In order to promote his latest, Geosynchron (Canada, USA, Europe), I invited science fiction author David Louis Edelman to pen a guest blog post to let newbies know a little more about The Jump 225 trilogy.
Do yourself a favor and read both Infoquake and MultiReal. As good or better than most quality scifi yarns out there.
Enjoy!
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Now it can be revealed, exclusively to the readers of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist:
I changed the title of the third book in my Jump 225 series from Infinite Improbability to Geosynchron in part so that the trilogy’s initial letters would spell out “IMG”, the HTML tag for images. Infoquake, MultiReal and Geosynchron: IMG.
So you made a cute acronym, you’re thinking. Who gives a crap? What bearing does this have on the books’ contents?
Let’s start with the simple fact that programming code is an integral part of the lives of the characters in my trilogy. My protagonist, a software entrepreneur named Natch, lives about a millennium in the future in a society run by “bio/logics,” the programming of the human body. The software Natch programs runs on a sophisticated network of nanobots planted in the body soon after conception. Want to cure those sniffles? Download a program for it. Need to change your eye color? Warm up your feet? Show a poker face? Ditto.
Of course, when you’re writing software that sophisticated, simple programming code won’t do. That’s why Natch and his cohorts create software in a three-dimensional holographic desktop called MindSpace, manipulating data structures with a series of 26 metal bars lettered A through Z. And to transfer all the petabytes and petabytes of information required to run these sophisticated machines, you need a ubiquitous cloud network called the Data Sea that your nanobots can access anywhere, instantly. And now that you’ve got this miraculous bio/logic network, why not use it to mentally project holographic images of yourself around the globe that can interact with your surroundings almost as if you’re there in person…?
When I first came up with this setup – waaaaay back in 1997 or 1998 – my brain started bursting with the human implications of such a system. How would bio/logics affect our politics, our religion, our government, our artwork? How would people interact and conduct business in such an environment? Come on, admit it – you want to know how people would screw in that world too.
Not so different from what Tim Berners-Lee might have been thinking waaaaay back in 1990 when he invented that little thing called the World Wide Web.
IMG. Simple programming code. An easy way for anyone to instantly broadcast images around the globe, skirting the publishing establishment and the censors. Rapid uncontrollable technological change.
Rapid technological change is the other crucial element of the Jump 225 trilogy. During the course of Infoquake, our (severely ethically challenged) protagonist Natch finds himself in control of an epoch-shattering technology called MultiReal. Explaining exactly what MultiReal is and how it works takes most of the second book, appropriately titled MultiReal. In a nutshell, the program allows you to instantly sift through millions of statistically probable outcomes of any action and choose the one you want to occur. Want to choose the reality where you hit a home run every time at bat? Use MultiReal. Want to choose the reality where you just manage to dodge that bullet, or where you shoot an impossible target – or where your mortal enemy just happens to throw himself off a bridge…? Ditto.
Is the world of Infoquake, MultiReal and Geosynchron ready for such change? Are its citizens ready to have their every decision turned upside down? Is the powerful centralized government led by the imperious high executive Len Borda ready to cede control to the hoi polloi? Is the Data Sea ready for such a rapid influx of information that such a radical technology might cause?
And in the end, Geosynchron asks the question: what happens when one of history’s most selfish and vicious entrepreneurs ends up with the power to save or damn the world?
(In case you were wondering… the title Geosynchron does have direct bearing on the themes of the third book, a lot more than Infinite Improbability ever did. In the Jump 225 universe, a “geosynchron” is one of the bots designed to maintain order and balance in the worldwide weather system. This directly relates to Natch’s predicament in the end of the series, as I hope you’ll discover when you read the book.)
No, it’s really not just a cutesy coincidence that the titles of the books in my trilogy reflect the angst we face today in our own runaway technologically evolving society. Religious fanatics sewing undetectable high-powered explosives into their underwear, sexual predators checking out pics of your kids on Facebook, multinational entertainment corporations brought to their knees by pirates swapping files on BitTorrent. The setting of the Jump 225 trilogy is not really supposed to be an accurate depiction of the future; it’s a funhouse mirror on the present, with a bit of pointed reflection of the dot-com era of the recent past.
For more info on Geosynchron, you can check out the website at http://www.geosynchron.net/, which includes the first eight chapters of the book. You might also want to read the Afterword to the Trilogy, straight from the back of the book, also published in full on the Geosynchron website.
Geosynchron will be officially released in stores this February. It’s available for pre-order now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s and IndieBound, among other places.
Do yourself a favor and read both Infoquake and MultiReal. As good or better than most quality scifi yarns out there.
Enjoy!
----------------
Now it can be revealed, exclusively to the readers of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist:
I changed the title of the third book in my Jump 225 series from Infinite Improbability to Geosynchron in part so that the trilogy’s initial letters would spell out “IMG”, the HTML tag for images. Infoquake, MultiReal and Geosynchron: IMG.
So you made a cute acronym, you’re thinking. Who gives a crap? What bearing does this have on the books’ contents?
Let’s start with the simple fact that programming code is an integral part of the lives of the characters in my trilogy. My protagonist, a software entrepreneur named Natch, lives about a millennium in the future in a society run by “bio/logics,” the programming of the human body. The software Natch programs runs on a sophisticated network of nanobots planted in the body soon after conception. Want to cure those sniffles? Download a program for it. Need to change your eye color? Warm up your feet? Show a poker face? Ditto.
Of course, when you’re writing software that sophisticated, simple programming code won’t do. That’s why Natch and his cohorts create software in a three-dimensional holographic desktop called MindSpace, manipulating data structures with a series of 26 metal bars lettered A through Z. And to transfer all the petabytes and petabytes of information required to run these sophisticated machines, you need a ubiquitous cloud network called the Data Sea that your nanobots can access anywhere, instantly. And now that you’ve got this miraculous bio/logic network, why not use it to mentally project holographic images of yourself around the globe that can interact with your surroundings almost as if you’re there in person…?
When I first came up with this setup – waaaaay back in 1997 or 1998 – my brain started bursting with the human implications of such a system. How would bio/logics affect our politics, our religion, our government, our artwork? How would people interact and conduct business in such an environment? Come on, admit it – you want to know how people would screw in that world too.
Not so different from what Tim Berners-Lee might have been thinking waaaaay back in 1990 when he invented that little thing called the World Wide Web.
IMG. Simple programming code. An easy way for anyone to instantly broadcast images around the globe, skirting the publishing establishment and the censors. Rapid uncontrollable technological change.
Rapid technological change is the other crucial element of the Jump 225 trilogy. During the course of Infoquake, our (severely ethically challenged) protagonist Natch finds himself in control of an epoch-shattering technology called MultiReal. Explaining exactly what MultiReal is and how it works takes most of the second book, appropriately titled MultiReal. In a nutshell, the program allows you to instantly sift through millions of statistically probable outcomes of any action and choose the one you want to occur. Want to choose the reality where you hit a home run every time at bat? Use MultiReal. Want to choose the reality where you just manage to dodge that bullet, or where you shoot an impossible target – or where your mortal enemy just happens to throw himself off a bridge…? Ditto.
Is the world of Infoquake, MultiReal and Geosynchron ready for such change? Are its citizens ready to have their every decision turned upside down? Is the powerful centralized government led by the imperious high executive Len Borda ready to cede control to the hoi polloi? Is the Data Sea ready for such a rapid influx of information that such a radical technology might cause?
And in the end, Geosynchron asks the question: what happens when one of history’s most selfish and vicious entrepreneurs ends up with the power to save or damn the world?
(In case you were wondering… the title Geosynchron does have direct bearing on the themes of the third book, a lot more than Infinite Improbability ever did. In the Jump 225 universe, a “geosynchron” is one of the bots designed to maintain order and balance in the worldwide weather system. This directly relates to Natch’s predicament in the end of the series, as I hope you’ll discover when you read the book.)
No, it’s really not just a cutesy coincidence that the titles of the books in my trilogy reflect the angst we face today in our own runaway technologically evolving society. Religious fanatics sewing undetectable high-powered explosives into their underwear, sexual predators checking out pics of your kids on Facebook, multinational entertainment corporations brought to their knees by pirates swapping files on BitTorrent. The setting of the Jump 225 trilogy is not really supposed to be an accurate depiction of the future; it’s a funhouse mirror on the present, with a bit of pointed reflection of the dot-com era of the recent past.
For more info on Geosynchron, you can check out the website at http://www.geosynchron.net/, which includes the first eight chapters of the book. You might also want to read the Afterword to the Trilogy, straight from the back of the book, also published in full on the Geosynchron website.
Geosynchron will be officially released in stores this February. It’s available for pre-order now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s and IndieBound, among other places.
David Louis Edelman
3 commentaires:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/11/02/why-do-we-have-an-img-element
(Trilogy sounds very cool, BTW)
I've been planning to get the first book in the series for awhile now. This is just more encouragement.
On “IMG”-- Considering the programming propensity for easter eggs, I find the initialism formed by the titles not the least bit cheesy. And it also seems quite appropriate to the context.
Great post, David!
This is such an interesting series, and fans of sci-fi definitely should check it out!
It's not balls-to-the-wall action sci-fi; it's one that you'll have to slap the thinking cap on for.
I've got Geosychron on the shelf, and I'll be reading it sometime in March or April.
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