The ghost in the machine

There's something weirdly detached about AI art. This is beyond the various "tells" that range from obvious to edge cases. It is this sense of there being no there there. A soulless-ness that is of a different quality than corporate art or mass-produced art or been-through-too-many-committee-meetings art. That's the backdrop that makes those glimpses of a real soul in there so striking.

The first level is seeing those human signs that are divorced from their original context. In Saberhagen's Berzerker series, the titular machines do not have vocoders or some other synthesized speech. Instead they talk using scraps recorded from the various humans who have been its prisoners. From word to word the age, accent, gender, and emotional content of the voice changes. And you get glimpses of those original personalities, the fearful, the resigned, the aloof intellectual, the child in terror.

It freaks me out as someone who has tried to learn visual arts, and who has studied the style and careers of various artists. Much of what the AI was trained on is effectively anonymous, as this was the output of commercial artists on contract or the various cogs in a studio system, or just artists you haven't yourself learned to recognize. 

But you still see those things, those brush strokes, those choices in line, the way a mouth is drawn. Things that in context are part of a complete style and approach. That come out of a philosophy (quite possibly one that is ever-shifting, as an artist approaches different projects with different intents, and their career changes over time as well).

But you don't see the same thing across the image. One line is drawn one way. Another line, right by it, is drawn in some different way. Not completely different (the AI is more selective than that) and not usually pure (it always blends a little). So you probably won't see an Arthur Adams mouth or a Rob Liefeld foot, not perfectly preserved in amber. But you will have a blurry glimpse, a funhouse mirror version, enough to know without the slightest doubt that this particular artist was in the training material.

And this lack of a clear overall purpose is also visible in something else. Something that is most marked when some semblance of it is present.

And that is in composition. On the largest scale, on the scale of the total image, the AI will probably have a harmonious composition. Most of the material it was trained on had that, and enough of it was using similar rules (or, more precisely, a small set of different compositional approaches that themselves have a small set of fairly well-defined rules). 

And some of this is because the current most popular approach of generative AI for visual art is progressive approximation, working from the broadest outlines in. So you could say the AI starts with blocking, with a massing study, and that is probably decent. Where it falls down is because there isn't a guiding purpose that makes sure that everything else unfolds according to it.

That's why AI is currently so shit at lighting, by the way. And yes, the AI-boosters will point out that it is "getting better" and will continue to get better. But it is doing so by brute force and band-aids. When the Hildebrandt's painted, they had a clear vision of sunlight (usually) coming from one direction, the reflection of what was often green earth coming from another. This was in their heads with every shadow, every shading of every limb or rock or tree.

And it was in the planning. When an artist like Jack Kirby penciled, he knew where there would be blocks of solid black, and he planned and placed them as part of the composition. They didn't just fall where you'd expect a shadow to fall.

The AI can capture this statistically. It places the shadows where they usually fall. It shades because the training examples shade. It only gets it right most of the time because most artists are doing the thing in similar ways and with enough samples it will probably not be led into producing an outlier.

But that's all aside of where I was going with this. There are AI images which go beyond simplistic harmony in their composition and actually move on to telling a story within it. Where there is a focus and eye-leading, where the pose isn't just a collection of average limb positions but actually communicates intent. When a character is engaged in a purposeful action that can be read.

And the reason is because there was an original image. I recently watched a video about a young artist (who has learned better since) who did quite nice drawings then sent them into AI to make them look more polished. His style was perfect for this, by the way. AI gets confused by linework and isn't going to save it anyhow, but blocks of color tells it the ideas you want it to flesh out.

There are other routes to this soul transplant. One is by over-prompting the AI to copy a single original artwork you've been inspired by. You might ask it for an astronaut on the moon and with any luck at all you will get one of the three top images from Apollo 11 that appear over and over across media. With a few screwy details, because it is still mashing together multiple sources and not all of them came from the photograph in question or even from the real space program. Or you might outright name the artwork and/or artist, and surprise surprise, you can absolutely get the Mona Lisa back. 

But there is also image to image. And that is, in the essentials, using AI as a Photoshop filter on an existing artwork. Or photograph, or whatever.

In fact, there are entire models that are absolutely and unapologetically based on this.

In ComfyUI, one workflow -- right there on the front panel of the application -- is to take an image of a person (which could be the actual original photograph of a real person) and a screen-grab from a movie or a TikTok, and put the choreography of the one on the other. This isn't an edge case or an abuse of the model, this is how it is intended to be used. ComfyUI supports plenty of models which are text-based and even in the above the final results can be shaped by a more typically generative process, but this is absolutely making a paste-up of two real (stolen) things. It is necessarily so; the toolchain doesn't work if you don't provide these two pre-existing things for it to mash together.

What is sad here, though, is the glimpses of a potential partner. There are parts of making art where the amount of expression you put in is too low a ratio for the effort put in. Inking is wonderful stuff. Erasing the pencils, not so much. And few people want to grind their own pigments.

Somewhere in there is the ability to partner, to have a dialog, to use technology to draw the inbetweens or fill in the blocks. Some of it, we have. Some of that has been with us for a while. There's a reason why Photoshop survives the shitty business practices of Adobe. 

Just, this thing we currently have that we call AI is being applied to the wrong parts of the process, and too often for the wrong reasons. We could have a tool that would allow us to work as artists, and automate the parts of the process that are least human. Instead we have a tool we are using to bypass the parts of the process that are the most expressive of artistic intent; to do those things that should be human.

(And, in the end, fuck up the small details we might have turned to it to do.)

Also... have you looked at the price of RAM lately?

Turducken

I don't know why I'm rushing to find another project. I'm finally into the meaty scenes of this novel. The stuff I was looking forward to doing when I started this book.

Took three days to hammer out a draft of the "Footloose" scene. That's one of those scenes that's not in the outline but comes organically out of the story. From the first moment I introduced Penny to Alamogordo and sent her to a Blake's Lotaburger, I realized there was a thing I could do there. 

It grew, until it became a scene where Penny confronts a bully like something out of an '80s movie -- a connection she, with her Media Arts degree, makes herself. Which is why the scene indirectly references Flashdance, Back to the Future, Footloose, and War Games. But I also name-drop the Marianas Trench and Manchester United. 

(You might also count in Breaking Bad, as a Blake's makes frequent appearances in that as well.)

It ain't about the name-dropping. That's just an observation. The scene is about how we see ourselves in movies, how some of the plots in movies reflect unhealthy trends in our society, and the point of it is Penny finding a way not to play out those tired old stereotypes. But it is really a side-note scene, at best the resolution of a tiny sub-plot; the real thing going on is pulling her off the path of solving the mystery no matter what, and placing her emotionally where she can take a different path at WIPP as well.

Anyhow, I've been thinking less of potpourri, and more of sequences that stack multiple elements to make something bigger than one alone. And I've been trying to figure out a simple way to describe one of these Turducken set-pieces in the Horizon Zero Dawn series, that becomes one of the more memorable sequences in the second game.

Our protagonist, Aloy, travels to the ruins of Las Vegas, now half-buried in the sands, on her quest to rebuild the terraforming system needed to bring the Earth back from disaster.

When the terraforming system was attacked, key sub-functions achieved a sort of unhappy self-awareness and fled to whatever distant surviving servers they could use as hosts. POSEIDON took refuge in Las Vegas, its arrival triggering the old desalinization plant and flooding the ruins of a grand casino that was once the center and showpiece of Vegas -- a Vegas already rescued from the desert once, through the efforts of a man named Stanley Chen, both investor and inventor of that desalinization system.

With me so far? A lot of stories might have stopped at the vista of ruined casinos overtaken by the desert sands. That's pretty spectacular already. But a big part of the adventure takes place in the transformed lower floors, now filled with water and the holographic illusions of sea life as a drowned god dreams.

In the middle of this mix is a trio of Oseram delvers, their leader driven by visions of the Vegas that once was discovered then lost again by his father. Delvers who are also showmen and who make the choice in the end to stay and to rebuild the town once again. And all three have amusing quirks and work well off each other; these are hardly throw-away side characters.

And as you the player explore, completing the challenges and puzzles to return POSEIDON to the task of saving the world, you encounter recordings that outline the story of Stanley Chen; his betrayal by his own business partners, his long-shot gamble at reviving Vegas, his success, and his final lonely trip through the town he had saved and made his home as the terraforming fails and the deserts sweep in again...leaving the computer core running out of sheer nostalgia, never dreaming of how that would one day save Vegas again in ways he could not have imagined.

Of course, all of this is set against the story of the Horizon Zero Dawn series, and Aloy's own personal journey. Themes and plot and story and character are all near-seamlessly interwoven with game mechanics. The very traversal mechanism (a sort of magitech SCUBA mask) that you use comes from those Oseram delvers and their personal story arc. (One reviewer used the subtitle "Gear and Clothing in Las Vegas.")

I love it when you can pull together different elements like this. I was recently trying to talk about this in a Reddit answer to a writer's question about using AI for inspiration. I am split here. Stated baldly, you could assemble one of the combinations mad-lib style. Or with a dartboard, or via ChatGPT. The tough part is joining them in writing.

But I think it is more likely you would come up with a winning combination because you understood the kinds of connections that worked for the story you wanted to tell. So you aren't trying to force something from a limited selection into working. Instead you are open to ideas, so when you are in the middle of constructing a story or story part, you recognize the germ of a thing that could be added in as it floats by in the form of a random news story, a face in the crowd, a spilled cup of coffee. Instead of an external generator of ideas, the story itself generates them out of wisps and whispers.

I do still expect a few more of those. I recently added a sort of apocalypse log to the Atlas Missile sequence, which I hope will make that more interesting (and is also my current solution for getting both Project Pluto and the next clue for the mystery into what otherwise is a bare silo).

The beats weren't quite working. This would be a good time for Penny to make some wrong choices, to fail a little, and for once not be so analytical about things. 

So Wargames is out, but Kubrick is in. Not the one you are thinking of, either. This isn't a line quote but a cinematographic quote; the Kubrick Stare.

Beta reader

ProWritingAid has really been pushing their AI beta reader. Many, many emails and popups and so forth on the sale of the credits necessary to run the thing. With the subscription I already have comes a small number of "free" credits so before I succumbed to the "now 35% off the 50% off of the special sale price!" Black Friday/Cyber Monday stuff I should really, really try the thing out.

I did.

It is AI.

Okay, it took a while to find how to activate it at all. All of the buttons went to the sale page, not to the "run this thing on my existing credits" page. And full compatibility with Scrivener requires putting ProWritingAid in as the always-on grammar checker and wanna-be Clippy for every single bit of text you type on your Mac. Not something I wanted.

But I was able to finally find it on the web version of the software and threw an opening chapter at it.

On the positive side, it seemed to grasp what it was reading. And possibly answered the biggest question I have about my writing (probably, that every writer has); does the reader understand what I'm saying?

Possibly, because this is AI. Which is to say, all it knows is that my text has the same text-shaped objects that it has seen in the other text-shaped objects it has been shown. Which might have been examples of good writing from good writers, or fanfic dredged from wherever it could get it.

The fact that it seemed to understand the three character names as belonging to, well, characters, is a trick that ELIZA was capable of. And that program can be emulated in a few dozen lines of BASIC.

On the downside, it praised the sample for having a fun and engaging narrative voice, and for weaving the modern-day setting with historical information. But, shit, that's what I was trying to do. So I made text-shaped objects that my meat-brain thought looked like the text-shaped objects made by writers who could actually pull those things off. I borrowed ways of saying things that I'd seen other writers use. 

So the silicon-brain agreeing that I'd accomplished my goals is really it saying, yes; I'd borrowed things from other writers it had seen. What does it bring to the table that allows it to tell if I pulled it off? In what way does it replicate the experience of a human beta reader?

(The pic above is of course the human, Beta; clone-sister to Aloy of the Horizon Zero Dawn franchise.)

The effusiveness of the critique gave it the flavor of friends-and-family feedback. That is, praise you can't trust, especially as it is so content-empty. As with all things, the most trustworthy things the AI spat out were the few small criticisms it was willing to risk.

Yes, I am very suspicious. LLMs are being trained both evolutionarily and programmatically to coddle the users. An AI that criticizes and corrects is going to be less popular and in the end sell fewer copies. And from all the sales, ProWritingAid really wants to sell some copies. So a tool from them that praises my writing is a tool I can not trust.

Even that, I could work from. Except for the so-very-typical empty AI phrasing. The "many writers have agreed that this may be a better way to phrase..." stuff that ends up saying almost nothing, but wrapped in language that does its best to hide the lack of anything inside.

The other tools of ProWritingAid are more useful. Sure, it is wrong a significant amount of the time, but it is absolutely clear about which words it doesn't like and why it thinks those words are wrong. So you can work with it, looking into everything it flags and checking, yourself, to see if it found something that should be corrected.

The same sample I threw at the AI engine was automatically sent through the checks for spelling and passive voice and so on. And it found things I would fix. But on the gripping hand...that chapter had already been through ProWritingAid. A couple of years back, but...it missed the stuff then. So what is it missing today?

Metered

I got into the usual back and forth about the opening of the next scene. Couldn't resist an Eagles reference but decided to save most of the desert highway (dark or not) for the trip to WIPP.

I'd hit the references and I thought I picked out a decent Geiger counter for her. I didn't remember the references but I remembered the trail I took and pretty soon one model was leaping to the fore. Okay, good, but what did she learn about such things during her (as yet unwritten) museum trip? Did I have pictures of that cute little interactive exhibit?

I did. And what was in it?

 Yeah, that's clearly the same CD-V 700. Cool!

I picked it because it is still a good tool, if basic and lacking any modern logging capabilities. But also made of metal, painted in John Deere yellow, issued to Civil Defense and even has the triangle on one side. And we're still not done. The dial is marked for mr/hr (yeah, not even mR). And despite the manual claiming strontium, what is under the nameplate as a test source for most of them is depleted uranium.

***

So that was a tech success. Also this weekend, I finally found out why my gaming machine was crashing randomly. It wasn't Steam Cloud, it wasn't a bad thumb drive, it wasn't bad RAM, there weren't any bad sectors on the SSD and it wasn't even the old SSD transferred from the other machine.

It was the two-month old Samsung M.2 that was randomly disconnecting. I can't entirely blame them for not ameliorating; it is a rare issue, at least from the reviews. They could just put a tiny subroutine that would detect the drive was disconnecting and save those users all that pain, though...

...especially since when I'd finally figured it out (due to the boot being corrupt and the repair tools refusing to fix or reinstall Windows), it was too late to get my files off before it disconnected for good.

Yeah, don't talk to me about cloning the system. I can reinstall Windows fast enough. It is getting Python and the Nvidia drivers and everything back in order that's the pain. Oh, and over a terabyte of files that I also didn't have anywhere big enough to make it worth backing them up. 

Well, Steam is mostly back up. Maybe just as well my AI pipeline is gone.

Sigh. You'd think, four days off, I could get some stuff done. Clean house, take a walk, write more than a short driving scene. It is already Saturday evening and I've just got Penny standing in the dirt looking at a suspicious drum and wishing archaeology covered more nuclear physics than how radiocarbon dating works in practice.

I am dreading the end of the year. A short vacation for us; we take off Christmas Day and return the first full week of January. Seems like a lot of time, and when we get back everyone will be expecting us to be fully rested up and ready to work the next three months without a single day off (have to, since we have to burn our own vacation days for these mandatory days off).

Really, it is just over a week, and it will pass in an instant.

Hatches

The "Tewa taco" scene is finally done. And it ended up overstuffed like a Mission burrito.

(For those who don't know, the American burrito is considerably larger than its Mexican ancestors. In SF's Mission District, they came up with a way to steam the burrito in order to fit even more inside it.)

There were a lot of constraints going on there. I did want to do more of the thing I just did above; the processual view of things that I've had Penny doing since the first book (if only to underline that she is an archaeologist). So spotting, say, a connection between the red soil around Santa Clara (many houses are painted that same color) and the famed Santa Clara blackware. 

I also wanted to keep this scene low-key, without conflicts -- and that meant without uncomfortable questions -- because the theme here is a moment of peace. And on top of all of that, I find it harder writing about Native Americans than I did shamelessly exoticizing the French. That means a lot of the obvious things like "how do you say that in your language" are things I don't feel right including.

(Yet for some reason, I get three words in Navajo. And none in Tewa, which I had intended for my focus. In part this is because the character we get closest to is Mary Cartwright, who is Tewa but doesn't want to share. The Navajo man, Edward, we got those three words from is someone they both encounter as an outsider.)

The process of getting though this whole sequence went long enough I forgot the details of my outline. Besides, discovery writing. Some stuff doesn't feel right now that I've looked at it longer. But I've more or less got it figured out now and I am ready for the Sheep Ranch scene and the Atlas crawl. 

The latter went a strange direction. I'm going for a Fallout sort of vibe now, and Penny is discovering a series of short poem-like writings scattered about the place by a prior urban explorer, notes I'm calling an "apocalypse log" after the thing that's in so many games.

But I am seriously considering opening up a C emulator or something and writing a bare-bones text generator for these. I want them to be poetic and I've had my (recent) fill with poetry. I want it to be mad and mad is hard to write. And I just thought of this and I've got so much to write already to finish this one anyhow...

So I don't have a next book yet. At this point, I usually have another Athena Fox I already want to write. I do have three, rather more fantastical, projects in the wings...but I was thinking today how much they are not so much a problem of theme, but one of philosophy.

The philosophical thing that's beneath my Steampunk Venus story (well, almost everything is beneath them, being as you can't land on the surface of Venus and live)...anyhow, that's about the inertia of systems.

Yeah, sounds thrilling.

Basically, that politics and culture, technology and government and industry, all of these things are complex structures because they need to be. You can make a stone axe with two stones. You can't make a turbojet without factories making the parts you build the factories out of that make the parts. At least that many layers deep, and probably more.

A city-state with its necessary physical infrastructure (um, floating above the acid clouds, anyone?) and the relationships with other polities is going to be big, and have a lot of interconnected systems, and have a lot of history and a lot of cruft.

And this is set against the backdrop of a Venus that someone started terraforming. Or something. The planet is changing, and ecosystems especially when they interconnect with some crazy high-temperature chemistry get really, really complex and potentially chaotic.

There are villains, because people are people and some of them are gonna angle for "what's good for me" regardless of the cost to others. But mostly there is inertia, the inertia of past choices and present command structures and fragile economics and the big-ass problem of changing the spark plugs while the damned engine is running. 

The tension of the story is whether humans and their systems can move faster than the changing environment of Venus.

 

Which actually said the way I just did makes it seem interesting. Regardless, I am thinking a lot more about the new idea, my engineer-hero space opera. To sum up the theme of that book, it's post-processual. Err, that is, it is about how structural understandings are a powerful tool -- as long as one understands their limitations.

So there's a lot of that structural understanding going on. Some of it weaponized. But, and especially once some of it has been demonstrated, it gets abused by people who want to take the process without the caveats, or worse, take the results without the process at all. 

That's the watsonian. On the doylist side, this is plot written by one of the older underlying conceits of science fiction as a form; to start with a question, and then consider the implications.

Not exactly new. In Asimov's The Caves of Steel every clue is rooted in something about that environment and the implications thereof. In his robot stories, each story is the working out of possibly implications of the Three Laws of Robotics. In Niven, plot points come out of his behaviorist view of his alien species. Oh, wait -- that Kzin wasn't smiling.

The purest form of this being right at the bread-and-butter are those gadgeteer sorts of books. Sometimes they invented something, sometimes it is something alien they are working out the possibilities of. But there is fast-paced, mad-scale development of this ideas in real time and that forms the backbone of the plot. 

And yeah, that goes back to the Edisonades. 

And that's what I've been wanting to see in an engineer hero. But even when the book was co-written with Mr. James Doohan himself it tends to stick with conventional fisticuffs and when tech is encountered, someone "techs the tech."

(That was what they actually advised outside writers to do on The Next Generation. Just write that with the planet about to explode, Geordie techs the tech and the Enterprise is saved. The regular staff writers will put the right technobabble in there. Which certainly works for story purposes but only underlines that the science and engineering is never the point.)

Doing a book which wears that Edisonade history on its sleeve, in which the characters actively talk about technical debt and design-for-manufacture, means it is an active part of the ideas being explored when your engineer-hero crawls into a duct to cross-wire a critical circuit. Not just some fine work by Matt Jefferies.

This sort of thing -- usually found in harder SF -- is akin to the mystery form that choses to play fair with the reader. I am reliably informed, however, that even in Ellery Queen's this style is not the most popular. Plays fair, in this context, means the solution is in the clues that have been provided equally to detective and reader. They can, and sometimes do, guess the solution before the detective does.

Really, though, there is much to be said on having what is at play be character and emotion. Us monkeys want to watch other monkeys dance, after all. Not stand in a blank room solving math puzzles. The point being, by both using an engineer hero of a particular mindset, and by making that sort of thinking about design goals and understandable compromises and the implications thereof an explicit theme and in-universe plot points, the process of solving those particular math problems becomes a thing our protagonist does and the reader (hopefully) enjoys following along.

That all puts me in mind of Holmes. Reading or watching him work now, it feels like he pulls it all out of thin air. He might as well be asking the Bat Computer for the answer.

But back when they were written, the often extremely structured lives -- in a class society with clearly defined trades and roles, with the esoterica of those trades rather less esoteric than the nature of a transducer-test technician is to us today -- meant his guesses were more believable. Some of it is the satisfyingly comfortable stereotypes, so his deductions felt emotionally right. Some of it was trivia that one could find someone who actually was a printer and confirm that, more-or-less, that was how it worked.

Maybe this is why back with Doyle, or with Christie, we could have these very structured mysteries, these locked-room murders and so forth. And why we've gravitated towards character instead, to the point where it perhaps doesn't even matter that the clue or the method of acquiring it is nonsense.

But alas, science has also increased in complexity and detail and thus in distance from the reader. You could present a clever bit with throwing a rock around an asteroid back when we were mostly in a Newtonian universe. Not saying it can't be done today -- but the clever things Mark Watney did took a lot longer to explain. The Martian spent a lot less time solving chemistry problems, and a lot more time going "Ahhr!"

Which sounds like I am talking myself out of Ensign Blue. Not necessarily. Maybe this stuff is too nerdy and the readership isn't there for as much as I want to put it. But the fact that I can do it, attracts me a lot more than the rather more hidden themes lurking behind those sulfuric-acid clouds.

Which brings me to mixed drinks. There's some potentially fun stuff in The Tiki Stars. Colonialism, exoticism, the commercialization of leisure. The uneasy balancing act in which "cultural appropriation" is but one slice and one label. That and a sort of fable about the birth of Tiki culture, taking the existing mythologies and re-mythologizing them in a different setting.

There's also a writerly question, about how much you can do and have fun with old-school pulp in this modern age.

But this is definitely the lesser of this trio, when it comes to having an interesting philosophy to work off of. There is, in plainer and simpler words, a lot less to say (or at least less that I am interested in saying).

Frybread

I'm calling it the "frybread" scene now. They are making Tewa Tacos. I did some more reading up and watched a couple videos so if it felt like I wanted to do some kind of "sounds of cooking came from the kitchen" I'd have some idea of what was going on there.

Well, now I do.

I'd taken a sick day but just before the grocery store closed I woke up with a need to actually cook something. Ran out and threw the basics for Indonesian hot rice in the basket. And then said what the hell and added a bag of flour and a box of baking soda.

No recipe, no measurements, just memories of what I'd seen on YouTube and mild experience with dough in the past (making pasta from scratch. I'm glad I did it, feels nice to know how, don't really want to do it again).

And the frybread came out...okay. Could have been fluffier, and crisper, but it was tasty. 

The other bit of research that cropped up during this scene is I wanted to show family and relationships. The opening there came by accident; I opened the scene with Helen Naranjo on the couch and wrote in another woman just to open the door for Penny. So now I've got three people and there's a chance to do genealogy stuff I've watched my own family do. The "You remember Sarah, don't you? She's the sister of the mother of that friend of my daughter's from school. Well she just moved in with Peter, a man from Boston who goes to the same poetry readings as my friend Lana."

For many Native American nations, this is clan stuff. The whole "Born to Bright Water Clan, born from Beaver Clan." Except. Turns out the clan names (and associated things) are considered private in Tewa culture. They are not shared with outsiders.

My research method failed on this whole sequence. I'd read about a third of The Tewa World (there's actually two books by that name) but by the time I did the scene where Mary talks a little about it, I'd forgotten practically everything. And because of other story reasons, my Tewa character ends up spending most of that conversation talking about Dine mythology instead!

(And, yes, there was a hole in the narrative that Mutton Man fit into perfectly. So I did get to use him after all.)

And apropos of nothing, I'm oddly attracted to San Antonio for the next Athena Fox story. No idea of a plot. I just like the history, and their extensive underground world. 

Anyhow, even with adding this "sister of the mother of the friend of the" stuff, I'm within a half-dozen paragraphs of finishing the Rez sequence. This is the tipping point; the book accelerates from here, and for various reasons both internal to the text and having to do with my working methods, it should go much faster after this.

There's a lot of stuff to go, though. A "Glowing Sea" sequence as Penny pokes through an illegal dump site with a borrowed Geiger counter in one hand, the "Duel" sequence on the highway that ends with Penny being very glad she got collision coverage on her rental, a visit to the War Zone -- sorry, "International District" -- of Albuquerque, the descent into the pit and a few bad moments at the very bottom of an old Atlas-F silo, a confrontation with a bully at a 50's diner that goes strange, a trip to the Waste Isolation Plant Prototype, a doped-out conversation about nuke cats and the heat death of the universe, another "Hello Clarise" scene, a confrontation with the senior archaeologists and digging up a grave for the third time, a confrontation with a mysterious assailant in the trailer of a dead conspiracy nut with a convenient weapon-lined wall of everything the aspiring mall ninja would want, and then the long long trek through White Sands on foot after a horse that probably does have a name, dreaming of Lozen and Etgveld Girl and even Lucy...

Finishing with a little rock-meets-laser as Penny shows what she's learned about knapping flint at the very base of the Trinity monument. And the final scene with Jackson and Sanchez, when at least they explain what part of the Air Force they work for. Although I don't think Jackson will ever explain what inspired him to buy a hummer.

Structural Elements

 

I am almost through the "Rez" chapter. Just finishing up the conversation between Penny and the aunt who Mary Cartwright choses to spend time with. There's a lot about Mary that I'm leaving for the reader to unpack. How much of what she has said and done in other chapters came out of her interactions with her extended family, life in Santa Clara and Albuquerque, even the way this favorite aunt used to work "on the hill" (aka Los Alamos).

In archaeology, they call this processual (there was a lot more to unpack in this movement, also called the New Archaeology, and why we are somewhere in post-post-processual today). In SF, we call it part of the fun; Gernsback's "What happens next?" and so on. And it is absolutely all over the Athena Fox books.

How did this thing come to be? What forces shaped this thing? What are the implications of this thing? You can't stroll through modern Paris and not have the very path you take be shaped by the decisions taken by Baron Haussmann, working out of the philosophies of his time -- and the desires of his Emperor Napoleon III.

This is why I keep coming back to the Athena Fox series. And why I have so much trouble with the tiki book. Because the latter is just conceit. It is surface texture. There are interesting things I'd like to unpack and explore about the nature of tiki; about exoticism, appropriation, the commercialization of leisure. But it doesn't really have those meaty questions of "why."

And that's why I keep taking notes about Ensign Blue. (Working name for the file folder, I will have you know! Not an actual title or character name.)

Which came, mind you, out of experiments I was doing with WAN2.2 et al towards telling a story in animation via AI. Which is a fool's quest but that's another story. So; those same questions you ask of "Why didn't the Maya use the wheel?" or "why are barns red?" are baked into this project from the start. "Blue" is because the renders I used as a starting point had a character in a blue uniform. Okay?

And in longer twisty paths I don't feel like spending the time going over, there are things about the various cultures and their interactions which came out of those WAN experiments. Things about them that became ways of thinking about them, and the kind of exploration I've been talking about.

A theme, even; behavioral determinism with its insights, its process, and its limitations. (Which, to any student of the history of archaeology, is familiar ground; the way the understanding of cultures was shaped by the systems of thought of archaeologists themselves, which themselves came out of the same processual -- and other! -- forces.)

(Something which was way back in the first Athena Fox book. Our way of looking at classical cultures is shaped too much by our history with the Classics. The Greeks and Romans wrote. A lot. And via Rome -- and to a lesser extent the Greek Orthodox strains of Christianity -- western culture preserved the ability to read Latin and Greek. Which circled around and became a status symbol -- something that started back when the clergy were, essentially, the lettered class -- and that meant privileging of a particular way of viewing the classical cultures that also not-coincidentally privileged those doing so.)

(Or so goes the gloss. It would take a very long essay to unpack that one even slightly more than that.)

But to boil it down, Ensign Blue gives me an excuse to play Jared Diamond/Larry Niven games with biological and environmental determinism, while at the same time making pointed commentary when the facile "The Hrunt are descended from herd animals; they will never go to war" gets shown wrong on the pointy end of an incoming armada of Hrunt warships.

And all the fractal way down; Blue is an engineer, a ship's engineer, and there is always a world of "why the hell did they design it this way!" that can, at times, be ways that make it difficult to maintain, ways that make it prone to break under certain conditions, ways it can be repurposed, and ways it can be hacked.

Like, well, vents. You can call them Jeffries Tubes if you like, but at the bread-and-butter, there's a way that your clever characters can get around the boarding party.

One thing, though. (Well, there's a lot more than one...) Having this sort of underlying structural rationale that can be leveraged to generate "what kind of ships do they have on this planet" answers, or exploited to explain how the good guys (or the bad guys, who are allowed to be clever, too) manage to get some plot-necessary thing to happen, means it would all work better if some of this world was planned before I started writing.

Yeah. I actually have a structural and even thematic reason to want to embrace world-builder's disease.

(That, and I'm plotting backwards. Well, plotting is always a dialogue, but I've had a lot of experience lately with having to build the plot around what is actually on the ground. My concept for this book, it works just fine if I already have the map and the tech and I try to figure out stories that work with that groundwork.)