Ben Franklin was not an alien spy

I was thinking this morning about urban fantasy. And then I wondered if there was a way of using magic to break history.

And not with the usual hidden history garbage. Something that happens now, in the contemporary world, that makes the fun stuff of pseudo-history --  the mysterious secrets of the ancients, glowing swords, and multi-level ancient tombs -- possible now when it wasn't how history unfolded then.

Well, I did think of one. "The Fae Lords."

I'd just read the first book of an urban fantasy series that very much did not have a masquerade (as TVTropes calls it). In this series, the magic came back, and was so deeply antithetical to tech it made a ruin of Atlanta. Well, the whole world, but the setting is Atlanta. What I mean is an urban ruin; the kind of charm of big city urban decay that got people so riled up when lead additives to gasoline were still a thing.

Life goes mostly on but the usual underfunded infrastructure is now dealing with lycanthropes and necromancy in addition to car crashes and fentanyl.

Well, that's an idea I like. 

So here goes; "The Fae" (whatever they are) show up suddenly in the modern world, complete with most of the powers and attitudes you'd expect in many contemporary depictions. And they fit right into the existing power struggles and other issues. Humans don't suddenly get the ability to throw magic around. Tech doesn't stop working (the Fae would like you to think that, but mostly they just like to hang wifi jammers around their spaces).

And they are fascinated by human history (there's some reason I haven't figured out yet). But this is the shallow fascination of cheap AI YouTube channels, pushing the fast-and-fun myths (water was so foul medieval people lived on beer) over anything with more substance.

The Fae love that kind of stuff (and maybe other aspects of pop culture...haven't gotten that far). And...this is something that has been going on for a long time already anyhow in this our real world...rich dilettantes are buying up historical things in order to more fully realize their fantasy version of that history. Only these particular arrogant, ultra-rich, strangely popular tech-bros can work magic.

The whole point of this (something that seems like a sideline, and almost certainly is a sideline to what they are doing to economics, politics, etc.) is that space I was trying to explore with Athena Fox; both having the real history of the Palais Garnier, and having an actual living breathing ghost-haunted Paris Opera House complete with hidden passages, half-masked weirdo in the basement, and a non-OSHA chandelier.

Basically, a mad wizard did it.

Anyhow.

I gave up on the plan of kicking another novel out in six months while I continued to work and put money into the 401K. Had a chance encounter of my own (plus a couple of other things). So it was time to quite the day job and go back to contracting. For the moment, I actually have time to write.

Which was great, because the more I looked at it, there was no way in hell of getting any book kicked out in six months. "Blue" is coming along (now with the subtitle "tales of the Fairy Ring." Probably). I was spending time on energy mostly to nail down the easy stuff first, and have a firm foundation to grow the rest of the world-building.

Now, I've got several books and at least one TTRPG campaign under my belt to know better than to succumb to world-builder's disease. But that doesn't mean there isn't work to do, and I may have underestimate how much work.

Which makes two reasons why the Tiki book might be what I should be aiming to write next.

The world-building of the tiki book seems simpler, as it isn't attempting to make sense of the used furniture. Also, as I realized taking notes today, it comes out of pulp, which doesn't delve into structural reasons (what set SF aside, at least as argued by Campbell and others). There's a revolution, but who really cares what the true causes were, or who is in the right, or even who wins. Instead it is a situation where adventure can ensue. We may have a rebel character who has their own strong emotional reasons for what they do, but this is character, not world-building.

The other reason, though, being the tasks of writing a story that isn't a linear whodunnit in a single POV. I have to re-learn how to construct different kinds of plots and different ways to present them. Now, the Tiki book is episodic. So more like a string of short stories. Blue adds the complexity of more continuity with these episodes being parts of a long continuous story.

But basically the one is like a story-board; a form that lays out the writing problems in a way that is simpler to understand.

Cooking

I am looking forward to getting back to cooking. I was gifted a wok. And I found a new cookbook.

 I have a grocery store next door with a great selection of fresh produce, bulk produce, and harder-to-find ethnic items. And if that always fails, I have a few of these:

I hope I don't regret not taking the whole box.

I'm also hoping to finally get some cleaning done. And, well, writing. Less money coming in, though -- a lot less. But it was time to make the move. For that, too, I hope I don't regret it.

Turnip Tesseract

So you are hiring an editor and want to know if they are as familiar with science fiction as they claim. Or you are hiring an artist and want to know if they are familiar with ligne claire.

Well, between Google, Wikipedia, and now AI, all you need is an insulating layer of text between the questioner and the target. Now any hungry slop merchant can pretend expertise long enough to get you to fork over the money.

I've got two beta readers on hire right now, several developmental editors I've been talking to, and new art needs in the future and I am in dire need of a Turing Test. How do you hold an oral, a books-closed exam, a calculator-free test, when you can't see if the person at the other end is answering out of their own expertise or is frantically typing away in the background to let Claude answer for them?

Before you drop $2K to $6K on an editor?

Think of say SF. In my lifetime, there was a time when you had to have read the stuff. There were some Cliff's Notes and the like but basically you could ask them if they knew the book that put powered armor on the map (Starship Troopers), or the name of the protagonist (Johnny Rico).

When things first became searchable online, the data was there but not the associations. Ask them to compare two "big dumb objects" and they'd have to go into their own memory to realize that both Ringworld and Rendezvous with Rama had suitable examples.

Now Wikipedia has much more associational and analytical pages which fill in the connections between the raw data. And increasingly, you can ask AI, which can very quickly do some very subtle associations based on questions created on-the-fly.

When you get the work back, then you have the volume and the leisure and the real-world application of those promised skills, and that is where failure will show (and AI will become obvious). But what do we do in the hire?

I got the beta read back and I am in an uncomfortable position. It was detailed and echoes many of my own thoughts and that's given me some actionable stuff to do. 

Yet, the beta reader is aggressively asking me to post a rating. Not comment or critique, just stars. And there are so many weird little not-quite-red but certainly-not-green flags about her work and her presentation.

I am very sensitive to cadence. The cadence of her speech in all (but one) text communications is different from the cadence of her report. This isn't just the formality level. It feels different in a way that word choice and grammar wouldn't cover.

I've never had a beta read before. I had the impression that they should spend their energies in top-level impressions. Did the story hang together, did the ending feel deserved and complete, was the protagonist sufficiently something to keep the reader interested in them.

This report seemed to get down in the weeds very quickly. Sentence level corrections, down to typographical errors. Organized in bullet points. Too much praise. Now, there are things that feel like a human hand was involved, but I'm still getting the smell of AI off it.

The positive reviews for this beta reader on Reedsy are...strange. In fact, some of them have the same cadence. The negative reviews are clearly human and one of them (there's not that many reviews overall) questions whether this reader understood the assignment. This switching back and forth from business-speak to something very idiomatic feels to me like someone who isn't comfortable with English and is using artificial tools to bridge that gap.

If she is using AI, it is part of a process. I can't tell what percentage of that process is hers, however.

I'm not comfortable leaving a good review. I also am not comfortable confronting her on this. And as I said, she is being very aggressive about asking for those stars.

The next million words

I finished the New Mexico book. I think the series went sideways, and it never went as commercial as I intended, and I don't seem to be able to find my readership for it.

But this what I've been doing since 2019. Six years of work (and change). A series, five books and counting (and that's another half a million words there). That's a bit too much of my writing life and output to shelve it.

So now I'm back in that terrible limbo I was in when I finished Shirato (my actual trunk novel, now) as I shopped it around to publishers and never heard back. 

I have a vague plan forward, which is multiple steps of scouting expedition. Get some beta readers to tell me if I'm writing books, or absolute crap (and I should go back to fanfiction and stop tricking people into paying for it).

Depending on that, both see if I can learn what I'm doing badly and should work on going forward (in hopefully more commercial work), and potentially, do some developmental editing on the way to revising the books. And, simultaneously, get opinions on how to best place these books in genre and towards audience.

And depending on how good I feel at that point, spend the money and time for more robust editing.

And then, depending on what I might have changed in order to find a market, change titles, covers, re-issue under different ISBN and so on.

What hurts, though, is that during all of this, the book isn't being read. It doesn't really "exist" because it is only on my own computers right now. There's no way for someone else to encounter it. I think I might be less attached to this one than any of the others. Hard to tell; I've been feeling very detached from everything lately. 

Failure

I finished the New Mexico book. Most of the things I was trying for...didn't happen.

I wanted in this one to fill the pages with empty desert and open road. I wanted to luxuriate in those descriptions, and give Penny space to clear her head. On the mystery itself, I didn't want her usual friends and supporters (or her increasingly complicated back story). I wanted her isolated emotionally as well as physically.

It didn't happen.

First off, backing away from her expertise meant I was trying to describe desert when she couldn't even name or recognize a Saguaro cactus. And she couldn't talk as much about the complex and fascinating history, because, well, she didn't know enough of it.

Worse, having her in an unfamiliar place meant I fell right back into having people explain it to her.

I made the people she interacted with unfriendly but they still ended up helping despite themselves, because that's the nature of a mystery. You have to get the clues somehow. And turns out, not being supportive and friendly is not the same thing as not having an emotional connection. Lon is annoying, Mary angry and sarcastic, and Dylan blissed out but she's still emotionally involved with them. There's even an arc.

As usual, the space was too big. All I wanted at the central core was to juxtapose nuclear secrets with the first humans in the Americas. But I couldn't leave the Native Americans out of either story. And that brings in frontier history and the cowboy stuff is something parts of New Mexico wears on its sleeve anyhow.

And set loose someone who still has to be weaned from snarky internal monologue crammed with pop-cultural references, and there are gonna be a lot of cracks being made about, well, everything. (Besides that, "be mean to Penny" for the characters Lon and Mary ended up being a lot of "be snarky," so I've got pop culture and trivia coming from three directions or more.)

The mystery didn't chunk as well as it should have, either. My idea was to make each clue a distinct moment that drops hard, that feels like the plot advances, and that often changes the ground. I mean, there are places it sort of worked. Realizing UFO nuts were yapping about the radioactive body in the desert changed the mystery of that body, and sent Penny on a road trip towards Roswell.

But the mystery wasn't quite deep enough to provide many of those moments. Same problem with using the mystery for the long drives; there wasn't enough to puzzle over. Worse, the changes in how the story plays out, like Penny having to go walk through an illegal dump site with a Geiger counter, or getting side-swiped by a Hummer and fleeing in near-panic, were constrained by the mechanics of plot and geography.

I spent weeks trying out different combinations, and none of them really made the plot clunk along like the intermittent gear I wanted it to be. Instead the physical aspect, the change in the world, the emotional moment and, oh yeah, the progress in the mystery didn't track that well.

But it is done. Or at least, the second or third draft is done (I revise as I go).

I've been looking for developmental editors and/or beta readers. Finally dropped a hundred on Fiverr for one of the latter, because it costs almost as much to use ProWritingAid's AI. So at worst case...I'm overpaying. A weird one. Her communications were exceedingly casual (as in, not even trying to spell simple words).

But not as weird as the Dev I'm talking to at Reedsy. Reedsy requires a sample, he told me he was going to mark that up as an example of his work. That's more than what was expected. However; he returned an rtf without tracking, highlighting, or other marks of what he did. It took me a while to notice he'd gone and added a scene break, and a chapter break. It took me longer to find out he'd added one sentence (again, without marking it in any way). A sentence explaining the joke (or possibly being really literal-minded) about one of Penny's pop-culture drops.

This is not what developmental edit usually is. On the scale where proofreading is at one end, this is about as close to the other as you can get. Developmental is looking at the big picture, of story arcs and character arcs, of plot and theme, of world-building. Moving around chapter breaks might come out of it, but that's not really what it is about. Also, editing is about discussion. Editors mark their changes, or suggest a change be made. They don't insert a new sentence.

It seems to me I've been through this before. There are reasons other than being stubborn or stingy as to why I've ended up doing my own so often.

(I told my cover artist to stop trying to understand the difference between Mexico and New Mexico, and I'd try to draft something myself. Yeah.)

Colonial Vipers

Well, I found "good enough" batteries. A mix of fuel cells and SMES for "around the energy density of gasoline." Nuclear isomer batteries for the higher-energy stuff. It's a good tech for story-telling purposes because while the theoretical energy density is slightly shy of nuclear fission, we haven't really engineered any right now and the isotopes we've been playing with are...somewhat less than that. So right now, a writer can peg it pretty much anywhere from "almost as good as a lead-acid battery" to "atom bomb in a box."

That led to the next problem, and a couple of slow days at work spent reading high frontier stuff, Charlie Stross being cranky and practical, lots more Atomic Rockets, and running into such delightful concepts as "Dutch Disease."

 And...it's really hard to justify a space colony. That power problem is there again. When you peg your energy resources high enough to allow getting all that stuff out there to start a colony, there are a lot of other options you could take instead. Or as Charlie puts it, colonize the Gobi; it's nearer and cheaper.

There's a concept I've started calling the Saturn V margin. You see, you can't get into orbit with a rocket. The energy density of rocket fuels is slightly lower than the ultimate kinetic energy of that rocket in orbit. The only way we can work that trick is with multi-stage rockets (SRBMs are a similar solution).

What I've been working on for the stuff underlying all the engineering that shows up in the story is the overlap between different regimes. For instance, it is only economical to run your spaceship off some ultra-high-density thing (like He3, or even antimatter) that was manufactured somewhere close to a much bigger power plant. (Our wormhole-physics vacuum-energy extractor thing.)

But you can, just barely, refuel with a fission power plant you build at a smaller poorer colony world. Which itself can run any kind of power-hungry planetary vehicles, construction machines, or in-system (aka strictly interplanetary) spacecraft.

Which, in a pinch, can be refueled with petroleum tech. It just takes a lot of it and you need to be patient. This goes all the way down to being able to turn a crank or pedal a stationary bike to recharge the SMES in your emergency radio...because food is within a single magnitude of gasoline, even if you have to add a few more doublers for conversion efficiencies.

The hidden point here is that you can only jump one system. There is no way in hell that stationary bike will ever get you off the planet.

This also ties in with what I've been calling the Fairy Ring model. Not the right metaphor, but there's nothing sufficiently sonorous about the ecological succession I'm thinking of. So you've got a place with built-up industry and a good customer base but raw materials are getting uneconomical.

So you start an extraction colony. Send a bunch of Spanish peasants to dam up rivers and run a mining operation getting silver out of the New World. Eventually there are enough people there, they get their own government and their own industry and their own higher standard of living, and they go looking for somewhere to purchase mining rights that's cheaper than going after the dregs they have in this new home.

The ring of colony growth and industrialization spreads out. It's a fun model. Looks a little silly when you think about the energy needs of getting the stuff across a solar system, much less to another star. If nothing changes the physics, its gonna be easier to mine the ocean floor than mine the moon.

The usual futurist claim is the stuff is heavily automated, probably self-replicating, and made "with local materials" so basically all you have to do is send one little rep-rap printer out to the Moon, plug it into an RTG, and before you know it ingots of lunar gold are raining down from the skies.

That probably doesn't work, for a lot of reasons a lot of people smarter than I am have been discussing for quite a few years. It also, more to the point for the writer, doesn't look a hell of a lot like the Alaskan Gold Rush, or a Cuban plantation, or any of the other cool historically-influenced settings you find crawling around golden age science fiction.

(If for no other reason than our local Bat Durston with his trusty space-mule and atom-pickaxe is wielding what is basically nuclear technology.)

I have what may or may not be two steps in this ecological succession of colonization. The setting for the stories is a as-yet unnamed consortium of worlds founded a bunch of generations back from Earth. Lately, they've been expanding into their own resource-extraction colonies...except that the new space they've sent their prospectors and oil-rig like extraction platforms and company towns has its own thriving ecosystem of several different alien races.

Highly opinionated ones. Friction ensues, plus the pace of the expansion is revealing all sorts of problems of policy and tech, from drill strings snapping to software licensing issues to miner's strikes to...

So what I really want for this is that the Core Worlds are basically on their own. Earth isn't actively dictating policy or sending technical assistance (or demanding their colony send more molasses for the Triangle Trade). And I also want this push, one that is happening fast enough so that nobody is really prepared for it. They haven't done enough local research to understand the problems they are getting into.

And while initially people are going "I hear there were some problems out on the frontier" those problems do not stay local. Eventually that trouble involves the Core Worlds.

The problem is, I don't see a clear way for this to have arisen out of the underlying economics and physics of the setting as so far developed. I could easily argue that there is some sudden rush of Manifest Destiny causing a huge rush of people wanting to get out the Conestogas, but it just doesn't feel organic.

Batteries

Still working up three or four SF novel concepts, and haven't made the hard call which to write first. It depresses me a bit. The standards and expectations have grown faster than I have. So many people have already looked at these problems and came up with elegant solutions that are now familiar to the readership, but I feel slower and sleepier every day.

The "Blue" universe is space opera. Something to scratch that itch of space warfare and planetary adventure. The Space-Hornblower career arc, even if this one starts in something more like a Merchant Marine. The requirements for the tech is that it has enough surface plausibility to keep the reader from stumbling over it, and that it produces interesting story potential.

As I've been reading, I've been running into a lot of examples from early SF in which exploring the ideas was paramount and as a result there are extensive lectures on the tech and its implications. Less so in modern fiction, which trends towards adventure with the majority of the tech left largely unexplored as part of the background. But even that fiction will foreground tech that has good plot implications.

As I'm writing about someone with an engineering background and a hacker's attitude, who is through the plot often faced with questions of "how does this work (and why did anyone chose to make it that way)?" I do want a good basic schema for how the place works...technology, cartography, society.

licensable from Vecteesy

First premise: interplanetary travel takes a real-world magnitude of energy. The energy generation of the civilization is several magnitudes above that, making casual interplanetary travel plausible. 

Second premise; the upper magnitudes of this power generation, starting from around interplanetary travel and moving up through interstellar, is only economically available from large fixed plants, which are effectively infinitely renewable but may need to be sited on the equivalent of a resource node.

(Basically, we're tapping a natural wormhole for power. With a large costly plant.)

So there's two big trickle-downs from this. One is a civilization in the region of Kardashav-1, post-scarcity in terms of energy. Not enough energy to remove the need for "manual" manufacturing, resource extraction, basically an industrial base. It is not economical to transmute or nano-fabricate or otherwise do away with the physical infrastructure of an industrialized society.

The second is that since other methods of power generation fall several magnitudes below what these power plants can provide, the middle space between "takes so little power you can slap a solar cell on it" and "flies to the next star system with a load of cargo" is dominated by the logics of energy transport, not energy production.

I hasten to add, this gets pretty blurred. Gasoline, after all, is an energy transport mechanism that took significant power (and infrastructure) to produce, but is used in something that looks more like a generator than it does a battery. Up through more exotic tech like RTGs, He3 reactors and antimatter, this sort of "spend a lot of power to make a compact fuel for power production" is going to be a mode.

Halo dropship

Point is, if we peg "looks kinda like a battery" on human-scale equipment to let us run a VTOL off it, we've got fairly insane (dangerous) levels of available energy. We can do powered armor or blaster pistols not because they are themselves efficient, but because we've got the energy infrastructure so it is just plug-and-play.

That, and some of the implications of post-scarcity (energy, mind you, not all resources) means the look-and-feel gets close to TNG Star Trek.

All I really need to write a story is a hand-wave name that doesn't sound too implausible. But I've been having a tough time finding something in the right range.

One issue is that the basic rule of chemical batteries (stored power versus discharge rate) oddly holds through the gamut of storage technologies. RTGs score incredibly high for power density but their discharge rate is tiny (and not an easy issue to fix). SMES can handle extremely rapid discharge (and cycle with essentially no waste) but their capacity is down around fuel cells or lower. And fuel cells are basically a little gasoline-powered generator.

When you look at SF, it leapfrogs right over the two or three magnitudes higher density I am wanting into stuff like Kerr-Neumann black holes. And you quickly hit mass conversion and zero point and other not-a-battery stuff -- just an infinite source of more energy.

Right now the most plausible stuff is things like lattice confinement fusion, nuclear isomer batteries, or tricks involving monatomic hydrogen (or metallic hydrogen). And, yeah, just like antimatter, the go-to always seems to be buckyballs or carbon nanotubes. Still, at a theoretical 380 MJ/Kg, protons-in-nanotubes is nothing to sniff at.

(The downside to pretty much anything nuclear is that even if you start with stable isotopes, nuclear reactions are always a scatter plot. Even that nice He3 is only "mostly" aneutronic, and I have a really hard time -- given the philosophy of the story -- hand-waving out all the stray x-rays and neutron embrittlement and exotic short-lived daughter products.)

Really, SMES are damn-near perfect, despite their theoretical power density being just a little small. They have side effects, too, but they are all so delicious.

Looking through Atomic Rockets, Reddit, Stack Exchange, the Kerbal forums, questions like this seem to come up a lot. Mostly because people want their pocket laser pistols, but there is a good presence of electric-powered vehicles in there as well. In any case, just beating the power density of gasoline is tough.

Oddly, even tougher seems to be hitting that goldilocks zone between "better than gasoline" and "black hole in a box" is harder.

Zed-P-M. He's Canadian