Last week I was still flying high on the reviews I had received for The Deep Dark Well (8 Five Star and 2 Four Star). Also received three five star reviews for The Shadows of the Multiverse. Most of the reviews were detailed, and some let me know what fault the reader found with my work, despite the praise. That seems to be the thing about good reviews. They point to particulars in the story that they liked, as well as what didn’t work for them. Some things are easily correctable, typos, formatting, misspelling a character’s name half the time (which can happen with made up names). Some are not so easy, like changing a book from a multicharacter, multiviewpoint work to one with a single strong focus. I got one of those the other day, a three star which complimented me on my science and the descriptions of hyperspatial dimensions, but came down hard on the use of so many different characters in different scenes stretched across an Interstellar Empire. I knew that was a risk with that kind of story, but I have always loved Harry Turtledove, who makes a living with such works. Another review loved that approach, so it seemed to work for some people, which is all I can ask. The guy who left the three star later wrote a glowing, detailed five star for The Deep Dark Well, and also communicated with me on Amazon to let me know that he was reading The Shadows of the Multiverse and loving it.
Then I received a pair of two star reviews back to back on The Deep Dark Well, which was really ego deflating. The first review stated that the novel was not polished, and made a crack about self publishing, stating that the best reason to be published by traditional firms was that the writer received constructive criticism. And of course none of this constructive criticism was offered. I am still not sure what the reviewer meant by polished. Did he get an earlier version of the work before I learned how to format, and started more rigorous quality control procedures? Or did he mean the writing style itself was not “polished’. The second one was just as enlightening. The reviewing mentioned a few books by masters scifi writers and said that I was not there yet. Remarks were also made about poor writing, but nothing that gave me any useful information. The most painful remark was how the book might be a good story for young readers (children?) Then I received the five star review which talked about how intelligent and thought provoking The Deep Dark Well was, and how I treated the reader like he had some intelligence of his own. I guess what I came away with from this is most negative reviews, even though they hurt, are pretty much useless, except to tell you that they thought you sucked as a writer. While many good reviews actually tell the writer something about perceived strengths and weaknesses. I corresponded with a friend who is a best selling scifi author on Amazon, and he pretty much had the same assessment. And I guess that I have arrived as a writer when I am getting attacked in the minority of reviews.
Today is the last day of my free KDP Select Promotion of The Shadows of the Multiverse. It was not doing well through Sunday, and I had only given away a little less than five hundred books. Yesterday it picked up, and by this morning I had given away 2,500 of them, and this evening is sitting at 2,828, and was ranked #84 on Kindle Free Books for some of the afternoon. Just hope I will get some reviews out of them, and the book will pick up in sales in the coming month. I haven’t tracked the other books like this, but since I learned how to use Amazon Reports I will do so in the future. Are Mondays and Tuesdays really the best days for giveaways, and the weekends not worth anything? Or was it just a statistical blip. I was trained in graduate level statistics, and know better than to put much emphasis on a One N study, unlike the people I work for. I will track again on my next promotion in three weeks and see if there is a trend there, then report it to all of you out there.
Archives
All posts for the month October, 2012
The Shadows of the Multiverse is Officially live today as a Free Ebook on Amazon through KDP select. The promotion worked very well for The Deep Dark Well, not as well for The Hunger, but as this is a science fiction novel I am hopeful it will do as well as TDDW and will get out into the hands of many readers, who will generously go back to the Amazon page and write a review (hint, hint). The promotion will run through Tuesday, 10/30/2012, after which the book will be offered for the ridiculously low price of $2.99. So far I have gotten three reviews of this novel, all five star, with another promised from someone who told me it was better than TDDW. Don’t know about that, but I think it is a very good novel, one which fans of both hard science fiction and science fantasy should enjoy.
Set nine hundred years in the future, when the solar system is the home of several governments and almost a trillion citizens, many of them in the mass of space habitations in the Dyson Swarm around the sun, the human race has spread to other stars by use of the many faceted gates that orbit a half dozen planets in each of the Galaxies throughout our Cosmos. There are lots of ruins across this space, both eroded on planetary surfaces and in pristine condition in the vacuum of space, showing that a lot of sentient races have appeared and disappeared throughout the last ten billion years. The real mystery is that many seem to have fallen at the same time, in cycles, and that there are no signs of a great war or natural catastrophe to explain where they went. And then we meet the catastrophe come to life, in the form of creatures from another dimension that fear our quantum minds. The mystery is solved, but unlike some mysteries finding out the truth does not in any way lessen the threat posed by the nightmare personified that is the Weavers (so called because they can weave reality into the form they want).
Three unlikely heroes are called to fight the Weavers, who are pretty much immune to the weapons deployed by the space faring races. Lucille Yamamoto is the captain of a Terran Federation battle cruiser. Known as Lucky Lucille throughout her career for her uncanny streak of fortunate circumstances, Lucille is a more than competent captain who is hated for her luck by many over her. Howard Turner was once a physicist who gave up his research into weapons of mass destruction based on the Zero Point Energy of Space. Known as Howard the Luck in scientific circles, Howard is also an extremely fortunate man for whom the ball always seems to bounce in his direction. Siobahn Hunsicker is the child of missionaries, and the third member of the trio who are the only hope of the Universe. The three must learn to use their abilities to fight creatures of equal ability, and must do so before it is too late. I hope my readers will find this one as imaginative and enjoyable as The Deep Dark Well. Get it now while it is free, and remember, reviews are much appreciated. And now for an excerpt.
“What in the name of the ten hells are they doing?” exclaimed Admiral G’Narjanasan.
“It would seem to serve no purpose,” agreed the tactical officer.
“How far are they from us?” asked the admiral through his com link, wishing he were not so constrained by his acceleration tube.
“Over seven light minutes,” said the tactical officer.
“Over six hours travel time at their current velocity,” said the nav officer.
“Their ship would reach us before those projectiles,” said the tactical officer.
“So the projectiles serve no offensive purpose,” said the admiral, his eyestalks straining to see the view of the enemy ship. Purely a reflex action as the image was actually projected directly into his visual cortex. “Do they serve a defensive purpose? Or a diversion?”
“I assume they were intended for one of those purposes,” said the tactical officer. “Which one I am unsure of. And what good it will do them I am also unsure.”
“They must feel it serves a useful purpose,” said the nav officer.
“We will just have to wait and see,” said the admiral. “But they are of no immediate concern to us. What of the convoy?”
“They are heading away from us at maximum acceleration,” stated the nav officer. “But they can at best make twelve gees with their slower freighters. We should be within effective main weapon’s range in approximately ten hours.”
“And the battle-cruiser will be within range of our weapons,” said the tactical officer, “and we within range of hers in about seven hours.”
“One capital ship against our entire force,” said the admiral. “What can they do without any support?”
What do they expect to do, thought the admiral. It depended on the ship’s commander. Was he a fool or a genius? Or would chance decide the fate of the human ship? Only time would tell. Seven hours’ time.
The admiral turned his attention to other matters. Like the disposition of the enemy ships they were vectoring toward. The escorts were falling back from the merchant vessels even farther, obviously hoping to sacrifice themselves that their charges might escape. A false hope, thought G’Narjanasan. The escorts would cause minimal damage to his own ships while he destroyed them utterly. And then went on to sweep up the defenseless cargo vessels.
“Detonation,” called one of the bridge officers, catching the attention of the admiral who brought up the view toward the battle-cruiser. One of the warheads had flared, causing sensory nodes to switch to heavy filter mode to dampen the deluge of radiation. Seconds later another of the warheads flared, followed by yet another and then a fourth. Seconds passed as the other forty-six warheads continued to fall toward the fleet.
The admiral noticed it just as the tactical officer brought it to his attention.
“The battle-cruiser is gone.”
Yes, the capital ship had seemed to disappear from his sensors, shielded by the flood of radiation that interposed their view of the human ship.
“The human captain set that spread of warheads on a path that would cloud their approach,” said the admiral. “Keep a close watch in case we catch some hint of movement out there. But they obviously intend to detonate those other warheads at points that will maximize their ability to hide the ship.”
“Or make us think that they maximize it,” said the navigation officer. “If I was the captain I would make sure the pattern of detonations gave us multiple possibilities to think of.”
“Contact the other captains,” ordered the admiral. “Calculate all possible paths that the enemy ship might take and keep running the calculations to update probabilities. Assign a ship to sweep the path of each possibility with a portion of their sensory systems.”
“Aye sir,” replied the flag captain, as communications officers worked diligently to send the messages on secured tight beams to the other ships of the fleet.
That devil might cause more damage than I find acceptable, thought the admiral. But they would not stop the fleet from reaching its target. Nor would they escape destruction themselves. The admiral relaxed, sure in his decisions and confident in the ability of his squadron to handle anything the inferior enemy force could throw at him.
Find it here. The Shadows of the Mutliverse
As stated in my last blog entry, I will be offering my sort of hard science fiction novel The Shadows of the Multiverse for free on Kindle from Friday, 10/26/2012 through Tuesday, 10/30/2012. I say sort of hard scifi because, while the underpinnings of the setting are based on real world physics, there are definitely some fantastic elements involving the quantum mind. Like, is Schrödinger’s Cat just a thought experiment, or, if there is no sentient mind to see it fall, does a tree really fall in the woods? And by logical extension, is a really powerful quantum mind able to change reality to suit its purposes. Still, in the reread just before setting up the promotion I was again fascinated by the possibility of humans become Gods for all practical purposes.
The other dimensional creatures who all have this power are the antagonists of the story. While not really intelligent as we would judge such, they possess powerful quantum minds that are able to warp and change reality in our Universe. And they fear the power of other quantum minds that might develop among the intelligences of our Universe. So they resort to the solution that so many humans have resorted to in the past. They exterminate intelligences in our Universe so they will not grow to threaten their hegemony over the dimensions. So intelligent species grow in our Universe, spread out through space, develop the rudiments of the quantum mind in some of their members, and then the monsters appear and wipe the Universe clean of intelligent life, until the next cycle.
I originally sent this novel out to publishers under the title Weavers of Reality, the Weavers being the transdimensional creatures who are the enemy. That name was change from Quantum Reality. The problem was I really did not like either name, and this after coming up with the title The Deep Dark Well for the book before. Sometimes titles are easy, other times they are very difficult. The creatures are still called the Weavers. I had thought of calling them the Shadows, but as a fan of Babylon Five I thought that name was already taken. But Shadows still came out in the title.
The idea for the gates of course came from many sources. Fredrick Pohl, Stargate SG-1 among others. The gates are a little bit different though. Each is a large globe with three million facets, each leading to another gate somewhere across the Universe. And every gate in the Universe also has three million openings, not all leading to the same places as other gates, linking hundreds of billions of star systems into a network. The bottom line is that though the nearest stars are still years of travel time away, a habitable system three billion light years distant is just a jump through the gate. Civilizations exist in bubbles of space linked by the gates, while the Universe at large is still a mystery. It has a great effect on strategy, as the only way to attack an enemy system is through the gates, and fortifications are built around them to prevent a successful assault. Also, reinforcements are only a jump away. So wars are normally a series of overwhelming assaults until both sides get tired of being whipped by forces that outnumber them at some points, while they outnumber the enemy at other places, and the ebb and flow really favors no one.
The Shadows of the Multiverse will probably be a stand alone novel. There is not a lot more to do with the characters (and you will have to read the book to see why). I may, someday, write in this Universe again, or maybe not. Still, I hope my readers will enjoy it, and it will make them want to try another one of my books. And now for an excerpt.
“Goddamitt,” said Lt. Marishana Mangana. Lucille looked up from the acceleration tank she was crawling into to see what the assistant tac officer was looking at. The image of a battleship appeared on the main viewer, leaving the gate far to their rear.
“Shit,” added the captain to the cussing going through the bridge. Flashes appeared at the front of the long cylinder as a dozen missiles left their acceleration tubes and headed for their targets. Matter/antimatter warheads exploded into one of the covering destroyers, while the invisible beams of lasers ate through the hull of another.
“We aren’t at war with the Tripods,” exclaimed Lt. Ngyen. “What the hell are they doing?”
Taking advantage of surprise, thought Lucille. The poor bastards at the gate picket hesitated for a moment and paid for it with their lives. A single warhead impacted on the alien battleship, blasting a small hole in the forward hull. Within a second the counterattacking destroyer was spiraling away from the gate, a lifeless wreck. Another cylinder rushed from the gate, a second battleship. Followed by a third.
The lone remaining destroyer maneuvered as fast as her crew could handle, moving along the side of the gate sphere as if trying to escape. Two of the Tripod battleships flared thrusters as they turned to follow, trying to lock their stationary particle beams on the target that was dodging and weaving away from their laser turrets. A missile left a tube, followed by another. But the destroyer’s crew was on the ball and a dozen interceptors left its stern mere microseconds after the missiles. Interceptor missiles struck, antimatter warheads erupted, and the space between hunter and hunted was filled with hellish radiation.
“They really foxed them,” said Ngyen, admiration in his voice.
Yes, thought Lucille. The radiation will interfere with target acquisition as well as helping to diffuse the power of laser and particle beams.
The destroyer rotated swiftly in a maneuver guaranteed to cause casualties if the crew wasn’t in the tanks. A message carrier streaked from a bow tube at thousands of gees acceleration, heading into a specific facet of the gate and disappearing before anyone could do anything about it.
Then the destroyer pulled another high gee turn, lining her own bow up on one of the pursuers and unleashing a volley of missiles. It was to be her last volley. Incoming fire tore through the radiation cloud. Some of the enemy missiles lost target lock and sailed past the smaller ship. Others smashed into her nose, warheads powerful enough to cripple a battle-cruiser like Navarin exploding into the thinly armored hull. The fire of explosion ran instantly down the length of the ship, engulfing her in a maelstrom of flame while pieces of hull and fragments of internal machinery spun into the cold of space, as if trying to escape the inferno. When the flame had attenuated enough to see the destroyer was gone as if it hadn’t existed. Gone too were the three hundred crewmen and women aboard.
Counter missiles from a tripod battleship took out two of the destroyer’s last volley. Laser fire from the target ship took out two more, leaving one to slam into the bow of the battlewagon. The battleship was most heavily armored at the bow, while the destroyer’s torpedo was not nearly as powerful as the ones that had been launched by the tripod battleships. But the fury of its explosion still caused damage to the battleship’s forward missile tubes and its particle beam projectors, as well as closing off its main KE cannon tube. It also took most of the ship’s forward momentum away in an instant, which couldn’t have been healthy for the crew.
The bridge crew of the Navarin cheered as the fury of the explosion stopped the enemy ship in its tracks. While not a deathblow, or even enough damage to keep the battleship out of action, it was still a weakening of enemy power.
The cheer died to a hush as another Tripod battleship popped from the gate, followed by another. Then in single file a mass of cruisers and destroyers. Within minutes the ships had clustered into task forces and all were boosting for destinations throughout the system. Lucille only had eyes for one of the groups though. On the tactical was displayed an arrow with figures showing two battleships, a heavy cruiser and five destroyers. Their heading was toward the convoy she was tasked to protect. The convoy she was nowhere near.
“Sharks are on the way,” she muttered to herself. “Already fifteen minutes on the way toward my minnows.”
“Into the tanks, everyone,” she shouted across the bridge. “Maximum accel in one minute.”
Crew scrambled into their tanks, completing the last second safety checks that would ensure that they survived the killing acceleration that was to come. All over the ship people did the same, disciplined to think of no other task than to seek safety. Because when full boost came in an emergency situation there would be no time to make sure everyone was safe.
I spent a good portion of this weekend filling out online forms to have my science fiction ebook, The Shadows of the Multiverse, promoted during its Free on Kindle days. Starting on Friday, 10/26/2012, and running through 10/30/2012, this novel will be free. Now I did really well on my promotion of The Deep Dark Well, giving away 3,800 copies and since selling over four hundred. The promotion for The Hunger, my Anti-twilight Vampire Novel, did not do nearly as well, garnering 1,100+ giveaways and selling twelve books after. I believe that Twilight is actually hurting the sales of these kind of books, either by being found wanting by those who love sparkly vampires, or thought to be the same by those trying to avoid those books. It’s still out there though, and any sale is a good sale. The Shadows of the Multiverse is a different kind of science fiction tale, incorporating quantum physics and string theory into the background. Using the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, in which nothing is said to be real until a sentient mind actually observes it (and I guess the cat doesn’t count) I thought about the possibility that some minds might be better at fixing reality than others. And a really strong quantum brain might actually be able to change reality despite the influence of lesser minds. I realize this might fall into the realm of fantasy or mysticism, but still, the idea seemed very cool to one who, as a child, watched Charlie X make people disappear in the original Star Trek.
Except for this little foray into mysticism, and the invention of the gates which transported ships across the Universe, the setting of the novel is pure hard physics. Lasers, antimatter, negative matter, all proven or at least hypothesized constructs. No force fields beside electromagnetic fields that we know exist. Ships move by sending mass in the other direction, though in a manner that makes our modern rockets look downright primitive. And thrusting has an effect of piling up gee forces on the passengers. A ship can thrust at ten gees, but the crew is going to catch hell. I really wondered if this would be a book that readers would like, or if it would be too far out there, both in the use of quantum physics and string theory and in the use of real world physics for space travel and battles. But several people who have read both books and praised The Deep Dark Well have said that this book is better. That is music to a writer’s ears. Both that one of his books was very good, and that the next book he wrote was even better. I’ll leave it to my readers to decide which is the better book. It’s just important to me that they are both considered good tales by the people who read them. So grab your free copy when it becomes available on Friday 10/26/2012, and remember to write a review when you finish. And now for an excerpt from the first appearance of the creatures.
Howard walked toward the door while the large negative matter gun was moved backwards on its frictionless rollers. Sarana continued to talk behind him, wrapping up her interview segment while a trio of holovid recorders caught the scene at the door from three different angles. Turner knew that they were joined by a multitude of sensory probes held by many of those present. Looking for any anomaly, any information that might be of interest.
“Go ahead and attach the opener,” he ordered. Men moved to obey, rolling the stout looking framework toward the door. Once in place they drove the laser bolts into the hard stone-alloy, holding the framework tightly to the wall. Armatures were swung out to the door while great suction cups were attached to the super strong material. As soon as the cups were pressed tightly to the door pumps evacuated what little air remained, forming a tight seal. Nothing else would connect. Not glues. Not electromagnetic forces. Not any kind of bolt.
“Crank her,” yelled Turner over the excited speech around him. The armatures began to move back, pulling at the door through the suction cups. At first nothing happened as the armatures, made of the strongest alloys known to human science, actually began to bend slightly. Turner was afraid the suction cups would pull free and he would have to rethink the project, finding another way to get through.
A loud cheer echoed through the chamber as the door began to shift, to swing outward slowly under the pressure of the pull. A centimeter at a time, as if it had a will of its own and was resisting its opening, the door moved. Turner studied his team as much as he studied the door. Good people all, they stayed at their instruments, recording every event as the vault was opened for the first time in millions of years.
With a last groan the door swung open. Turner swore under his breath as he took in the thickness of the material. Over four meters of that marvelous substance. If they could crack its secret alone they would all be rich beyond the dreams of the wealthiest mega-businesses in the Universe. The door continued to swing open, revealing a pit of total darkness that not even his light amplification augments could penetrate.
A couple of his crew moved forward with powerful laser flashes, shining the bright beams into the darkness. They might as well have flung matches into space for all the good it did. The darkness stood, undispelled, in violation of any physical laws Turner had ever heard of.
“Is there anything blocking the way?” he asked Smothers, who was monitoring the panel showing the accumulation of all the instruments aimed at the void.
“Nothing that I can monitor,” said the technician. “Nothing at all. Nothing on radar, ladar or hyperwave. It’s like the chamber doesn’t exist.”
“We’re getting an energy spike,” said one of the other techs. “Off the scale.”
In front of them the blackness of the void began to ripple, as if something on the other side was trying to push through. Weapons appeared in the hands of several of the crew. Howard had hired them for their toughness and ability to survive as much as for their archeological skills. Most had fought their way out of other sites, through aborigines or the hostile parties of other races.
A glowing tentacle thrust through the darkness, questing around as it felt its way. The crew started inching back, out of reach of the limb. A man raised his weapon to fire, a particle beam rifle from the look of it. Turner raised his hand to stop him as he shook his head. It had not shown hostile intent and he was damned if it would be his party that started a war with a race forty million years in the supposed grave.
“What the hell is that?” yelled Sanara Nakamura. Howard turned as the shadows began to materialize in the room, bringing feelings of terror with them. Nakamura screamed as one quickly engulfed her. A scream that turned into a croak as her body began to shrivel within the grasp of the creature. A desiccated corpse fell from the shadow as it moved on to the next target.
Turner backed toward the void as more of his people became victims of the unknown manifestations. Screams rang through the chamber along with the phuts and hisses of projectile weapons and particle beams. Weapons that did nothing to the things. Didn’t even slow them an instant, before they grabbed the weapon wielders and ended their lives. The shadows were growing more substantial with each kill and soon there was only one living human in the chamber.
Turner pressed his back against the black field, his mind reeling in terror as he tried to find some way out of the room. The tentacles continued to move about, almost cartoon like in the way they ended in midair. They quested about as if they knew he was there but couldn’t locate him for some reason.
Dr. Howard Turner frantically looked for a way out, a way past the creatures. He could find none. They quivered a moment as if confused, then all turned in his direction as if they had finally located him. They had him hemmed in and were tightening the circle slowly, as if they wanted to savor this last death. Howard pushed his back against the barrier with all his strength but it wouldn’t yield. His panicked mind forced him to try and put some more space between his life force and their ravenous appetite. Even if that space was measured in centimeters. He started as his back touched something soft, something moving. And he remembered the different local tentacle that had come through the void.
Without warning the appendage grasped him in a grip that was both secure and gentle. Through some connection he realized that this creature meant him no harm, and he did not fight it as it pulled him back into the darkness. There was an instant of resistance and then he was through, into another world, another dimension of existence. His poor monkey’s mind, only a couple of million years removed from the trees of home, could not grasp the world that was before him. Unconsciousness closed the world off from him in merciful blackness.
When I was growing up I was really into comics. I had Spider-Man 1 through 100. Same with the Fantastic Four, and all of the X-men. I also read Iron-Man, Hulk, Thor, Submariner, Captain America and the Avengers, as well as any of the new comics like Lucas Cage. Now I also read DC comics, Superman, Batman, the Flash and Green Lantern. They were just too powerful for my tastes though, except for Batman, who had no powers at all. Superman, the Flash and Green Lantern were more akin to Gods than people with special powers. I guess the Hulk might have been a God as well, but he didn’t possess the intellect of a conqueror. Anyway, Marvel advertised their characters as Superheroes with problems. And boy did they ever have some problems.
Peter Parker was probably the one most identifiable to a child. A teenager himself, starting the tale while he was still in high school, Parker was picked on by the bullies and didn’t have much luck with the girls. Parker was smart, a science wiz in the manner of comic book scientists who can whip up a great discovery in an afternoon. And then he received his gift at the hands of a radioactive spider (since then they have modernized the tale to give it more of a retrovirus from a genetically engineered spider feel). And his gift included superpowers, great strength, agility and speed, a danger sense, and the ability to stick to things like walls and ceilings. Not strength in the class of the Hulk, or even Iron Man or the Thing, but enough to make him stronger than normal people. Not speed like the Flash, or even the water downed Marvel version, Quicksilver, but fast enough to allow him to dodge most assailants. Agility and wall clinging were his greatest abilities, coupled with the web shooters that he built for himself. Spider-Man turned into a wisecracking crime fighter who was so unlike the shy teenager he was in real life. His most common opponents were street criminals, though he soon graduated to villains with either superpowers or some kind of gadget which gave them a leg up over ordinary cops. Against the unpowered Spider-Man was almost unstoppable. Against those with super abilities he often had to use his brains to supplement his powers. I thought of Spider-Man as sort of Batman on steroids, though Batman never did anything as cool as standing on the ceiling while knocking out two hoods with a double punch.
Enter the Rhino in Marvel Tales 32, about the time the art work of Spider-Man was settling into good quality renderings. The Rhino was very strong, powerful enough to run head on into a moving eighteen wheeler and knock it backwards, while destroying the engine and cab. Maybe not quite the strength of the Hulk, more like in the Thing class. His skin made him bulletproof. And he was into using his size and strength to steal things. Just what Spider-Man was meant to stop, leaving saving the world and the Universe to groups like the Avengers and the Fantastic Four. At first things didn’t look good for Spidey, who could punch away all he wanted without hurting the Rhino. Unfortunately for the Wallcrawler, the Rhino could hurt him, and did. Until Spider-Man used his brains and his agility against his more powerful opponent. Using the slings and arrows of his verbal barbs, Spidey kept the Rhino pumped on anger and kept luring the big guy into charging him, and missing. The Rhino ran into walls, lampposts, vehicles, over and over again until he started to show the wear. He wore down, as Spider-Man jumped and taunted. Then Spider-Man finished him off. Now why do I consider this the best hero villain match of all time? For one thing it is still memorable to me forty some years later. For the other it was a hero who the villain could crush in a toe to toe fight. And the hero beat the villain using brains, strategy and agility. Sure, it wasn’t the Hulk against the Submariner. And most of the battles by DC’s Godlike heroes were the other way around, their villains were weaker and used strategy and trickery to beat their more powerful opponents. It always easier to cheer for the outmatched one, and Marvel gave us one of those fights.
I learned a lot about plotting from this comic, though I didn’t realize it at the time. The villain should be more powerful than the hero, stronger, better equipped, etc. And then the hero should use his or her brains to outmaneuver the villain, letting the villain beat himself up so to speak. That is the stuff of drama. No Dudley Doright using his strength and good looks to beat the smarter Snidely Whiplash. Great stuff from Stan Lee.
I think of my world Refuge as being a very imaginative creation. I created kingdoms, continents, oceans, all very detailed. I filled in a history and then blended it with our own history, the product of millions of modern Earth people being transported to the world with their cultures and traditions. I decided that the concept of our fantasy archetypes originating on this world was also cool. I tried to fill in a little of this background, using the names that readers would be familiar with. When I sent the original novel out to publishers and readers in the late 1990s one of the comments I received over and over again was that I was using the same tired old fantasy races, Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, Halflings, and whatever. So when I did the updated novels I gave the races their own names, as well as the ones the transported humans gave them that fit their own conceptions of those creatures. So I still had elves, high (Ellala), forest (Conyastaya) and dark (Dikefin), and the dwarves (Gimikran, Dimikran, and Kidimikran), orcs (Grogatha) and others, and gave them evolutionary backgrounds that linked them to humans. But they still had the traditional names as well as the new names I made up for their own representations of self. So why even use these traditional names. Because that is what the humans would call them after seeing them. I think over ninety percent of humans, on seeing a slender fair humanoid with green eyes and pointy ears would immediately think of an elf. Or on seeing a squat muscular creature with a beard would think of the term dwarf. There was a world building article out years ago about how some authors would describe a long ear, furry, hopping herbivore on another planet as a Smeep. When anyone hearing the description would think rabbit. The point of the article was to use the common name instead of something made up when it was the common creature being represented. It made it less confusing to the reader.
So what about mythological type creatures? If the creature is fair skinned and pointy eared does it matter if it’s called an Ellala, an elf, a Melnibonean or Eldritch. Or if it lives seven hundred years, seven thousand, or is immortal. Most people would call it an elf, and it would seem natural that it live in the woods. Its ebony skinned brethren would make sense living underground, as would squat, heavy muscled creatures that we would call dwarves. They might be called different names in different works, but they are still dwarves.
I see this all the time in newly released books, even some that are put out by major publishers. They have a race of squat, powerful humanoids who are great miners and smiths. They have a different culture, maybe a different affinity for magic from other races of fantasy. Maybe they are scrupulously clean, not dirty like many fantastic dwarves. But they are still dwarves by any other name.
I love the both the subjects of Nanotech and Genetic Engineering. Maybe not in the real world, especially the genenging part, which may turn out to be a flippen nightmare in the near future. I don’t think we will start giving people superpowers like the X-men, though we may make a species of superior human that makes the rest of us obsolete, not something I look forward to. Conversely we may rid our species of many medical ailments and genetic disabilities which cause much misery, and that is a good thing. I have also heard that nanotech has been called the potential greatest gift and greatest danger to mankind. I think the danger has been exaggerated (see my post on why nanotech is not the danger it is portrayed in science fiction). Nanobots are just too small and fragile to handle a full scale attack by human science. However, the benefits are difficult to exaggerate.
Now modern Genetic Engineering is done by using a retrovirus or other chemical means to snip out a bit of the human gene while another inserts a different bit(the same process used by viruses to turn our cells into virus manufactories). This works with single bits of DNA, and possibly with more than a few at a time. We mostly do it with single or just a few cells, which means we can make changes to the small collection of cells that will become a human being. And while many people may be against those changes, I would work them in a heartbeat on a child that is destined to become Downs, or Autistic, or be cursed with Spina Bifida. Sorry if you don’t agree for religious or moralistic reasons. I would do it to prevent the suffering that is to come. Unfortunately we don’t always know that we have a problems until the future human is more than a small collection of cells. Sometimes we don’t know until the baby is born, or even further into development with some disorders. So we might have to do retroactive Genetic Engineering and also let surgery and advanced nutrition help the solution to the problem along. And while it might be possible to insert genetic material into every one of the trillion cells that make up a human, it still looks like a holy bitch to do with retroviruses or other chemicals. And then we would have to reconstruct, in some cases, entire Chromosomes made up of thousands of genes in order to make the necessary changes.
This is where nanotech would be the perfect complement to this kind of retroactive genetic engineering. Literally trillions of nanoscale robots could be introduced into the body of the person in need of changes, making their way into each individual cell and constructing genes, then cutting and splicing as necessary. One nanobot could accomplish the task of multiple retroviruses, and within a short period of time the genetic structures would be repaired. I don’t know if that would be enough to cure the person. In the case of disorders like Diabetes or other metabolic disorders I am pretty sure it would. In other cases the nanobots might have to make further structural changes. But I’m pretty sure we will work around whatever needs doing. There may be mistakes and problems, but I am sure the benefits will greatly outweigh the harm.
In my science fiction novel Diamonds in the Sand I use nanotech to retroactively engineer adults to give them animal like abilities. That may have been a simplistic approach, beyond the abilities of a single scientist or small group of them. But I found the idea intriguing, and in fiction we can explore those possibilities without having to delve to deeply into the problems that might have to be circumvented. And I believe the future truth will be much stranger than any fiction we might be writing today.
Imagination Unlimited
The Deep Dark Well
The Hunger
Diamonds In The Sand
The Scorpion
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