A little glimpse of Proteus from the notes. Two years before I’d begin writing it from the top.

“Robin and I had a frank disagreement, you could say.” Mina had a sharp look in her eyes. She was never one to hide her impatience. “You would never believe what he said.”
I grinned. “Robin? Oh I think I could guess.”
“Really? Try this. I went to see him so I could borrow the lander. I had some instruments to fly. It was early evening when I saw him. He was drunk.”
“So far so good. I know about his stash.”
“Oh, I think he has a brewery set up in there by now. But that was just the start. He’s under pressure, he doesn’t like it here. I get all of that.”
“What then?”
“He has a theory.” She laid back and sighed. “About this whole planet.”
“One that’s always more obvious when he’s been drinking?”
“Why not?” She sighed. “You want to hear it?”
“Go on.”
“He thinks the odds are too long. That we can’t have found a planet with breathable air, with life, with recognisable habitat and especially…”
“The Ana?”
“Of course. Especially them.” She started to smile. “He asked me if I have found any of their ancestors. He said he wondered whether they evolved just like us as well.”
“Sounds pretty reasonable. They did?”
“I don’t know! It’s too early to tell. It does look wrong from where we are. I’ve nothing to show against him.”
“So what is his theory?”
“Oh, this is the good part.” She paused for a drink of water. “He’s so skeptical he thinks we’re being fooled.”
“Who by?”
“He doesn’t know. But he thinks he doesn’t have to. He’s sure it’s easier to trick our senses than to explain a world anything like this.”
“What, a conspiracy?”
“A lab experiment!” She laughed. “Maybe we never left in the first place!”
I cringed. “That’s quite a thought.”
“Yes, it is. But it will take a while to prove him wrong.”
She got up and left me wondering. I looked at my notes full of Anatara and everything Tani had told me, and I walked out to look at the indigo blue twilight sky. It really was quite a thought. I couldn’t shake it.

—January 2010

Sounds pretty much like Marie’s writing, now she’s found her voice. She and Mina seem their modern selves as well. But, as I remember, Robin was not a Scot, but a Swede; and Saturnine at that. Thus far, and I’ll admit Proteus has come a long way further than I ever planned, Robin may well be a jocular, indeed, quite stereotyped man. That’s because we have barely glimpsed his soul. Events conspire. Don’t write him off as yet. You know me and my taste in characterisation. Or shall.

What then of his theory? There’s nothing worse than when things end in “it was all a dream!” Besides, it’s a bit late now, don’t you think? His thought does have a place, somewhere in the tale, albeit in the background best. It’s just that seeing as Proteus is what it is – the world-building backstory of my tale within a tale – we already know how it ends. The only dream is mine.

Stories need a good beginning. The way you kick things off matters more than you might think. People judge a book by its cover, or first few pages, of course; but there’s more to it than that besides. You’re setting the tone. You’re signalling the way you mean to go. And, in a certain sense, the start encapsulates the end. Some books are written especially like this, but I think there’s some truth to the idea that every beginning is born united with its end, a pair of potent opposites yet one and at heart the same. That’s the way I’m going about Andala, anyway. Even if that ending is as so very far away as I think it may be.

In all the time that Alpha has been kicking about in my mind, I’ve not settled on the exact start. For a good while, I thought a fair way to begin would be with Alexander waking from a dream. Yes, I was not yet aware of the cliché. Here’s the draft, which ends with a section break and is followed by the headline that we are, indeed, in 2301.

Silently, brilliantly, the arc of indigo, white and blue drifted into his sight. As large as the world, as long as the day, as great as the horizon, he had seen it a million times before but still it surprised him. It did not seem as though a man should ever see this sort of thing, even though we are all looking for it. Somewhere before him it was midmorning or perhaps late afternoon, he didn’t know which, but it looked just as beautiful from his vantage point. For that silent and inconceivably simple yet ornate curve, creeping into his eyes was the Earth, the beginning and the end, the inescapable and the eternally free.

Mankind had once awoken there, countless generations ago, with the gift of intelligence but not a word as to what it was for. There the years, millennia and aeons had turned just as days, while the ancestors of us all lived their lives as best as they could, from one meal to the next, precious little ever left of them to speak for their personalities, treasures or accomplishments. It was good enough that they survived. That one day, with the collective gifts of a history of creativeness, some of them would ascend through the skies and be awarded with the indescribable vision of the land that had made them. Delicate and pristine, even at this late point in human time, the immortal globe that has seen everything.

“Wouldn’t you know? We made it!”

—June 2004

“Silently, brilliantly.” I do like that pair of words, even if they are egregious adverbs, but I’m not at all sure that it works as an opening line. And I’ve certainly come to dislike the idea of starting with such a prose-heavy, “zoomed out”, descriptive-yet-not-describing slab. One couched in passive voice, of course. Having read Stephen King’s best book somewhere along the way since, and just read more in general, I can see the error in my otherwise, I suppose, not so hopeless ways. A sleepy awakening to the orb of the rising Earth is a cinematic kind of start. But I’m not riding with it. Even the bit where he rose with a jolt at Katerina’s voice and, weightless, thumped his head.

Another plan involves a swing in the opposite direction. It starts with the spy. We witness a flying chase through the streets of three centuries hence Rome. It’s night, midwinter, and the rain lashes down while the vehicles twist through the past and future city half oblivious to their struggle. Arriving outside the guarded gates of a palace, whose energy shield sparkles as it boils the falling rain, the spy leaps out his vehicle and holds his hands behind his head as armed men pounce. He yells in English: “Fortitude 359! Fortitude 359!” And the quick scene ends with a policeman butting him with a gun.

Too little. Too much. Right? Old Goldilocks here is seldom easily pleased.

The spy story serves a purpose. Events are afoot on Andala, and the foreknowledge of this back on Earth is something I want to play with as part of the wider Zinoviev plot. There’s not much room for all that in Alpha, but if there’s something I’m fond of it’s a grand foreshadow.

Oh, there’s another. Alexander, the one human on the Dragonfly, has a habit of thinking a touch too hard about the endlessness behind the stars. He may be a fair talented physicist, but he shares with me more than just a little of the mystic lodged in the firmament of his mind. His wavering path from eldritch childhood to hapless lynchpin between the two worlds is one we follow quite a bit. Instead of his waking up with a start, could I have him explain his trick himself? Just another thought.

But what is Andala, the whole thing, really about? The discovery of another world, eerily and unmistakably like ours, but with a people whose uncanny power is the bane of our hitherto unrivalled existence. It’s about the individual people thrust into this, and how they come to terms with what and who they truly are. It’s about a living, breathing, dreaming and awakening world quite beyond our own; and a few more we built besides. Goodness, I can’t really say I have a good grip on it. I just know that it is, not what. And somehow, amongst all of this, I have to find an introduction.

So there is no answer today. What a surprise. But I’ve no shortage of options. Whatever sneaks up and becomes the obvious and shining solution while I’m not looking, that’ll be the one. That’s how this process always is. Intuition. No one ever knows until the deed’s already done.

A fine Scots blizzard of April sleet and hale made for an apt setting to take a sick day. What I did get up to, however, was listening in to an episode of the BBC’s Horizon on artificial intelligence. Can’t say I recommend it, as the necessary thrust of the show was a tech-dizzy sense of inevitability as progress surely marches ever on. While IBM’s Watson, and a parade of variously impressive robots, were given their praise, not once was the presence in the background of this little thing we use millions of times each day. Google, you might have heard of it. (And rivals.) The internet, I’m not the first to reckon, is a closer step along the path to whatever AI we might ultimately discover. And the fact that we can index and search it, this endlessly complex and forever changing thing, to serve up half decent results in an instant is an everyday feat I find naturally more convincing than acing chess or Jeopardy.

I’m being a touch unfair, of course. AI is a an age old problem, as is its coverage. A much better documentary, as I remember from digging it up a good while ago, was The Machine that Changed the World. It may be twenty years old, but its impressions of the imminence of our artificial peer’s arrival were pitch perfect for today’s. Telling. And they even bothered to cover the internet, in charming period dial-up modem and virtual reality treadmill style. Is there anything quicker ageing than technology?

But all this is to say that I’ve the problem to address for myself, writing of a future so often supposed to contain Turing’s answer. Rummaging in my 2010 notes again, I see that I’ve considered this before.

(Put on Yarus by John Berberian if you like. Yes, the archives have a soundtrack. Why would you think they didn’t? Oh, right. Well, this one is a mood piece. See if there’s sense in it.)

(And beware distant spoilers. But they are so very distant indeed. Aegean? What in the name of epistemology has that to do with this? Don’t expect complete answers. Work. In. Progress.)

Andala Tech: Computers

The Extent of AI

Let’s just lay it down here: there is no hard AI in Andala. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Real, old-school, artificial intelligence is the stuff whole stories are made out of. And I’m quite sure to their eventual detriment. It’s not to say that my avoidance of what is, thus far, quite beyond us is in any final sense better. You can well shake your head at the internet’s absence in so many an old future’s tale. Foretelling the future’s a mug’s game, it really is. But for those of us who insist, we can at least remain consistent to our own, doomed, rules.

Within the narrative: why not?

Philosophical questions abound wherever “AI” is spoken. As good a warning sound that bull lies ahead as we all often know. It’s only natural, I suppose. A mind with a power switch? An alternate, potentially infinite, realm of existence? All the ancient unknowns the humblest of computers used to garner, how quaint, are turned new again. We really don’t know how this story goes. And so the fiction.

But that’s not especially useful to me. Not for this particular novel and universe. Hence my determined scowl to side-step the whole ado.

But I could still use an answer for why not, from my people’s perspective.

I’ve heard word of great equations with hard AI and various quantum or statistical limits. Oh really? Not that I’ve gone back to check their reasoning, but it sounds perfect hogwash. Intelligence, for as much as we typically find it awkward to analyse and place within our systems, is here already. There’s nothing unique about the conditions within the human brain. Practically speaking, we may not have gotten anywhere close yet, but there’s no magical barrier holding back our eventual progress. I don’t doubt we will experiment in very synthetic intelligence, discovering as we do quite how common or arcane our own natural kind turns out to be once you’re running the process. Emergent phenomena have the hint of transcendence to them, effervescing somewhere above our day to day intuition and handiwork. But we will know them. And they very well may change us. Boy, that would be a second computer revolution to witness, or to miss.

Yet I’ve got to put it off.

Various different realms of excuse occur to me. Computational density is a good one. A wholly practical “no can do” on elaborate brain emulation thanks to incomplete technology. It’s my safest bet. Though obviously at odds with my eventual plans at Mintaka.

A rather more involved alternative is the prospect of a ban. Perhaps it was achieved in the meantime, and prove so wildly disruptive in whatever place that it did, that the whole thing was sealed in embargo. Has a ring of conspiracy about it, typically something I don’t like but which fits with the Aegean much better than my simplest choice. The real promise to this one (if I can find it in myself to accept any such thing as Pandora’s Box resealed) is its partiality. Most may not have AI, but some can, so long as they know to keep entirely quiet. Yes, this is the one a writer’s instinct would snap at, I know. I’m thinking synthesis.

Truth be out: I suppose I’ve already decided all of this in the past, now that I consider the first two options to come to mind. The events at the Aegean are about something essentially equal to the hardest core of all AI. Universal simulation: the superset of every conceivable mind. So here at least AI is a foregone conclusion. You know, if they needed it, in the explicit HAL sense of old.

I’ll write another section about simulation and the practical limits on computation in the Andala universe, as I consider it a separate subject, hence my dawning surprise. But as for computers which think they are human, or operate with apparent consciousness and free will, I’ve already described why I’m against it. The in-world reasoning may be identical, but I should also remember mind playback, come to think about it. Thoughts in progress, I tell you, even if they are for the most part just memories.

—September 2010

By and large, I think I was right. (What a surprise!) As much as I respect 2001: A Space Odyssey, copying it is not a goal, and that includes HAL. Besides, between now than then, I read Stephen Wolfram’s take on emergence, and adopted some of what I thought of it for the physics of my story.

Quite besides Andala, I’m more convinced now that Turing Machines the like we have today throughout our technology, are a poor match for the hard intelligence problem. What we have managed to construct, thus far, is something of an endlessly elaborate Mechanical Turk. Software is still a painstaking craft, every bit as specialised and handmade as the realm of industry before mechanisation. We’re the ones deciding at every step of the way, whether we use these machines directly as tools, or beforehand when writing the code that enables this. There’s something else to intelligence. Nothing holy or sublime, but something self realising, self improving, a self in the first place if you will. This is why I fear for algorithms alone to ever get there. Rule based we are not. What we are is about as emergent as it gets.

Just trying to figure out how to explain my view is a little taste of the quagmire I’d find throughout my book if I let it loose in there. And yet…

Eventually, just like the hosts of these breathless shows, I reckon AI is ultimately around the corner. The prospect is so disruptive that I can’t have it any sooner than the end of my story, should it ever get there. And that’s what I was on about with those vague allusions to “Mintaka” and “Aegean”. All that stuff about mind uploading has stuck with me longer than I imagined. There’s something I can’t quite comprehend lying in wait for Andala. That may very well be every bit as nutty a path as it sounds. But I wouldn’t be too sure. Writing is a curious, shrouded, inscrutable thing. Just like intelligence.

As for when the Pleiades did come up as the perfect place to put Andala, that took a winter sky. Literal, outside my frosty Edinburgh window, as well as virtual within another on my PowerBook. So obvious, and yet to my surprise still fairly novel. Apparently.

Well here’s an idea. How about moving the whole thing to the Pleiades? I was playing in Celestia an hour or two ago in the eventual evening quiet, trapped still by feline will, when they caught my eye and I remembered how close they are. Almost conveniently close. Rotating the view, I figured Merope lay at the centre and ran my scripts and spreadsheets based from there. What a cluster. Also what a pick for a point of interest, as Merope has one of the most gorgeous nebulae I’ve beheld. A speedy calculation yielded the result: what looks like 30 arcseconds of filament here would be 60 degrees of night filling grandeur there. And pretty damn notable throughout the region. Merope itself, as with all of the dazzling keystone stars which light up that far flung sky, is too mighty to consider for Andala. Or so I think. Plugging in the numbers, my crude model yields a terrestrial orbit way out at 25 AU – between Uranus and Neptune’s – lasting 60 years. Being big and blue, Merope spins and must bulge like Vega, but so much so that its equatorial plane is spun with an Xray-rich wind. Hmm. Habitability aside, Barnard’s Merope Nebula would be a wonderful setting for a certain misty fight. Not least if it is close enough to be apparent from Andala, and embedded in their sky lore.

There seems to be a bit of confusion as to how far the Pleiades lie away from here. The Hipparcos satellite brought them a fair bit closer than expected, leaving niggles in the region both sides of 400 lightyears. That’s a mere six times farther than I had envisaged in my calculations, making it doable if not identical. I just think there’s so much to win in setting their world there, for both what its sky looks like and for what our journeys there are made to be. Plus it is such a little revelation for ordinary folk who never took the time to look into the stars before to see that cluster staring them in the face. I remember my old friend’s first reaction (when I pointed out that strange blur of tight packed stars, hidden in plain sight upon the sky) as though it were mine. No need to worry about sixth magnitude anonymity, even if I do go with one of the “appropriately” fainter locals. So long as it’s that way, they’re there.

It’s a start at least. You know how I love those.

—December 2009

Andala’s star, Aira, is not Merope. But it’s fairly close. I’ve yet to lay my hands upon a sufficiently detailed catalogue (Hertzsprung’s, anyone?). Oh, actually, scratch that: here it is. Thank you internet. So, what I mean to say then, is that I can indeed have a little sift through that and pick a specific real life star for Aira to be, if any take my fancy. There is a case for not being nailed down to a reality which can always prove you wrong, but I need my coordinates whether fiction or otherwise.

All this rummaging about in my notes spells the fact I’ve still a world of work to do. At least. The next matter in hand being a definitive table of transit and communication speeds. Now I’m sure I had one already made around here somewhere… (Damn it.)

The speed of speed matters a fair old deal in how I’m writing Andala. Future history and tales within tales are just my kind of thing, and I’m determined to be at the very least self consistent. This is not new. Some notes follow from three years ago. See if you can spot what’s changed from the top.

I’ve been doing some Wolfram|Alpha aided arithmetic:

• Mentakai is 68.1 lightyears away
• That’s a 10 hour flight at 60,000c
• Alpha starts in the late morning of January 3rd, 2301
• The Ode to Joy fight is over by late evening of January 4th, 2301
• Given 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. GMT for both of the above, that’s a total time of 36 hours
• Say the nebula fight takes 6 hours, that leaves 30 for travelling
• The Dragonfly leaves from Earth orbit to the nebula, arriving for the battle in Act II
• It then flies from the nebula to some waypoint towards Andala with communications
• It then flies directly from there back to the Earth
• The three journeys should fit into 30 hours

I quite like 60kc as the Dragonfly’s top speed during Alpha because it gives very useable travel times for my plot needs. Here are another two for context:

• Travel time to the far side of the galaxy (direct route through core, 25+51 kly) = 463 days
• Travel time to Andromeda (closest large galaxy, 2.57 million lightyears) = 42.88 years

Bear in mind that 60,000 times light-speed is not yet commonly available. In fact it may be best to use an old idea and have it only achievable by the Kinnerins’ experimental 4th design as presently fitted to the ship, and even then only with Madala’s assistance during acceleration. In other words: Andromeda is still just out of reach to explorers, but not for long. As for our own galaxy, it’s safe to say much of it has been visited by we busy human beings, especially lately as the Kinnerins’ advancements are felt. I’ll need to establish a “3G speed” in that case. And for that, I’ll need the lower limit of pre-Alexander drives, upon which Madala did of course travel to the Earth in the first place.

• First contact mission to Andala: 8 years for 68.1 lightyears = 8.5c if they went directly

Here’s a dirty assumption: say each generation is seeing a geometric advancement over the last; whereby the original pre-Kinnerin number becomes “generation zero”. Then the factor is around nine each time. So:

• Generation 0 = 8.5c
• Generation 1 = 77c
• Generation 2 = 693c
• Generation 3 = 6237c
• Generation 4 = 56133c (They’re pushing it extra fast with Madala’s supervision for 60kc)
• Generation 5 = 505197c (Beyond Alpha. Specifically by the time of Epsilon.)

That last one – to be developed by Alexander and Madala as the story progresses, and largely thanks to Zinoviev – yields a Mintaka travel time of 16 hours and an Andromeda mission of 5 years in one direction. Quite respectable for a little later on.

The first one is a big problem though, unless I see Madala putting up with a several year long flight. To get it down to just below a year, you’ve already got to be going at 77c, supposedly still awaiting invention between her and Alexander. Looks like I need to bump them all around a bit. Let’s say there was a lot more speed improvement in the period between first contact and the K1. And here’s a good one: let’s say the Lorenz problem was still an issue throughout, only being fixed down to anywhere near 1.0 by the Kinnerin solution. That way she can burn up some of her long span away from Andala, without having to suffer unfeasible boredom stuck in a little ship. Leave that to the old explorers.

The easiest answer is to bump everything along by one. Namely have the two <100 figures as earlier generations before Kinnerin, and then have their work start with the very respectable increase to 700c. That way they’re still working on K3, with K2 being the mainstream drive and K1 now legacy tech. There’s no fundamental need for there to have been another whole generation in the relatively short time they’ve collaborated (since mid 2288, i.e. 12.5 years). Alrighty then, revised (and definitive?) table coming up:

• 2117: Discovery = 8.5c
• 2286: Transport = 77c
• 2290: K1 = 700c
• 2296: K2 = 6200c
• 2301: K3 = 60000c

It was choosing to include years in that table which led to an interesting few things to come up while creating it. Delving into ye olde writing materials – otherwise never looked at, or not since early April at least – I found the timeline I was looking for and tried lifting its points directly. First Contact in 2117, okay. Alexander meets Katerina in 2286, oh, hmm. Christopher born 2288, ah, I see. And I also noticed one of the four peoples already named, circa 2003 or so: Aitiri. Turns up remarkably Google free, could be handy.

What I’ve really been thinking about though is Akanai. According to that old timeline, he was the brand new king when the humans first arrived, and I see now a whole 29 years old! Guess those figures aren’t to be trusted. That’s what comes from being wowed by the brushed-metal calculator on your new Mac! Or maybe it was different in Jaguar. Anyway, making a new timeline is something for my get done in the next few days list. I could draw up a verbal litany of dependencies before I start, such as: Akanai is old, always old.

Is he? As far as all my remembered visions of him have been. (I mean that in the purposeful imagination way, ye of little psychiatric faith.) Then there’s this matter of his visiting the Earth.

Picture this. Akanai, the old or perhaps even young king, becomes so enthused with these humans that he decides to make the return trip with them? The Ana girl who discovered them in the first place and has become key cultural as well as lingual translator, is obviously keen on paying back the expedition, and it’s safe to assume that she persuades the human quartet to let her ride with them; becoming a global celebrity those few years later on Earth. Akanai though, well, if he gets an idea there is no one to stop him. No matter even his Yekatareh-like queen consort’s likely exasperation. Perhaps instead of riding back on the very first ship, he waits out until the subsequent flurry of human contact; but sooner or later he goes. He goes for good. Antonaster, his disliked but able son, is left with the king’s task but not his title, and Akanai gorges on cultural discovery as one of the very few of his kind to make it to Earth. I picture his dying there, years upon years later, having long forgotten just why he’d like to return to the smaller culture of his own world. Antonaster is finally made king once the news arrives at whatever is then the best speed. He reigns for a decent while until his ominously powerful grandson comes of age, triggering the battle which starts the stalemate only Alpha ends.

Here’s a question: what of the humans’ communications and retaliation grid? I’ve long imagined Yolanda has a final “nuclear option” at her reach whereby the sleeper satellites, which have been used for communications over Andala for more than a century, fire their hidden weapons, assuring its sterilisation. What a human trap to have installed. I think I’ve long given it the code name “Osiris”, though it may have been to do with the Aegean. Best to pick one with just the right background and tone for the occasion. That system will need to be fitted in either Akanai or Antonaster’s reign. I’ve considered Akanai to be pro-human and Antonaster to be much more skeptical, so the former makes more sense. Is there some degree of Akanai ruling from a distance very much despite his son in Ayanakert, I wonder? I rather like the promised dynamic.

Two places instead of times are obvious by their omission. One is Aria, which by the timeline is settled relatively early on: 2167. Aria needs me to select another promising star, perhaps one of the UFO-hallowed Zeta Reticulis. They’re a nice far apart binary system consisting of two very near solar stars, around an eighth of a lightyear apart and a mere 39.4 / 39.5 lightyears distant from Earth. I see they’re already claimed in fiction by the Chigs of Space Above and Beyond, Alien and several others besides. Even the UFO tales have them a mere 9 months from here (yielding 52c from our purported greys) and such a value slides in nicely with my table above. The only real downside is that both stars are very old indeed. Any habitable planet should have been through the wars, as it were, either by aeons of hostile nature’s fury or even in its own advanced life’s exploit. Worse than that, it sounds like Zeta-2 is pulsing in what could be a sizeable sign of its nearing doom. With many stars to choose from, it seems odd that Aria would be created at an old one, even with mere human time-scales in mind. Tau Ceti anyone? Oh, but for the night’s second sun, and names which are already so well known within the circle…

The other place is rather more pressing, needing featured directly in Alpha. The nebula? It has to fit within the 30 hour travel window I identified earlier on. And, boy, is 30 hours in two stints quite the excess in this case, given I want minimal intrigues in conversation out- with my chapters. A nebula within 102 lightyears, at the most and not at all too far from Andala: are there any? Might I need to recast?

A quick note on Aria. Don’t know if I’ve covered this before, but I’ve certainly thought about it. Aria had better have some damn good reason to draw as many people as far away as it does. Especially so for its earlier days when travel was all the tougher. Human migration isn’t random. People follow other people, and the shorter the route very often the better; c.f. America with Australia. The old assumption has been that terra-forming is a tricky business, and Aria happens to be the first success, along with Andrea its similarly treated satellite. (Formerly Sophia.) But even so: given a century and more in the future – Aria’s colonisation is slated for 2167 which sounds more or less where it must be – there had better be some deeply compelling reason for so many millions to leave Earth for its artificial and distant sister. There are orbital stations long before it, to cater to the needs for new real estate in the right places. Aria has to offer something unique to be the draw that it is. Something which survives its apocalyptic night in the infamous Incident. I don’t yet know what that is. Not something I couldn’t replicate elsewhere and thereby bear Aria to it. A mystery all right, and one needing fixed for Aria’s big part in Beta.

—June 2009

So I hadn’t set Andala in the Pleiades yet. That makes a difference. And Aria, too, was not where it is now. I only vaguely remember, off hand, what I was up to in my original choice of star. Or indeed its native name: “Mentakai” has since become Aira; its ghost living on as Andala’s planet. But I was playing the same game of pace setting interstellar speeds, which is at once reassuring and a touch of a disappointment. See, I never did finalise Alpha’s calendar. Back to the millstone!

(If there’s one thing I won’t find in my archives, it’s a finished novel; I know.)

Notes I rediscovered today among my files, written well before this site. Looks like the iPad got me thinking.

Andala Tech: Computers

Interaction and Usability

Seeing as this is 2010, it’s all to easy to be all caught up in iPad. It’s a model whose time has finally come. Notably, similar things were in use on Star Trek and 2001, the idea is as obvious. Here’s a living book. Like the computer screen you sit in front of, but in your hand, minus all the indirection. Just like the original Macintosh, this year’s iPad will be quaint in many ways as the years roll on, but just as vital there’s will be more than just a little bit about it which remains the same. You know, so long as we’re sill holding our computers, and they’re made of matter.

But this is not to be taken so for granted.

As someone with his share of headaches and more eyestrain than others often believe, I certainly do know the appeal of technology beyond our basic senses. I make use of text to speech, exchanging one ancient artifact – the written word – with its even older ancestor. I enjoy the portability of my little iPod touch tablet, but write in preference at a keyboard. Dancing fingers, like the mind’s eye, are as though just a touch beyond our current mastery. But what I really mean is attention in the abstract, entirely.

My honest expectations are actually quite high for our interaction with technology in a few hundred years from now. It depends, of course, on all manner of unforeseeable details and the arbitrary ups and downs of history. (What were the 1990’s but a recession in interaction?) Writers more attuned to the cyberpunk than I have long conjured artificially augmented men, be it jacked in by the ear or full out cyborgs. But the far reaching, and typically hackneyed, repercussions of human-computer symbiosis is not a question I fancy taking on. Too easy to seem downright silly, now and once it’s known, and a giant distraction from my own point besides. Which is to say that, just like artificial intelligence, my instinct is to slap a big lock on it so I don’t have to lose the plot within.

I will, however, gladly countenance touch-screens of every size and format, with ubiquitous networking, as they are in essence already here. We have no trouble zapping indecent amounts of data all about the shop when compared with many a message from the annals of old science fiction. Not least, the best point to learn is that people are scarcely any more technically minded today than their ancestors when it comes to most kit. I dare say the, admittedly close to non-existent, understanding drivers are required of their cars is the misleading historical outlier; and I hope one to be obsolete none too soon, the murderousness of routine human error. Certainly, we are not the jargon spewing techies of almost every creation from yore. We spew a cultural jargon of ephemeral effervescence only occasionally even tangential to the tech we happen to use. Now and always, I should imagine. Pending the usual closing fail-safe about unforeseen quantum leaps. This old continuum, made of chapters.

But then I did also mention material.

Something I’m really keen on, and which often enough shows up in technology and our other creations, is the other side of function. How to put it? The difference between an eighties Walkman and this century’s opening iPod. There’s many, but the one which matters to actual human beings is just how much music it can take. A linear, century old, magnetic tape storage system versus random access compressed audio files on a hard drive: who ever talks about that? The convincing idea in the iPod was just its small physical size betraying gigantic capacity. The fact its interface was sweated over at length, so as to not constantly confuse and dismay the user, is an implementation detail. Vital for its, still outclassed, competitors but irrelevant for the millions who would buy them. It’s this whole design and consumer focus hemisphere of technology which is so often entirely missing from speculative fiction. Everyone winds up using the unfriendly box, making jokes based on their shared memorisation of the manual. No wonder it’s for nerds. We only see ourselves.

So, I’d like to try a few different kinds of advanced, cultured, and essentially humane designs for various items which will need doing by the plot’s demand. Namely the systems by which we navigate, communicate, and maintain our vessels; and their domestic counterparts for use by all ages. In other words, I need to move from principles to at least the verbal outline of designs.

—September 2010

You know I’m always about the ramp of progress. I wouldn’t be too surprised that after the physical touch screens we already have today, and the virtualised, projected ones my book expects tomorrow, our successors will still not be sated. The physical fact of moving about fingers, hands or arms may be rendered obsolete in time. What would that be like?

Futurism is a mug’s game. It’s as hard to see as it is to make. But I’ll play around a little bit. Including in the future beyond Proteus and Alpha. The limitations and excuses I laid out there most definitely apply. But you know me, once I’ve started wondering. This whole thing began the same way.