Adrift Among The Stars

Hi Guys,

Short post this time. Just to tell you all that Adrift is out.

It's a space opera about a man who's abducted by aliens, rescued by alien police and then just wants to get back home to Earth. The book continues the theme from The Travel Bug, that alien really means alien - not people with funny noses and extends it to their worlds, pointing out that it's unlikely we'll ever be able to just wander around safely on alien worlds in a T-shirt etc. But mostly it's just a romp in space with a lot of twists.

I hope you enjoy it.

Cheers, Greg.

The Travel Bug

Hi Guys,

Just a quick note to let you know that my latest book is out: The Travel Bug. And no, despite comments to the contrary it's not a hot, steamy romance! It's a sci fi - bordering on space opera. But you try finding a cover that shows astral travel space opera!!!

Anyway, here's the blurb:

Abel Montgomery had slept his way to the top – literally!

He was a traveller. He spent his days searching the stars in his dreams. Hunting for advances that would make the world a better place.

It was a good job. The hours were good. The pay was very good. And he got to see all the wonders that were out there.

Until the aliens started following him home!

Cheers, Greg.

Relativity-ly Speaking

Hi Guys,

New post this time. It's late and I'm tired, so I thought I'd give all the relativists among you a conundrum to enjoy.

This is one that's based on the theory of special relativity, and also one that I posted long ago on Philosophy Forums before it went away. You may still be able to find it under my nom-de-net of Psychotick.

This is based on the commonly known twins paradox. Most of you will be familiar with the basics of it. In essence special relativity says that if you have two twins and you stick one on a rocket ship and he flies away at high speed and comes back, because he's been traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light, he will have experienced less time. So when he comes back to Earth and meets his twin brother, he'll actually be younger than him.

Now about three or four years ago it occurred to me that this scenario is self defeating. (From a philosophical / logical point of view. Those of you who've watched The Good Place - which is brilliant by the way - will have heard the oft repeated complaint that "this is why everybody hates moral philosophers". Here I'm going to expand that to "this is why everybody hates philosophers!")

Okay, so lets get back to the paradox - and try and place it within the frame of special relativity. Now the first tenet of relativity is that there is no absolute inertial frame of reference. A complicated way of saying that you can't look at an inertial problem from the outside. You can only examine it from the perspectives of the - usually two - inertial frames of reference concerned. Call them A and B - or in this case the rocket ship and Earth.

Immediately you do this, you run into a basic problem of definitions - and no I don't mean that semantically. In short if we have no absolute inertial frame of reference, then it becomes impossible to say that a rocket ship leaves Earth. You can only say that if you have an external perspective on the situation such that you can see that the Earth is stationary or alternatively moving at a standard rate with no accelerative force acting on it, while the rocket ship is traveling away from it. Since you don't have this by definition of the theory of special relativity, you can't make this statement.

Instead the statement you have to make is that the earth and the rocket ship are moving apart.

I know, that sounds screwy. But within the confines of special relativity, it's correct. And you can understand it from a practical perspective too. If you're on the rocket ship and you stare out of the port hole at the retreating Earth, who are you to say that you're the one who's leaving the Earth and it's not leaving you? If you're not accelerating, you won't feel any motion. So the only thing that tells you you're leaving the Earth is your understanding that the Earth is huge and you blasted off from it. Likewise if you're on the Earth staring at the rocket ship, the sensation of gravity makes you think that you're standing still and it's leaving you, but that is no part of special relativity.

Alright, now lets hook this new definition into the twins paradox. Now according to the original paradox the rocket ship was leaving Earth. Now we can say instead that the rocket ship and the Earth are leaving each other. If that's the case than our two twins are both in the same situation. Each sees the other leaving him at whatever speed, and according to special relativity that means they're both in the position of claiming that because the other is traveling away from them at a significant fraction of the speed of light, and therefore both will expect the other to have experienced less time. Which means that when they come back together, there should be no real difference in elapsed time. Time slowed down equally for both of them.

So now we find ourselves in a conundrum - I think I'll call it a Psychotickian Conundrum! There are two options. Either the paradox doesn't hold, and we don't expect the twins to come back together having experienced different amounts of time - despite what we are constantly being told has been observed. Or the basic tenet of relativity, that there is no absolute inertial frame of reference, does not hold.

Now of course those who believe in relativity, are going to argue that it's due to mass, gravity and acceleration, none of which I would point out are a part of special relativity.

Okay, so enough of this. I'll leave you to your head scratching, and just finish with this most basic of all understandings. This is why everybody hates philosophers! We love to poke holes in things!

Cheers, Greg (aka Psychotick).

Fear And Loathing In Outer Space

Hi guys,

Bit of a different post this time. Hopefully one that makes you think a bit. But to begin with I put out Madness and Magic about a month ago – really happy about that – and have got some nice reviews for it which is great. And of course immediately after that, while I probably should have been doing something useful, I started on a brand new book.

But this one I actually completed!

The rough draft is now finished – (87 K in a month – don't tell my editor!) and I'm tinkering with it at the moment. Turning it into something more fun to read mostly. At the moment it's title is “The Travel Bug” which is a bit of a pun and it's a sci fi – but not a traditional space opera. There are no spaceships – a few flying saucers though – and no epic space battles. Instead the action is set mostly on Earth and the book is based on two basic ideas.

The first is astral travel and the idea that some people who experience lucid dreams or astral traveling, are in fact actually able to travel to the stars. And that scientists will one day be able to record our dreams, meaning that these people, these actual astral travelers will become the equivalent of astronauts. Traveling the stars and bringing back all the wonders out there for the rest of us to see and learn from.

This of course is not a new idea. There aren't a lot of new ideas in fiction. And this one though it's been used a bit, mostly comes from Simak's “Time is the Simplest Thing”, which is a really great read and I recommend it. I fairly much recommend anything by Clifford Simak.

But it's the other idea contained within the story that's really the subject of this post. That we don't know and can't really understand what alien actually is. And we won't be able to until we actually experience it for ourselves.

This idea has been used all over literary fiction. If you read Lovecraft you'll know that his great and terrible creatures aren't just terrifying, but they overwhelm the understanding of his characters. A few years back the movie Gareth Edwards film “Monsters” came out and one of the central themes in it was that aliens while dangerous and apparently determined to immigrate to Mexico, are something we've just never encountered. The film tried desperately to make us experience a concept of “alien” not really seen before. I also recommend seeing this film, not so much because of the usual things, but because it is an experience. A little bit on the mind blowing side of things.

In “The Travel Bug” I wanted to take this idea and advance it. To ask the question, what would people do if one day they encountered something – an alien – that was completely beyond their understanding? Would they be terrified? Shocked? Overwhelmed? How would we deal with it?

This is actually an important question. We all know that the chances that there is alien life out there are high. The chances that it will visit us in the near future are quite a bit lower, but never the less, we've come up with plans for dealing with that eventuality. But every one of those plans that we've ever heard of centers around the idea that there will be a commonality between our visitors and us. That we will be able to understand them on some fundamental level. But is that realistic? Will we be able to understand them at all? Or will the sheer alien nature of them, completely overwhelm us?

I think this is a possibility we need to seriously consider. Because I'm not sure that we are at all ready to understand what alien really means. And yet we keep imagining that we are. And we even attempt to justify our imaginings with theories that may have no more scientific weight than candy-floss.

We can talk about concepts like parallel evolution meaning that certain body types and ways of interacting with the world will be universal. But really that's guesswork. Evolution has no plan, there are multiple ways of interacting with the world we live in, and worlds themselves may vary wildly. Is there actually any reason to think that an alien water life form should look at all like a fish? It may have evolved a completely different way of living in water.

And why should we assume that they think like us at all? Just because they go to the trouble of visiting us, does that mean they actually want to see us? Some of you will have read the story Roadside Picnic in which the aliens came to Earth simply for some sort of stopover on their journey and mankind wasn't even on their radar. They weren't interested in us at all. And we're trying to interpret the items they left behind in the belief that they left them for us. But really, it's just rubbish that they tossed aside. The point is that we assume aliens will be like us in some ways. That they'll behave in ways we do. But I suspect that may be a mistake.

Assuming that some alien with funny ears may simply wander down the landing ramp and tell us they come in peace, is likely a mistake. Whatever arrives may actually ooze through the porous hull of its vessel and then completely fail to recognize any form of intelligent live on Earth as it really just came to look at the pretty sunsets.

And how would we deal with aliens? We want to think we're rational people. But just as one example, what if what came down that landing ramp was a human sized spider? We already know that a certain proportion of people will run screaming in terror if that happened, while others would find themselves rooted to the ground in terror. We don't know why, but arachnophobia is a common human issue. We fear spiders. They have too many legs, move in unpredictable ways and we're frightened that they're poisonous. Yet the reality is that they're mostly harmless. And we're far less terrified of dogs even though vastly many more people are hurt by them every year. The reason I suspect, is that we can sense a sort of kinship with dogs. When a dog barks or growls, we can get a gist of their intentions and what they'll do. Spiders are simply too alien, for want of a better term.

But spiders are from Earth. We have far more in common with them than any alien being that may come from the stars. So why not take that phobic reaction we get from seeing spiders, and amp it up a thousand times or so, to try and understand what our reactions to our alien guests might be. Suddenly it might not just be a few people screaming in terror, running away in blind terror, depositing the contents of their stomachs on the ground, or standing rooted to the spot like statues. It may be half the population.

And I can hear the doubters scoffing at this even now. They watch horror movies. Nothing could scare them. Not like that. But my counter would be that this wouldn't be a movie. It would be real. There's no screen in front of you, constantly telling you that what you're seeing is only a movie and that you're safe. Instead there may be sounds and smells that simply make no sense. Actions we just can't interpret. There's no way to predict how people will respond when something truly alien walks into their life without the reassuring safety net of a screen between them and us. But my guess is that it could be very badly.

The gist of this blog is really that when it comes to aliens, we don't actually know what alien is, and we won't until we finally meet it. We also don't know how we'll react to it. And we won't even be sure why it came. But the one thing we do have to do, is put away our beliefs that we do. Because all our theories about aliens have rooted deep within them, the idea that they'll be just like us in some ways. 

And the whole point of being alien, is that they're not.

Cheers, Greg.

House Prices in Midsomer and Unintended Consequences!

Hi Guys,

This time I thought I'd turn my attention to unintended consequences in world building. And the title, though perhaps a little tongue in cheek, says it all. Would you buy a house in Midsomer? I wouldn't when the chances of your surviving there until old age are remote and the likelihood of suffering a gruesome death is high. (On the other hand St Mary Mead is once more a desirable place to live now that Miss Marple has gone away, and house prices in Cabot Cove are starting to rise again since the departure of Jessica Fletcher!)

I know, this all sounds very odd. But in essence it's a simple point for writers. We dream up characters and world builds and all sorts of wonderful things, but too often don't stop to think what the consequences of our dreams would be in the real world. Nowhere is this more true than in the realm of science fiction and fantasy.

The reason I bring this up is that in writing more steampunk fantasy like Madness and Magic and now Callum, I've been having to concentrate a lot more on this very issue. In Madness, I had my hero riding on a steam powered motorbike - which I thought was damned cool idea, I admit. But in doing that I had to deal head on with the question - could you have steam powered motorbikes in a world full of magic? Because if everyone had magic, why wouldn't people just fly or portal wherever they wanted to go? On the other hand if magic was rare, complicated and difficult and only a few had it, why would anyone even care about it let alone desire it? Everyone would be getting motorbikes and the roads would be perfectly smooth.

This has been my struggle with world building for steampunk for the last couple of years. A tricky balancing act where I have to both advance and hold back technology and magic to explain why neither of them has dominated the world. Why there hasn't been an industrial revolution and mass production - or a magical enlightenment. What lets them compete in the world without one dominating the other.

For me I've developed and used a number of answers to resolve these questions and I think they've been reasonably coherent. Enough that my worlds don't leave people scratching their heads too much - I hope! But after handing Callum over to my editor I've begun watching more shows of late, and seen more versions of these problems popping up everywhere.

In Powers - a show I really enjoyed - I watched superheros and villains streaking across the sky and having aerial battles over the city and a question struck me - would you have air travel in a world like this? Because planes would be horribly vulnerable to attacks and accidents and the safest way to travel would quickly become the most dangerous. The industry would never take off! (They actually had a partial explanation for this in the show about flight heights and rules, but it didn't sound plausible to me.)

I re-watched Lord of the Rings and once more found myself caught with the question about the eagles. If you can simply get on an eagle and fly why wouldn't you just fly the damned ring to the mountain? I know, there is an explanation - the ringwraiths on their dragons would tear the eagles apart - but really Mordor is a big place and the ringwraiths can't be everywhere. They could sneak through. Especially at night. And more so when they have invisibility on their side.

Then there was Powerless - a fun little comedy where the employees of Bruce Wayne beaver away in their building creating all sorts of devices to protect people from super villains. But a single question arises - why haven't the super villains got together and destroyed the building and its people? They are after all villains and it is a threat to their continued villainy.

My point in this post is really just that actions - or in this case characteristics of your world build - have consequences, and that we as authors really need to sit down whenever we come up with a cool idea like wizards on motorbikes, and start asking ourselves what is this going to mean for our world? Will house prices go up?!

Cheers, Greg.