Aside from working on Architect of Worlds as time permits, I’ve also been working on a first draft of the novel Twice-Crowned. That’s making enough good forward progress that I’m increasingly comfortable calling it my primary literary project at the moment. If you check out the sidebar on this site, you’ll notice that I’ve updated my “In Progress” widget to indicate where I am on word count for that. I’ll keep that up to date as I work, so you can get a sense for how well that project is going over the next few months.
Just a quick note today. If you follow my Facebook feed, you’ll know this has been a rough week – I haven’t gotten much creative work done since before the holiday. Only this weekend have I managed to get moving again, mostly working on the first few chapters of Twice-Crowned.
I did take a few hours today to paste together the first integrated draft of Architect of Worlds. It’s all in one big document now, for the first time since I started work on the project back in 2016. In Microsoft Word, it comes to about 175 pages and a little under 74000 words.
There’s still a ton of editorial work that needs to be done before I can share the complete draft with anyone (see my planning message for July for a summary). I doubt that’s going to happen this month. Still, this is a big milestone.
June went fairly well, it seems. I was able to get a new section of Architect of Worlds written and pushed out to my patrons, I also shared a timeline for my Danassos setting as a free release, and I got another book review written.
The usual list of projects is getting a big overhaul this month. The thing is, that section of Architect that I wrote last month is the last section that wasn’t complete in draft. I’m now in a position to meld all of the pieces of Architect together into a combined draft for the complete book. The result won’t be finished by a long shot, of course. I have a lot of work to do before I can start thinking about layout and getting ready for final publication:
Build the first complete draft for the book out of the separate parts that exist now.
Polish up the world-design sequence.
Polish up the “working with real-world astronomical data” section.
Complete a few minor sections, especially in the “special cases” chapter.
Add “modeling notes” sections, with references to scientific papers and textbooks, to any portion of the design chapters that doesn’t have them yet.
Clean up the extended examples.
Clean up the math throughout the book (rationalize variable names, be consistent about how computations are described, and so on).
Develop images (diagrams, flowcharts, public-domain astrophotography, alien-worlds images) to fill out the content.
I suspect this is going to take at least a couple of months, and it’s going to be one of those cases where the draft looks terrible for a while before I get it under control. I don’t think this is going to generate any releases for my patrons until I’ve waded through most of the above steps. I’m therefore announcing now that there will almost certainly be no new Architect of Worldsreleases to my patrons for at least the month of July, possibly the month of August as well.
Once I get close to having a really clean and complete draft for the entire book, ready to start on layout, I may share that with my patrons as a final charged release before publication. There will almost certainly be enough new material to justify that. We’ll see how things go. I’ve still got my fingers crossed that I might be able to release the first edition of Architect of Worlds by the end of this calendar year!
Meanwhile, regarding my literary projects, I’m switching over to the Danassos project as my top priority for the time being. I’m going to start working, as time permits, on a draft of the novel Twice-Crowned. If I can put down, say, at least 25 kilowords of polished narrative at the beginning of the novel, I may share that with my patrons as a charged release.
My intention is to divide my time between Architect and Twice-Crowned more or less evenly this month, and we’ll see what results I get. Watch this space for updates, as always.
Here’s the planning list, with two items in the “top priority” category:
Top Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Work on preparing a complete draft of the book for eventual layout and publication.
Danassos: Begin work on a new draft of the novel Twice-Crowned.
Second Priority:
Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
Human Destiny: Begin work on a new Aminata Ndoye story, set during her first year at the Interstellar Service academy.
Back Burner:
Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
Krava’s Legend: Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).
Aside from these items, I suspect I may end up doing a little cartography, certainly for Danassos, possibly for Human Destiny as well. I may have a couple of free sketch maps to share with readers and patrons this month.
The Lazarus Taxa is a readable and entertaining, but rather predictable, story of time travel and dinosaurs.
Sidney “Sid” Starley is a daredevil, constantly in search of experiences that no one else has ever had, the riskier and more dangerous the better. When we first meet him, he is climbing a Himalayan peak that no human has ever conquered before – partly because the local government has forbidden mountaineers from making the attempt.
After his expedition fails, Sid is bailed out of prison and recruited by the British billionaire Richard Mansa for a new venture. Mansa’s firm has developed the world’s first working time machine. He now plans to prove the new technology with an expedition back to the late Cretaceous era, the time of the dinosaurs.
Sid jumps at the opportunity, and soon finds himself with three teammates in central North America, sixty-eight million years into the past. After six months on station, the time machine will have recharged sufficiently to bring them home to the present. The plan is for them to survey the countryside, examining the flora and fauna, gathering photos and scientific data. They are well-armed, they have plenty of supplies, and their transit vehicle is something of a fortress. They have every confidence that they will be able to survive their sojourn in the Cretaceous. At least at first.
Unfortunately, it soon becomes obvious that Mansa has misled Sid and his colleagues in several respects. They find evidence that their expedition was not the first to venture into the distant past . . . and there may be other humans already there, with an agenda of their own. It soon becomes a race to see if they can solve a few mysteries and still survive the experience.
As far as basic mechanics are concerned, The Lazarus Taxa is at least workmanlike. The copy-editing was a little rough in spots. Characters and plot are unfortunately rather flat and predictable – the story reads like a treatment for a film script, with all the anticipated beats and plot twists. I saw the solution to the mystery well in advance, with the remaining suspense coming almost entirely from wondering which of the characters was going to reach the denouement.
It’s clear that Mr. Kinsella is well-versed in paleontology, and it’s in the passages where he describes a long-ago and alien Earth that the book relaxes enough to shine. He makes a move which I found rather odd at first: every few chapters he breaks up the dramatic action with a short essay in authorial voice, giving the reader some paleontological detail. The technique grew on me after a few iterations. Many inexperienced genre novelists make the mistake of larding their narrative with exposition-dumping and telling-not-showing passages, pulling the reader out of the story every time they succumb to the temptation to show off all their research. By loading most of that into these well-marked interstitial chapters, Mr. Kinsella avoids crippling his dramatic narrative with it. The result reads a little like a “docu-drama,” and it works well once the reader is used to it.
Readers should be aware that the story ends up rather violent and gory in places. It’s a story about dinosaurs meeting humans – of course there will be some scary beats in the plot!
I found The Lazarus Taxa readable and entertaining. Recommended if you’re interested in stories about dinosaurs, or time travel into Earth’s distant past, with a dash of corporate intrigue.
Short Story Now Available: “Encounter in the Dawn”
I’ve posted a new short story, “Encounter in the Dawn,” to the Free Articles and Fiction section of this blog.
“Encounter in the Dawn” is an excerpt from a piece of fan-fiction I wrote back in the 2012-2014 timeframe. It’s completely separate from the fan-fiction’s source material, however, and works as an original stand-alone vignette. Consider it an experiment in writing well-researched historical fiction, without any speculative elements at all.
I’ve been blocked on my major literary project in the fantasy genre for over a year now. I did manage to write one piece of short fiction in the Krava’s Legend series, but the second novel hasn’t budged in a long time. Not sure what’s up with that – I have some notion of where the story needs to go – but I’m just not feeling the story the way I did with The Curse of Steel.
Meanwhile, a few days ago I went back and re-read what I had written of my novel Twice-Crowned, which I last worked on in about 2019. It’s about 22,000 words so far, and I find it’s actually pretty good for a rough draft.
Twice-Crowned is a bit of alternate-historical fantasy. It’s set in a world that looks a lot like Classical Greece, but with a few supernatural elements folded in, and a big point-of-divergence that is bending the course of history away from what we’re familiar with.
The notion is that there was a survival of the civilization we call “Minoan,” which got away from the sack of Crete by proto-Greeks and set up an enclave in the west. Where our history put the city-state of Syracuse, this alternate timeline has a city called Danassos. It’s a lot like other Hellenic poleis, with the very prominent exception that women are full citizens, holding property and exercising their own political rights and privileges. In one sense it’s a world-building exercise – how can I come up with a culture that’s plausibly Classical Greek and yet has the very non-Hellenic feature of (relative) gender equality? What consequences would that be likely to have as the history of the period unfolds?
I’ve been moved to spend a few days working on back story and research, with the result that I’ve got a fairly substantial timeline document and the start of some notes on how this imaginary society works. I think by this evening I’m going to package some of that up as a free release for my patrons, just to drum up a little interest in the project. Once that’s done, I need to get back to work on Architect of Worlds over the rest of June.
In the long run, I think Twice-Crowned may become my main literary project for the next few months, taking the place of The Sunlit Lands. Maybe if I can get that novel finished, I can come back to Krava’s Legend with fresh eyes.
Well, May didn’t go quite as planned. I originally planned to write the last open section of Architect of Worlds, but early in the month my muse decided to go and live on Mars instead. I ended up writing about 10000 words describing Mars in the Human Destiny setting, and giving myself a ton of new ideas for the universe and for fiction set therein. So my big project for May turned out to be a new partial interim draft of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate instead.
Okay, Mars is (more or less) out of my system now, so it’s back to Architect of Worlds for the month of June. Here’s the formal planning list for this month:
Top Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Write a section describing the structure of the galaxy and of interstellar space, and providing guidelines on how to make maps for interstellar settings. Also carry out further additions and revisions to the “special cases in worldbuilding” section. These two tasks are expected to give rise to a charged release, assuming they amount to at least 10,000 words of new material.
Second Priority:
Architect of Worlds: Further additions and revisions to the “working with astronomical data” section. May lead to a free v0.2 update, or may simply be integrated into v1.0 of the complete book.
Human Destiny: Continue compiling material for the eventual Atlas of the Human Protectorate.
Human Destiny: Design additional new rules systems for the Player’s Guide and add these to the interim draft.
Human Destiny: Begin work on a new Aminata Ndoye story.
Krava’s Legend: Review and possibly rewrite the existing partial draft of The Sunlit Lands, and write a few new chapters.
Back Burner:
Human Destiny: Finish the novelette “Remnants” for eventual collection and publication.
Krava’s Legend:Write the second short story for the “reader magnet” collection.
Scorpius Reach: Write a few new chapters of Second Dawn.
Scorpius Reach: Start work on a third edition of the Game of Empire rules for Traveller (or Cepheus Engine).
About the only change from the initial plan for last month is that I’m bumping a new Aminata Ndoye story up in priority a little. My main focus is going to be on Architect this month, but I may spend some time working on a story about Aminata’s first year at the Interstellar Service academy in France. Basically an immediate sequel to “Pilgrimage.”
Meanwhile, I’m continuing to tinker in my extensive spare time with QGIS and the NASA topographical data for Mars. I may work on one or two maps of 23rd century Mars for the Atlas, and if that works out it may yield a couple of free rewards for my patrons. We’ll see how the month goes.
The Shadow of Troy is the fifth volume of Empires of Bronze, Gordon Doherty’s ongoing historical fiction series set in the ancient Hittite Empire. This volume is a watershed for the series. Everything that has gone before now collides with one of the world’s great narratives: the story of the Trojan War.
The Shadow of Troy continues to follow Hattu, now king of the Hittites. In the previous novel, The Crimson Throne, we learned how Hattu defeated his wicked nephew and seized the Hittite throne, as a divine prophecy had long predicted he would. Unfortunately, the struggle decimated the Hittite army, and the once-powerful kingdom is barely able to defend its own borders. Worse, climate change and the movements of barbarians beyond the edges of civilization are beginning to threaten every great kingdom in the Bronze Age world.
It is at this moment that King Hattu receives a desperate cry for aid from an ancient Hittite vassal, the city of Troy. A Trojan prince has offended the powerful kings of the Ahhiyawans across the sea, abducting one of their wives and bringing her back to Troy. Long greedy for Troy’s wealth, the Ahhiyawans have come across the sea with a thousand ships, and the Trojans have called for their Hittite overlords to defend them.
Hattu has no army to spare, but he is honor-bound to answer . . . so he comes alone, with no one to support him but his son and heir Tudha, along with a few of his veteran comrades-in-arms. He may not have an army, he may not have much hope left, but he has decades of experience as a warrior and captain in one bitter struggle after another. The Ahhiyawans will not be wise to take him lightly!
Throughout this series, Mr. Doherty has consistently done a good job of working with what few original sources are available to us. In this story, he has nothing less than the Iliad to work with, along with the other works of the so-called Trojan Cycle. In The Shadow of Troy he does masterful work, weaving together familiar bits of myth and heroic narrative while telling the story from a foreign (that is, Hittite) perspective. For example, if you’re familiar with the Iliad, you’ll recognize a lot of very specific bits of action in the battle scenes.
The novel does interesting things with the mysteries of the narrative. Why did the Achaeans come to attack Troy – was it truly over something as simple as an unfaithful wife? Troy was almost certainly a Hittite vassal state, and in this story the Hittite king comes to support Troy in the war . . . so why does the Iliad say absolutely nothing about the Hittites? What was really going on with the Trojan Horse, and the final fall of the city?
Most of all, Mr. Doherty does something remarkable with the preordained conclusion of the story. Throughout the series King Hattu has never lost a war, even if his victories have come at terrible cost. He is clearly the hero of this story . . . and yet it’s a foregone conclusion that Troy will fall in the end. How The Shadow of Troy ties up all these threads is a treat to watch, even (or especially) if you’re already familiar with the Greek sources.
Mechanically, the novel works on several levels. The plot is tight, even though it has a few more twists and reversals than usual. There’s more moral ambiguity in this story than in the previous volumes – there are brave heroes and foul villains, but for once it’s not always clear which is which. There’s a superb subplot involving Hattu and his son, in which both characters get plenty of development as sympathetic protagonists. The prose style is very clean, with no copy-editing or other errors to pull me out of the narrative. In all, a very workmanlike job.
Readers should be aware, as always, that the story is set in a brutal and violent time. Descriptions of human cruelty and violence are common and very explicit.
I very much enjoyed The Shadow of Troy. I understand there will be one more book in the series, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Mr. Doherty does to wrap this story up. Very strongly recommended – an action-packed and bloody retelling of the Trojan cycle and what comes afterward.
Here’s a small sample of material for the Human Destiny setting and game book that’s slowly taking shape. In the Cepheus Engine and related tabletop games, there’s often a system of “technology levels” that helps characterize what kind of gear and weapons one might expect to find on a given world. The concept has its problems, but it’s a quick shorthand that’s useful for game purposes. Since Human Destiny is eventually going to be published as a Cepheus Engine game, it seems useful to put together a set of “tech level” tables for the setting.
Here’s a first very rough draft for that section of the Human Destiny sourcebook.
Technology Levels in the Human Destiny Setting
The Khedai Hegemony maintains a sophisticated scheme for classifying the technological and social progress of emerging civilizations. The following system of “tech levels” is a (vastly simplified) shorthand for the Hegemony’s scheme.
General Technology
As is the standard in any Cepheus Engine game, Technology Level or Tech Level is a measure of the social, scientific, and industrial progress of a given world or society. In Hegemony documents, each TL has an evocative descriptor, and can be associated with an approximate era in human history.
TL
Descriptor
Approximate Date or Typical World
0
Era of Stone Tools
Paleolithic, Mesolithic, or Neolithic society
1
Era of Metal Tools
3000 BCE
2
Era of Exploration
1500 CE
3
Era of Mechanization
1750 CE
4
Era of Electricity
1900 CE
5
Era of Radio
1930 CE
6
Era of Atomic Power
1950 CE
7
Era of Space Exploration
1970 CE
8
Era of Information
1990 CE
9
Era of Crisis
2020 CE
10 (A)
Low Interstellar Society
Minor human colony world or outpost
11 (B)
Low Interstellar Society
Major human colony world or outpost
12 (C)
Average Interstellar Society
Maximum level for the Human Protectorate
13 (D)
Average Interstellar Society
Maximum level for a second-tier client society
14 (E)
High Interstellar Society
Maximum level for a first-tier client society
15 (F)
High Interstellar Society
Maximum level for the Khedai Hegemony as a whole
It may not be immediately obvious, but the Hegemony’s scheme for classifying technological progress includes two singularities, each of which creates a discontinuity in the above table.
The normal pattern for any newly evolving technological civilization is to progress from TL 0, passing through the higher levels in order, finally reaching some maximum level of social and technological progress. At this point the civilization invariably suffers an existential crisis that, at a minimum, forces all its component societies back to some lower TL. This may happen multiple times before the sapient species in question is finally driven into extinction. The highest point of independent development is almost never higher than TL 9. In fact, civilizations that reach TL 9 on their own almost always suffer particularly deadly collapses, likely to cause immediate species extinction – hence the term “Era of Crisis.”
The transition from TL 9 to TL A represents the first discontinuity or singularity in the scheme. Very few civilizations manage to pass the Era of Crisis on their own. Almost all societies that survive the transition and attain interstellar status do so only because an older civilization intervenes, as the Khedai Hegemony did with humanity.
Under the Praxis observed by the Khedai Hegemony, newly discovered sapient societies at TL 0-3 are observed from a distance under a strict non-interference policy. Societies at TL 4-9 are subject to close observation, and possibly annexation if (as in almost all cases) they appear unlikely to survive on their own.
The interstellar levels that follow (TL A through TL F) do not represent a hierarchy of new technologies that appear one after the other in a progressive fashion. Instead, they represent an array of mature technologies, all millions of years old, which are all available throughout the Hegemony. The TL of a world which falls in this range represents the kind of technology that is widely available on that world, because it is locally manufactured and can be supported by existing infrastructure. Items from a higher TL will also be available, but possibly at a higher cost in social credit, or with specific limitations under the Praxis.
Humans know nothing about any technologies above TL F. Humans may speculate, and the khedai doubtless know what technologies might be possible, but under the Praxis such possibilities are cloaked in silence. A few humans suspect that this silence conceals a second discontinuity or singularity, beyond which even the Hegemony dares not go.
Energy Technologies
The Hegemony’s scheme for classifying technologies is most strongly determined by a society’s ability to harness and direct energy to carry out the work of civilization.
TL
Typical Developments
0
Muscle power Domesticated animals Slave labor
1
Hydromechanical power Water wheels
2
Wind power Windmills
3
Steam power Exploitation of fossil fuels (coal) Crude electrical transmission and storage
4
Widespread use of electrical power Exploitation of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas) Oil refining to produce high-quality fuels Hydroelectric power
5
Rural electrification Urban power grids
6
Nuclear fission reactors Regional power grids
7
Increasing use of solar power Continental power grids
8
Mass application of renewable energy
9
Crude “smart grids” Possible abandonment of fossil fuels
10 (A)
Advanced “smart grids” Advanced fission power Superconducting power transmission Hyper-efficient power cells Solar power satellites Complete abandonment of fossil fuels
11 (B)
Nuclear fusion reactors
12 (C)
Advanced fusion power
13 (D)
Antimatter generation and transport
14 (E)
Advanced antimatter power Portable fusion power Catalyzed fusion
15 (F)
Miniaturized fusion power
Communications and Information
This category covers technologies for generating, transmitting, storing, and applying information. It also includes various forms of artificial intelligence and artificial sapience.
TL
Typical Developments
0
Oral communication
1
Written communication Printing press (block printing) Crude cryptography
Radio broadcasting Massive special-purpose computing devices
6
Television broadcasting Massive general-purpose computing devices Information theory
7
Early packet-switched networks Personal computers Industrial automation Advanced cryptography (digital) Public-key cryptography
8
Global Internet Advanced personal computers Advanced ICS/SCADA systems Large-scale public-key infrastructures
9
Miniaturized personal computers Early natural-language interfaces Early automatic translation Sophisticated robots and drones “Cloud” computing Crude quantum computation
Sophisticated personal assistants Advanced expert systems Advanced cybershells Sophisticated personality emulation
12 (C)
Early Virtual Sapience systems Fully Turing-capable systems Undirected machine learning “City minds”
13 (D)
Advanced Virtual Sapience systems
14 (E)
Early Artificial Sapience systems Proof-of-consciousness systems “World minds”
15 (F)
Advanced Artificial Sapience systems Transapience threshold
Environmental
This category covers technologies that can alter or maintain planetary environments. It also covers common developments in environmental awareness – the process by which a civilization learns how its own activities can impact the environment upon which it relies for support.
TL
Typical Developments
0
Agriculture and pastoralism Early trade networks Forest clearing Overhunting Megafaunal extinction
1
Early cities Basic aqueducts and sanitation Advanced trade networks Continental empires
2
Global trade networks Transcontinental empires and colonization
3
Indoor plumbing Advanced sanitation Large-scale use of fossil fuels Large-scale habitat destruction begins
4
Super-cities (>1 million) Large-scale water treatment Sophontogenic climate change begins
5
Super-cities (>10 million)
6
Megalopolitan regions (>50 million) “Green Revolution” in agriculture Awareness of global harms from pollution
7
Megalopolitan regions (>100 million) Sophontogenic mass extinction begins Awareness of sophontogenic climate change
8
Gene-modified crop species Awareness of sophontogenic mass extinction
9
Crude geoengineering Civilizational collapse
10 (A)
Organic urban reserves Advanced geoengineering Climate and ecological remediation De-extinction
11 (B)
Domed cities Artificial species to fill ecological niches Type I (Mars) terraforming
12 (C)
Advanced climate and ecological remediation “Biome minds” monitor wild ecosystems
13 (D)
Type II (Venus, Mercury, Luna) terraforming
14 (E)
“World minds” monitor global ecosystems
15 (F)
Type III (extremal) terraforming
Medical
This category covers medical and biological technologies.
TL
Typical Developments
0
Herbal remedies Crude surgery and prosthetics
1
Diagnostic process Basic understanding of anatomy
2
Advanced understanding of anatomy Crude immunization techniques
3
Germ theory and bacteriology Epidemiology Antiseptic surgery Advanced anesthesia Crude psychiatry
4
Antibiotics X-rays and other internal imaging Public health measures Mass vaccination
5
Blood transfusions Discovery of transplant rejection
6
Eradication of some infectious diseases Discovery of the structure of DNA
7
Theories of molecular evolution Crude genetic engineering Advanced prosthetics
As sometimes happens, my plan for creative work for the current month has taken a big leap out into left field. My original plan for May was to write up the last open section of Architect of Worlds, and release that for my patrons. Instead, I think I’m going to be living on Mars this month.
One of my Human Destiny subprojects is to develop the future history of colonization and terraforming of Mars in that universe. In a sense, Mars is where human beings first figure out how they might fit into the Hegemony’s interstellar society – setting aside the follies of old Earth, disciplining themselves to a centuries-long project in a harsh environment, learning galactic technologies and ways of life. I’ve already written one piece of fiction set on the planet, and Mars is going to be important for the story of my lead character, Aminata Ndoye. Meanwhile, I anticipate dedicating a lengthy section of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate just to describe late-23rd-Century Mars.
The spark for getting back to this subproject was the computer game Per Aspera. This is a logistics-engine game, focused on the colonization and terraforming of Mars. Early in May, the developers of Per Aspera released a new DLC which added a bunch of useful features to the game’s model. I sat down to spend a little time experimenting with the new version, thinking I would just spend an evening or two on it . . . but the result was a superb run which gave me all kinds of setting and story ideas. Forget devoting a section of the Atlas to Mars, I suspect I could write a complete tabletop RPG dedicated to this one planet.
Okay, that’s probably an excessive notion. Still, right now I think I could easily write a first draft of that section of the Atlas. I’m also experimenting with the QGIS software package as a tool for making useful maps of Mars. We have a lot of data about the topographical layout of the planet, so producing plausible maps is not going to be a problem.
So that’s the new plan for May: at the very least, produce a new interim partial draft of the Atlas for my patrons and readers. That will be a charged release if there’s at least ten or twelve thousand words of new material. If time permits, maybe knock out one or two maps of terraformed Mars to go with the new text. If I can get Mars out of my system over the new couple of weeks, then I should be able to turn back to that last section of Architect in June.
