See, no windshield!
Entry 1-245: August 27, 2013
World-building
A little known secret about the world of Rome's Revolution is just how did the whole 35th century, mind-connected Vuduri element come about? The answer is lengthy but at its core, the truth is, I just wanted to have a dramatic scene where my 21st century hero Rei (pronounced Ray, not rye) was all alone on the surface of a moon, in a spacesuit with no radio. But who the hell would build a spacesuit without a radio? Why, people who were mind-connected, of course. They wouldn't need radios. With that simple realization, I was off to the races.
I had to postulate a 24th chromosome which imbued my people of the future, the Vuduri, with such an ability. I further realized that if everybody could read everybody else's mind, there was no privacy, not even of thought. This would cause people to suppress their natural creativity to point of being deadly dull. When Rei first meets my heroine, Rome, she has almost no personality. It wasn't until she is isolated from the Overmind, the group consciousness that was a byproduct of the Vuduri mind connections, that her soul was revealed. Even though they were born centuries apart, they could not help but fall in love.
With regard to the rest of the Vuduri culture and technology, I wanted to "reboot" mankind so I introduced The Great Dying in the year 2081 AD. Over nine billion people died causing mankind to become nearly extinct. Who was behind this terrible tragedy is at the core of the sequel to Rome's Revolution entitled The Ark Lords. The remaining handful of humans were knocked back to the Dark Ages so by the time Rei is thawed in the 35th century, the Vuduri have finally created a world which was just past our level of technology but having taken a complete left turn.
Much of the Vuduri creed was to not do things the way people did them in the past so as to avoid the catastrophe that hit the Earth just after Rei left on his Ark. Their power sources are infinite and sustainable. They have an FTL star-drive based on principles known today. They have a healthy fear of sentient computers. And crucial to the central conflict in the novel, they hold us, the people of the 21st century, responsible for the devastation of The Great Dying. They regard us with such disdain that Rome is ejected from the mass-mind (a process called Cesdiud in Vuduri), just for consorting with Rei.
After the initial shock wears off, it takes Rome a little while to learn to think for herself. Eventually she realizes how crucial this is to the survival of mankind and ends up transforming her society into something which is a hybrid of the two cultures. And that is why the trilogy is entitled Rome's Revolution.
For more details on what it takes to build an entire universe, see my blog entitled Tales of the Vuduri. It is 250 articles to date and I'm just getting started! If you like hard science fiction, there is lots of juicy stuff waiting for you.
Entry 1-246: August 28, 2013
Feet, meters and miles
In a previous post, I discussed the fact that in the original long-form version of Rome's Revolution, the Vuduri kept what is called metric time. I left in a few references (like OMCOM says one of your months) but mostly it has all been excised to squash the size of the book.
But what about distances? It would appear as if I am completely inconsistent in whether I measure distances in feet, meters, kilometers or miles.
The fact is, I am very consistent, but I need to explain my writing rules. The books are told from the perspective of Rei Bierak. My assumption is by the year 2067 AD, even the US caves into the metric system. So you will never see Rei mention anything other than meters, kilometers, kilograms, etc. I just presumed the Vuduri would continue using this system of measurement (why not?) so you will never see Rome or OMCOM or MINIMCOM refer to anything other than kilometers, kilograms, etc.
However, as an average American, I still cling to my inches, feet, yards and miles. And ounces and pounds. So as the writer, when I am addressing some point to you, the reader, I use English units. In Rome's Revolution, I said the diameter of the crater at Kilauea was ½ mile. In The Ark Lords and Rome's Evolution, when I gave you heights or distances for reference, I used miles.
So there it is, when the characters speak, they use meters and kilometers. When I "speak" I use feet, inches and miles.
P.S. I got interviewed on KWOD Internet radio. You can click here to listen.
Entry 1-247: August 29, 2013
The evolution of the Chara mission
When I first started the modern long-form version of Rome's Revolution, I had always planned for five Arks but their destinations and crew makeup were different. Ark I was always intended to go to Alpha Centauri. The short story I wrote about Silas Hiram was supposed to be the prologue to the original book. It was removed when I had to compress the first three books into an omnibus. It is still one of my most favorite stories (and I think best written) and will appear in The Vuduri Companion which will be out early next year. The Ark II, Rei's Ark, was always intended to go to Tau Ceti. After all, that is the whole basis of our story. Ark III was originally supposed to go to Beta Hydrii. Ark IV was going to go to 82 G. Eridani and Ark V was going to go to Nu2 Lupi.
I had even created the demographic makeup of each of the Arks and I filled Ark IV with murders, rapists and generally the scum of the Earth. The theory was that nobody knew what kind of people it would take to survive on an alien world. So they tried putting a bunch of criminals in Ark IV thinking that might be the toughness they need. Originally, that was the Ark that returned to Earth and brought the Erklirte, the Ark Lords.
But when I came up with the idea for the novel for The Ark Lords, I had to switch everything up. I left the Deucadons traveling in Ark III but made their target 82 G. Eridani instead. I moved up Ark IV and made it go to Nu2 Lupi. That was now supposed to be the last Ark. You'll find out what happened to those people in the upcoming novel, The Milk Run.
Now I was able to redirect Ark V to Chara. It was called "The Stealth Ark" because it wasn't on the books. It was no longer filled with criminals but rather the toughest of the tough soldiers who had but one mission: to return to Earth and reclaim it for America. They were the fail-safe alternative to the inoculation program for Virus Strain 4 and whether or not any Darwin Project members ever returned from the habitable planets.
The Kepler Mission has given us loads of information about exo-planets. 136 have been confirmed as of today. So I just figured by 2067 AD, we'd have a pretty good idea of which stars had suitable worlds. That was why Rei was so surprised that an extra Ark was sent to Chara. If there was to be a fifth Ark, he would have guessed it would be sent to Beta Hydrii.
That's the cool thing about being able to upload new versions and print new versions of a book. If you have to go back and modify them (slightly, please!), you can do so. The version of Rome's Revolution that is out now is consistent with the revised future history.
Entry 1-248: August 30, 2013
Three little words
Three little words: "Women were taken" made all the difference in the world when I added them to Rome's Revolution.
In yesterday's post, I discussed the evolution of the Chara mission. It went from being an Ark full of criminals to the main hope of the Darwin Project for re-conquering the Earth for America. Instead of bad people, it was chock full of the best soldiers we had to offer. This set up the entire plot line behind the historical novel interleaved in The Ark Lords.
Once I knew about the change, I thought about such a mission and how it would alter the dynamics and distribution of personnel. The leaders of the Darwin Project had to balance the military needs against likely scenarios. One possible scenario was that the Earth was devoid of all humans. So they had to send a goodly number of women along, about 100, to ensure that there were enough mating pairs to repopulate the Earth,
just in case.
Another scenario was that the Earth was fully repopulated and the soldiers were going to have to conquer untold thousands or millions of people. They had to put more men (not women) on the ship, about 400. The feeling was that if humans survived, there would be fertile women who could be captured and used as breeders. I realize that this is completely sexist and not politically correct but these decisions were made by the mission planners. Such a fate befell Helen Henry as depicted in The Ark Lords.
To make this strategy clear, I added the three little words 'Women were taken' to one part of Rome's Revolution. It was during one of OMCOM's long expositions on the past (our future) to explain to Rei why the Essessoni are so despised by the Vuduri. Just adding that sentence made it all click in. Who would have thought that three simple words could make such a big difference?
Entry 1-249: August 31, 2013
Trouble with Casimir Pumps
As you know from having read Rome's Revolution, the Vuduri use a thing called the Casimir Pump to power their star drives. They also use it to create their PPT resonance which underlies their mind-to-mind connection as well as leading to the rise of the Overmind. However, there are some severe, fundamental, flaws with using this as a real device.
First of all, how do you collect negative energy when, by its very nature, it does not exist? How would you bottle it? How would you project it? I thought about waving my hands and invoking dark matter or dark energy. In the end, I just decided to ignore it because it was easier and, after all, it is science fiction.
Well, Bruce just stumbled across an article in Yahoo! News that kind of vindicates everything I've been speculating about for 40 years. The article is entitled "Engage! Warp Drive Could Become Reality with Quantum-Thruster Physics" and describes a "real-life" warp drive. Except it isn't a warp drive and doesn't require dilithium crystals.
According to the article, this is from Harold "Sonny" White:
The physics models that tell us how to construct a q-thruster are the same models we'll use to generate, design and build a negative vacuum generator. The quantum thrusters might be a propulsion manifestation of the physics, like the big ring around the spacecraft. If you looked in there, there might be 10,000 of these little cans that are the negative vacuum generators.
In summary, the article describes tiny negative energy generators to draw negative vacuum energy out of neutral space in order to create a star-drive that goes faster than light. Sounds a lot like Casimir Pumps, doesn't it? MINIMCOM would be proud.
Entry 1-250: September 1, 2013
Star Trek and Rome's Revolution
Recently, a woman bought both Rome's Revolution and The Ark Lords and she mentioned to me that the books reminded her a lot of Star Trek. I didn't see it but I have to look at it objectively. Specifically, she mentioned stellar cartography and telepathy. I'll come back to those topics but let me back up a step and consider a few of the basic design elements. The staples of Star Trek are the Enterprise and its warp drives, transporters, phasers and communicators. In my books, I suppose you could call my PPT star-drive a warp drive but then every science fiction book ever written that sends man into space would be considered the same. In yesterday's post, I cited some scientist's observations that my predictions may not be that far off but I would not call my FTL drive a warp drive.
Next are the transporters. I definitely have them. MINIMCOM figured out how to create them in Part 2 of Rome's Revolution as traveling PPT tunnels. In Star Trek, their transporters deconstruct the person or thing being transported and reconstruct it elsewhere. My transporter simply moves a PPT tunnel past a person and they end up elsewhere. It would have been just as easy to set up a standing PPT tunnel and have the person step through so I'd say my transporter and that found in Star Trek are completely different. What about phasers? I don't have them. I have plasma projectors which have been miniaturized and turned into pistols and rifles but they are based upon physics known today. I simply supplied a made-up Casimir Pump to supply limitless energy but there is nothing special about Vuduri weapons beyond that.
What about communicators? Well, hell, we all have cell phones today. In fact, Motorola sold a phone called the StarTAC which was as close as they could come to Star Trek without violating any copyright laws. I don't have anything like cell phones in my books unless you consider the genetic enhancements to Rome and Rei that allowed them to talk inside their heads to one another. But they never called them anything other than cell phones in the head and it certainly wasn't ESP. So that brings me full circle to the reader’s comments. She has not read Rome's Evolution so she was simply referring to the mind-connected Vuduri. I would not call it telepathy. Especially because it led to the Overmind which is a different thing altogether. In Rome's Evolution, Rome does evolve into a true telepath but no way is it reminiscent of Star Trek.
The only thing remaining is referring to the planetarium on Dara as a stellar cartography lab. I can't apologize for the word stellar. The lab was created to map out the stars. And mapping is called cartography. So I wasn't using a fancy title, I was just referring to what it was. Oh well, my books do not remind me of Star Trek any more than they do every classic science fiction book or movie that features faster-than-light travel, transporters, ray guns, crazy computers, aliens, spaceships, genetic manipulation, bad guys (and girls) and so on. What do you think?
Entry 1-251: September 2, 2013
Happy Vuduri Labor Day
Do the Vuduri work? Of course. I have spent close to half a million words describing their society and their lives. In Rome's Revolution, within the first two chapters, Rome describes her two jobs (data archivist and computer lutteur) and Rei sees how much activity is going on.
Do they ever take time off? Does the concept of Labor Day have any meaning for them? Not really. They literally have nothing better to do than wake up, do their jobs, eat and go to bed. They never take a day off. They have no hobbies. They have no relationships to pursue. In fact, in an earlier post, I originally envisioned that the Vuduri did not even sleep.
Rei finds this very dismaying. Of course, he and all the Essessoni use their minds for creative thought and absolutely must have some time off to decompress. Toward the end of the story arc, in the book Rome's Evolution, you can get a hint of what the merging of the societies represent. They have a natural holiday to celebrate Deucado's liberation, as described in Part 2 of Rome's Revolution. It is certainly something the Ibbrassati would celebrate because they worked so hard to achieve freedom and a good life style.
It is my contention, even in the future, there will come a time when that new society will observe a day dedicated to the social and economic achievements of workers. So from the 35th century, Rei and Rome (and Aason and MINIMCOM and OMCOM and Binoda and Fridone and even Lupe) wish you a Happy Labor Day. Enjoy!
Entry 1-252: September 3, 2013
Who was Alex Haynesworth?
A name you will never hear throughout Rome's Revolution or any of the other books in the Rome's Revolution series is Alex Haynesworth. Besides the man who invented the Grey Drive which took the Arks to the stars, Alex is the single most important person to put the group of stories in motion.
As mentioned in a previous post, the Earth was a mess and only getting worse. Some of the themes in my future history were a greater percentage of the world's worth being funneled into a decreasing number of people. One of these concentrations of wealth was the world-wide mega-conglomerate called the Reynolds Corporation. As mentioned in a previous post, Sally Reynolds' father was the head of this corporation.
Somewhere along the time, they had either a wave of conscience or a focus group told them that a humanitarian gesture would be good for business. Al
ex Haynesworth was tasked with the responsibility of figuring out how to spend $10 billion dollars for the greater good of mankind. That sounds like a lot of money in today's economy but in 2040 AD, it is not quite as much. Alex eventually came up with the idea of the Ark program. It turns out that the program ended costing more than $50 billion dollars but the military space command came up with the additional 80% of the funds in exchange for 20% of the seating on the Arks.
Of course, we learned in The Ark Lords what they were up to at the time but Alex did not know this. You will be able to read his whole story (entitled "Pruno Dreams") next year when I release The Vuduri Companion.
Entry 1-253: September 4, 2013
Who was Wally Grey?
In the world of Rome's Revolution, Wally Grey was the inventor of the Grey Drive which was the propulsion system that took the Arks to the stars. He was a quantum physicist employed by the government who studied quantum black holes (QBH). After the Tevatron was supplanted by the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, it was decommissioned in 2011 and remained unused for about 20 years. A breakthrough in quantum physics outlined the conditions required to create QBHs and the Tevatron was started up again.
It took about five years but finally Wally and his team succeeded. Immediately they noticed that while they were able to create QBHs, they "evaporated" almost instantly if you didn't feed them mass. Wally's team shot a steady stream of xenon atoms into one of their QBHs and was able to keep it intact for days at a time. They noticed that the black hole had created a "white hole" a few angstrom units away which emitted Hawking Radiation. Essentially, they had figured out a way to convert matter into energy in a smooth and continuous fashion.
About this time, some astronomers who had been do historical research on the findings of the Kepler Mission deduced that there were some solar systems where planets were "missing." A round-table of discussion led to the startling conclusion that ultimately, perhaps every technological civilization achieved the ability to build quantum black holes but if they dropped one, it would quickly sink to the center of the planet and eventually absorb it. Meaning death to all. That was the end of Wally's experiments. However, the capability of applying using the QBH to produce thrust could not be denied. It was born to power starships.
So they packed up everything they needed to produce the QBHs and put the equipment in space. Eventually, the star drive was perfected and became known as the Grey Drive, named after Wally, its discoverer. However, Wally knew it was actually a joke because the drive was based on the coupling of a black hole to a white hole and therefore was really a gray hole.
Different Arks burned their fuel at different rates. The mission to Alpha Centauri was able to achieve 1/10th g acceleration so they were able to get up to 10% of the speed of light before they coasted. This made the trip to our nearest neighbor only 40 years. Rei's Ark, having to travel a much greater distance, only accelerated at 1/20th g and only achieved 5% of the speed of light so it took 240 years to get to Tau Ceti.
The Deucadons were supposed to go to 82 G. Eridani which is about 20 light years from Earth. They had a larger capacity propulsion module but even so, it took them nearly 450 years to get there. There were no habitable planets so they came back to Tau Ceti (Deucado) which took them another 400 years. Thus they landed 500 years before the Ark II arrived.
Finally, there is the crew that went to Nu2 Lupi which is nearly 50 light years away. That trip took them over 1000 years to get there. Thus when Aason encounters them in The Milk Run, they had only been on the planet of Hades for just over two centuries.
Entry 1-254: September 5, 2013
Can people really survive freezing?
In next year's The Vuduri Companion, you'll read how Alex Haynesworth invented the Ark program. One of his inspirations came from Sven Ausland aka The Ice Man. Sven was a human who fell into a crevasse, froze solid for 17 years and when he was found, they thawed him out and resuscitated him. Since this takes place in 2040 AD, clearly I made this up. However, the entire backstory of Rome's Revolution requires that a viable method of freezing humans be discovered in the next thirty years. So...is it possible? No one can prove or disprove it right now. However, we have tantalizing pieces of evidence that hint it may be possible.
It isn't the freezing part that is hard. It's the successful thaw. Scientists found some seeds in Israel that were confirmed to be 2,000 years old and were successfully germinated. Other scientists have claimed to have germinated 10,000 year old seeds called Lupinus arcticus. The world's record so far for reviving an ancient plant is sitting at 30,000 years. In the article, they cite that "the plant is of the species Silene stenophylla, and radiocarbon dating says it is 31,800 years old." Amazing, huh?
However, the most fascinating fact we have so far is the strange habits of the common wood frog in Canada which, according to reports, freezes solid in the winter and thaws out again in the spring.