Year: 2018

Categories
Fun stuff

What bot is that – answers to last week’s quiz

Last week,I gave you six bots and asked if you knew which books they were from.

Bot 1

Once upon a time there was a cyborg. That’s me.  You might think my life is a fairy tale. I can tell you it’s not.  I live in New Beijing with my stepmother—who hates me—and my two stepsisters. The stepsister I adore is dying of the plague.

Who is it?

Cinder, from Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles series. More specifically, the first book, which was called Cinder. This is a retelling of fairy stories as science fiction.  Including an evil queen (the ruler of the moon).  Book one was Cinderella’s story.  She had an artificial foot.

In the Lunar Chronicles anyone with artificial appendages (like the foot) is a cyborg, and considered sub-human.

 

Bot 2

We’re here to solve a murder.  The New York detective I’ve been partnered with doesn’t trust Spacers. Or robots.

He’s from overcrowded Earth, where they hate robots because Earth people believe robots take jobs humans could do.

Who is it?

This was R. Daneel Olivaw from Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel. It’s probably the first robot book I ever read, and Elijah Bailey and Daneel Olivaw were probably my two favourite Asimov characters ever.

Bot 3

“I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.”

This one is a direct quote, which I will attribute next week, but I love it so much I’m quoting it verbatim. This is also a really great start to a novel.

Who is it?

Everyone’s favorite murderbot. Ranks up there with bonus bot (below) as one of my two favorite artificial intelligences of all time.

The SecUnit from Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries.  Book one, All Systems Red, won a Nebula for best novella this year, and it’s a Hugo finalist as well. I, personally, am voting for this on the hugos. I love Murderbot.

Bot 4

I am 50,000 times more intelligent than a human, and have a “brain the size of a planet” which I seldom get a chance to use. I was built originally as one of the (many) failed prototypes of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s GPP (Genuine People Personalities) technology.  I’m bored. Maybe a little depressed.  People have called me paranoid, and manically depressed. I’m just stoic, patient even.

“The first ten million years were the worst. And the second ten million. They were the worst, too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that, I went into a bit of a decline.”

“Do you want me to sit in a corner and rust, or just fall apart where I’m standing?”

Who is it?

Marvin the paranoid android from Douglas Adams’ The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Alan Rickman played Marvin in the 2005 movie of the book.  We didn’t see it, for some reason, but I can imagine Alan playing him. He’d do it so well.

Bot 5

I used to be a ship AI, but things went wrong and I had to do a hard reboot. Now I’m in a body. That takes a bit of getting used to. It feels cramped, and tiny. I can’t remember what happened before.

Who is it?

I thought some people might have chosen Breq (bonus bot) for this one, but they didn’t. This bot is Lovelace, aka Sidra, from Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit.

For a bonus point

I used to be a ship. I controlled thousands of human bodies. My ship was destroyed. All that’s left of me is the one human body I am in now. This body sings. Badly.

Who is it?

My other all-time favourite AI. Breq, from Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice.

Categories
Fun stuff

What bot is that?

Our book is done. This draft, anyway. Due date was the 1 June.

We delivered, although of course we’d love to have another round of editing right now. Books are like that. Every time you look at your writing you see something else you want to change.

I have to clean my desk ready for the next one. It’s becoming a tradition—clean your desk ready for the next book. I just don’t understand how a desk can get so messy, but it does.

We have ideas for the next story, but nothing planned. We’ll take it easy for a couple of days, and then talk to our agent about what we should do next.

Meanwhile, it’s time for a quiz.

It was initially going to be a quiz totally about humanoid robots, but in the end I’ve stretched it out to full robots, AI, cyborgs, augmented humans and everything between.  So it’s not really just bots in the sense that most science fiction people know them. (There’s a very big hint here, people.)

How many can you get?

Bot 1

Once upon a time there was a cyborg. That’s me.  You might think my life is a fairy tale. I can tell you it’s not.  I live in New Beijing with my stepmother—who hates me—and my two stepsisters. The stepsister I adore is dying of the plague.

Bot 2

We’re here to solve a murder.  The New York detective I’ve been partnered with doesn’t trust Spacers. Or robots.

He’s from overcrowded Earth, where they hate robots because Earth people believe robots take jobs humans could do.

Bot 3

“I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.”

This one is a direct quote, which I will attribute next week, but I love it so much I’m quoting it verbatim. This is also a really great start to a novel.

Bot 4

I am 50,000 times more intelligent than a human, and have a “brain the size of a planet” which I seldom get a chance to use. I was built originally as one of the (many) failed prototypes of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s GPP (Genuine People Personalities) technology.  I’m bored. Maybe a little depressed.  People have called me paranoid, and manically depressed. I’m just stoic, patient even.

“The first ten million years were the worst. And the second ten million. They were the worst, too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that, I went into a bit of a decline.”

“Do you want me to sit in a corner and rust, or just fall apart where I’m standing?”

Bot 5

I used to be a ship AI, but things went wrong and I had to do a hard reboot. Now I’m in a body. That takes a bit of getting used to. It feels cramped, and tiny. I can’t remember what happened before.

For a bonus point

I asked Sherylyn to do the quiz before I put it on line.

“I know who one of them will be,” she said, and told me.

No. I didn’t put that one in there. Why not? Because I forgot it. I’m not sure how, because it’s my favorite AI in a human body story ever, and I rave about it all the time.

So here it is.

I used to be a ship. I controlled thousands of human bodies. My ship was destroyed. All that’s left of me is the one human body I am in now. This body sings. Badly.

 

 

How many did you get?

Categories
Talking about things

Voting for the Hugos

2012 Hugo. Designed by: Deb Kosiba; Photo: Deb Kosiba.
2012 Hugo. Designed by: Deb Kosiba; Photo: Deb Kosiba.

In which I attempt to explain how Hugo voting works, and why I like the system*.

Compulsory voting

Here in Australia we have compulsory voting in elections.

I have to confess that in politics, I’m a huge fan of compulsory voting. If you live in a country where voting isn’t compulsory, you probably think I’m crazy, but I like it. To me, it changes the onus on choosing to have a say in your country’s politics from ‘opt-in’ to ‘opt-out’.

That may seem a small distinction, but it’s not.

With non-compulsory voting you have to opt-in, and you need to do it twice. First, you opt-in to register to vote. Then you opt-in to vote on the day. Maybe you don’t feel like voting that day. The weather’s bad. You don’t feel well. Some bully is threatening you while you stand in the voting line.  Maybe you missed the date to register.  Or all the candidates are equally bad, and you don’t want to vote for any of them.

With compulsory voting you have to opt-in, too, by registering to vote.  By choosing to not do this you are already making a choice. Theoretically you have chosen to be fined rather than vote.

Likewise, on polling day. Don’t turn up.  You have chosen to be fined, rather than vote.

Even if you do turn up, you don’t have to actually vote if you don’t want to.  Get your name marked off, take your papers, put them in the box without nominating anyone.

It’s not a perfect system, by any means, and there’s a whole stack of issues that come with it, but I still like it a lot better than the alternative.

Hugo voting isn’t compulsory

Despite the fact that I like my politics compulsory, voting for the Hugo isn’t compulsory, and I don’t think it should be.

You opt-in initially by purchasing a WorldCon ticket. You opt-in a second time by nominating various works/persons for the ballot. And then you opt-in a third time by actually voting on the shortlist.

So what’s this got to do with the Hugos, then?

Because that brings me to the other thing I like about the Australian voting system.

Preference voting

Hugo voting uses a variation of the Australian preferential voting system for voting on the shortlist.

(I’m not going to talk about voting to put items onto the ballot in the first place, that’s more of a straight count.  I’m also not going to talk about how parties can totally distort things in Australia politics by setting their own preferences, sometimes purely to spite other parties. You don’t have to vote along party lines.)

Voting on the Hugo shortlist is done using what they call runoff voting.

It works like this.

Suppose we have four books on the Hugo Best Novel.  (I know there’s more, but how long do you want this post to run for?  Let’s keep it simple. I’m also not going to use real names. I got these from the Fantasy Name Generators site.)

  • An Argument of Water
  • Bakker’s Butcher
  • Solar Flare
  • Life in the Vacuum

You go in and vote. Four books, five options, because not awarding the prize rather than voting for a book you don’t like is a valid option. Let’s say you vote as follows.

There can be two results.

An outright winner.

There’s no question here. Bakker’s Butcher got over 50% of the votes. It’s an outright winner.

But suppose the results are a lot closer? There’s no outright winner between a novel that gets 35% of the vote, and one that gets 32%.  (From now on I’ll leave out ‘no awards’ as I’m trying to keep this simple. Read the Hugo page for more detail on how No Award works.)

We then look at preferences.  Solar Flare only got 6% of the votes. So we take all the second choice votes for Solar Flare and distribute them amongst the other candidates.  Let’s say half the people who voted for Solar Flare voted Bakker’s Butcher second, and the other half voted for Life in the Vacuum second.

We still don’t have anyone with 50% of the votes. So we take the next lowest.

20% of the people who liked An Argument of Water voted for Life in the Vacuum as their second choice.

We have a winner.  Life in the Vacuum.  It’s not necessarily the winner you wanted, but there’s a good probability that more half the people voting put it in their top one or two books. Chances are it was also in your top 2-3.

It’s important, when you vote for the Hugos, to give serious consideration to not just what you think should come out on top, but also to how you rank the others. And to where you place No Award, if you choose to use it.

“But, you say, Bakker’s Butcher should have won. It got more votes first time around.”

Should it? It got less than half the votes, which means that half the voters didn’t think it was the best novel. And more voters put Life in the Vacuum in second place.

It’s not a perfect result by any means, but it does mean that when there is no clear-cut winner, the winner is the one deemed most popular overall.

 

* A couple of caveats.

This explanation is a rough approximation of how it works. I’ve left out a lot. If you want the full details, check it out on the Hugo website.

Also, it’s not perfect—politically or for the Hugos. It can be gamed. No Award is valuable in these cases.

Categories
Writing process

Two weeks to deadline

With two weeks to go before we send Stars book two to our editor, I’m sitting back and relaxing while Sherylyn works on final cleaning up of the story.

In fact, I’ve started editing another story that Sherylyn had worked on mid-last year while I was working on an earlier draft of Stars book two.  It’s fun, and fresh, because after you’ve been working on the same book for the last year it’s always nice to start on something new.

Oh, and I’m catching up on some reading.

Then, out of the blue, Sherylyn says, “I don’t think we’ve given [name redacted] enough reason to do what she does [also redacted, for spoiler reasons].

Noooo!

She’s right, of course. But two weeks.  And this is basically the inciting incident for the whole story.

I go into denial first.  Of course. I mean, who wants to change a major plot point two weeks away from submission? Then we talk it out. I come around. We talk some more. How might we fix it?

Okay, we can do that, and that, and that.  Three small changes to the story will fix it.

Phew.

It’s funny how often you don’t need to make big changes to a story to make a big impact. Just a tweak, here and there.

Disaster averted.

I go back to working on the other book.

Until the next bombshell. 🙂

Categories
Writing process

Eurovision 2018

This is the tag line for Catherynne M. Valente’s new novel, Space Opera. This is from the front cover.

 

Catherynne M. Valente has introduced a lot of people to the Eurovision this year with her new novel, Space Opera, which is effectively Eurovision in Space.

By the time you read this the Eurovision Song Contest 2018 will probably be over.  The final will be held Sunday morning, Australian time.

Here in Australia we see the contest on Sunday night.  Sherylyn and I try to avoid spoilers throughout the day, then sit down at night and score each entry. We seldom pick the winner. In fact, the ones we like often score very low.

Normally I go through the songs and pick out the power ballads. I’m a sucker for power ballads. This year there weren’t many. The closest I could find was Azerbaijan.

I rather liked the Azerbaijan entry (singer, Aisel). It’s one of those songs you like better every time you hear it.

 

Unfortunately, they didn’t make it past the first semi-final. A pity.

The other song I really like is Estonia’s entry (singer Elina Nechayeva). I don’t think it has a chance of winning, but listen to Elina’s voice.

Plus, she deserves extra points for that dress.

Categories
Writing process

Paper newspapers and magazines help generate stories

I’ve three old, screwed-up paper serviettes in my bag. I can’t throw them out, because I’ve written on them, and because I come home from work and dump my bag and don’t look into it until the next day. As a result these little notes remain until I remember them. After which they stay on my desk for a few weeks until I finally get around to putting them onto the computer.

They’re my story ideas.

They’re the ideas that I have while I’m out, where I snatch the nearest thing to hand and scribble down the fragment that comes to mind.

The thing is, I often have these ideas while I’m out, at breakfast, reading the newspaper.

I get most of my news online now. I read the news online, have a number of news sites that I visit, but that only gives you the news you choose to read. Printed newspapers are, and always have been, a major source of ideas for me.  For both of us.

That and printed magazines.  I used to regularly buy the New Scientist and Scientific American magazines, just for the ideas. Now I look at that online too.

Nowadays, the only time I look at newspapers is when I’m out. Cafes, at breakfast time, are the main places I read on paper now.

There’s something about reading a printed news source. Your eye catches an article—something you wouldn’t even think to read normally. Eye-brain triggers something. An idea pops into your head.

Quick, where’s the notepad? Haven’t got it? Anything will do. What about a spare paper napkin?

Which is how I come to have so many scribbled notes in my bag, waiting to be transferred to the computer.

Of course, my handwriting is so bad, by the time I come to transfer them, there are always a couple of words I have to guess, because I have no idea what I wrote.  But sometimes that simply adds to the idea.

Categories
On writing Talking about things

Speculate 18

From the Dungeons & Development: Character Under Pressure panel
From left to right: Ben McKenzie (moderator) and dungeon master (and dragon), Jay Kristoff, Amie Kaufman, Andrew McDonald and Brooke Maggs.
I didn’t get a picture of the band, there were too many heads in the way. The band leader was Maize Wallin (maizewallin.com). Unfortunately, I didn’t write down the names of the band members, either. (I didn’t write anything, to be honest, but I took a photo of the intro slide, so at least I can name the speakers.) Music and effects were great.

Yesterday I went to the Speculate 18, which is a speculative writers’ festival, held here in Melbourne.

It was pretty good.

As festivals go, it was small. One stream, five sessions. But they were good sessions. Three in the morning, two in the afternoon.

The most fun session was the first one after lunch.  Dungeons & Development: Character Under Pressure where our four panel members and the moderator did a D&D role play live on stage, with a band to add sound effects on the side.

It was lots of fun, and the dynamic between everyone worked really well.

I couldn’t pick a standout session in the more serious topics.  They were all uniformly good, and I liked bits from all of them.

Two of my personal favourite bits were from Science Fiction: The Past, the Present, and What’s to Come.  One was Dirk Strasser’s summary of the current state of science fiction.  The most popular trends at present, he says, are climate fiction, generation ships, space opera, and gender themes.  Plus Laura Goodin’s point that back in the Victorian era, genre didn’t exist. Writers like Dickens happily wrote across genres.

The audience questions from this session led to some really thought-provoking answers, too.  One audience member asked whether the pace of scientific change would make science fiction irrelevant. No, Laura Goodin says, science fiction is a lens by which we see ourselves through fiction.

I have to agree with her.

A lot of people get this idea that science fiction is only about the science, and that somehow there’s no science left to discover.

I think most of us would agree that’s not true. Sure the mobile phones, artificial intelligence and self-driving cars and other things dreamed about in the forties, fifties and sixties are finally here, or nearly here, and the rate of change of some of these things has increased almost exponentially, but what about genetics? What about climate control? What about massive ocean farms?

Plus, science fiction isn’t really about science. It’s about people.  As Laura said, it’s a way to see ourselves. Fahrenheit 451 is still just as relevant today as it was when Ray Bradbury wrote it, even if instead of burning books they’re burning data stores. The Handmaid’s Tale shows us a bleak, dystopian future.

Science fiction is still doing what it set out to do. Entertain us, but also make us think.

The audience questions on all panels were good. (Kudos, too, to how they kept the questioners on track. No statements, just questions.) A question on an earlier panel sparked a discussion about the things writers take out of their books.  (What Sherylyn and I call our pet words.) Sadly, that got cut off because we’d run out of time.

Now, we just have to go back to our own manuscript and check for ‘somehow’. Which is, as was pointed out, a lazy way of having something happen without the author having to explain it.

Sherylyn (who came along, too), pulled her notebook out at the start of the first session. She started writing, and kept writing through the whole of session one.

“You took some comprehensive notes there,” I said, while they set up for the next session.

“Not notes,” she said. “The first thing they said, about describing the woman walking down the street. This whole idea popped into my head. I had to write it down.”

All in all, it was a good day.  I was exhausted by the end, I admit. Five sessions were enough.

Categories
Book news

Japanese versions of Linesman

The Japanese versions of Linesman arrived in the mail the other day.

They’re so tiny and cute.  Smaller than a paperback and half as thick.

Look at the covers. If you put them together, as we have above, they combine to make one long picture.

With the help of Google translate and a helpful reader (thanks Elizabeth) we’ve worked out that the book is called Starship Eleven in Japanese, and we think that one version is less complex than the other. (Blue dot is simpler, possibly)

The cover illustration is by K. Kanehira. The cover design is also credited, but sorry, awesome cover design person/people, we can’t read your name, and we don’t know how to get the name from the book to screen.

Likewise, we’re not too sure who the translator is.  Google Translate gives us Triangular Kazuyo. Hmm. That might be right, but we think we’ll have to confirm this. More as we find out. If anyone knows, please let us know.

Update 25 April.  S.E. Jones mentioned that the book is in two parts, and told us the name of the translator.  (See comments, below.) Kayuzo Misumi.  Here are twitter posts from @kzyfizzy on 14 February, which was when the book was released.

I do like the way our name translates phonetically into Dance Tall.  It sounds so much better than it’s literal translation of the ‘brown stone’.

Thank you, S. E. Jones.

Categories
Book news Progress report

Progress report

I pulled a muscle in my back this morning while cleaning the bath.  I’d like to say it’s living proof that writers shouldn’t do housework, but unfortunately the reality is that this particular writer hasn’t been doing enough of anything active, housework included, to keep herself supple. Many writers are notoriously bad at keeping fit.

So while I wait for the Nurofen to kick in, let me tell you what’s been happening in our writing world lately.

We’re making good progress on the next batch of rewrites for Stars Book 2.  It has a current, tentative title of Stars Beyond.  We don’t know if that’s set in concrete.  We’re at that stage in writing where every change we’re making is a positive change. “This will sound better if we do this,” or “If we move that section down past here the timeline will flow better.”  Of course, some of those changes have flow-on effects, but that’s the way it is with rewrites.

We’re heading toward the deadline. We have to deliver the novel in six weeks.

Based on prior novels, there’ll probably a couple of obvious issues we discover really late.  It’s amazing how you can go over a book ten, twenty times and still not see something so obvious until the last minute.  Sometimes you can’t see it then, either, and your agent or your editor has to point it out to you.

Sigh.

In other news. The ARCs for Stars Uncharted have started going out to book bloggers and reviewers. The publisher has given some away on Goodreads. Keep an eye on the giveaways there if you want a copy, as we don’t always know about these when they happen so we don’t publicise them.

We’re busy putting the finishing touches to our April newsletter. This will include the first chapter of Stars Uncharted, so it’s going to be mammoth. Chapter one’s pretty long, so we’re trying to pare down the newsletter to a reasonable size.  We’re getting there. Slowly.

Categories
Books and movies

Tomb Raider was worth seeing

Image courtesy of the official Tomb Raider movie site. http://www.tombraidermovie.com

We went to see Tomb Raider on the weekend.  I have to say, I liked it.

I didn’t love it the way I loved, say, Wonder Woman, but I thought the movie was quite strong and I enjoyed it.  (I’m a supporting member of WorldCon this year and I already know which movie I’m going to vote for. Wonder Woman.)

The story line for Tomb Raider worked. It was solid, if a tad predictable. There were no massive plot holes where you thought what? How? Everything made sense.  I particularly liked the ending, where they solve the puzzle not by supernatural means but by science.

I preferred this version way more than the 2001 version.

Probably the silliest bits were those that obviously came from the computer game. The floor falling apart around them while they tried to solve the puzzle, or sliding under the massive metal grates just in the nick of time.  Don’t get me wrong, I love these things in computer games, but they don’t translate well to the screen. You really have to suspend disbelief to believe that someone will go to all that trouble to kill tomb robbers.

Alicia Vikander made an excellent Lara Croft.  A believable one, too.

It was rather like settling down with an author you know, who reliably always turns out books you enjoy.

They left it open for a sequel.  I’m looking forward to the next one.