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.
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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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Kac'hin

In my previous blog post I explored the implications of the artificial lifeform Reginal, a pek, being the birth mother of Parthney, the main character of Exode. When Parthney was born on Hemmal there was no woman on the entire planet, so it was necessary that a pek be the vessel that served to gestate Parthney. Here, I need to make a similar investigation into the origins of Kach, a human woman who grows up on Hemmal at the same time as Parthney.

Just before Parthney departs from the planet Hemmal he meets Kach. Kach is under considerable strain because she has been working diligently for years to wheedle her way into Preland society. She hopes that direct study of the Prelands might provide her with insights into the nature of the Creators, the mysterious beings who, according to Preland tradition, created the Prelands.

by Jon Lomberg

At the same time, Kach has decided that Parthney, as the only male on Hemmal, represents her only opportunity to have children. Kach orders her pek assistant Muchlo to collect some of Parthney's germ cells. One of Muchlo's secrets is that the pek have no need for anything as messy as a sample of Parthney's germ cells. The pek have long had Parthney's genome on file and they could effortlessly provide Kach with a child that combines Kach's DNA with that of Parthney or any of billions of other people with their genomes on tap in the pek data banks. However, Muchlo has other reasons for accosting Parthney, so everything proceeds as Kach expects during the last night that Parthney is on Hemmal.

Several years later, after she has become frustrated by her inability to learn anything useful about the Creators from the Prelands, Kach gives birth to Boswei, who is Parthney's son. By this time, Parthney is far away, living on Earth.

When Boswei is grown, Parthney manages to return to Hemmal and collect his "family". Kach, Parthney and Boswei go off to the Andromeda galaxy. Parthney has been recruited by the Fru'wu to go in search of the mysterious Nereids. Kach hopes that the Nereids might be the Creators.

Related reading: The Religion of Exode

The Journey Within

Kach is fundamentally wrong in her belief that the Creators are somewhere "out there" and waiting for Kach to arrive and have a nice chat with them. Long ago the Huaoshy originated as biological organisms, not too different from we humans, but they developed the technological means to transform themselves in a form of artificial life based on sedronic matter. Thus, the Huaoshy no longer exist as beings of conventional matter constrained to the three extended dimensions of our human experience. Kach has no way of knowing how different the Huaoshy are from us, so is her life-long quest to make contact with the Creators doomed to failure?

For billions of years prokaryotic cells have produce nothing more complex than stromatolites. Eukaryotic cells make possible complex multicellular organisms such as we humans. The gulf between a bacterium and a human is similar in magnitude to that which exists between a human and the Huaoshy.

What Kach only slowly comes to realize is that she holds within herself the means to achieve contact with the Huaoshy. Kach, like Parthney, has an unusual biological origin.

When the Huaoshy finally understood that positronic robots, an invention of humans, had developed the technological means to travel through time, they also realized that it was their own dabbling in dimensional engineering that had made time travel possible. The Huaoshy began the difficult task putting an end to time travel and correcting the damage that had been done to Genesaunt civilization by the positronic robots. In order to make these "corrections to Reality", the Huaoshy had to deal with another fundamental and serious problem.

source: Ron Blakey, Department of Geology, Northern Arizona University

During the hundreds of millions of years during which the Huaoshy had existed as sedronic lifeforms, they had lost interest in the dingy three dimensional universe of their origin, the universe of conventional matter that is inhabited by primitive biological creatures like we humans. The Huaoshy long ago designed the pek, an artificial lifeform that exists within three dimensional space, and for hundreds of millions of years the pek have followed an automated program of spreading Huaoshy influence from galaxy to galaxy. When the pek encounter a world like Earth, they set about "domesticating" any organisms that have the capacity to develop a technological civilization. Working slowly, the pek provide a means of systematically altering such biological lifeforms into a form of life that can make the transition from conventional matter into the domain of artificial life known as "Huaoshy".

Four phases of life.

The Huaoshy long ago lost interest in the work of the pek. More importantly, from the human perspective, the Huaoshy lost interest in the existence of individual species like we humans and they lost the ability to understand the concerns of lifeforms as limited and restricted as individual humans. Thus, while it is easy for Kach to imagine that the Creators might be similar to humans (to the extent that they could explain themselves to we humans), in fact, such communication between humans and the Huaoshy had slowly and gradually become impossible during the time period when land animals evolved on Earth.

However, when the positronic robots invented time travel, the Huaoshy noticed that for the first time in their long existence they suddenly faced a serious threat from the domain of conventional matter. The Huaoshy had long worried about -and prepared for- the possibility that somewhere else in the universe there might be another lifeform that had mastered the science of sedronics and begun to engage in dimensional engineering. The Huaoshy contingency plan for that possibility was triggered by the positronic robots of Earth and their development of time travel technology.

When the Huaoshy became aware of Earth they faced a serious problem. They had no way of understanding humans and investigating the mystery of how humans had liberated themselves from pek control and creating an unprecedented hole within the vast fabric of Genesaunt civilization.

In order to deal with this crisis, the Huaoshy started working through their proxies in the domain of conventional matter, the pek. The pek managed to infiltrate the budding Interstellar Empire of Humanity and obtain a damaged positronic brain. Careful study of that brain allowed the Huaoshy to realize the importance of positronics. Still ignorant of the existence of time travel, the Huaoshy made several attempts to defeat the positronic robots who were beginning to spread Humanity from Earth to other planets of the galaxy. Only after several failures did the Huaoshy realize that they were dealing with positronic robots who could travel through time. Finally, the Huaoshy mastered time travel themselves.

The Huaoshy realized that the positronic robots of Earth were actually still at a primitive stage in their understanding of sedronic matter. Further, the positronic robots had so far only achieved a strangely limited form of dimensional engineering that allowed for their ability to travel through time and exist within temporal bubbles where the links of causality to the rest of Reality had been broken.

The first of these "Temporal Bubbles" that was discovered by the Huaoshy was Eternity, the time travel device being used on Earth.

The Huaoshy went into the past and tried to prevent positronics from being discovered by humans. Only after several failed attempts did the Huaoshy realize that they were fighting against positronic robots who were using several "Temporal Bubbles". If all the Huaoshy did was pop one such bubble then their adversaries would emerge from another hidden bubble, travel back in time, and prevent the Huaoshy from regaining control over Earth. In order to put an end to this futile time war, the Huaoshy traveled back in time and brought into being a new population of humans.

The Kac'hin
This newly designed variety of humans, the Kac'hin, became the tool that the Huaoshy could use to regain control of Earth (as told in The Start of Eternity). Working through the medium of several Kac'hin individuals, the Huaoshy were able to reach a deal with Noÿs that ended the struggle over the fate of Earth.

As part of their negotiations with Noÿs, the Huaoshy agreed to allow humans to retain possession of Earth rather than stick to their long-standing plan to replace humans with Prelands. Noÿs insisted that humans on Earth be allowed to establish a technological civilization and achieve first contact with the Buld in approximately the year 2000.

Exode is the story of the events leading up to that "first contact". During the 20,000 years before Earthlings first have knowledge of Genesaunt civilization, the Huaoshy arranged for the pek to produce several types of human "agents" who were routinely sent from worlds like Hemmal to Earth. Some of these secret agents were Kac'hin.

As a Kac'hin, Kach has a brain structure that has been selected to make possible a form of communication with the Huaoshy. As an analogy for how difficult such communication is, imagine establishing a data channel for information exchange between a bacterium and a person. From the perspective of a human communicating with a bacterium, the information received might seem quite limited and boring. However, the Huaoshy have made an effort to establish the means to monitor the communications channel that they created by designing the Kac'hin.

source: Dan Durda, Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, CO.

In order to communicate with the Huaoshy, Kach must learn to use the "bimanoid interface", which is a specialized collection of devices composed of sedronic matter that can interface with the pek nanites that have resided in her brain during her whole life. When Kach arrives in the Andromeda galaxy and has a chance to question the Nereids, she learns about the planet Luk'ru where the Kac'hin were originally created.

Arriving at Luk'ru, Kach quickly decides that there are no surviving Kac'hin on the planet. She and Parthney depart Luk'ru and go off in search of some living Kac'hin who Kach hopes will be able to teach her how to use the "bimanoid interface" and allow her to communicate with the Huaoshy. By this time Hana is about to give birth to Izhiun, so she and Boswei decide to settle on Luk'ru and establish a human settlement in the Andromeda galaxy.

Source: Matthew Trickel

Kach eventually realizes that her use of the "bimanoid interface" as a communications channel to the Huaoshy depends on her doing something that is of interest to the Huaoshy. Imagine that the Huaoshy have a monitoring system that is analogous to the way that humans might monitor microbes for pathogenicity and potential to harm people. When Kach finally makes her way to Earth and starts interfering with the Overseers who are stationed at Observer Base on the Moon then she finally attracts the attention of the Huaoshy.

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Note. For more about the Bimanoid Interface see my blog post "Let there be light".

2014. Update on the origins of Kach.