Review: Augment Nation, by Scott Overton

Review: Augment Nation, by Scott Overton

Augment Nation by Scott Overton

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

Augment Nation is a science-fiction novel of the old school, portraying the collision of all-too-human characters with plausible new technology, along the way serving as a chilling cautionary tale.

Our story begins about a decade from now. David Leiter is a fourteen-year-old boy, critically injured in an automobile accident. He suffers serious brain injury, and develops a condition called visual agnosia, an inability to process or recognize visual stimuli. He can still see, but he has lost the ability to interpret what he sees, identifying objects or recognizing faces. Luckily, he is selected to receive a radically experimental treatment – a computerized implant to augment his brain’s natural functions.

At first the implant only operates to mitigate David’s agnosia, but over time he learns to use it for other purposes: logging into wireless networks, browsing the Internet, mastering computational skills, and so on. Unfortunately, these new abilities also come with a heaping dose of alienation. His peers notice his social awkwardness, missteps with young women earn him a poor reputation, and authority figures punish him for suspected unfair advantages.

Only once David graduates from high school – taking some revenge against the worst of his tormentors on the way out – is he able to start building a worthwhile life of his own. He moves to university, taking the new name of Damon and setting aside his miserable adolescence, and life begins to improve dramatically for him. His implants are upgraded with new hardware and software, providing him with still more new abilities. His skills turn out to be a boon in academia and employment, he becomes less socially inept, he even finds ways to build healthy relationships with women. For a few years, he moves from success to success.

Yet slowly, Damon realizes that the gift of his computer implants has not come without a price. Someone is watching his progress, even after he has taken steps to avoid being monitored. Technology that was tested on him is being deployed to more and more people . . . and it becomes plain that shadowy corporate and government interests do not have any individual’s best interests at heart.

Mr. Overton’s prose style is very clean; I noticed one or two formatting issues in my e-book copy, but nothing to pull me out of the story. He exercises very good viewpoint discipline. The story does need quite a lot of exposition, but none of it is clumsy or obtrusive, almost entirely arising through Damon’s understanding of the world. This is a very well-crafted novel as far as the mechanics are concerned.

David (Damon) has a compelling story with some very credible challenges. Augment Nation isn’t just an exploration of plausible future technology, it’s a story about individuals caught up in the machinations of unscrupulous power. There are those in the story who would gladly use the new technology to lie and manipulate the public, and Damon’s confrontations with them are downright frightening. In the end, the story isn’t just recounting a personal odyssey, it’s describing a potential failure mode for civilization itself. Once I finished this novel, I found myself much more skeptical about the prospect of brain-machine interface technology than I was before I began.

One minor advisory for the reader. Augment Nation is about, among other things, a teenage boy discovering the potentials of new technology. As we might expect, some of the applications he finds have to do with sex, with all the awkwardness any young man might experience! The story is often frank, although never explicit. I found none of this material offensive, although some of Damon’s experiences were mildly uncomfortable to read about; your mileage may vary.

I thoroughly enjoyed Augment Nation, and it left me wanting to read more of Mr. Overton’s work. Very highly recommended if you enjoy believable near-future science fiction with some rather disturbing implications.

Status Report (22 January 2023)

Status Report (22 January 2023)

A few items to report incremental progress on today.

Layout for Architect of Worlds has started in earnest. I’m learning Adobe InDesign as I go, but I’ve already taught myself a number of techniques that will prove useful. At the moment I’ve got about 20 pages of layout roughed out, all of the “Introduction” and getting into the “Science of Star Maps” section. I had thought to build a “toy” layout using excerpts from throughout the draft, but instead I’m just forging ahead and building the final layout in full. At the end of each day’s work I export the current state of the book to a PDF and give it a once-over to catch any obvious problems. Once I have 40-50 pages finished, I’ll probably take that to a printer and make sure it looks okay on paper as well. In the meantime, I think I’ll share the interim layouts with my patrons each month so everyone can see progress.

I’ve been applying Architect to a side project – developing a planetary system for the Dune: Adventures in the Imperium RPG. Call it a bit of playtesting for the main book, and a worked example for how it might be applied to a given game universe. Might post some of those results here over the next couple of weeks.

One thing this side project has accomplished – it’s forced me to work through the new Step Thirty-Two (Fine-Tune Climate) of the design sequence, and I find that material needs more work. It’s clumsy, it seems to provide unintuitive results, and at least one of my readers has been having trouble with it as written. So that’s high on my list of components to test and rewrite as I work on the layout. Step Twenty-Four, Geophysical Parameters, is also likely to get some polish – if only because the math in that step is very ugly at present.

Meanwhile, in odd moments I’ve been collecting notes for the eventual Fourth Millennium project, and I’m about to start reading a novel or two for the end-of-month review.

Biggest obstacle in the past week has been that my whole household has come down with some nasty seasonal crud – not the plague, apparently, just a bad cold. I’ve been severely lacking in energy and focus for the past few days. Still, I seem to be on track to have a few things to share by the end of the month. No charged releases for my patrons, but maybe a freebie or two.

Fourth Millennium

Fourth Millennium

Alexandros III of Makedon, called “The Great,” first Great King of the Argead dynasty (2702-2735 EK) (Image by Arienne King, original found here)

By the reckoning of years used in the Danassan Hegemony, the date is 3000 Ἔτος Κόσμου, the three thousandth year since the creation of the world. A new millennium is at hand, an age of prosperous cities and growing empires, new gods and ancient mysteries, science and darkest magic. It seems likely to be an age of conflict as well. Ambitious generals and kings struggle for power, and barbarian peoples look with envy on the wealth and sophistication of civilized lands. What history will reveal next, not even the gods can know for sure.

Fourth Millennium has been conceived as a game setting, derived from some of my own fiction: short stories set in the Greek “Heroic Age” as well as the novel-in-progress Twice-Crowned and its eventual sequels. It’s grown past its literary beginnings, though, taking on shape as a rich alternate-historical fantasy world.

Fourth Millennium echoes the Mediterranean world of our own history, in the first century before the Common Era . . . but fate has taken its own turns here. An offshoot of Minoan civilization survived, creating a neo-Hellenic culture in which women hold religious and political power. The Peloponnesian War may have taken place, but its outcome was less viciously harmful to the Hellenic civilization at its peak. Alexander the Great may have died young, but his son survived and came out on top of the civil wars that followed his death. The Roman Republic is on the rise, but it faces tough competition in the East, in the form of an Hellenistic world that is stronger and more unified.

Adventurers can come from a variety of origins: Greeks of several varieties, Romans and other Latins, Celts, Germans, Berbers, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Judeans, Persians, and many more. They may be warriors and soldiers, oracles and seers, legates and senators, or philosophers and scientists. There will be a variety of possible campaign structures: military stories, politics and intrigue, high-stakes commercial ventures, mysteries, exploration, possibly all of these at once.

The concept in my head is for a Cypher System game, published under the Monte Cook Games open license. I can already see the broad outlines of the game, and a lot of details that will fit the setting. I’m still debating whether to write one book or two here – there may be so much setting detail, so much to suggest a variety of structures for campaigns and adventures, that it won’t all fit in one volume.

Best guess is that I’ll be pulling together notes for Fourth Millennium while I work on getting Architect of Worlds out the door in the first half of this year. I might post a few fragments and notes here, or push them to my patrons as small freebies. Once Architect is finished, assuming my muse is still engaged by then, serious work on this project is likely to get under way.

Have to say, the more I think about this project the more excited I am for it. The ancient Mediterranean world has been a personal fascination for over half my life; it will be nice to get back to it as a game designer. Not to mention I’ve learned a lot since I wrote GURPS Greece, coming up on thirty years ago . . .

The OGL and the Palace

The OGL and the Palace

There’s been a serious mess evolving in the indie-creator space over the fate of Wizards of the Coast’s Open Gaming License (OGL). It appears, due to leaked language from the upcoming new version of the license, that not only is it going to be more restrictive in the future, there’s a good chance that older versions of it are going to be revoked or de-authorized in some fashion. This has a lot of independent publishers and creators in a bind. The OGL is over twenty years old at this point, and a lot of publishers, a lot of livelihoods, have been founded upon it.

I’m fortunate in that I’ve never had anything published specifically under the OGL, and my plans moving forward are only minimally affected by any changes to that license. So I’m not going to offer any opinion about the potential change, other than to hope that my fellow indie creators can weather the storm. This post is just a note about where I think my own work may be affected by what’s about to happen.

First off, Architect of Worlds will be completely unaffected. That book is game-system-independent to begin with, and doesn’t rely on anything but my personal research and game-design work. I don’t expect any change in when that book gets released – later this year, exactly when depending on how long it takes me to to edit and lay out the final version.

One of my long-term projects probably will be affected by what Wizards is doing, if only indirectly. The Human Destiny space-opera setting was tentatively going to be my next big tabletop project after Architect was released. My plan was to release it as a Cepheus Engine product . . . but the problem is that Cepheus Engine relies on the previous version of the OGL and derives from the Mongoose Press edition of Traveller. If that version of the OGL goes away, the status of Cepheus Engine becomes uncertain even if Mongoose takes no hostile action against it.

As I understand it, the major Cepheus Engine publishers (Samardan Press, Independence Games, and so on) are already aware of the potential issue and are rapidly developing contingency plans. By the time I’m ready to start working on something other than Architect, the dust may very well have settled and there will be a way-forward for Human Destiny as a Cepheus Engine product as planned. I’m not going to fret about it, since there’s nothing I can do except wait patiently for the outcome.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking hard about releasing another tabletop setting – based on my Danassos setting, with the working title of Fourth Millennium – as a Cypher System product under the open license offered by Monte Cook Games. If worse comes to worst, that may move to the front of my queue, or I may consider moving Human Destiny to that venue as well.

For now, though, I’m just watching developments and putting off making any decisions until I see how things shake out. It’s important to remember that no one has actually seen the new version of the OGL yet. This may be a tempest in a teapot . . . although given a lifetime’s experience with how corporate entities deal with stakeholders who don’t actually own shares of stock, I’m not sanguine.

Planning for January 2023

Planning for January 2023

December went about as expected – I spent a lot of time learning Adobe InDesign and starting to plan the book design and layout for Architect of Worlds, and didn’t produce much of anything new.

At this point I think I’ve learned enough that I can at least start putting together the final design for the book. The immediate objective is going to be a “toy” version of the book, no more than 18-20 pages of excerpts from the complete draft. That won’t contain anything resembling a usable subset of the draft, but it will show off all the bits of design and layout I need to assemble: blocks of text, section headers at different levels, chapter title pages, a title page and acknowledgements page for the book as a whole, tables, diagrams, mathematical formulae, filler art, and so on. The idea is to have something to show off for patrons and interested readers, while building a framework on which I can hang the whole book. That’s going to be the big project in January. Whether I’ll finish this month remains to be seen – this is a very new endeavor for me.

Meanwhile, in my spare time I’ve been playing around with my Danassos setting, the alternate-historical fantasy world in which my novel-in-progress Twice-Crowned takes place. I spent odd moments in November and December using some of my tabletop games to generate an alternate history for the setting, up through about 50 BCE. In the process, one of the Muses seems to have inspired me – I think I see how to build that setting into a very playable tabletop RPG, as well as a backdrop for more stories.

The working title for that setting book is probably going to be something like The Fourth Millennium, because the current end-date for the timeline is right around the year 3000 by the setting’s dominant reckoning. It’s got a lot of interesting features: a Mediterranean world divided between Hellenistic and Latin empires, plenty of internal conflict in each empire and the possibility of a big war between them, barbarian peoples around the fringes looking to take bites, new gods and religious movements, magic, new technologies of clockwork and steam, the possibility of monsters lurking in the shadows. It’s a world in which we could adventure at the height of the imperial era without being beholden to the actual course of ancient history. Best guess is this would make a good Cypher System game, published under Monte Cook Games’ new open license.

That’s not going to be a top priority any time soon – I’m focusing on Architect over the next few months – but it might occupy some spare cycles. Not to mention I want to make more progress on Twice-Crowned and maybe write a couple other stories in that setting.

Here’s this month’s priorities:

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Finish studying book layout techniques.
    • Architect of Worlds: Begin setting up a “toy” design for the book.
  • Second Priority:
    • Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Danassos: Write a short story drawn from the setting timeline.
    • Danassos: Produce a new interim draft of the setting timeline, and otherwise gather notes for an eventual Fourth Millennium book.
    • Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
    • Human Destiny: Produce a map of late 23rd-century Mars for the Atlas.

As before, the “second priority” items are likely to function as a list of smaller creative projects that I might work on in odd moments while I focus primarily on Architect. It remains unlikely that any of this will amount to a charged release for my patrons this month, but there may be a couple of smaller freebies. We’ll see how the month goes.

2022 in Review

2022 in Review

For all the chaos out in the world at large, 2022 was a decent year for me as a part-time creative and blogger. Traffic to this blog continues steady, although there wasn’t quite as much as during the previous year. I still have a couple dozen patrons who are supporting my work.

I also managed several major accomplishments this year. In particular, I finished writing the first full draft of Architect of Worlds in 2022 – not bad for a project I’ve been working on for over six years at this point. There’s a near-certain chance I’ll have that book ready for release sometime in 2023.

Meanwhile, I did some work on the Human Destiny setting, putting together early partial drafts of the core book and the Atlas of the Human Protectorate. These seem likely to be tabletop RPG releases at some point, most likely under the Cepheus Engine system. Once Architect of Worlds is released, this is likely to be a good candidate for more attention.

I also revived an old novel project, Twice-Crowned, and got perhaps 40% of the first draft of that written. That’s another good candidate for more progress in the coming year, especially since its alternate-historical fantasy setting has been growing on me at a rapid pace. I may start writing that up as another tabletop RPG setting in the coming year, most likely as a Cypher System RPG under Monte Cook Games’ creator program.

Meanwhile, I got a round dozen book reviews done. I seem to be a success at that – I’ve been able to push out a review every month like clockwork for a couple of years now, and those reviews seem to be bringing at least a little attention to my other work too.

One thing I didn’t do much of this year is short fiction. I did push a couple of short items to this site as free stories, but those were mostly old writing being given a new venue. I’ve got several concepts for new short fiction that I want to work on soon, if I can get Architect moving toward release.

The top ten posts for 2022 turn out to be:

  1. Rethinking the Placement of Planets
  2. New Release for “Architect of Worlds”
  3. Architect of Worlds: The “Special Cases” Outline
  4. Breakaway!
  5. New Models for Gas Giant Formation
  6. New Models for Planetary Formation
  7. Review: Lurkers at the Threshold, by Jürgen Hubert
  8. Status Report (16 April 2022)
  9. Review: Obelisks: Dust, by Ari Marmell
  10. Status Report (29 March 2022)

Interesting that most of the high-traffic posts all had to do with Architect, although I’m not overly surprised at that. A couple of my book reviews, a couple of status reports, and a side project (the Space: 2049 setting that I’m playing with). Fairly typical.

My objectives for the coming year should be pretty straightforward. I want to get Architect ready for release, and that currently involves teaching myself Adobe InDesign and some basic book-design principles. I want to make progress with at least one novel-length project, and maybe write a few pieces of shorter fiction. And once some of that is well in hand, I may start looking at publishing one of my settings as a tabletop RPG book. Plenty to keep me busy, that’s for sure.

Review: Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget, by Stant Litore

Review: Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget, by Stant Litore

Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget by Stant Litore

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

This is a rather different review than my usual. The book in question isn’t a work of fiction, it’s a coaching toolkit for would-be authors who want to write fiction.

I first came across Stant Litore when I read his book on Scriptural exegesis, Lives of Unforgetting. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that he was also a genre author, and that he has written a lengthy series of “toolkits” for writers. Many of these have titles of the form “Write [X] Your Readers Won’t Forget,” and for the most recent book in the series, the “X” is magic systems.

I’ll confess that when I write fantasy fiction, the notion of developing a “magic system” mildly repels me. I think of magic as wonder-working and miracle, not the kind of formal, rule-based endeavor that ought to be governed by a “system.” To my delight, this book addressed exactly that tension on the very first page, which was enough to pull me into the rest of the text.

The book is organized in a very workmanlike manner. Each section addresses a single question that the writer needs to think about when developing a magic-infused world. What is magic like, how do people in the world experience it? How do magicians experience it, and how is that different from everyone else’s understanding? How do magicians fit into the community, if they do at all? What are the personal and other costs of magic? And so on.

In each section, Stant Litore discusses the issue at hand, explaining why it’s crucial to the author’s vision for their fantasy world. He provides plenty of options and examples, quoting from well-known works of fantasy fiction. Then the section is closed out by one or more writing exercises, encouraging the reader to work through the details for their own fantasy setting. The book closes with a sample worksheet, collecting in one place all the considerations discussed throughout.

I don’t normally find books of this kind to be all that useful, but I suspect Write Magic Systems Your Readers Won’t Forget is going to be an exception. I’m considering formally working through it to help flesh out the two fantasy settings in which I work. If I have any quarrel with the book in its current state, it might be that it’s too short. Just on first reading, I can see several ways to expand on what Stant Litore has done here.

Still, I suspect anyone interested in developing a fantasy setting, whether for gaming or literary purposes, will find this a useful resource. And if the quality of this book is any indication, I would seriously consider checking out the rest of the Litore Toolkits for Fiction Writers. Very highly recommended.

Cover Mockup for “Architect of Worlds”

Cover Mockup for “Architect of Worlds”

This isn’t the first mockup I’ve produced for the cover, but it’s the first one I’m happy with. It includes the design elements I most wanted – spiral galaxy, starfield, alien landscape with other worlds visible in the sky. The elements come from different sources, but I think I’ve managed to blend them together reasonably smoothly, and the composite image seems to work. This may or may not be the final cover, but it will certainly do for now.

The font is called Nasalization, and it’s based on a 1970s-era NASA logo. I think it’s clean and readable, and has the right aesthetics. I believe I’ll be using the same font for chapter and section headers inside the book.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to poke at Adobe InDesign, looking at a variety of worked examples too, and I think I’m getting a grip on how the project needs to go. By early January I’ll probably start to put together a toy layout that will include all the features that I’ll need to put in the final book – text passages, chapter and section headers, sidebars, mathematical equations, citations to scientific papers, tables, diagrams, filler art, the whole nine yards. Once I have that put together, I’ll be able to show it off and then take what I’ve learned and apply it to the bigger problem of building the complete book.

Progress!

Planning for December 2022

Planning for December 2022

November saw a big milestone: the first complete rough draft of Architect of Worlds, shared with my patrons and a few selected readers on the last day of the month.

That accomplishment doesn’t mean the content of Architect has been finalized, by any means. While I don’t expect any more big changes to the “rules” mechanisms, I’m almost certainly going to polish the prose, clean up the mathematical formulae, and produce a number of graphs and diagrams to help support the text.

The big task, though, is going to be to start laying the book out for publication. Layout is a completely new skill set for me, so I expect to spend a fair amount of time mastering the basic skills before there’s substantial progress on the book. That’s where most of my creative time in December of 2022 is likely to go.

So, here’s this month’s priorities, arranged the same way as in November:

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Study and master book layout techniques.
  • Second Priority:
    • Danassos: Continue work on the new rough draft of the novel Twice-Crowned.
    • Danassos: Write a short story drawn from the setting timeline.
    • Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
    • Human Destiny: Produce a map of late 23rd-century Mars for the Atlas.

As you can see, the “second priority” items are likely to function as a list of smaller creative projects that I might work on in between studying Adobe InDesign or examining other small-press products for layout pointers. At this point I find it kind of unlikely that any of this will amount to a charged release for my patrons this month, but there may be a couple of smaller freebies as pseudo-holiday-gifts.

Incidentally, I’ve already mentioned this elsewhere, but for my patrons and anyone else who’s interested: last month is the last time I plan to charge my patrons for any Architect of Worlds content. Any further changes to the draft are going to be incremental, in service to getting the book ready for release sometime in (hopefully the first half of) 2023. My patrons at the $2 and above can expect to get a free copy of the book if and when it’s ready.

What’s in store for Architect after it gets released? Well, I’ll almost certainly continue to keep an eye on the science as it develops, and I may write the occasional blog post here on the subject. Good chance there will be a second edition of the book in a few years, too. That endeavor isn’t going to be a “once and done” project, I suspect.

Review: Obelisks: Dust, by Ari Marmell

Review: Obelisks: Dust, by Ari Marmell

Obelisks: Dust by Ari Marmell

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

Obelisks: Dust is the first volume of what appears to be a planned duology, set after the world falls into a very unusual apocalypse.

At the beginning of this story, the astronauts aboard the International Space Station are engaged in normal operations. Flight Engineer Cynthia Han, our protagonist, is a member of the current six-person crew. When we first meet Cynthia, she is helping to welcome several guests aboard the ISS, while also concealing a growing medical problem that she fears will end her spaceflight career.

After a difficult day, Cynthia retires to her bunk. When she awakens, everything has changed. Even a quick glance out the ports shows that Earth has changed drastically. The planet’s surface is invisible, shrouded in a thick layer of airborne dust. Meanwhile, the ISS has lost contact with the ground; only a few radio stations are still on, and those are broadcasting nothing but noise.

The astronauts and their guests wait a while, to see if the situation changes, but eventually they are forced to make an emergency return to Earth. They soon find most of the human population missing, the environment harsh and hostile. Strangest of all, mysterious obelisks have appeared throughout the landscape . . . and to even glance at one of them from a distance is to risk madness and death.

Cynthia and her colleagues struggle to deal with conflicts among their own group, while surviving in the hostile landscape, searching for other survivors, and trying to figure out just what has happened to the world. The story that follows is bleak, with plenty of moments of horror, but it also promises a glimmer of hope.

Mr. Marmell’s world-building and plotting are well-done, with a fast-moving and suspenseful plot. He’s adept at ratcheting the tension upward; every time the audience thinks we’ve gotten a handle on the strangeness of the situation, another wild card gets dealt. The story is framed as “horror,” and there are certainly a lot of very ugly moments in the narrative. Yet the focus is always on Cynthia and her colleagues, using their wits and skills to survive. Despite their flaws, the characters are sympathetic and resourceful people, and I found myself rooting for them to resolve their differences and push forward.

The prose style here is very clean, with high-quality copy- and line-editing. I didn’t find myself being distracted by editing errors. Viewpoint discipline is good, with the story told almost entirely from Cynthia’s perspective. Exposition is subtle and clear. This is an accomplished writer working in good form.

If I found anything to quarrel with here, it’s that the book is a bit short – it was clearly written as the first half of a longer narrative. Nevertheless, this story does work as a stand-alone novel, with a number of subplots resolved as of the end of the book.

I found myself pushing through this story in a single sitting, unable to put Obelisks: Dust down, and I really do want to see the sequel. Very highly recommended.