird. I’m using Linux myself, so it’s not an OS issue.
Hey! Anyone else out there! Can you post images in comments?
Image test
It’s settled, then. It’s Vteam’s fault.
I honestly can’t think of a way to redeem myself. The japanese used to have something fitting for a shame like this, but it still wont cut it.
Hahaha, “cut it”, get it? Hahaha, I’m smart! I can words!
I can’t think of a way to redeem yourself either. No wait, I can. Book a flight to Rio and climb up on your knees to the Christ-the-Redeemer statue. You may meet other pious pilgrims on the way who offer you encouragement. I thought I’d answer you since Peter appears to be busy and I like to check in on me mateys before the Ovaltine kicks in.
I tried the other day, failed. Possibilities:
ETA: It’s not #2, since I tried to Attach an image to the above post which does have text, and WP ate it as well.
As for when I drag-n-drop the image directly into the text editing box, it looks fine but when I click “Post Comment” this is what gets posted (the raw image data encoded as base64 text):
data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQAAAQABAAD/2wBDAAYEBQYFBAYGBQYHBwYIChAKCgkJChQODwwQFxQYGBcUFhYaHSUfGhsjHBYWICwgIyYnKSopGR8tMC0oMCUoKSj/2wBDAQcHBwoIChMKChMoGhYaKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCj/wgARCAL2AlgDASIAAhEBAxEB/8QAHAAAAQUBAQEAAAAAAAAAAAAABQACAwQGAQcI/8QAGgEAAwEBAQEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAECAwQFBv/…KIpv82OOY71Y6wnrAcEHMEU
So I’d be leaning towards WP being a picky snot. So it goes.
Yeah, those symptoms plague me as well. The alphanumeric hash on drag’n’drop, and the insistence on having text in the box before the comment will post. Can’t speak to FF on MacOS. I’m using FF on Ubuntu (although I’m hearing increasing ominous things about Mozilla, I don’t like their paternalistic “We’re going to force our updates down your throat whether you like it or not” attitude, and I used Brave for all financial/confidential stuff anyway), and if works fine if you follow the protocols.
Worth pointing out it’s actually the WPDiscuz plug-in we’re talking about here, not WP overall (which can’t even handle attachments in comments, last I checked?)
There may be a reason for the forced updates, check out project glasswing: Anthropic created a new AI that is extra good at finding software vulnerabilities so they’re rushing to patch as much as they can before releasing it (Or something equivalent is released by someone else)
Their pets, feed them. Keeping raccoons keeps us all safe.
I would say I detect a slightly disdainful curl of whiskers although on closer inspection with a magnifying glass I notice they are slightly pointing down like Caesar’s thumb at the gladiatorial games of old.
Perhaps my slutty pussy comment was indecorous. I apologize, although the captions do sort of write themselves.
:-))))))))))
Meant for Abaddon, really.
But it’ll be nice to have a hardcopy of Fold Cat on my shelves too……..
That’s exactly the case.
Welcome back!
I enjoyed Project Hail Mary, bit of hope fiction is nice now and then – though I’m cynical enough that when (mild spoilers) the ship gets in trouble after parting ways with Rocky I briefly wondered if that dastardly alien had sabotaged it.
You could maybe get chatgpt or claude to troubleshoot the website, they’re good at that sort of thing. We may as well get some use out of these things before they turn us into paperclips.
Just saw it over the weekend. Mixed feelings. Might review.
Do it, please?
Somebody needs to adress the Timothy mcVeigh in the room with the whole astrophage thing.
Yeah, people seem to be bandying the phrase “Hard SF” around far too loosely these days…
Where’s you seem to always interpret that “hard” in a very specific way.
It’s like half the time the pictures work, and other half they just dont.
Book Cover Reveal Party
At Peter’s party, which is a book party without an actual book, the soirée was in full swing.
Instead of attending Peter’s party, Dave and 002 we’re hanging out at his house drinking. “I’m at Dave’s house not at Peter’s book party. I mean are the aliens here?” 002 quipped in her confessional, “like this is some real epic shit.”
Dave was still upset about the way that Peter treated him at Richard’s disco party. He told 002 how “mad” Peter was when he interrupted him on the dance floor. “I’ll hate him forever for this,” before adding “No, I’m kidding.”
It’s been a long time since 002 got a mention on these pages…
Been watching Ze Frank’s True Facts? Plasmodial Slime Molds by any chance?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k_GTIL7AECQ&pp=0gcJCU8Co7VqN5tD
Long time fan of Ze Frank. Maybe even a bigger fan of Jerry.
Unrelated to the fic above, but relevant to the themes of a lot of your work:
https://indi.ca/how-the-fossil-record-shows-the-rise-of-machines/
https://indi.ca/we-live-under-an-evil-ai-empire-already/
Interesting and provocative, although I think Charlie Stross beat indi to the punch by several years on that whole corporations-are-AI riff. Also I don’t even buy that ET would regard Voyager as a life form, much less a superior one, given how rudimentary it is (although I do appreciate the larger point being made). And I have to look askance at any classification that puts Russia as a “free” entity outside White Empire.
Still. I don’t have to agree with every point to appreciate the perspective.
Or Ridley Scott, if we’re counting. (Though Fritz Lang and Karel Čapek might have words.) But a psychopath is just a particularly efficient predator; it’s the narcs you really gotta worry about.
Oh, hey, gotta go, AM is calling.
Agreed regarding Voyager and Russia.
I think the author falls for the old trap of “if a thing (like the US) is bad, then whatever opposes it must be good.”
I was more interested in the corporations-as-AI / humans-as-hosts-for-machines angle, and must have somehow missed Stross doing the same thing.
I’ve read Singularity Sky but have not yet read Accelerando, which is probably where I’ll find it.
I’ll have to add that to my list.
Since it’s mentioned twice already, I just have to wedge myself into this conversation.
The corporations-are-AI thing is a pretty compelling idea, but there’s a pretty strong criticism levelled against it – a corp can’t be smarter than its people.
Robert Miles lays it out and sums it up pretty good, and he does AI safety for a living. Yeah, yeah, I know, appeal to authority, sue me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw
I’m very not sold on the corpos-as-slow-AI analogy. You have to fit the definition of “AI” around it to make it work.
Corpos are far more like bacteria. Distributed, virtualised bacteria living in intersubjective reality, which chase money gradients the way that the slimy meatspace kind chase sugar gradients.
“AI”, by contrast, doesn’t even follow a reward signal when it isn’t actively being trained. Set it loose with some kind of embodying wrapper in a continuous training environment (hello, social media algorithms!), and then it starts to better resemble a corporation; but only because it starts to better resemble a bacteria.
“A corp can’t be smarter than its people” is surely on even thinner ice. What’s “smart”? A brain with 10000 neurons is better at hunting food than a brain with just one, so we’d call it “smarter”; are corporations better at hunting profit than individual humans? We get to call their behaviour dumb and self-destructive because our billion-plus years of head start clues us that they are far too big and hungry for the tank that they have grown in. But the proof of who is really smarter only comes from the pudding of whether or not they ultimately survive; and if the Nick Lands of this world happen to somehow be correct, then we are in for a surprise there.
Okay, in general, we don’t have “AI”. What you see nowadays, and what is now being trained, all these LLMs and generated porn – is machine learning. Very sophisticated expert systems. Roided out matrix multiplication.
As for “smart” – i mean, arguing about words is the most boring argument imaginable, one needs to be a born lawyer to deliberately engage in such an activity. Look it up in the dictionary.
You are trying to mix up survival and intelligence. I don’t know if its deliberate or you’re just a bit shaky there yourself, but this just looks weird. By that logic one of the smartest creatures on the planet is the horseshoe crab (not a crab). Go ask his opinion on your diatribe, I bet he’s got some remarks.
Not his fiction. That’s from a talk he gave to some evil corporation or other (Google, I think?)
Is there a unification of all the existing parts of this story somewhere? Like, a list of links?
Or has the web moved on from such things; and now we’re supposed to just ask whatever crackbot is available on the nearest piece of rental furniture to recite the story to us, or something like that?
Three of them appear on my free backlist page (just look for the links with “Sunflowers” in parentheses). Ultimately the goal is a cohesive ominbus or series of books. But until someone offers me an enormous advance for such a megaproject, I’ll just squeeze them out now and then around the edges of other work.
I see! Thank you!
Few observations:
1. Sunflowers is quite the “Dark Star Trek” serial setup! (Though I’m sure would have to shed several Moh levels to work on screen.)
I can see why you couldn’t leave it alone, even though the first story tells the whole story and the following ones have a hint of animatronic taxidermy to them.
2. Being also a twist on the old Colony Ship trope, it reminds me of Bear’s Hull Zero Three; which is in most respects an inferior work, but hits a few interesting horror notes that are definitely adjacent to your favourite stomping grounds.
3. I’m not sure if I’ve read anything before which goes that deep and direct at the similarity of any spaceship-like system to Plato’s Cave. Maybe even more on the nose than Blindsight.
I think that Egan brushed against the idea a few times from a “difference that makes no difference is no difference” angle; but (for fairly reasonable in-verse reasons) never gave the characters motives and impulses which were seriously at odds with those of the “ship” – and so never forced them to agonise over whether or not the “ship” was actively lying to them, nor whether or not they were even functionally separate entities to it.
(I’m pretty sure that “long haul voyager mutters deliriously to itself” has been done a good few times, though. The whole Eriaphora system resembles that.)
4. At 20% of light speed – stated top speed, so granted that they’re probably not hitting it most of the time – the ‘sporans would cross the Milky Way in only 500KY from our perspective, less from theirs. So presumably they’re extra-galactic by now?
5. You’re racking up quite a Fermi bill by casually sprinkling plain ol’ regular physics aliens into a world in which barely-off-baseline apes can throw planetoids around at a fifth of light speed! (No shortage of Unreliable Narrator cop-out available, though…?)
Plus, can Kardashev really be taken seriously, without the hubris of assuming our own brains to be suspiciously close to the optimum solution for usefully modelling reality – an idea which you have pretty much signed your own name upon in boot prints by now?
6. Eriaphora has its own little Fermi problem, lampshaded in the very first passage of the series. It’s established that smaller craft could catch up with it, and that its wake appears to contain a large variety of civilisations. So what’s stopping ANY of those from sending an invasion force, never mind a postcard?
…
As you can no doubt tell from a 6-strong list of brain farts, I enjoyed those three stories quite a bit, especially the first one.
Ye cannae change the laws of Phenomenology!
Looks like my reply was sent to moderation. Is that supposed to happen for non-novel posters (I think it might not be)? Or are the WP gremlins having a go at our host again?
A catching up comment.
Before you get too smug about calling the lone star tick as a planetary self-healing system, you should know that PETA proposed it in a joke post – I think it was in the 2000s sometime. Must have been sometime between when Blindsight first hit the infowaves, and the end of the post-war bubble.
A joke post (at least, I thought it was, Poe help me). In the middle of the “War On Terror” era. Advocating deliberate spreading of the lone star tick. PETA. Really.
Unless I don’t share the exact same history as you – and from your perspectives, I imagined the whole incident.
Nah, it sounds like PETA. I don’t begrudge them. There are times when you really shouldn’t give a shit about “reading the room”.
So when does the green sidebar entry go up for Team Trump’s ingenious attack on world fossils consumption and food production?
(Very mixed, I know, with some places now burning coal to get by. But on the other side of the Suez, Ukraine are trying to help too.)
Yeah, I think I’d argue that the net Trumpian Impact is still deep in the red. I’m keeping my eye on it, though.
Reminds me a little of an old Tom-Baker-era episode of Doctor Who where the Doctor has a chance to eradicate the Daleks and decides not to, because of all the alliances and friendships forged amongst all the species who united against them.
Ah, a man of culture and taste. Genesis of the Daleks (1975). Space Nazis from The Good Old Days (before Space Nazis got cool).
Mind you, even bogtastic narcfuhrer Adolph gifted our world the People’s Car and the Death of the British Empire, so not 100.00% terrible.
Heh. IIRC, the Daleks didn’t even really start off as Space Nazis; they were just a slap-up monster which went so immediately viral that they had to keep coming back, and so the IRL Nazis got grabbed as a handy template.
Without those origins, they might not have had the iconically ridiculous design for Davies/Tennant to riff upon in the <i>Genesis of the Daleks</i> retcon skit a couple of years ago.
Speaking of (possibly) missing sidebar entries, China’s multi-decade tree planting project around the Gobi was in the science news very recently. Maybe an opportunity to add a green…
Peter, would you be interested in selling any autographed copies of Fold Catastrophies?
I’d be happy to autograph copies of Fold Catastrophes. Racking up an inventory of signed copies and then charging a premium for them seems a bit crass, though.
Fair enough.
I could purchase 2 copies–one to read, one to send your way for signing, if that works.
Will Gremlin be a printed work like Freeze-Frame Revolution or will it be added to the backlist (thank you for doing with those stories there, btw).
Definitely printed.
The whole free-backlist thing was a hail-Mary to keep Blindsight from sinking without a trace when Tor refused to promote it on initial publication. I broke my contract to do it, but my editor signed off on the strategy (Cory Doctorow was also a Tor author, and was giving his stuff away under the Creative Commons, so there was precedent). Tor has intermittently tried to get me to take those parts of my backlist offline in the years since, but they’ve never offered me anything in return for that, and― given that the only reason I still have a career as a writer now is because I broke some rules to get Blindsight into the public eye― I’m reluctant to backtrack on the one strategy that saved my ass.
Subsequent books, though, have involved new contracts. Everything may end up on the Backlist page eventually (like, maybe after I die), and I expect to keep posting short stories there, but the longer stuff is probably off-limits for the foreseeable future.
So says every dealer: first hit is free. Now I daren’t donate my brain to medical science or they’d be pulling tendrils of P. Wattsi out of everything for years.
Peter Watts still knows how to write. Can’t wait for this one.
It’s not a Mayfly, it’s a Cadddis Fly. I read about this years ago and thought it very cool.
It’s completely unrelated to your post but I thought the biologist in you might find this insect human collaboration interesting.
https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/07/hubert-duprat-caddisflies/
Can’t wait. You got my money as soon as this comes out.
PD: Did you ever get proper credit for being the first author to perfectly describe an LLM in fiction? (that seemingly-conscious entity the multi-core brain linguist lady has a verbal duel with in Blindsight, on approach to the creepy ship-organism)
Actually, I think you could go all the way back to Starfish, where some puffed-up blowhard based on someone I knew in grad school had a conversation about board games with a head cheese. Beat Blindsight be a good seven years.
And yeah, both have been pointed out on occasion, vis-a-vis their relevance to LLMs. Sometimes not even by me.
After a significant pause, greetings again from the edge of tomorrow (and the known world, apparently).
Watching people I know struggle through the same issues of decrepit, increasingly ravenous digital infrastructure piling against them – makes me feel sympathetic. I hope that they can carry on with a certain reserved demeanour towards many new and unknown things that are coming their way. I mean, I could only come so far thanks to seeking cooperation with other people of goodwill, and this is how I intend to proceed again.
The drones are falling from the sky and the internet connections are tearing up and coiling into the hoops, but it does not deter me from looking where I want and expressing myself in a manner that I can. I know how much worse it could be and how privileged we are still thanks to our bravery.
I am also looking forward towards whatever dear author is cooking up for their audience. I’ll be sure not to mise a single scrap of information.
In the meantime, here’s a little gift. It bugs me a lot these years in it’s laconic suggestion.
https://cloowerwooma.bandcamp.com/track/cloower-wooma-false-freedom