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Danny H Jorgensen
Category:
Science Fiction
ISBN-10: 1495290271
Type: Fiction
Pages: 186
Copyright: Jan 30, 2014
ISBN-13: 9781495290275
Price: $0.99 (eBook)
Ever got fed up with a great series that ended up going nowhere? Then you need Still Light, a meticulously planned look at the next 500 years of humans history.
This is the beginning. Still Light is a tale that spans centuries, beginning in 2020 and ending in 2507. This volume covers the first thirty years, as transhumanity becomes dominant, the first AI are born, and the first posthuman is created. It is the story of Mia, Feng, and Zhukov, the developer, genius, and soldier, as they rise through the ranks of Abraxas, the hidden rulers of the world.
Still Light is an episodic tale that spans centuries, beginning in 2020 and ending in 2507. Each of the 120 individual episodes (called Acts) is set five years apart, and will be released monthly. The stories are released as ebooks, and collected into novella-length Cantos of 6-8 Acts apiece, and Arcs of 3 Cantos, roughly the length of a standard hard sci-fi novel.
The idea is to steadily and carefully trace the evolution of technological, genetic, social, and political structures that arise as humanity develops. Over the course of events, we see humans adapted or deep sea and deep space, a huge proliferation of societies and forms that have to share the same solar system with one another, despite having little to nothing in common.
The monthly release is to force me to make each part of the story a complete story in itself, so there's none of the slogging through that characterises so much of hard sci-fi. Pace is critical to any good story, and this format forces pace, as well as giving the chance for each part of the story to be distinct in tone and form, from fast-paced action stories to quiet coming-of-age tales. It is also optimised for the ebook age, since it creates leads to regular releases as well as iterations (when each Canto and Arc is released, it means rewriting the individual Acts that form that book).
Excerpt
The island had been their world for over a year now. It could have been idyllic, or terrible, but instead it was host to a contented team busily working underground, amidst screens and handfuls of wiring and components, like the bloodless remnants of a robotic massacre.
Whether they would still be there tomorrow depended on the game.
Feng wasn’t normally competitive, but did not want to lose today. Losing meant that they would leave the island in victory, and he would become the first high ranking player to be beaten by a machine. That aside, leaving the intellectual Elysium of the island was itself unpalatable. His defeat would be their triumph, but was still sour in his mouth.
If anyone had bothered to ask, he would have told them so. They didn’t, partly because he was sitting alone in the centre of the room, the others arrayed in tiered seating around him.
Still, he would have liked someone to ask. Or, for that matter, talk to him; the contrast between their easy conversation and his tension wasn’t helping. He sat back, treasuring the few moments of calm before the game began, scanning the faces around him.
They were a study in diversity, disparate ages and nationalities brought together by the promise of technological marvels. Each had achieved something substantial, early enough that it did not draw too much attention, and turned down personal glory, believing their work and the products of their labours to be more important than their egos. Somehow, despite their privacy, they had been noticed by a well-resourced but secretive start-up called Abraxas, and enlisted to create the computing architecture of the future, the systems that would enable a new wave of interaction with the world and between humanity.
That was what they had been told, at least. It was revealed as a lie when they got to the island. They didn’t really care. On the island they had access to technologies that were little more than rumours to the world at large. These marvels were duly understood and accepted as justifications for duplicity and secrecy. In a connected world, paranoia was no longer rare, or unreasonable, an inevitable cost of being at the edge of progress. They had been sold, and hungrily bought, the dream of building a brighter world.
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