Gunther Primes

Asimov's Prime Radiant

If mathematics is the Queen of the Sciences, then once in a while there should be some math in our science fiction. Last May and also in March, I blogged about pi and primes: both prime numbers and other types of primes in science fiction such as the Prime Radiant.

Dr. Garlock, S.O.B.
gets the girl (source)

Here, I explore another science fiction prime, Edward Elmer Smith's novel The Galaxy Primes. The story is set in the not-too-distant future, in a time when humans have already spread out to "three planets and eight satellites" of the Solar System and are now ready for the initial test flight of Humanity's first starship.

Maybe it happens to all aging science fiction writers at the end of their careers. In the case of Asimov, we got the Trevize and Pel transgalactic road trip. Jack Vance indulged his wanderlust with Ports of Call. "Doc" Smith sent Earth's first two Prime Operator telepaths out on a random walk through the universe.

a 3 hour film in the Ekcolir Reality

Dr. Garlock and Dr. Bellamy are described by Smith as:

"Her hair was a brilliant green. So was her spectacularly filled halter. So were her tight short-shorts...."

"big, clumsy, muscle-bound gorilla"

The later (above) is what the shapely Dr. Bellamy calls Dr. Garlock after he threatens to give her a spanking. Thus properly introduced, they set off in Earth's first starship, named Pleiades, to explore the universe and each other. Later, half way through the novel, after they've gotten to know each other, she sweetly calls him "big lug" and they finally have sex (actually, since this was published in the 1950s, they get to "pair" behind the closed doors of the spaceship crew compartments).

cover art by Edward Valigursky

In keeping with the animal theme, our heroes must do battle with various alien creatures, including flying tigers (see the cover art to the left).

Many reviewers have not been kind to The Galaxy Primes. For example:

"One wonders how something this bad ever got published....."

I think this other review is correct; we are not expected to take The Galaxy Primes too seriously.  John McCreery views The Galaxy Primes as a window into the past, a view of how people thought in the early 20th century, a time of optimistic and simplistic futurology.

Dr. Bellamy exercising her telepathic power 

Biology
Smith was trained as a food chemist and apparently worked to create recipes for things like doughnut mixes. When I was 12 years old, I felt that Smith "jumped the shark" when he wrote into his fictional universe the idea that really fast spaceship travel went at the "speed of thought".

I've previously blogged about the "all human galaxy" of Asimov. In Asimov's Foundation Fictional Universe, humans are the only intelligent creatures in the galaxy and they spread out from Earth, colonizing 20,000,000 Earth-like exoplanets. In The Galaxy Primes, Smith takes us to far off galaxies where there are so many planets, all of them inhabited by humans, that Dr. Garlock estimates their number as: "millions of millions, instead of millions and millions; and squared and then cubed at that". Not only that, but on each of these worlds human civilization has reached the same state of development, give or take a few centuries.

Brains

cover by Albert Nuetzell

The other "jumped the shark" moment for me that brought to an end my reading of Smith's stories was the idea of his Arisians, ancient aliens who have big brains and vast mental abilities: so much so that they can calculate and predict the future. Asimov went on to become famous for his "psychohistory", a science of predicting the future, but the idea was already there in Smith's fiction and, indeed, in the Newtonian equations that formed the foundation of 19th century Western science. Of course, during the 20th century, all the West's fantasies of predictability came crashing down.

In his Lensman Series, Smith used a technological device (the "lens") to provide humans with telepathic abilities. For me, The Galaxy Primes reads like an early draft of a Lensman story that Smith might have put in a drawer after he "invented" the "lens". If so, it is not clear why he later (1959) published it. Maybe he needed money.

convergence of the Primes

After their journey across the universe, during which they discover Prime Operators on other worlds, Dr. Garlock suggests that the fate of telepathic Prime Operators is to merge into a vast intergalactic group mind. Dr. Bellamy is staggered by the concept:

"If it is true that our vaunted mentality is only that of one blood cell compared to that of a whole brain ... and that intelligence is banked, level upon level ... well, it's simply mind-wrecking."

After some snuggling, the good Doctors regain their swagger and are ready to fulfill their intended purpose in life, the formation of a great Galactic Service which will organize the telepathic abilities of all humans on every planet to promote the betterment of all.

40 twin primes

Handwavium
How does this intergalactic group mind business work? According to Smith, the key math/science discovery is enshrined in "Gunther's Theorems" and their Psionic Corollaries: they provide a grand unified theory of both the physical and paraphysical. The starship Pleiades is expensive, so Earth only builds one ship. Interstellar travel depends of the "Gunther Effect" which can "annihilate distance", and space travel involves the poorly-understood "Gunther Field", which requires human psionic guidance for the control of which one of the "myriads of billions of equiguntherial points" will be reached by space travelers who utilize the Gunther Effect. Oooh, now I get it!

Our heroes, Dr. Bellamy and Dr. Garlock eventually learn that to control their destination during interstellar travel: they need to merge their minds, undergo a "fusion". Men and women form "Prime Pairs". As demonstrated by Bellamy and Garlock, it is for the best when the minds of two people are most dis-similar; then when they form a Prime Pair they have greater psionic power... or something.

According to Gohrlay, there were many television shows and movies with mathematical themes in the Ekcolir Reality. The partial analogue of Ivory Fersoni was one of many science fiction writers who helped bring the work of E. E. Smith to video formats in that Reality.

Agents 101 and 103 in the 9th episode of Prime Pairs.

The long-running television series Prime Pairs had a formulaic plot that was used in each episode. Two telepathic Primes (usually from different countries on Earth) were deployed by the Galactic Service to deal with some evil doing on a distant exoplanet. Each Prime Pair included two people who at first came into conflict and struggled to cooperate with their partner.

Drunken Aliens

However, by the end of the episode of Prime Pairs, the two stars of the show had learned to work together. During the initial broadcast of each episode, fans of the show got to vote on how that episode would end. Either the two stars would decide to 1) permanently remain on their exoplanet or 2) return to Earth. In the later case, they would be re-deployed in a future episode of Prime Pairs.

Next: more unlikely science fiction from Deep Time

Note: this is the first of a series of blog posts about forgotten science fiction stories. The next three are Drunken Zombie Aliens, Sound Science and Incomprehensible Alien Invaders.

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Platinum and its Privilages

Alien Invasion!
It all started innocently enough. Human history is replete with invasions and destructive wars. With time, we Earth folk looked up and contemplated the possibility of life on other worlds.

Inevitably, someone like Herbert Wells would have to provide us with a template for the Alien Invasion story.

1) In a Wellsian invasion of Earth, the aliens are vastly superior to us: "the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us".

Save the monkeys!

2) Blow things up.  Have you ever gone into a forest and seen a monkey? If so, I'm sure that you quickly activated your heat ray and vaporized that region of the forest.

3) Happy ending! Of course, no matter how intelligent and evolutionarily advanced the aliens are, no matter how carefully their invasion was planned, no matter how great their military technologies surpass our own, we lowly and bumbling Earthlings will repulse the evil alien invaders. Hurrah!

Aliens from planet Metaluna need Earth's uranium

At some point in the 20th century you could no longer get readers to believe that evil aliens might soon arrive from Mars. We had graduated from the era of chemical energy and entered the atomic age.

steam punk Cape Canaveral (source)

After the dawn of the atomic age, alien invasion would no longer come by means of projectile-like spacecraft launched by chemical explosions in giant canons, but rather in the form of self-propelled spaceships using far greater energies derived from subatomic forces.

For the Exode Saga, even greater energies are found among the hierions and the sedrons. Who has time for boring space voyages when you can just use a transgalactic teleporter?

Interstellar Invasion
By 1920s the world was ready for Edward Smith to take the alien invasion idea into the interstellar depths. In his Skylark series, Smith used the idea that a mysterious metal (X), once it had been isolated from a batch of "platinum residues", could efficiently act as a kind of nuclear catalyst to liberate all of the energy available in atomic nuclei.

For his story Triplanetary, which would eventually be fit into his Lensman saga, Smith again included the importance of metal and in his new story: his alien Nevians were in need of metal (iron).

Of course, by the time I read the Lensman Saga, Smith had jazzed up Triplanetary with a back story about the ancient Arisians as told in several new introductory chapters. Even Atlantis got thrown into the story!

source

I've long been amused by the excuses given in science fiction stories for why aliens travel across vast interstellar distances to come torment we Earthlings. One of my favorites is "they came to mine gold".

For Foundations of Eternity, I imagined that platinum is a natural source of valuable sedrons. So, you might say that sedrons are my version of Smith's mysterious substance "X". Maybe we could all just agree to use the name "handwavium" as our imaginary materials that we need as science fiction plot devices. But no, it is too much fun for each generation and each author to imagine and exploit yet another future technology.

In Smith's fictional universe, no matter how biologically and technologically advanced as the Arisians are, they cannot defeat their Evil adversaries, so they must evolve two human lineages leading to Kimball Kinnison and Clarissa MacDougall. Their children will be able to do what the Arisians never could: defeat the Bad Guys. We humans are so special. Ta da!

Earth's defensive technology
by Nihil-Novi-Sub-Sole
available under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

You could call Thomas my equivalent of the children of the Lens. As the son of an Asterothrope and an Ek'col, Thomas becomes a "proof  of concept" for a new way to efficiently introducing important gene combinations into the human population of Earth. The Exode Trilogy ends with the hope that such genetic engineering might allow Humanity to survive and reach the stars.

While it is true that the pek have mined Earth for sedronic matter, that is not why they came to Earth. Imagine hiking through a wilderness and coming upon some ripe fruit. Just because you might eat some of the fruit, that act of consumption does not imply that you went on the hike in order to get fruit.

Planes of Existence

I was baffled at age 12 when I read about Smith's Evil Alien Eddorians being "forced into the next plane of existence". Smith insisted that the planet Eddore did not originate in "normal space-time". However, through their "visualization of the Cosmic All", the Arisians had been able to foresee the arrival of Eddore in our universe.

As imagined by Smith, the Evil Alien Eddorians were sexless shapeshifters. Relentlessly seeking POWER (not the atomic kind), the Eddorians "were intolerant, domineering, rapacious, insatiable, cold, callous, and brutal".

The Space Opera formula requires a brilliant hero who can battle Evil Aliens...and win the girl.

If  so, then the Exode Trilogy isn't Space Opera, because there are no Evil Aliens. The image to the right is a pulpish reimagining of Thomas Iwedon's novel Miners of Earth. In the fantasy world depicted here, the Hollywood union standards for alien invaders are upheld.

In this fanciful Space Opera version of  Miners of Earth, the only humans shown are the two gold brick-toting slave ladies (1) in the lower panel. Of course, the rest of the human species is busy: they are out mining precious metals for their masters, the pek.

The pek (2) Overseer is performing a test on the gold and determining how many precious sedrons are present. The pek are not interested in the metal itself, only a rare sedronic contaminant.

In the upper panel, a scene that is taking place within the Hierion Domain (see below), an individual of the Huaoshy "species" (3, Thomas' equivalent of the Eddorians), a Sedron Lord, views events on Earth. Also shown is an imagined Kac'hin (4), a humanoid, but somewhat alien in appearance.

The Hierion Domain
E. E. Smith included "hyper-spatial tubes" as one of the imaginary technologies in the Lensman Saga. Of course, Smith lived in the Age of Tubes and his stories are full of an impressive array of tube-based plot devices. Smith used tubes of various types to accomplish many tasks, just as I use trendy plot devices like nanites at every turn of a story that is written from my position here in the Age of the Transistor.

I've previously written the Sedronic Domain into the Exode Trilogy. In honor of Smith's flamboyant imagination, Thomas includes the Hierion Domain in his novel Miners of Earth. When Malin and Mary finally reach their destination in South Africa, they are not loaded into a spacecraft and taken off into space, but rather they cross from our Hadronic Domain into a Hierion Tube!

More magazine and book covers.

Within the Hierion Domain there is a vast network of artificial habitats that can be fruitfully compared to Asimov's Eternity on steroids. Maybe Lendhalen and Klyz are places that exist within the Hierion Domain. Maybe the Kac'hin population of Izhiun's home world could easily conceal itself within the Hierion Domain.

I imagine that the temporal bubble of Eternity is R. Gohrlay's version of a synthetic habitat in the Hierion Domain. The Huaoshy have guided thousands of Genesaunt species through their use of the Hierion Domain as a convenient stepping stone towards the Sedronic Domain.

I've wondered how the Nereid Interventionists could maintain a hidden base of operations on Earth. Maybe that base was in the Hierion Domain, accessible from the headquarters of Space Energy Missions.

Hierion Tube (gif by Abel M'Vada)

Why is the Observer Base located on the Moon never observed by Earthlings? Why are the comings and goings of Observers and Overseers never seen? Observer Base is located inside the Hierion Domain. Travel between the Moon and Earth is accomplished by means of a Hierion Tube.

The Huaoshy allow Genesaunts to use hierion-based technologies, but they reserve sedronic technology for themselves (see the Sedron Monopoly). The Huaoshy eventually create for themselves a new existence as artificial life forms in the Sedronic Domain.

Their control over sedronic technologies and the Sedronic Domain gives the Huaoshy god-like powers. However, they are constrained in their actions by a set of self-imposed ethical rules that govern their interactions with biological organisms in the Hadronic Domain.

Adulthood
The Huaoshy think of themselves as the responsible adults of the universe. They've seen thousands of Earth-like words where human-like species have come and gone, species that destroyed themselves with their self-inflicted technological excesses. They use the pek to guide the evolution of hadronic lifeforms towards forms that can merge into the vast galaxy-spanning Genesaunt Civilization and that can eventually transform their biological existence and  transcend into the Sedronic Domain.

I've previously blogged about Childhood's End, a story that I have still never read. In Childhood's End, Clarke explored the consequences of Humanity being inevitably absorbed into some non-material group mind, this being accomplished in a hundred years or so.

In the Exode Trilogy, I imagine a far slower type of interaction between the alien Huaoshy and we Earthlings in which the human species is first created by the pek and then is slated for replacement. On Earth, we invasion-obsessed humans are quick to imagine that it is our fate to be replaced by the Prelands, a primate species crafted by the pek to be more suitable for transcendence into the Sedronic Domain.

The Huaoshy have about as much interest in primitive creatures like we Earthlings as we might have in a patch of algae on a random rock at the beach. We Earthlings only come to the attention of the Huaoshy because of a strange trick of fate.

It is technically incorrect to say that the pek created the human species. It is more accurate to say that the pek created the conditions under which the human species could come into existence. The "trick of fate" was that some humans, particularly the Neanderthals evolved a capacity for telepathy. That telepathic communications ability was limited to an unconscious brain system that supported social cohesion.

It is also an over-simplification to say that the pek alone were responsible for the existence of our species. The Nereid Interventionists worked long and hard to slip interesting gene combinations into the human gene pool. After R. Gohrlay kicked the pek out of Observer Base on the Moon, the Nereids became aggressive in their support of development of a  technological civilization on Earth. The full extent of their actions to allow the rise of human civilization is uncertain. [but see this late 2014 update]

Before the revolution sparked by R. Gohrlay, the pek had gently suppressed all cohesive advancement towards civilization by the people of Earth. It might be that the Nereids and R. Gohrlay's tribe of telepathic positronic robots collaborated to keep the pek from interfering in events on Earth. That might have been all it took for civilization to arise. Alternatively, did the Nereids actively provide Earthlings with assorted "cultural hints" that significantly accelerated the pace of technological advance?

I am currently cut off from any contact with Angela and Ivory. Without more help from them, I might never be able to sort out these kinds of questions. Even the sensation of telepathic contact with Ivory that I had been imagining is now gone. I do not fear alien invasion. I fear that we have been abandoned by the aliens and even our fellow humans who could escape from this planet.

Dr. Arroway

Life Looks for Life
Carl Sagan's fictional account of first contact (Contact) depicted aliens as largely indifferent to the existence of humans. The aliens who Dr. Arroway communicated with were much more technologically advanced than we primitive humans and they were concerned with their own affairs within a galactic community. This strikes me as more likely than aliens who feel compelled to travel vast distances to Earth just to participate in a Wellsian invasion.

click image to enlarge

Sagan imagined nothing as paltry as the human species having been created by aliens, rather, he had Arroway discover evidence that our universe had been created and intelligently designed. In the Exode Trilogy, I draw the line at having the Huaoshy merely modifying the dimensional structure of the universe. Ah, the power of platinum!

Next: in my next blog post I further explore the Hierion Domain.

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by Earl Norem

by FRANK R. PAUL

Image credits: Check out other online art by Norem, Paul and Youll!

by Stephen Youll

200 - Blogging about Writing

The Olmec Intervention

This is my 200th post to this blog, so I'm going to take a look back and reflect on some of my experiences with collaborative fiction writing and blogging that have changed the way I write science fiction stories.

In 2005 I started exploring the use of wiki websites as a tool for collaborative fiction writing. Prior to that time, working by myself, I had created the first story set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe. Exodemic was written as a kind of alternative history story, but I was feeling dissatisfied and constrained by that format. It was valuable for my growth as a writer to go online and find other science fiction writers who I could collaborate with and by doing so gain writing experience that expanded my fiction writing repertoire.

Elsewhere, I've summarized some the important online collaborative writing projects that I've had the pleasure to explore by making use of wiki technology and in 2009 I started blogging about my fiction writing, both here and at other websites.

Looking back on what I've learned from these online experiences, I can identify a few types of activities that have been particularly fun and educational. The rest of this blog post provides a summary of those experiences.

Fan Fiction

The Start of Eternity

Back in 2005 I had recently discovered the joy of fan fiction. I've occasionally blogged about my condition: I now suffer from "fanfiction disease", the incurable desire to write stories that make use of famous characters created by others and it is my habit to do so by inserting those characters into stories that are set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe.

My first act of fan fiction sin involved the creation of an X-Files/Star Trek story in which I brought together Gene Roddenberry's characters from Assignment: Earth with some X-Files characters. I've also sinned by making fan fiction using characters from science fiction novels published by Isaac Asimov, Jack Vance, Carl Sagan and Sydney J. van Scyoc.

source

The most egregious example of my tendency to hijack famous characters is a fan fiction novel called The Start of Eternity. As described in a recent blog post, I'm very pleased with The Start of Eternity because it allowed me to make use of the Huaoshy to provide an amusing ending to Asimov's Foundation Series. At the same time, I was forced to develop my thinking about the technological prowess of the Huaoshy and define some limits on their seemingly god-like powers.

Right now I'm feeling very happy with my fan fiction experience because as a consequence of my dabbling in this sinful activity I was able to imagine a satisfying backstory for my current science fiction writing project: Exode. That backstory involves time travel, but Exode is not a time travel novel.

Time Travel
One of the first science fiction movies that I remember seeing was The Time Machine. Even when I was ten years old I was disappointed by the idea of a time machine looked like a sleigh. The only time travel story that captivated me was The End of Eternity.

For most of my life I was a space travel snob, convinced that the proper domain of science fiction is stories about spaceships and distant planets with alien beings. However, I was haunted by the thought of Noÿs Lambent living out her life in the 20th century after having been born ten million years in our future. When I finally decided to write a fan fiction sequel to Asimov's Foundation and Earth I could not resist the temptation to include Noÿs in the story.

When I translocated Noÿs into the Exodemic Fictional Universe I had no desire to write a time travel story, rather, I wanted to put an end to time travel. This was possible for the Huaoshy, who, it turns out, were responsible for the existence of time travel. When the Huaoshy altered the dimensional structure of the universe so as to make possible faster-than-light travel, they inadvertently also made time travel possible. As described in The Start of Eternity, time travel was not invented by the Huaoshy. In a strange twist of fate, time travel was discovered by positronic robots.

Having developed the technology for time travel, the positronic robots of Earth caused a big headache for the Huaoshy. Eventually, the Huaoshy decided that the had to undertake one final dimensional engineering project that would make time travel impossible. At the same time, that shift in the dimensional structure of the universe ended the ability of positronic robots to exercise the telepathic abilities that Asimov had depicted in his robot stories.

About a billion years ago, in a distant galaxy, a sapient biological lifeform developed the technology that is required to harness fusion energy and antimatter-based spaceship propulsion. They started slowly exploring their galaxy while looking for the means to travel through space at speeds faster than light. These beings were not yet Huaoshy, but I'll use that label for convenience since they eventually transformed themselves into the Huaoshy.

The Huaoshy discovered that they could alter the dimensional structure of the universe. By first switching the dimensional structure from the "ground state" to a "transitional state" they made possible faster-than-light communications using hierions. This was a great advance for the management of their growing interstellar civilization.

However, the Huaoshy really wanted to be able to travel through space at faster-than-light speeds. They completed another even more technologically challenging alteration in the dimensional structure of the universe that gave them mastery over sedronic matter and which allowed for faster-than-light travel through space.

The Huaoshy were satisfied with that new dimensional structure and they slowly transformed themselves into an artificial lifeform composed of sedronic mater.

However, when humans invented positronic robots the Huaoshy discovered that their dimensional engineering had also made time travel possible. Eventually the Huaoshy made one more change to the dimensional structure of the universe which made time travel impossible while continuing to allow travel through space at faster-than-light speeds....which, afterall, is an important technology to have around for space operas!

Space Opera

My personal introduction to space opera was similar to that described by Will Stackey. When I was 12 years old it was fun to imagine building a spaceship and heading off to the stars...meeting aliens, defeating the bad guy and ending up with the girl...at least, for as long as the innocence lasted. Unfortunately, the more I learned about science the less I was able to tag along with Dr. Smith and his cosmic adventures, particularly when they involved spacecraft that flew at the speed of thought. 

Smith can be blamed for starting my revolt against science fiction written by physical scientists. Given my interest in biology it should be no surprise that I have trouble when chemical engineer starts trying to get me to believe that thought "travels" faster than the speed of light.

By the time I was out of my teens I had developed a preference for "hard science fiction" that never seemed to violate the laws of physics or trot out biologically implausible plot elements.

For example, when I started writing Exodemic, I wanted to depict a future in which there was no faster-than-light travel, no time travel, and no telepathy or "mental powers"....and no religion, too.

I had reached the point in my thinking where I was more comfortable traveling slowly from star to star in generation ships than flashing across the universe in defiance of the laws of physics.

Writing The Search for Kalid

Then I was lucky enough to participate in the collaborative writing of The Search for Kalid. Left to myself, I never would have started writing a space opera. Three of the important things I learned from that collaboration were 1) that some characters can be crafted and developed in certain ways just because it is fun to do so (plot-driven science fiction can take itself too seriously), 2) it can be fun to include social elements like religion in a science fiction story even if the story is not directly about cultural elements like religion and 3) I was able to start making room in my science fiction for imaginary technologies like faster-than-light travel, teleportation and even forms of "weird biology" that would make possible "mental powers" and telepathy.

These changes in my science fiction writing "comfort zone" were very liberating. I've learned to live with "imaginary science".

Fictional Science
My science fiction writing has been powerfully shaped by three key ideas: 1) the Fermi Paradox, 2) Richard Feynman's realization that there is plenty of room at the bottom and 3) Clarke's suggestion that advanced technology can seem like magic.

The plot of Exodemic involves the realization by humans that small can be powerful and during the past year while creating Exode I've further refined my thinking about how to include the power of the very small in my fiction.

Nanotechnology

When I wrote Exodemic I used the term "nanodevice". At the Fiction Wikia I picked up the term "nanite" and started using it, for example to account for the ability of Isis to morph between human and cat forms.

Originally I conceptualize nanites as microscopic devices composed of conventional matter. However, I imagined that sophisticated nanorobotic devices could use fictional "hierions" to exchange information. Hierion-based communication between microscopically small symbionts inside people became a means of achieving telepathic communication.

Later, I developed the idea that there could be a type of matter formed by hierions where the bond lengths were zeptoscale. In Exode, the pek are composed vast numbers of nanorobotic devices that are made from of such matter.

Not satisfied with that level of miniaturization, the Huaoshy have taken their technology to an even smaller scale where intelligent artificial life exists in the form of sedronic matter in which bond lengths approach to within a few orders of magnitude of the Planck length.

Mental Powers

I never understood how Asimov imagined that telepathy would work in his stories. In Second Foundation he wrote about returning "the recording of his original brain-wave makeup" to Bail Channis in order to restore his erased memories, as if our memories are some kind of electronic software program to be loaded into a computer, or erased.

Asimov wrote that the Mule could sense the electric fields generated by a brain, thus allowing him to "read thoughts".  He could also alter personalities using "mentalics", impressing his pattern of brain activity on others.

First Foundationers who lacked the biological equipment needed for "mentalic abilities", were shown using sensitive brain wave recording technology to detect evidence that the function of brains (like that of Homir Munn) had been altered by "mantalic manipulation". So, electromagnetism was the basis of "mentalics", but the brilliant Dr. Darell had to invent an electromagnetic "mental static" device with hundreds of circuits in order to prevent mentalic mind control by the Second Foundationers. Eh?

While working on The Search for Kalid I took the time to seriously think about how it might be possible for telepathy to evolve and be present in a biological species like we humans. Thus, the telastid was invented and used as the fictional explanation for telepathy.

Having grown comfortable with such an imaginary mechanism for telepathy I no longer have qualms about endowing technologically advance artificial lifeforms with "mental powers" that can involve hypothetical hierions and be entirely independent of any physics as primitive as electromagnetism.

Illustration and Video
In my teens, when I first started writing stories, I had a dream about a science fiction book that I would one day write. In my dream, that book had an animated cover like a miniature television screen. When we finally rumbled into this millennium I was pleased that my science fiction stories no longer had to be restricted to text.

One of the joys of writing stories in electronic format is that images and videos can be easily added to the text.

In the first scene of Exode that I imagined, Hana saw a business card from Parthney with the provocative text: "Change your world" and images of some planets located far away towards the center of the galaxy.

Hemmal became the most important such planet in Exode, the world where Parthney was born. The nearby planet Oib was where the Pla developed their plans for how to bring a technological culture to the people of Earth.

The Koly star system has one other inhabited world, Clu'ten'ium. No human would think to live there, but it is a world with some appeal to the Fru'wu, so that becomes the secret location of Lendhalen.

Blogging about Writing
As described above, my online experiences have greatly modified and expanded my interests as a writer. While I greatly enjoy collaborative writing, I've also learned to make use of blogging as a way to explore and develop a story.

Of course, when I say "develop a story" I really mean the development of the imagined universe that I think of as the Exodemic Fictional Universe. For me, that development process is endless fun because there is a logic to the Huaoshy. As an artificial lifeform that designed itself, the Huaoshy have an identity that is hidden from we humans, but if we keep chipping away we can reveal the structure of that logic.

There is no escape from the recursive nature of that logic. The Huaoshy created we humans and we find ourselves struggling to understand our origins. To do so, we we must imagine the Huaoshy and what they must be like in order for them to have created us and kept us so ignorant of our origins.
_________________________
Exode is the story of a small group of people who are trying to discover the nature of the aliens who made we humans. The story is under development and collaborating authors are welcome.
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