Splinter Project

<Novel In Progress> is a project with a lot of history for me. The story, in a more-or-less unrecognizable form, first came to me in December of 2002.

In essence, it was about "Rendrid DeMarco"--a savvy, borderline-psychopathic omni-savant who's profession was very similar to that of Siri Keaton in Blindsight (I give myself credit for coming up with the idea, but obviously Peter Watts beat me to the publishing punch by a considerable margin): In a world with a variety of transhuman and less-classifiable intelligences, Rendrid's job was to make sense of the incomprehensible and explain it to the indifferent (the normal people running government and military concerns). He'd been loaded hastily onto a military spacecraft, and sent out to Neptune to meet some aliens with very unusual habits.

Here, I confess, that my first contact story didn't work very well. It was basically a re-hashing of Ender's Game, in one sense: the conflict starts when a species with a radically-different physiology kills some humans and doesn't expect that they'll be terribly inconvenienced by this. The major difference is that this story was never meant to end with xenocide--in the end, Rendrid commits treason during wartime just to get his job done, and when it's all over (and the aliens have been established as "friendly"), he seeks shelter from a military tribunal by running to the aliens themselves.

It was a decent concept, I suppose--take what's written above, and you have the basis for quite a number of possible novels--even series of novels. The setting was a bit gonzo, and I never did quite iron out whether Rendrid and the other "S3's" (it didn't stand for anything then, and it doesn't now) had powers that were hypercognitive, but realistic, or outright psychic in nature. Some of the other characters straddled the line.

Did I say characters? I meant caricatures. Rendrid was the only compelling voice in the whole lot, and while the story was about him, it wasn't told by him. The narrator was a fellow named Salim bin Nasir, a soldier in some unspecified military who sort of played the same role in this book as Juan Rico, the protagonist of Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein - a moutpiece for the author. There was someone named Maggie, another S3 with whom Rendrid had a complicated relationship--but there was never really a sense as to why she was important to him, or in fact why the reader might be persuaded to care about her at all.

The writing dwindled as I began attending university courses, and eventually stagnated. I resurrected bits of the project for a fiction-writing class, but it didn't go anywhere. Mostly, it was so unpolished and...well, confused, that I didn't know where to begin. My desire to see this story told and, ideally, sold and published as a novel for mass market, took precedence over the joy of actually writing it. Eventually, I began developing the world again - thanks to Elly.

Elly, with whom I'd bandied creative ideas back and forth over the years, took an interest in my project. She has a way of absorbing other peoples' creative ideas, refining them and secreting a new product that's uniquely her own. Strangely, the pattern was reversed here: Rendrid's little adventure story swallowed an entire project she'd spent years working on, and got the beginnings of a halfway decent cast of characters from it. A setting shift took place, over time - the focus became less on space, and more on what was going on here on Earth, prior to the actual moment of contact (it was assumed Rendrid and his cohort, Yuki, would still venture into the outer solar system at the book's climax). In particular, one of the really prominent new cast members was an AI named EVE. Cliche? Definitely - religious themes and AI tossed into the same writing are hardly original. Still, it was a lot more compelling than the previous version.

The existence and purpose of the S3's got confused during this iteration; they were superspies. Or were they super-diplomats? Opinions changed on a weekly basis what precisely they were for. The sense was that they were not private contractors working for the government, but actually government assets - people designed in a laboratory and grown to specification for a job that was no longer well-defined. I wanted to show off Rendrid's abilities by having him successfully pacify a berserk military robot, indicating that he was still ultimately an "information topologist", as Watts puts it. Or they were supposed to be social engineers of highest caliber - Elly had a bit more hands-on knowledge of the sort of savvy I wanted to convey in this character. I was operating in a vacuum - I knew almost nothing about any of my subject matter, from the biology to the AI theory or even the basic skills S3s used to do their dirty, interesting work.

Little actual writing got done during this period, in favor of massive worldbuilding. Political boundaries were defined; they would shift at least a dozen times more, as none of it was too important anyway. We ditched the aliens, and decided they were a hoax by EVE. Later, we ditched the hoax too, and our story ceased to be about first contact at all. I saw a 3d rendering of a laser-launch facility by Anders Sandberg of Sweden, who inserted an artists' blurb about this image being from the fictional "Baikonur Republic." I looked up Baikonur that day; it's a little chunk taken out of Kazakhstan, indefinitely on rent to the Russian government since the fall of the Soviet Union. The entirety of Russia's space program is based out of this arid little hellhole on the Central Asian steppe. It was so compelling an image (the place, not the photo) that I decided it had to be included in the story. Later, we wound up contriving things so that EVE, our AI, was the nominal owner of Russia via a complicated corporate buyout.

I didn't say it wasn't farfetched, did I?

Once again, things stagnated - and because of how little actual writing got done at this phase of development, it wasn't hard for things to remain that way for years. In the meanwhile, Elly and I began a complicated on-off relationship that tended to define the tempo of development. It was during one of the "on" phases, in early 2007, that the project shifted again.

Elly had a dear friend with some stalled creativity issues of her own. Marie, who became a good friend of mine even despite the subsequent breakup with Elly (and corresponding slump in our own cooperative development of this sordid little project), had been writing a cyberpunk-esque story of her own for years. It was similarly lacking in focus, meandering through the world of ideas and personally-significant writings from when she was younger. A setting very much like our own, in other words - and her own cast of characters provided an especially welcome set of new interactions for the existing ensemble.

It was, in essence, a match made in heaven. Marie and I could work together on something; then she and Elly could go over it, and do their own work which I could work on with Marie. The volatility of my relationship with Elly no longer dictated the terms on which this book got written. We finally developed a coherent sense of the story - who had created this bunch of misfit transhumans, why they'd been brought up in a psychologically-traumatic, borderline Machiavellian social environment (sequestered away from the rest of society in a facility out on the steppe), and even what events the story revolved around. (I'm not revealing much if I say the first chapter still involves Rendrid setting off a nuke in a crowded city, for what he believes are eminently-justifiable reasons. That's only the hook, you see.)

Since then the book itself has been in active development - we've still overhauled it at least three times since then, creating distinctly different iterations of the same project. However, it's changing less and less as it goes; a process of refinement, of purposeful meandering as we get a sense of the territory and where, within it, we've chosen to build. At this point, we have layed a decent foundation with the first (technically "zeroeth") draft of the story, and are beginning to assemble what will hopefully be the bottom levels of our final structure.

Unfortunately, I'm not having fun right now.

The three of us trade off our availability. Booms and busts of attention and inspiration dictate who contributes what, and when. It works; we compensate for our own slumps and take up the slack left by one another. In the past seven months, we've used this method to produce more finished work than at any point in the five years previous.

The problem is that I don't feel very "on" lately, creatively. I have contributed bits to the new draft, and I have some excellent ideas for what I want to do with it next, but mostly I just languish and feel moderate social pressure to be doing more than I am while not getting much done. This isn't because of actual pressure per se - Elly and Marie both have lives too, and they understand I'm not always "in the mood," so to speak. More practically, there are some conundrums with the current plot that seem difficult to solve except by committee...and lately, the process of trying to come to an agreement on that has been very intimidating for me.

Again, not so much the fault of my coauthors. I've been quite avoidant of confrontation, lately, and that's the biggest reason why. I don't want to have arguments with people, especially not people I care about, and I can't always express why I think some particular decision doesn't work for me without effectively structuring my thoughts into argument form, and being prepared to defend them (and pick apart the responses in similar fashion). On top of that, sometimes the setting just changes for me - I have very high standards for literary SF, and I'm just barely convinced I might be able to write to them (at least, if someone else were to have written it, I like to think I'd judge it favorably).

This is also problematic when it comes to conventional signs for our writing. The narrative is meant to be realistic and reasonably "hard science" - not so caught up in getting it right that it brings out tables and graphs (in the writing or the appendix), but enough that I at least don't feel we've done something outright impossible or silly with the story. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do in any subgenre of science fiction - and especially so whenever AI, nanotechnology, biotechnology and cybernetics are part of the story. In this story, they're essential parts of the plot and background.

The issue is that all of us are products of an educational system that stresses numerical grading scores rather than comprehension of scientific material. On top of that, even if we were heavily-schooled in science from an early age, the stuff we're writing about is the bleeding edge of today - at best. In most cases, it's still speculative, even if there are existing bodies of theory to draw from. None of this is material commonly presented to the layman in accessible form. Furthermore, these are all popular tropes in the sort of media we like to consume - which again, tends to be popular science fiction. The images of them are vividly in our minds, and given our ages, have been since childhood. So we're dealing with material that is understood in, at best, an iconic sort of way.

What do I mean by "iconic?"

Think of the Borg in Star Trek. They're said to assimilate people by injecting "nanites" that transform their cells and run machinery into them. We encounter the word "nanites" again later, and this time it's used to describe grey goo machines that tear matter apart at the atomic level. "Little tiny autonomous robots" would be a better word for what we understand the term to mean - but fundamentally, what it really means to us is "magic." It can do this and that and any other old thing we need it to. We may even come up with fun new thought experiments for how it could be used in ways we haven't seen.

So the word "nanites", and by extnesion, any use of the prefix "nano-", get associated in our minds with these vivid images of what we think it can do. These images are everywhere in the media we like to partake from - especially videogames, a pastime we all seem to enjoy. But there's not much actual basis for this depiction of nanites in current theory. Is it possible? If I had to go out on a limb, I'd say "Probably." However, dry molecular nanotechnology is sort of the holy grail right now, about the way HAL-9000 (a talking, thinking machine that can solve any problem and never makes a mistake) is to modern AI. In the popular perception, AI is about creating machines equivalent to a human in some broad way...or alternately, ones that seem to be but never can have that special whatsis people always attribute (quite unjustly, in my opinion) to humans.

In reality, modern AI mostly concerns itself with ways of solving more limited problem domains...and even "artificial general intelligence", the sort that can learn to plumb a toilet as effectively as it learns to solve some obscure math problem, isn't far from being a holy grail in its own right. The main difference from that and HAL is that real R&D into general forms of artificial intelligence doesn't visualize a synthetic human being as its end-product. And while I'm a qualified believer in Strong AI (the qualification being "Who's going to build this? Why?"), I don't see it as a likely result of any current or near-future AI research (I also think that consciousness is an overrated idea, but for more on that, see my pending review of Blindsight).

Okay, so we're not dealing with crazy adventure stories here - and crazy adventure stories are what this project is all about. So what's the harm in playing fast and loose? I suppose the only way I can answer that question is to say "It matters to me," because there are some things that would kill enjoyment of any novel, no matter how many liberties I was likely to grant it. If you don't know that X or Y or Z is patently absurd, and akin to putting a magic wand into your plot when it's neither necessary nor a decent exploration of what you can do with a magic wand, then you won't find it hard to accept and enjoy a story that has them. If you do know this, then you are going to view the resultant story very differently. It depends on how hard the author was evidently trying, and how well they pulled it off - I'll suspend disbelief, as long as the author isn't asking me to do so for trivial reasons.

Because I spent so much time studying the relevant science behind all this stuff (mostly so I could write about it at all; when I don't know anything about a subject, the words simply fail to materialize), I have a more coherent grasp of it than the other two. This has put me in the position of being our official go-to girl for all matters technical, and unfortunately, that means a lot of nitpicking. For an idea of why this might be problematic for me, see above about confrontation. Right now, especially, I'm very unwilling to engage in much of it.

Furthermore, my explanations and technical corrections go over the heads of my coauthors, frequently. That's not an attack on them, and it's also by their own admission; they don't know this stuff like I do, and it took me years of just reading to gain the level of familiarity I have. We all have lives, and there's no way to impart what I know such that they can meaningfully expect to write to my standards. It would neither be practical, nor productive for the novel itself. What happens is I correct some subtle thing, which impies changing our current view of the novel significantly (and it takes considerable time, effort and negotiation to sort it all out); then, later, someone else is hit by a major creative burst and introduces up to half a dozen new items that, when brought into line with my own standards, will require a lot of followup.

We all have an emotional stake in the end product; the novel is the spawn of all our efforts, and pieces from each author are wound so tightly into the fabric that we could not feasibly divide up our intellectual property and go our seperate ways with this thing. Thus, we have to find ways to work together. I don't seriously doubt the long-term viability of this project (and I'm even optimistic that it could get published, whenever it's done)...but it has been very taxing on me of late, to deal with all the maintainence it requires.

Lately, I've been exploring the possibility of a side project I can develop solo. So far, my suggestion has been met with lukewarm reception by Marie, but I think that's part of solo writing...you're not accountable to anyone else. I think it would be good to do this for myself... I need some sense that my ability to write isn't tied to them or this one novel. Thus, while looking at the extensive background that goes into the story prior to the beginning of the first book, I noticed that we have about six decades worth of events, involving some very fascinating characters who take a backseat in <current novel project>. Events that would make for compelling stories in their own right, and (hopefully) contribute to the finished form of this novel-perpetually-in-progress...

It involves the story of Katerina, AKA "Kiska" - the founder/president of Baikonur Corporatsya, and her rather significant role in world history, particularly the events that lead to the design and birthing of our novel's principal cast members, including Rendrid. A barely-glimpsed figure in the current project, yet one feared and respected by everybody else in the book. And, as it happens, one who is directly responsible for the creation
of EVE...