Lights are on/Someone is home

When I reload my cyberpunk world - and I am planning to return to cyberpunk - you can expect the technology to look a little different. There are things I didn't imagine in 2004 (or 1991, depending on which parts of the Looking Glass world you're looking at), such as cloud computing, and the revolutions in the Middle East. There were things I did imagine too, for other purposes, and one of those things is this: a technique for making light activated neurons in mice.

Not inherently useful in cyberpunk you say? Consider this. Given a supply of stem cells, dropping those same genes into the stem cells and triggering those stem cells to become neurons gives you a supply of light activated neurons which you can implant in someone's brain. Add some encoding/decoding logic, a power supply, and an optical port, along with a good understanding of how the brain really works, and you've got direct neural interfaces. It's tempting to say "it gets rid of all the nanomachine handwaving of neurofibers" buuuut... I did say those neurofibers were practically living neurons themselves. In any case, I saw it, it amused me, and so here it is. :)

-JRS

Downloads Page is Back

As part of my update in support of Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings, I was quietly sunsetting the free downloads section of my site. Then I looked at the Google Analytics, and let's just say removing the second most popular page in the site seemed like a bad idea. So the Downloads page is back. :)

-JRS

Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings On Sale Now

TLDR version: Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings double novel is available for purchase! More info on my website at http://www.jamesrstrickland.com!
--
I'm pleased to announce that Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings (also known as Copperwood Double #1) is on sale now.

I've discussed Jeff Duntemann's Drumlin world before, but for those just tuning in, a quick recap.

Toward the middle of the 22nd century AD, the new Starship Origen departed Earth on her maiden voyage, bound for the colony on Numenor with a cargo of livestock, various frozen DNA samples of livestock, plants, and people, and a large number of scientists and university professors bound for SUNY Numenor. She never made it. Instead, when her Hilbert drive malfunctioned destructively, she emerged from her FTL jump all the way across the galaxy, in unexplored space, with no way of returning.

The castaways were fortunate enough to discover a planet strongly resembling Pleistocine Earth, and there they were forced to start a colony nobody had planned on, with only the tools and materials they'd brought with them. It wasn't easy. In the hard scrabble that ensued, a lot of the knowledge they'd brought with them was lost, and their civilization began to regress.

And there was something else. Scattered over the surface of the planet were tens of thousands of alien artifacts called thingmakers, each with a pair of pillars that make a drumlike sound when tapped, and a two and a half meter diameter bowl filled with silver dust. When 256 taps total are made, something will appear out of the dust in the bowl. Sometimes they're useful things, like axes and pilsner glasses and rulers. Often times they're unrecognizable metallic shapes.

Two and a half centuries later, the world those castaways named Valinor is slowly clawing its way back up the technological ladder. Steam locomotives have begun moving passengers and freight over iron rails, to and from the rural communities where the food is grown. The first hydrogen filled airships are being developed in secret. The uneasy truce between those who would re-develop human technology and those who would rely on drumlins has held. Humanity is prospering. An industrial revolution has begun.

As the title of the book suggests, there are two short novels printed in this book. The hardcopy is a double novel, like the old Ace Doubles of years gone by. Read one story, flip the book over, and read the other.

The first story is Drumlin Circus, by Jeff Duntemann. Drumlin Circus tells the story of Simon Kassel, a director of the Bitspace Institute, sent to suppress a drumlin used by the circus to train its animals. When his mission is wrecked by other Institute operatives who kidnap the animal trainer and her assistant, wounding Kassel in the process, Kassel joins the circus and becomes a very scary clown, bent on revenge against the Institute. He returns to Institute HQ to rescue Julia and Rosa only to discover that the function controller does a lot more than train animals. Played by an expert, human beings and even other drumlins will obey its tunes. And young Rosa is one very annoyed master.

The second story is On Gossamer Wings. I wrote it. Far out in the dusty farmlands of the Great Bowl, a strange, mute girl named Natalie Bishop discovered the rhythm for the Big Ball of Iron. This has not gone unnoticed by the Institute. Now, Institute director Hiram König has been sent to suppress it. What he finds is that in the meantime, Natalie has become a young woman, and the big ball of iron is only the beginning of what she's drumming up. Despite the fact that everyone considers her a mentally defective child who will never grow up, Natalie is determined to prove her worth, her intelligence, and her adulthood by drumming up the parts for a flying machine she's designed. It's up to König to spirit her and her unique gifts with the thingmakers out of the town of Joiners before the whole situation blows up and crushes her and her dreams of flying underfoot.

Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings is for sale in ebook and dead-tree formats from Amazon and Barnes&Noble. We'll hopefully be making it available from more ebook sites and brick and mortar bookstores soon.

-JRS

Belated Anomalycon Wrapup

I was surprisingly stressed out on the approach to AnomalyCon 2011. I've been into Steampunk since it first had a name (around the time Gibson and Sterling's Difference Engine hit the scene.) It's a genre I've enjoyed for quite a while, and the very first novel I completed for NaNoWriMo is in that genre. (It will probably never see the light of day.) Still, I had no real handle on what the crowd would be like, and Jeff and I, by vacuuming up any panel space that came free when the inevitable cancellations cropped up, had both a reading and a topic panel to give.

As it turned out, it was a lot of fun. The Tivoli Student Union building is a defunct 19th century brewery, still replete with much of the equipment - a large steam engine, keg management equipment, and so on - so it was a perfect setting for the con. It is also enormous, so when the con ran to three times the number of people the staffers reasonably expected to see, it still didn't feel crowded or harried, and we weren't getting the hairy eyeball from some hotel staff. The LLC running the con did a remarkable job for the first time around. Kudos to them.

Our presentation on Saturday was on Steampunk in post-future worlds. What this translates to is that Jeff's Drumlin world, while strictly by date, is set in the distant future. However, because the people of the colony have undergone a technological regression (they were never expecting to colonize a world from scratch, so the information they brought with them was on consumer grade electronics - which only lasted 10 years or so.) What our talk centered around was what forces made the original Victorian era occur, and if, given the same or similar values in the culture, it would recur in this future world. We concluded that not only would it, but between cultural DNA (they had lots of pictures and some pattern books) and manufacturing technology, it would likely /look/ very much like the Victorian era.

On Sunday, we did readings from our double novel: Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings. It was reasonably well received, though we were across (and literally right below the balcony of) a somewhat more popular panel. Fortunately Jeff and I are both experienced readers who can fill a decent sized room with sheer lung power.

The downside of the Tivoli building is that the light is absolutely terrible in it. Getting good pictures inside the con was very much hit or miss, even with my mighty F1.2 Pentax-A lens, which is the fastest camera/lens package I own. So I don't really have any compelling pictures to share.

A fun con, and I'll most likely be going again next year, with intent to read and/or panelize.

-JRS

Site Update

Switched on the new stuff to support the premiere of Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings on Sunday at AnomalyCon.

Please note that (obviously) the final art for the Drumlin Circus side of the double isn't in place - that's an artist's sketch that I labeled with the Dymo label fonts. :)

Oh, I also fixed the book reviews section - replaced it, really, with a javascript one from Goodreads. They somehow changed the feed and broke the magpie scripting that fed my bookshelf to my desktop. Hopefully they'll refrain from doing the same to their own API.

See you at the con.

-JRS

Anomaly Con

Anomaly Con is this weekend! Yay! The premiere is on!

For those playing the home game, For the last couple months, I've been working with Jeff Duntemann on a double novel. We're premiering it at Anomaly Con here in Denver on Sunday, March 27th, at 1:00pm in Panel Room 1.

Well, this week, the organizers of the con emailed me to ask if we could do a panel on Saturday as well, to fill in for someone who got sick at the last minute and had to cancel.

We said "Sure." :) So now we also have a panel on Saturday at noon in Panel room 1 called "The Evolution of Steampunk in Post Modern Worlds". As we've worked on the double novel, and indeed as Jeff worked on the previous stories in the Drumlin world, it became obvious that we were writing steampunk, whether we set out to or not. So Jeff suggested we take a step back for this panel and look at what forces produced the original Victorian era, and how many of them were replicated in the Drumlin world, and how those elements came together again to form the second Victorian era on that far-away, distant future planet. And once we started talking about it, we realized that's a good topic for a panel.

This is also a good time to give a quick shout-out to Wild West Mercantile for not only getting my order to me extremely quickly, but for going above and beyond by /measuring/ the vest in the store while I was on the phone with them, so we could make sure it would fit.

-JRS

Some Perspective

Some perspective on Japan's nuclear plant problems, courtesy of XKCD's Randall Monroe

http://xkcd.com/radiation/