Sharrukin's Palace

Hmm. Looks like I did it again – by the time I reminded myself about posting a planning message for August, it was already almost the end of the month. Retirement does not seem to have improved my tendency toward procrastination.

A lot has, in fact, been going on! So here’s a summary of events over the summer, and plans for the coming month.

University Studies

Summer vacation is about over, and I’m going to be starting to do some pre-review of the coming year’s course materials. In the 2026-2027 year, I’ll be taking two courses.

One is a straightforward astrophysics course, Astrophysics of stars and exoplanets, which looks as if it’s going to be digging a lot further into the quantitative aspects of modern astronomy. I’m looking forward to learning some new bits and pieces that might make their way into the putative second edition of Architect of Worlds.

The other is an experimental-physics course, Remote experiments in physics and space. You’d think it would be tough to do a lab course when you’re remote-learning across the Atlantic, but the university seems to have figured that out. I’ll be working with other students to plan and carry out some physics experiments and astronomical observations using remote access to the university’s instruments.

The courses formally open in about a week, although actual instruction doesn’t start until October. I plan to spend some time in September reading ahead and generally getting ready. At the end of this year I should be 75% finished with my BSc degree, still on track to start my post-graduate work by about 2029.

No formal objectives here for September. Those will start in October once my courses are actually under way.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

Since my last planning message, I’ve finished two stories, “The Country of Silence” and “Clear as Mudd.” The next story, “Sixpence in Her Shoe,” is under way and I plan to get that finished in September.

At this point, my return to fan-fiction writing has been going on for about a year and a half, involving 15 stories and over a third of a million words. Still not the biggest chunk of my fan-fiction corpus – my Mass Effect stories (written between 2014-2016) come to around a million words – but it’s been more robust than I expected when I started. Probably going to keep going for at least another few months before the planned series is complete.

A side project: the site where I started posting fan-fiction back in the day has become a sad example of the “dead internet” theory. It’s very poorly maintained, a lot of its functions no longer work well or at all, and it’s apparently awash in scam bots. So I’m in the process of moving all of my work off that site for good. Fortunately, I kept all my earlier work in my own files. Hence I can pull those stories up, possibly give them another coat of polish, and repost them to Archive Of Our Own (AO3) without much trouble. So as time permits, I’m doing that, including a few stories that I wrote and never did post to the old site. I’m also going to be updating my CV page on this site to make sure it points to the new master copies of everything. Once all that’s done, I’ll be deleting all my stories from the old site and deactivating my account there. Unfortunate, but probably necessary.

The objectives for September are:

• Finish and post “Sixpence in Her Shoe”
• Finish copying all my old stories over to AO3
• Update the CV page on this site to reflect the current status of my fan-fiction
• Deactivate my original fan-fiction site account

Architect of Worlds & Composer of Cultures

August and September were mostly devoted to an overhaul of the draft Cultural Evolution game for Composer of Cultures. The result was enough different from the incomplete version 0.5 draft that I’m labeling it version 0.6.

The game mechanics themselves are complete, and in fact Ken Burnside has done some red-pencil on them. Currently I’m in the process of writing all the supplementary material for the new draft (basically, all the material that would let the user interpret the results of the “game” and build an historical timeline for their fictional alien culture). No firm timeline as to when that will be finished, although I’m hoping to be able to release a complete draft to playtesters sometime this fall.

The objectives for September are:

• Finish version 0.6 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures
• Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Composer of Cultures
• Continue to collect other research for a potential second edition of Architect of Worlds, and make occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

Personal Universes

I’ve been creatively blocked with my “Human Destiny” space-opera universe for quite a while. To review the bidding: in its original concept, this is a universe in which benevolent aliens arrive (about 18 years from today) and conquer Earth in order to save us from our own folly, after which humans slowly become citizens of the galaxy.

Much of my trouble with that concept has been two-fold. First, it really was hard to write stories about human characters with agency when the Overwhelmingly Benevolent Aliens were in charge of literally everything. Second, I was just having trouble believing in the premise. Okay, it’s not like there’s any shortage of human folly around, but the back story is otherwise already falling apart. As an example, one of the stories I’ve actually written for this setting had a character loosely modeled on Elon Musk as the protagonist, set on Mars in the early 2040s. These days I have zero appetite for taking any inspiration from Elon Musk, nor do I believe we’re going to be putting any humans on Mars that soon.

So the solution I’ve meandered toward is to rethink the setting, so as to preserve a lot more human agency and simultaneously divorce it from those last vestiges of America-centrism. One aspect of this is to assume humans will explore and colonize the rest of the Solar System over the next century or so, although it will be a slow process and it will be driven primarily by powers like China, India, and the European Union rather than (e.g.) Russia or the United States.

To this end, I’ve been tinkering with a tabletop game, Stellar Horizons by Andrew Rader (who is a well-known space scientist). Probably the best “explore the Solar System” game I’ve come across for messing with plausible future histories. It’s been working pretty well! There’s a sequel too, which covers the exploration of the interstellar neighborhood over the next few centuries. I’m hoping the end result will be a medium-to-long-term timeline that will get my Muse moving more effectively.

The objective for September is to finish working with Stellar Horizons and build a first revised timeline for the “Human Destiny” universe.