Book Promo And Vignettes By Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike
Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt
Book Promo
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
FROM PAM UPHOFF: Outer Tiers (Chronicles of the Fall Book 18)
Konstantin Aslanov is back!
And posted to an Outer Tier World with an orphaned guardian’s store–the official name of the oft rumored “Doomsday Cubes” so popular in cheesy spy movies.
He hadn’t counted on children in danger, buying a hundred race horses, or running head on into a corrupt colony government. But with newly acquired sidekicks, it’s full speed ahead to save an entire World as Plagues and Invasions hit the entirety of the Three Part Alliance!
FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: All Precious Stones and Peoples (Timelines Universe Book 11)
Once, a million years ago, a water world populated with dolphin-like beings, the product of gene-alteration by their Progenitors on the Earth-like world one orbit closer to the sun, was flung into the cold and dark of interstellar space by the passage of a rogue star.
And four thousand years ago, its engineers were awakened from suspended animation to bring the world into a new orbit around a giant, blue-white star, where the waters of the World Ocean could thaw and life could continue to flourish.
This is the story of the A’ka’pa’i’ka’ti, and their Foretold Saintess, Speaker to the Dry Ones, born to communicate with the Progenitors when they finally arrived to reclaim the lost . .
FROM DENTON SALLE: The Summoned Sage: The Summoned Sage Book 1
“Don’t bother. I’m already dead,” the man said. “Only a spell keeps me here.”
I froze and he continued speaking. “I am sorry I had to summon you. I wanted a young hero, not a sage. But someone must carry the scroll to my teachers, lest the world end in blood and terror.”
A dying scribe-magician ripped me from my retirement in Texas to help save his world. A world kind of like Old China, where the legends and tales about cultivators are real. And I have no idea how this works. All I have is some years of practicing an internal martial art.
But I’m trying to complete his quest as thugs from a tong, monsters, and other cultivators hunt me before some catalysmic event destroys the world. They killed him for this scroll, and I’m pretty sure I’m next. If the foxes or fu dogs don’t eat me first.
And I’ve picked up this girl by mistake, which complicates things even more. Maybe I don’t want to go home? But can I even survive in a world like this? Assuming I can complete this quest before it all goes to hell?
If you enjoy Beware of Chicken or the Unintended Cultivator, you’ll love this isakai adventure where a man from Texas finds the magic powers of taoist myth are real and a world depends on his choices.
Scroll up and one click to start reading this fantasy adventure today!
FROM CELIA HAYES AND JEANNE HAYDEN: A Full Dozen of Luna City (The Chronicles of Luna City Book 12)
The final chapter in the modern day chronicles of Luna City; where Richard Astor-Hall and Kate Heisel plan their wedding, Police Chief Joe Vaughn discovers that he is famous, the fabled Mills Treasure may have been found at last, and Miss Letty McAllister reveals all, in explaining the mystery of a rarely-seen ghost in the Cattleman Hotel.
BY CASEY NASH, ROBERT HANLON AND SCOTT MACREA: U.S. Marshals Timber, Flint And Jubal Stone: Showdown at Red Hollow: A Western Adventure (A U.S. Marshal Ezra Flint Western Book 7)
If you thought the stakes could not get higher when Marshals Timber, Flint and Stone teamed up for The Long Trail to Justice, then you haven’t imagined the dangers of their next adventure, Showdown at Red Hollow!
Jake Timber, Ezra Flint and Jubal Stone join forces to investigate the murder of a fellow marshal just outside the boomtown of Red Hollow. It looks like the work of the outlaw band The Crimson Veil, but soon the marshals realize they are caught in a bigger, more dangerous conspiracy.
Facing a ruthless team of hired killers, a renegade band of Comanche, a crooked politician bent on crippling the town, and the most efficient killing machine of the Wild West, Timber, Stone and Flint race to their ultimate confrontation… the Showdown at Red Hollow.
Showdown at Red Hollow is the pulse-pounding follow-up to The Long Trail to Justice, the first-ever teaming of Jake Timber, Ezra Flint and Jubal Stone. Now, acclaimed authors Robert Hanlon, Scott McCrea and Casey Nash come together to produce another white-hot, classic Western Adventure!
EDITED BY D. JASON FLEMMING: The Victober Collection 2023: 3 Classic Victorian Novels
Three classic Victorian novels, almost in time for the month of Victober!
Black But Comely
Born to gypsies, raised by Jews, Jane Lee turns eighteen and decides to win her way into the upper classes of Victorian society. Her heritage won’t let her go, but her single-minded will and cunning are a match for any gypsy plots against her.
Marmorne
The British Segrave brothers were as different as could be. Emil, the eldest and a solicitor, was passionless and precise. Julius, the middle brother, had enough energy for three normal men, so his decision to mount an expedition to Africa was no surprise. Youngest, Adolphus, was the peacemaker between the other two.
How their fates became tied to the quaint French village of Marmorne, and the Prussian invasion of France, none of them could have foretold…
Sweet Anne Page
Sweet Anne Page is an ideal to everyone who meets her. To Stephen Langton, she is the youthful ideal of love. To Humphrey Morfill, she is the ideal way to marry into money. To Claudia Branscombe, she is the ideal foil, a distraction that enables her plots and intrigues. And to Raphael Branscombe, she becomes the ideal path to revenge…
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Everything in 24 Frames
Twenty-four frames equals one second of motion-picture film.
Cather Hargreaves learned that fact for class, but as an abstraction. Now that he’s going on a tour of a movie studio and its back lots, he’s about to get real-life experience in just how movies are made.
What he didn’t expect was being tossed into a real-life horror, as the war against sectarian violence suddenly comes home to the City of Angels. It’s a moment that will change the course of his life forever.
When life is on the line, 24 frames can be an eternity.
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
FROM DALE COZORT: Wokuo Incursion
Invasion from an alternate timeline?
It’s December 1937 in a world exactly like ours except that it is about to veer wildly into alternate history. It’s less than two years before World War II broke out historically in Europe. War has already come to much of Asia, with Japan invading China. An isolationist US fears it will be drawn into that conflict, especially after the Japanese sink the US gunboat Panay. Just when President Franklin Roosevelt thinks he has that crisis under control, he faces a bigger issue. High tech descendants of the Wokuo, Japanese pirates and smugglers who should have vanished over three hundred years ago, flood into the Pacific coast off California.
The Wokuo are both refugees and invaders, fleeing from war in an alternate reality where they survived and grew strong, while looking for new conquests to replace their lost empire. They set their sights on California. President Roosevelt sends disgraced former Colonel Martin to California to organize resistance to the invaders, but the Colonel has his own issues, buried deep in his brain and waiting to cause disaster.
FROM BLAKE SMITH: The Hartington Inheritance (The Hartington Series Book 1)
Almira Hartington was heir to the largest fortune in the galaxy, amassed by her father during his time as a director of the Andromeda Company. But when Sir Josiah commits suicide, Almira discovers that she and her siblings are penniless. All three of them must learn to work if they wish to eat, and are quickly scattered to the far reaches of the universe. Almira stubbornly remains on-planet, determined to remain respectable despite the sneers of her former friends.
Sir Percy Wallingham pities the new Lady Hartington. But the lady’s family will take care of her, surely? It’s only after he encounters Almira in her new circumstances that he realizes the extent of her troubles and is determined to help her if he can. He doesn’t know that a scandal is brewing around Sir Josiah’s death and Almira’s exile from society. But it could cost him his life, and the lady he has come to love.
AND YES I’M GOING TO REMIND YOU: No Man’s Land: Volume 3 (Chronicles of Lost Elly) is out.
Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.
To compensate, if you’ve missed the first three tracks of No Man’s Land Sound Track (WHY do you monsters suggest stuff like this to me when I’m stressed and weak?) they’re on youtube. (And yes, they will be up for sale and given for free to my paid substack subscribers. BUT first I need to deal with the sequella of mom’s death (sorry. It’s eating my life.)) And there are two more I need to put up before I go clean the grotty house. If I get them up before tonight, I’ll put up a post later today.
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
If you have questions, feel free to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: CARVE
According To Hoyt 
really outstanding covers and teasers!!
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And I did imperfectly carve the following from one of my in-progress messes:
—-
If heroes are measured by their convictions, I was content to remain unmeasured. As I told Thool once, the great advantage of having no principles is that one can never betray them.
Outside, the dome lights dimmed for curfew, and the canal reflected the pale shimmer of the stars. I raised my glass to them and murmured, “To progress—may it never catch up.”
—-
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Violetta froze. Augustus looked in steady silence, his gaze going over the papers. Then he crouched beside her, and said, “You are carving up the spells in geometric patterns.”
She nodded. “And also by their strength.”
“That would be hard to measure.” His mouth twitched. “How are you measuring lightning?”
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“Well, the Mad Butcher is dead. Good riddance.”
“True. But what bothers me is who or what carved him up like that. He was nearly invulnerable.”
“Ah right. Both of us would have had a hard time taking him down and there’s no sign of a fight.”
An unseen speaker said “Karma gave him what he gave out. Take his body and go.”
“Yes Sir.”
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OT but highly amusing, ICE is running recruiting ads during football games. The ads are aimed at police in sanctuary cities, offering recruiting bonuses and the chance to do their jobs protecting people.
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Even with all the technology the Chongu Empire gives us, carving out a home in the howling wilderness is no small task. Just because there are no indigenous sophonts on this planet, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing smart enough to be trouble.
The ultrasonics were supposed to repel the big predators and the lumbering grazers that look like a cross between a rhino and lizard, but something’s getting around that barrier. Near as we can figure out, these critters are just smart enough to throw overripe fruit at the emitters. It clogs them just long enough to scoot by, and wouldn’t you know, these critters have figured out that our henhouse is full of yummy pullets we’d been hoping to get to laying age.
Now we have to figure out just what this critter is. Can’t be too big, because the initial surveys would’ve picked it up. Say, something about about the size and smarts of a raccoon, but with a more primate-like shoulder structure that lets it throw accurately from a distance.
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Can’t guess much more about what the marauding monkey-coons are, but I can make a guess as to what they’ll (also?) be called, assuming their own there-then can see here-now in its historical rearview mirron.
Stobor.
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“How did you do at the cooking competition?”
“It went well, but not quite well enough.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I lost in final round. My cooking skills were as good as my competitors, possibly better, but my presentation was not up the their standards. They had a bit fir flourish in the way they cut up the turkey breast. I lost because the judges were grading on the carve.”
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Koi incoming.
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Gah. “Up to their standards” and “a bit more flourish.” Not sure how autocorrupt screwed that up…
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The best proofreading is always done after hitting “submit.”
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Just finished Part 3 and left a review. Will go back and leave reviews for Parts 1 & 2 (already ranked). 6 months (waggles hand) for the next one? I’ll wait as patiently as possible.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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I almost wanted to just lose my temper, activate a manip, and carve the door off it’s hinges.
But we were far too early in the relationship to really threaten Kage with violent dismemberment.
At least right now.
Instead, I raised my foot carefully, picked a spot just below the lock plate and kicked as hard as I could. There wasn’t a Japanese house door made in the 1980’s that could withstand the blow of a 6’6″ angry space elf’s irritated size fourteen combat boots and the door not only slammed open, but was partially torn off its hinges. “Kage,” I said in as much of a whisper as you can get when yelling, low and full of anger. “Where are you?”
One of his thugs, Fang, came out with a knife from around the corner and tried to slam it into me like an ice pick. Stopping him was so easy, it wasn’t even funny-grab his knife arm, pivot on my feet, slam his whole body into one wall, slap his head into the other, then kick him out the door. The other thug, Jinjo, tried to hit me with a framing hammer and I took it away from him the moment I could, slammed it into the wall so hard the handle was embedded half-way into the wall, and tilted my head slightly. “Leave,” I ordered with deliberate calm and Jinjo ran out the front door, picking up Fang and dragging him out of there.
Kage is in the bedroom, ATHENA told me, trying to escape through the window.
Well, we couldn’t have that, could we?
I politely opened the door to the bedroom and used a manip to grab Kage and drag him across the room, over the messy bed with a terrified yelp, and into reach of my very angry hands. I wrapped my fingers around his lapel and I knew the only thing Kage was seeing was the white cloak and fox mask I was wearing. “Kage,” I said, in very false tones of joviality, “I remember telling you that when I bought all of those loan debts from you, you weren’t going to bother them anymore.”
“I…I…,” he gasped, looking into the black lenses of the mask. “I didn’t…”
“Akame came to Youko’s apartment this morning,” I replied with that false tone of joviality and I didn’t need ATHENA reading his facial gestalt when I could smell him peeing in his own pants, “and made it clear that she still owed you money. And beat her up. And destroyed most of her furniture. I am not very happy about this, and I know that when I bought your loans, you told me you had the only copy of those loans.”
“Akame came by last night,” he gasped in terror. “I told him that you had paid their debts, but he told me that nobody ever pays their debts off and that if I couldn’t get the money…”
“And you didn’t tell me?” I asked, cranking down on his lapels and I could hear the material of his shirt starting to tear. “I think you would have told me, wouldn’t you?”
“Akame is hooked-in!” Kage half-screamed. “If he knew that I told you, I’m dead! He kills people because he bored!”
I tilted my head, as if I was thinking, then gave Kage a gentle shove into the bed. He landed roughly, didn’t try to get up. “Fair enough. That sort of man is scary and I don’t blame you for being afraid of him.” I reached under my cloak and threw the brown manila envelop onto his chest. “Invoice of all the damages to the four people he’s…talked with today…,” I paused for a moment. “You have a week to make good all the damages-if you can’t get the replacements, gift cards enough to cover everything. Don’t make me come back to talk with you about this. And don’t worry about Akame.”
I turned to leave and Kage gasped, “What…what are you going to do?”
I paused, looked over my shoulder and nodded slightly. “Akame is going to learn either a very short or a very permanent lesson tonight. Do stay off your phone, I don’t want him to think that you tried to help him, do you?”
Kage’s head shook vigorously. “Good man.” I waved at him cheerfully. “Have a good evening!”
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I’ve read all three volumes, and while I enjoyed them, I’m now perplexed about a point: What is the “magic” of the Ellyans? I had assumed that their bodies contained some sort of nanotech or picotech dissolved in their blood (perhaps) that projected images, healed, defended, and so on. But the last half of the third volume makes it sound as if they are using some kind of psionics, and as if the tech was simply working to enable the psychic phenomena. Is it possible to clarify what’s actually going on in those “magic” scenes?
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I thought it was clear it was nanotech? Interacting with some kind of “infinite potential universes concept” to pull things into reality?
I THOUGHT. Though, yes, they also have psionics for communication and such.
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All this makes perfect hard-SF sense to me.
It should be noted I haven’t read beyond Part I yet; and also that I’ve been reading hardcore SF since, well, I could get my hands on any to read. And ‘a bit of’ physics. So, from that viewpoint…
“Infinite potential universes” ought to work just fine (see “superspace” and “wave function of the universe” stuff in real cosmology). I’m guessing “vacuum energy” doesn’t get mentioned, but that also gives you a lot to draw from (again this is real physics). If mining adjacent timelines for oil and minerals (H. Beam Piper) doesn’t float your boat, read David Deutsch on “duplicating” things using (assumed) closed timelike lines = reverse time travel (again this one is real physics).
And (bio-?)nano-technology is one believable way to interface with all this, see “Casimir Effect batteries” in real physics (incl. Robert Forward); sometimes smaller really is more beautiful.
Finally the Schrodinger universe is a perfect explanation for where (the heck) all this comes from, because the drive can throw ships… very far back in time, thus combining “lost colonies” with the old “advanced secrets of the forerunner civilization” idea quite nicely.
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One of my friends who started as a commenter here is a physics/math genius (she works in it.) She was DEEPLY disappointed I couldn’t discuss the mathematics of the schrodingers with her, but she says the math checks, particularly my limitation that “you can’t travel back to something already observed/known by a large number of people.” I’m not, mind you, a scientist, but I read an awful lot of it, and used to read the actual college books when my cousins and brother were in college. (ALL grossly out of date now, of course.)
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Well, I’d guess, the only way there would be Schrodinger-drive specific math would be for it to show up in the story (or story gateway) AND for you be able to understand it yourself. That’s a pretty tall order. Even writers who have the “feel” for things aren’t all that common; H. Beam Piper (most of the time), David Drake, some other non-scientist ones I could mention. And, you.
(My alternate War Between 1860s features assorted things my characters invented, no really I can understand them and check them for at least near-veracity… but ‘created’ them? No. And this is ‘just’ somewhat enhanced our-timeline 19th century engineering.)
Interestingly a lot of scientists, even SF readers, can’t really talk about such thngs well either; they seem to be ‘stuck’ in a box made of their own comfort zone, or something. Many can; more can’t.
(And, what you said… it sounds like the more a place-time gets ‘visited’ the less likely it is the Schrodinger drive will ever ‘happen to’ reach it again — even if that’s what the hope or aim is. Of course Deutsch’s quantum time travel setting basically eliminates the paradoxes; only there you’re very explicitly in a multiple-worlds setting, which is apparently not at all what you’d want.)
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Well, I thought it was clear it was nanotech, too, most of the way through. But then there were references to what sounded like psionics. And that left me mentally off balance. It didn’t occur to me to suppose you were assuming both: I’m too accustomed to the Wellsian “one impossibility” style of SF. (Or, well, one impossibility plus FTL. . . .)
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No, there weren’t psionics, really. There were “Nanite enabled psionics.” WHATEVER that means. The founders intended psionics, but like everything else they intended…
Stuff like the pattern is the “shape” of their ability to take the nanites and use them to draw power. Doro distorts and enhances that, but it can kill the host of the nanites by drawing too much power too fast.
And it’s not mentioned because he passes out but I wonder if Skip crashed ALL the electricity in Capital City when he tried to kill himself by “pattern burn.” (The nanites, starved for energy draw it from the body. In his case because he was out and not pulling power anymore, VERY slowly. It was like a wasting disease and of course he was comatose.)
In their defense, they don’t know it’s nanites. Skip doesn’t either till the third book.
Oh, yeah, and I’ve run this by scientists and physicists. Remember physics is the intersection of science and “Oh, my Lord, is that theology” (Younger son despises it. It offends the engineering mind. He says the only thing worse are mathematicians. He usually says this to his dad, the mathematician. And they love each other.)
Anyway, the physicists and mathematicians all agree even though I only have a laywoman’s and “what?” understanding of it, it is as plausible as that edge of science is.
HOWEVER the illusions and mind-talk behave the closest to psionics. Again, though, it’s still nanite assisted. Otherwise you’re “empty pattern” and nothing.
I figured in the second book Skip had already got “infected” with the nanites, just not a strong culture. Look, he’d treated them while they were bleeding, and he’d been in the fight himself. All it would take was a cut in his fingers, which he wouldn’t even notice. BUT the culture would be so small that he’d be at best a very small power. Even though his pattern took much more than that.
GAH. I’m going to have to write “the science of Elly” aren’t I? It will probably take till book 3 or 4 though.
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It’s all a case of Nobody understands what a bunch of genius level lunatics put under extreme survival conditions with no boundaries all feeding off each other while they solved technical problems did. Just have a person look at it and go “we don’t know. The nano’s are control of some sort that depends on some gene work and a mashing of biology with engineering in a way that nobody has dreamt of in any fever dream. It’s going to take at least 100 years just to reverse engineer what was done, they done Tesla’d the whole bloody world.”
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Yep.
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In the second book there’s a section on that, because the scientists of Britannia are BAFFLED and it has caused them to revise several theories.
The one thing they know is they can’t replicate it without seriously messing with human biology, which is forbidden in all decent polities.
Unfortunately this makes the Ellyans very valuable and for more than the sex trade (though that too) hence book Three “the worlds of Men” where Skip goes off to do the forbidden by his sovereign, because it’s better to beg forgiveness (I.e. to go rescue Ellyans who were kidnapped as babies (some as fetuses) to be used as transportation devices. And Brundar does the inconceivable and stows away on one of her majesty’s ships. Because he’ll be boiled in oil if Skip is going to run into danger alone.
GAH. Let me get Orphans of the Stars out of my head first. Then that one.
Sigh.
It’s so weird being a receiver of weird transmissions.
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GAH. I’m going to have to write “the science of Elly” aren’t I? It will probably take till book 3 or 4 though.
You just proved this really is hard SF. No, truly, that’s a marker. Fortunately for us, people like Jerry Pournelle and Charles Sheffield (and of course Robert Forward, for the SF / theory /experiment trifecta) do have a history of getting out their “this is what that was” in clear form. So we don’t have to run around in dizzy little circles trying to guess it out, ourselves.
Fortunately for you, there are assorted people out here who could help (in addition to the ones you are already using). General relativity, special relativity, computation theory, quantum computing… (raises hand). Likely more as consultants / editors than writing, you got that one covered just fine.
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Could you tell me why you got the idea it’s psi-powers?
I did answer you infelicitously yesterday. In my defense, I’m running around trying to prove I’m not a dual citizen, and it’s weird and complicated. (Though I’m of course absolutely right. The problem seems to be the name change and Portugal going “Oh, we don’t know that name” and not having read further in the document. SIGH)
Elena Meyer intended psionics, but that’s not what they did. In any case, the psionics would be nano assisted.
If you tell me what gave you that impression I can probably explain it. Though for the full theory and mathematics I’d have to enlist at the VERY LEAST all the family men.
And there might be a book later, by the four of us, with diagrams. But again, that would be after book four.
Note, I can explain it in bafflegab. Or as Dr. Pournelle called it “the dance of the seven veils” (And when I wasn’t doing it well enough he’d instruct me to “Dance faster. I can see the naughty bits.” LOL) If I knew how to actually do it, I’d not have time to write.
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Did you ask him for a demo tape of what he meant (although he might have provided one… 😱😳😇 )?
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he might have. And it might be one he got from Heinlein.
I loved Jerry very much.
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Sarah Hoyt as Sally Rand. Okay… interesting mental picture. (Flashing back to “The Right Stuff” on the big / small screen. Of course they got Rand to play herself; no-one else on the planet could have done that.)
And, the picture of hard-SF writer as Fan Dancer (or Veil Dancer) really is rather spot-on; direct the attention where it should go, and, um, elide the questionable bits. (The “soft SF” writer just tries to ignore the fact there are any naughty-bits to hide.)
And if it were a real theory, you’d be doing real mathematical physics; if it were a real and correct theory, you’d be off playing Zefram Cochrane or the Westenra sisters, for real and for true. This is the practical and specific origin of the hard-SF fan dance: applied writerly economics.
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The relevant passage is in “Even So the She-Bear Fights”:
“They’d thought to give them the very basics. Psi powers, to communicate and teleport. But the full extent of teleportation, of healing…They’d not foreseen any of it.”
I took it that when Scipio said “psi powers” he meant “psi powers”: that is, power of minds as mind. It didn’t occur to me to suppose that he might mean “powers granted by nanites controlling exotic physical energies and processes to accomplish things like communication and transportation.” And I suppose that’s partly because I supposed that if you used a phrase traditional in SF since the 1950s or thereabouts you meant to have its traditional meaning applied to this new fictional world, because that’s how I would have used it.
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No. Thats what THEY WANTED TO GIVE THEM. That’s not what worked out, though. I did mean that’s what they wanted to give them because they were soppy and goofy.
What they did was try to make it work, but the only way it could work was with nanites and then it went nuts.
Let me find it.
I think this is it:
“They’d thought to give them the very basics. Psi powers, to communicate and teleport. But the full extent of teleportation, or healing…They’d not foreseen any of it. The nanos had fused with genetics in an unexpected way. Like everything else in this grand experiment, it had all gone sideways [].”
I tried to convey, without saying it, that the founders were a bit new agey and silly, while also completely insanely brilliant. I do immeditely point out they tried to achieve the “psy powers” with nanos. And it went sideways and upside down.
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Sorry, that took forever to get through, but yes, that’s what they WANTED. That’s not how it worked out in the end. They honestly wanted to FAKE psi powers. it still didn’t want. They’d be horrified at “battle magic.”
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Okay. That interpretation actually appeals to me a lot more; seeing what I thought was psionics being dragged into a story that had been developing just fine without it left me unsettled (the same thing happen to me with Orphan Black when it added telepathy to cloning). It just never occurred to me to take that passage that way.
I thought that what Skip meant was “they meant to give them basic psi powers and they ended up giving them much greater psi powers.” Perhaps that’s because, if I were able to create such a technology, I would never describe it as “psi powers”; I might describe it as “a technological substitute for psi powers.”
To quote Roger Zelazny (Lord of Light, his best novel),
“If by demon you mean a malefic, supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape—then the answer is no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one respect . . . It is not a supernatural creature.”
So in this case my precisionism tripped me up. Thanks for clarifying!
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Yes, but the founders …. How do I put this, they were very seriously messed up. Elena Meyer was the proverbial mad genius “They said I was mad maaaaad” and then proceeds to prove it. And yes, they wanted psi powers.
See, I think I was always p.o.ed by “space hippies.” Look, I had friends who were hippies. It’s a fine fantasy, but– Super-advanced with psi powers they ain’t. HOWEVER getting counterfeit psi powers would satisfy their… dreams of an advanced society with no tech, or something. They probably taught them to call it magic too, which is why the nanos translate it that way.
And yea, I think I need to do at least a ten or twenty page ebook on the science of Elly, but it will wait till at least after The Worlds of Men.
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I’m sorry if I got heated. I was panicky, because the future books proceed logically from the science, from laws against the science, and the fact that while the Ellyans are “indigestible” into the broader civilization because of WHAT they are, which makes their culture fundamentally different, the greater “human civilization” the good and the bad and the indifferent have reasons to keep them as they are, because they’re very useful as they are. (And they early on realize that, yes, it’s lost in single sex descendants within five generations.) So there’s a strong temptation to keep them “separate but equal” with the usual consequences.
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Nothing you’ve said has given any hint of offense. I just figured you were trying very hard to be clear, and I do that too. No apology is called for.
I’m a copy editor, and one of my most useful talents is the ability to misread anything that might have a second meaning. But it does have its downsides.
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LOL. Happens to all of us.
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Um, where’s the second one?
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I think William means that writers are “allowed one impossible thing” in SF stories.
The one “impossible thing” is the nanotech magic (with the possibility that it includes psionics).
Now the “psionics” could be the “second impossible thing” and FTL travel could consider a “third impossible thing”.
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psionics are via nanos, so they fall under the nanos impossible thing.
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Um… Faster Than Light isn’t necessarily an impossibility, at least not in the “leads to reverse time travel and thus paradoxes so it can’t happen” sense.
Going faster than light in any direction you please, in a “Star Trek warp drive” way, does lead directly to reverse time travel (i.e. “closed timelike lines” in technical-speak); this is textbook (see problem in Dodson & Poston’s classic “Tensor Geometry” for instance). Which throws you right into paradox-land, unless you use many-worlds quantum mechanics, and is time travel anyhow.
But a “jump drive” that takes you from one point in space and time to another, or even a “gate” that connects two (otherwise separated) locations in space, can be made to work without reverse time travel… you just have to deliberately rig things so it doesn’t.
If you pick a “universal time” so that all of spacetime is made up of a stack of equal-time surfaces (a “foliation”), and allow jumps to only go from one time to a later time, and only allow a gate to go between points on the same equal-time surface, then you cannot go back in (this) time (constuct a closed timelike line) no matter how you stack the jumps or the gates. And since the existence of the closed timelike lines / backwards time-travel paths is invariant — unlike time is, even in special relativity — that is, the same for all observers, it doesn’t matter that some people will see your jump as going back in time, or your gate as going back / forward in time.
This is weird physics; it means your jump /gate system “knows” about a “preferred reference frame” like the cosmic background radiation’s rest-frame. It means there’s some very deep, subtle coupling of the Big and the Small to your jump / gate device. And of course Nature may very well simply not allow any of this, there’s barely a hint against that possibility today.
But FTL is not equal to time travel.
(There could be a longer, better version of this, if desired for the “While I’m in Portugal” period..?)
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It’s desired. you know, my two initials, last name at the email of heat.
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Likely to be done in about a week, especially if the nagging sore throat /cold disappears. Also likely to include teleportation, because much the same analysis applies; think the old “Theory and Practice of Teleportation” essay by Larry Niven, only with extra bonus actual physics.
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I want to make, first, a copy editing point: The phrasing one impossibility plus FTL does not imply that FTL is an impossibility (nor that it is not one—it leaves the matter open).
However, I do regard FTL as an “impossibility” in a specific sense, which I use in talking about Wellsian SF: Not something that is proven not to be possible, but something that is not known to be possible, or that had not yet been discovered. Basically, a fantastic assumption: a distant land inhabited by people six inches tall, or a living being constructed from human remains and animated, or a submarine, or an invasion from Mars, or an orphaned child being raised in the West African jungles by apes.
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Yes, at most your language implies faster-than-light travel might be an impossibility, by trading it off in a context including other, stated impossibilities. And my main point is/was that there are people (even physicists) out there who claim the “Star Trek warp drive” case proves that FTL travel is just simply and literally impossible, at the level of physical law — when a more careful analysis says, not so fast.
And I even tend to appreciate the “one impossible thing” school of writing, which seems to have descended (generalizing madly here) to a lot of “Golden Age” stories as well, including ones I’ve known and loved. But some stories really do seem to need more, in order for their settings to be constructed at all; and I could say the same good things about those.
E.g., Jerry Pournelle’s CoDominium / First and Second Empire series. You need the Alderson Drive which rests on an “impossible” (Wellsian sense) fifth force of nature, for interstellar travel; the Langston Field for defense, which seems to need even more “impossible” (same sense) physics and which had to be discovered by lucky accident too; and then the CoDominium itself, which is (beyond being rooted in something very much like moral cowardice) at the least alternate-history and even arguably also a third such “impossibility” — simply to construct its backstory.
Oh, and you’re definitely not the only one out there, blessed and cursed with a copy editor’s eye… ask me how I know.
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On one hand, I don’t take closed timelike lines as proving that FTL is impossible. If FTL exists, we just have to accept that “past” and “future” are non unambiguous terms on a cosmic scale, even if they still apply locally. (I think that any drive that can be used to make a spacelike transition between points A and B, and another between points B and C, might be used to have point C end up pastward of point A, but I don’t understand relativistic physics well enough to be certain of that.) On the other, on the evidence so far I think it looks as if FTL is impossible, at least if we’re talking about the speed of light in a vacuum.
But stories that have both FTL and some other “impossibility” have a long history, at least back to Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity, which is a classic of the genre. I think by now they’ve been grandfathered in, at least if the FTL remains a vehicle (in the literary sense).
But I think that Elly by itself may count as having two “impossibilities.” One is the magic; but the other is the existence of a functionally androgynous human race. This may not be physically impossible, in the sense that animals species that alternate between male and female are not unknown; no one has actually tried to modify the developmental pathways of any primate species to this effect, so we don’t actually know what would be involved. But it’s “impossible” in the sense of being a purely speculative element that doesn’t exist in the observed world. The treatment of the idea in No Man’s Land, with its concern for implications and difficulties, comes across as much harder SF (so far) than the treatment of “magic.”
Of course, as a game master, I want to see a neatly laid out chart of what kind of effects each of the eight circles is capable of. . . .
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Oh, the effect of the drug is to HELP THEM DRAW POWER. They have to draw external power to work.
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Well it is psionics in terms of what kind of powers, nanos in terms of mechanism, tapping into “deep math of the universe” stuff.
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I understand the distinction you’re making, but it’s not one I would make. If I were writing this up for GURPS, for example, I would say that this is a new power modifier, neither “Magical” nor “Psionic,” even if it had a list of abilities very similar to what they might have. And also, I may have a more expansive list of abilities that could be called “psionic”; for example, it’s common to interpret Kryptonian “super-strength” as actually being non-ranged telekinesis, a psionic ability, because Superman can lift a tank or perhaps a battleship and not worry about the concentration of that huge weight onto the area of his hands exceeding the strength of the materials and punching a hole in the bottom. There is also the psionic shapeshifting character in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed. . . .
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I’m rather specifically not making a distinction: there is one and only one thing operating: the nanos. The effects they are generating are akin to SFinal psionics, and the in-universe scientific explanation is that they are tapping into the mathematical substructure of reality.
But there is still only one thing.
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They can communicate and teleport and heal because the nanos give them those powers. The powers are not inherent or latent in themselves, but require the “magical” nanos to work.
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And genetically only some of them can host the nanos. Now, the stupid ruby has more reach than it should have and records things it shouldn’t.
Oh, and ability to carry the nanos only seems to last five generations past the last Ellyan crossing, explaining why the Draksalls didn’t exterminate them root and branch when they occupied Elly. (BUT that is for the next two books.)
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But what should they be called? I mean, “midichlorians” is already taken…. 😇😁
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I don’t call them anything. They’re just nanos that went weird.
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Maybe it’s ‘smartmatter’. (tip of the hat to Joan D. Vinge)
An almost infinitely mutable substance made of nanomachines with both computer processing and fabrication capability.
That’s what’s going on in my story, anyway. There are many kinds of smartmatter; most are limited to a few specific functions. Some smartmatter artifacts are code-locked into a fixed physical form and one function. Unrestricted smartmatter can be catastrophically dangerous if it ever gets out of control — like ‘break down an entire planet in a few days’ dangerous.
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Smartmatter is like a physical manifestation of self-modifying computer code. If that doesn’t give you the willies, your imagination is deficient. 😄
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Yes it does.
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When I think of a physical manifestation of self-modifying computer code, I call it “life.” It has information processing, and fabrication capability, and almost infinite mutability, if you just give it time enough.
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yes, but a type of life that’s terrifying. At least to me.
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Ah, but smartmatter can modify itself directly — it doesn’t have to produce viable offspring with occasional random variations. It can change itself in any way that doesn’t terminate all of its functions.
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She shook her head emphatically. “No! You don’t monkey with unrestricted smartmatter on an inhabited planet. Our development facility is set up on a frozen rock fifteen billion miles from the sun. Because converting light and heat for energy is one of the first tricks rogue smartmatter picks up.”
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It’s some sort of genetically-linked nanotechnology. And the ELLYANS understand how to use it but don’t have the knowledge to create the nanotechnology. And the people who DID create the nanotechnology apparently were inspired to do something no one else has yet managed to duplicate. So it currently “looks like” something akin to magic. And it can’t currently be *clarified* because of those knowledge gaps.
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It was carving its way through the forest, she could see that, but she wavered. It was deep in the wild. Perhaps it did little harm. Perhaps she should go on and risk its reaching farmland, and spreading desolation in the wake of its song.
The ground ahead was rocky. Then she stopped. The ground gave way ahead of her. She edged forward a little. A cliff. Stony and straight. Her footing was sound, but she could see no path down.
The bird sang in a towering tree before the cliff. Leaves fell, until it was the only green thing.
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(Part 1/2)
There was a little crowd gathered around the front of the mini-tent, that looked more than a bit like the old pictures of campus kirkbooths from the ragged tail-end of the Crazy Years. Only that seemed somewhat unlikely.
Gregory bent his course across the sunken brick court of the quad, enough to read the half-door-sized cardboard sign that fronted the fold-up table where three people were sitting and talking to several students afoot:
CHARTERED ARCADIA COMPANY
Helping to build humanity a new home in the heavens
Because NOW is the time to extend our range.
APPLY TODAY TO WORK, OR EMIGRATE. OR — PROVE US WRONG!
Still walking, more or less at his usual ground-eating lope, he decided to at least stop by and sample some of what they were saying.
And quickly he found that most of it was, indeed, on-point talk about what was going on up there on Mars, and how soon (or if) someone here could get there… and how long they’d have to stay if they did.
“And you, quiet young sir, what do you think of all this?”
“I’m not really sure. I love the idea of people moving out into the bigger universe, abstractly. But I’m really not sure this is the best time, after all. The Baby Bust is barely over, and we still have a lot of older people who’ll be needing care and support; and the prospect of sending off some of our very best and most energetic people to carve out some frontier in the sky when there’s so much to put right down here…” He shrugged, more than a bit surprised he’d simply opened up and joined right in.
“So you don’t find the idea of space colonization inspiring? You don’t see it as a frontier that really can focus people’s attention on the future, not the things that went wrong in the recent past? Morale and inspiration can do a lot to move people forward, even if they’re not doing anything on space or transport or colonization itself.” The middle-aged woman smiled at him. “Ellen Duchene, I’m with the Chartered Arcadia Planitia Company. I never hit dirt on Mars, but I’ve at least seen it from close flyby, on one of our cyclers, going the long way ’round back to Earth.”
“Gregory Whitcomb. I’m in chemical and separatory engineering, cross-major in aerospace structures.”
“Ooh, that sounds right up our alley. Of course I couldn’t promise anything so far, and we couldn’t actually deliver anything until you graduate, save for some truly amazing work that most people never do.”
“Well, mostly I just stopped to listen. I’m amazed we’ve gotten as far as we have, up there, actually; learning what I have here really has brought it home to me, how so much of our resource base on Earth is due to geology having done much of our work for us, separating things and concentrating them in ore deposits. Surely not much of that in space.”
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(Part 2/2)
Ellen smiled, well, mischievously. “The early Mars rovers found, just to name one thing, almost pure nuggets of sulfur lying right on the ground. Even in the asteroids, even just scooping up ‘rubbolith’ — that’s the surface ‘stuff’ or ‘regolith’ on a rubble-pile asteroid — you find a lot of minerals that’ve been heavily altered by heat and water. You never did get much exo-geology yet in your classes, did you?”
“Ah, Ellen, they don’t talk much about that at all. It’s all the same-old time-tested methods that they teach you; you’re supposed to use those, or maybe tweak them a bit, that’s just good engineering — or so they say.”
“Down here they’re probably right. We’ve been building up our Earthly bag of tricks for centuries, even millennia — De Re Metallica is pretty high tech by the standards of the Iron Age, or the Bronze Age. But Out There, everything is different, or at least most of it is.” She leaned back.
“And that’s the big advantage we have. We not only have to re-do so much of everything from scratch, we get to do that — since our situation is different, so many ways, whether it’s Mars, or the Belt, or especially something wild like cloudhopping on Venus. It’s not tweaking something that’s been old hat for generations, it’s all wide open.” She smiled wide as the sky.
“And what we’re doing really isn’t hacking and carving out a flimsy freehold on some vast untamed frontier; what we’re really doing these days is actually building a technology base that lets Man live and prosper, in just about any environment out there. As long as there’s energy and matter lying around, and remember we’re about to send an unmanned probe to Pluto to prospect things like those nitrogen glaciers, we’ll before long be able to pretty much live off the land. Ores and sunlight, great. But not so much of one or both, well, soon enough there’s a great workaround for that.”
“So… what you’re saying is that Arcadia Planitia is just the beginning?” It was not really a new thought, not at all; but seeing it for the first time, all laid out like a map in his head — kind of blew Gregory away.
“Here. Take a card, there’s even a QR code to our Web site for the very old fashioned. We’ll be here two more days after today, come by anytime from 9 to 6 except lunch after noon.”
“All right, suddenly I know I need to think more about this. A lot. So, can I ask who you are, exactly, Ellen?” The card did not have her name, only basic contact and company stuff.
“I’m an associate department engineer for deep-space resource development, or in non-corpspeak, I do separatory engineering for raw asteroidal metal and volatile recovery. Rubbolith refining, basically. Taking the rough raw stuff of protoplanetary formation, and turning it into useful — everything.
“And before you ask the obvious question, I’m laying over here on Earth to meet a lot of our people in-person, and get out of a metal can for a great wonderful change for a few months before I catch the next one. The cyclers are an integral part of getting our people safely to Mars and back; using rubblolith to build and stock them is a game-changer; but I still really wanted to see the open sky and breathe the open air. Going to be awhile, before we work up to building our first O’Neill Island One or whatever.” She spread her hands wide. “Tent, fresh fall breeze, beautiful college campus, fine young people to meet and greet. Hard to beat that.”
And then she smiled deeply, wistfully. “And yet, I couldn’t ever do this for long. Not any more. My heart belongs to the Endless Black, I fear.”
(Hat-tip to H. Beam Piper, for the “Chartered $SOMEPLACE Company” bit.)
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A bit late, but:
Nibbles the House Mouse called “all clear?” The mice were huddled under the refrigerator, looking across the kitchen.
Skidoo the Field Mouse did a quick scan. “Looks good, looks good and – hold! Human-human-human-human!”
“Damn! Where?”
“Coming up the stairs. It’s the farmer’s wife, and she’s got her you-know-what with her!”
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“I was sent here to represent Howland Technologies in the territory south of D.C. and north of Atlanta, where I couldn’t do much damage,” sighed Nigel Slim-Howland. “Nobody actually trusts me.”
“Perhaps,” said Gwendolyn, Nigel’s cyborg maid, “you’re simply not a company man. Should you not carve your own niche?”
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Impressively off topic (except possibly in a “this ought to be science fiction” sense), the 11th full-up test flight of SpaceX’s Starship is (still) scheduled for launch at 7:15 — 8:30 EDT tonight. Last update, weather is 80% likely for a go.
This is the last flight of the Version 2 orbiter / Version 1 booster. The first stage is a re-fly of the one from Flight 8 with 2/3 of its engines previously flown. It will land in the water (so no tower catch) after testing a new landing burn pattern (13 engines lit then 5 then 3).
The 2nd stage “Starship” will (hopefully) make a borderline orbit so it re-enters above the Indian Ocean — after deploying fake “mass simulator” Starlink v3 satellites and doing an engine re-light test. Also some funky new in-air subsonic maneuvers before a hover crash landing, to practice for later re-entry and tower catch of a Version 3 orbiter.
You can see this at spacex dot com (through their Web page or X-Twitter but no account required), or on assorted ‘Net broadcasts like Everyday Astronaut, NASA Spaceflight, or Ellie in Space on X and/or U-Tube (if the latter will let you watch, of course, “sign in to confirm you’re not a bot” cack).
SpaceX coverage should start about a half hour before launch.
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The Zoom call was tense.
Dr Nicole Anderson, Boston psychiatrist, listened carefully as her sister in Egypt, Dr Joan French, described her nightmares.
” Thanks for asking, Nic – I’m 28 weeks on, and getting a bit bulgy for crawling through small passages.
A bit of a labor dispute has left us isolated here for several weeks, though we’re fine for essential supplies.
You know our excavation has revealed some minor temples just outside Damietta. Without most of our workers, we cannot remove the rubble at the entrance, but cameras on cable have revealed some of the usual mural decorations, and some low-relief sculpture on the ceiling, a real oddity.
But the dreams! The images are overflowing into my dreams. In just the last week, Egyptian monkeys have come down from the walls, wielding pickles! Snakes appear in corners, their scales made of sardines! I even had to climb a mountain of ice cream on a wall to get out of a room! Madness! The ancient Egyptians didn’t even have ice cream!”
“Ah, Joan. Your old dyslexia is resurfacing in your subconscious – those are cravings, not carvings.”
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