Review: Quantum Radio, by A. G. Riddle

Review: Quantum Radio, by A. G. Riddle

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Quantum Radio by A. G. Riddle

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

Quantum Radio is science fiction set in the present day, the first in what appears to be a planned series dealing with the “multiverse” concept.

Dr. Tyson Klein (“Ty” to his friends and family) is a scientist working at CERN, the European center for high-energy physics research. At the beginning of the story, he has made a remarkable discovery. The experiments running on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, are producing unexpected particles. What’s more, there appears to be a non-random pattern to these particles – as if someone, somewhere else in the universe, is sending a message.

Ty presents his findings to fellow scientists at CERN (and thus to the reader), hoping for funding and help to investigate further. Instead, when he returns home that evening, his apartment is bombed and he finds himself on the run from shadowy forces bent on killing him. Clearly his work has attracted attention from the wrong people, but who and why?

He soon finds allies, some unexpectedly familiar. With their help, he studies the LHC message and finds a way to interpret it. When they act upon the message, the story takes a sharp and rather unexpected turn . . .

Mr. Riddle’s prose style is immaculately clean, and he clearly had attention from a good editor; I didn’t notice a single copy-editing problem anywhere in the story. Exposition isn’t obtrusive, there’s no problem with tense or viewpoint discipline, both quiet scenes and action sequences flow very nicely. This is a very competent writer working at the top of his form. The story itself is certainly readable and fun, and I didn’t have any trouble getting through the novel in a couple of sittings.

Yet I also left the story mildly disappointed. The premise of mysterious messages from somewhere else in time and space, possibly leaning on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, isn’t a new one. Stories such as Greg Benford’s Timescape and James P. Hogan’s Thrice Upon a Time have walked this path before . . . and honestly, I couldn’t help but think that those classics did more with the premise than Mr. Riddle does here. The stakes here don’t seem as high, and the sense of wonder that can come from the best hard science fiction never quite materializes.

To me, Quantum Radio never managed to rise above the level of a simple adventure novel, sticking firmly to tropes that would be familiar to any Star Trek or Marvel Cinematic Universe fan. In fact, I suspect the purpose of this novel is to set up a series of similar adventure stories, taking advantage of recent audience awareness of the “multiverse” concept as driven by popular films.

So in general, I did enjoy Quantum Radio, finding it a fun adventure novel. I’ll certainly be interested to look for the sequels if and when Mr. Riddle releases those. On the other hand, if you’re looking for truly high-concept hard science fiction, with the sense of wonder such stories can provoke, you might want to manage your expectations with this one.

Status Report (22 March 2023)

Status Report (22 March 2023)

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I’ve apparently hit my stride with respect to doing layout for Architect of Worlds. I reached my tentative milestone for that earlier this week, passing page 70 out of 180 in the draft.

I intend to continue working on that for the rest of March, but not pushing the pace too hard – maybe a page or two at a time, possibly getting as far as page 80. Meanwhile, I’m going to take a creative break and see if I can complete some revisions and bang out a few more chapters of Twice-Crowned before the end of the month.

Here’s the plan, then, for my patrons and other readers. You’ll be seeing another incremental draft for the rough layout of Architect of Worlds regardless, as a free update. Hopefully that will get us to a point most of the way through the “Designing Planetary Systems” chapter. However, if I can get at least to the end of Chapter Eighteen in Twice-Crowned, I’ll push that out as a charged release. That will be roughly 12,500 words of new material that you folks won’t have seen before. If I don’t get that far, there won’t be a charged release for this month and we’ll see how things go in April.

The Structure of “Fourth Millennium”

The Structure of “Fourth Millennium”

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Things are moving right along on Architect of Worlds. I’m confident that I’ll be able to hit my objective of page 70 out of 180 by the end of this month, and probably a few pages beyond that. So while I’m working on Architect, I’m also giving some thought to what’s likely to be my next big RPG project: Fourth Millennium.

Fourth Millennium is envisioned as an alternate-historical fantasy, set in the Mediterranean world sometime in the middle of what we would think of as the first century BCE. The setting is the same one in which I’m writing the novel Twice-Crowned – I’ve already written a few short pieces in it too, and will likely write more as the muse moves me.

The underlying game system is probably going to be the Cypher System from Monte Cook Games, under their (very generous) creative license. Assuming I live and stay motivated long enough to produce the whole thing, it’s going to have three major components:

  • The core Cypher System-compatible rules for building characters and roleplaying in the setting, with rules for not only personal-combat-heavy adventures, but mass combat, social and political conflict, and so on. There will be a magic system based heavily around spirit-derived and divine magic, with a strong trace of neo-Platonist hermeticism as well.
  • A gazetteer of the Mediterranean world in the setting, somewhat familiar from our own history, but also full of divergences (a surviving Minoan-derived state, a Roman Republic that hasn’t been quite as fortunate but still has the potential to conquer widely, an emerging Hellenistic world-empire derived from the Alexandrian οἰκουμένη, and so on).
  • At least one One Ring– or Pendragon-inspired “grand campaign” that organizes adventures in annual cycles, letting characters start out as minor figures, work their way up to being movers and shakers, and change the course of the setting’s future history. So (e.g.) in a Roman Grand Campaign, characters might start out as clients supporting an ambitious Roman senator, but while assisting him they would build up their own wealth and clout, eventually setting out on the cursus honorum and standing for the offices of praetor and consul in their own right, all the while dealing with the perennial crises facing the Republic.

It’s that last item that has me cogitating heavily. I’m concerned that a single book that contains all three of these components is going to be huge, especially if I go all-in on building multiple interlocking Grand Campaigns based on different cultures. I could see building at least three of those: one set in the Roman Republic, one in the Hellenistic empire, one in the Minoan-derived culture that occupies an uneasy space between the two.

So suppose I instead build a single book that contains character-design and adventuring rules, the extra rules needed to support Grand Campaign play, and the gazetteer describing the setting. That book would be enough for players and GMs to build their own adventures and campaigns. Big, but not outrageously so. Then there would be one or more follow-on books that describe each Grand Campaign in detail.

The thing I’m wrestling with is, which campaign book to plan to work on first.

  • The Roman book would have the advantage of being the most well-documented in primary sources and extant fiction, and the most familiar to the audience. No trouble building a plausible political and social system here, with plenty of room for adventures. Of course, Roman society was very problematic by modern standards – strong misogyny, a very equivocal view of LGBT+ behavior and lives, rampant slave-holding. Good portion of the audience would probably be repelled by that, even if I were to work hard to provide alternatives.
  • The Hellenistic book would be most attractive to me, given that I’m a Hellenophile of long standing, but it would carry a lot of disadvantages. Primary-source documentation of the details of society and politics among the Hellenistic kingdoms isn’t as rich, since most our sources were (of course) Roman. I’d have a harder time developing social and grand-campaign mechanisms for this piece of the setting to the same level of detail. Maybe not quite as much values dissonance for the audience, but the difference would be pretty slim. Hellenistic societies tended to be just as nasty as the Roman by modern standards.
  • The Minoan-derived society would have its own set of trade-offs. In this case, I’d be making the details up almost out of whole cloth – we’re talking about a culture that just didn’t exist in the corresponding era of our real-world history. Which would probably mean that I’d have to work all the harder to get the audience on board, since this would be the most historical-fantasy piece of the setting. On the other hand, the post-Minoans would be a lot less problematic for the modern audience – very little misogyny or patriarchy, a much more liberal view of LGBT+ people, slavery present but not nearly as prevalent as in Rome or the Hellenistic world. Not to mention, this society’s location between the other two would add a certain degree of tension and potential conflict to the setting, possibly helping to engage the audience.

Mental note: this project is really going to need some effort spent on consent-and-safety tools.

So yeah, in the short run I’m not going to need to make any decisions, but by the time Architect is in release and I’m starting to produce rough-draft material for Fourth Millennium, I’m going to have to have a lot of this figured out.

I’d be interested in hearing from my readers and patrons on this one. If you have any interest in Fourth Millennium at all, which of the three grand-campaign sourcebooks do you think you’d find most interesting and useful? Feel free to drop me a comment or an email if you have any insight.

Some Insight on Oceanic Super-Earths

Some Insight on Oceanic Super-Earths

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I came across this article a few days ago, and it’s making me think I need to make a small adjustment to the Architect of Worlds planetary design sequence: “Astronomers identify a new class of habitable planet” (Astronomy.com, September 2021).

The case in question is one that we should all have been aware of for a while: super-Earths with very dense atmospheres dominated by hydrogen, with deep world-spanning liquid-water oceans. Architect would call these Class 2 (Dulcinea-type, after Mu Arae c) worlds with Massive prevalence of water.

The problem is that if these worlds are too warm, the current Architect design sequence quickly turns them into Class 1 (Venus-type) worlds: very hot due to a runaway greenhouse, but very dry because their primordial oceans have been boiled away and lost to photodissociation. But if I understand the physics correctly, this shouldn’t happen in these specific cases.

If a Dulcinea-type world has a rocky surface, it’s buried under many kilometers of ocean, and atmospheric heat isn’t going to bake carbon dioxide out of the rocks to cause a runaway greenhouse. Now, these worlds are likely to have a ton of water vapor in their atmospheres, and water vapor is itself a really effective greenhouse gas. But that doesn’t seem likely to boil the ocean itself away. With a really dense atmosphere, the boiling point of water soars and you can keep liquid-water oceans with surface temperatures well above 370 K. Meanwhile, these worlds aren’t going to lose their water due to photodissociation, because they’re massive enough to retain molecular hydrogen anyway. Any water vapor that gets into the upper atmosphere may break down due to high-energy sunlight, but the hydrogen won’t just fly off into space, it’ll stick around to recombine with oxygen again.

Fortunately I think adjusting for this will be an easy fix in the Architect draft, something I can do on the fly while I’m doing the rough layout. Basically, I’ll build an exception into the sequence for Dulcinea-types, forbidding them to make the usual transition to a runaway greenhouse somewhere just above a blackbody temperature of 300 K. I may need to add a provision in the procedure to compute surface temperature for these worlds – if they’re already hot, they’re going to have a fierce greenhouse due to water vapor in the atmosphere and yet will still keep their liquid-water envelope.

These strike me as odd worlds to call “habitable,” although in the scientific literature astronomers generally use that word to just mean “probably has liquid water.” You could theoretically land on one of these, but it wouldn’t be a remotely shirt-sleeve environment for humans.

Planning for March 2023

Planning for March 2023

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I didn’t get as much done in February as I had originally hoped, although those milestones were probably more than a little optimistic. I wrote a little bit of Twice-Crowned, and made it almost to page 40 in the layout and book design for Architect of Worlds.

The only really new element in February: I’m starting to use the documentation tool Notion to gather and collate notes for the Danassos setting. That’s really promising as a method for archiving world-building notes for a given setting – much better than my usual procedure involving a bunch of disorganized Word documents. For now, I’m using it to support work on Twice-Crowned and to prepare for work on the Fourth Millennium RPG book later this year. I also anticipate it may be a very useful tool for the Human Destiny setting – I can see using it to cleanly document Architect of Worlds designs for various star systems, for example.

So in any case, this month’s planning message is going to look a lot like last month’s, aside from some minor tweaks.

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Continue work to design and lay out the finished book. Tentatively plan to finish through page 70 (out of approximately 180).
  • Second Priority:
    • Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Danassos: Gather notes in Notion 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 usual, while I focus primarily on Architect, I don’t expect a charged release for my patrons this month unless I get really ambitious with the novel or some other piece of fiction. There will probably be at least one free update – the next partial interim draft of the Architect book design.

Review: Grimm Diagnosis, by Matt Golec

Review: Grimm Diagnosis, by Matt Golec

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Grimm Diagnosis by Matt Golec

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

Grimm Diagnosis is the flawed but entertaining story of a present-day doctor, caught up in a land of fables and folktales.

Robert Lang is an American physician, who at the beginning of the story has somehow found himself in another world and is doing his best to adapt.

It’s a strange place! It looks like a medieval German village, with the appropriate level of technology (and personal hygiene). On the other hand, many of the inhabitants are odd to the point of eccentricity, there’s a plethora of princes and princesses about, and everyone seems to speak idiomatic 21st century American English. Strangest of all, Dr. Lang can match many of the villagers with characters out of German (and other) folk tales. His office assistant is a young man named Hans with a sister named Greta, he has dealings with a ruthless guild-mistress called the Godmother of the Fair . . . and the girlfriend he has acquired since arriving seems to be a grown-up Red Riding Hood.

Dr. Lang struggles to make a place for himself, offering what little medical care he can without modern reference books or tools. At first, his biggest worries seem to be competition from the local guild of barber-surgeons, and a spell that has every eligible girl in town competing for his attention. Then the world he came from begins to intrude further, first as simple stray objects, then in the form of people. Soon it becomes obvious that the contact between worlds is expanding, and the results may be disastrous.

Mr. Golec’s prose is fairly clean, although I thought the story could have used some editorial attention. I caught a few grammatical stumbles and other minor problems that a careful copy-editing pass might have fixed. This wasn’t enough to pull me out of the story, but it was noticeable.

The biggest problem I had with Grimm Diagnosis was an oddity of its story structure. Dr. Lang, our viewpoint character, is an oddly passive protagonist. He doesn’t solve the mystery of what’s happening around him. Indeed, he seems barely to notice some aspects of it until other characters call them to his attention. His decisions and actions seem to have little effect on the conflicts of the story. Even his relationship troubles with his girlfriend seem to be resolved more on her initiative than his.

Dr. Lang is certainly a sympathetic character. He has plenty of moral integrity, and his devotion to the well-being of his patients and his adopted community is admirable. Still, he’s not a very active character. Some of this is likely due to the fact that most of the story is framed as a comedy; a comedic protagonist can often be more the victim than the instigator of the plot. Still, I occasionally found myself wishing for him to do something about his situation, rather than letting everyone else in the story do all the hard work of advancing the narrative.

Despite its flaws, I enjoyed Grimm Diagnosis, and found it a light and entertaining read. Highly recommended if you enjoy light-hearted portal fantasy.

Status Report (20 February 2023)

Status Report (20 February 2023)

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Quick note today, to discuss progress on Architect of Worlds.

Slowly but surely, I’m improving my layout skills in Adobe InDesign. In particular, I’ve developed workflows for producing chapter title pages, managing several levels of header, cleaning up font variations, producing mathematical formulae as vector images and placing them in the draft, building tables with a consistent format, and so on. It’s getting to the point where I can pretty reliably lay out a page per hour, which means I ought to be able to make at least a little progress almost every day.

The biggest change I’ve made is that I’m no longer trying to produce filler art as I go. Pages that end up with a significant amount of white space are going to be left as is for now. Once I’ve got the whole book laid out, I’ll go back and select all the filler art that’s needed. Where I need images to help support the text, those are being selected or generated and inserted into the draft along the way – that’s actually one of the things that slows me down the most.

As of this afternoon, I’ve gotten all the way to the end of “The Science of Star Maps,” or about page 31 in the integrated draft. I think I’m going to be making slow but steady progress from this point onward. My proposed milestone for the month of February (about 60 pages completed in this month alone) seems awfully optimistic, though. I’ll probably be somewhere in the range of page 35-40 by the end of this month instead.

I’ll probably continue to provide partial drafts each month for patrons to review, as free updates. Honestly, the next few months may not see much in the way of charged releases, while I work on this as my primary project.

One note, for those of you who are reviewing the incremental drafts and providing potential errata and other feedback. Right now, I’m concentrating on getting the book laid out! Any comments or proposed tweaks to the text are being heard, much appreciated, and carefully stored away, but you’re not likely to see them reflected in the draft until I’ve got the book fully laid out in rough. Once that’s done, I’ll be doing a polishing pass, to include building the table of contents and credits page, polishing up the layout, adding filler art, and making any final corrections and tweaks to the text.

Patience. We’re definitely in the home stretch on this project!

Thoughts on Fourth Millennium

Thoughts on Fourth Millennium

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“Battle of Pydna 168 BCE,” by Peter Connolly

While I continue to make incremental progress on Architect of Worlds and Twice-Crowned, I also keep thinking about what’s likely to be my next big tabletop RPG project, beginning later this year. That’s a full-fledged historical-fantasy game, probably published under the Cypher System, with the working title of Fourth Millennium.

The premise is that this is the ancient Western world, centered around the Mediterranean basin, but it’s not exactly the world we see in our history books. There are fantastic elements: spirits that can be bargained with, gods who may or may not be kindly disposed toward mortals, magic that works more often than not, strange creatures that lurk in the wilderness beyond the borders of civilization. It’s also an alternate history, with several points of divergence: a survival of Minoan civilization, a Hellenic world that didn’t commit suicide in the fifth century BCE with quite so much short-sighted enthusiasm, an Alexandrian οἰκουμένη that managed to survive its founder’s death. The setting is divided between two incipient world-empires and a whole host of minor kingdoms and barbarian peoples, each with their own distinctive flavor.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is the “canonical adventure” for the setting. My past experience with RPG design tells me that this is really important. Potential players and game-masters need to be clear as to what they can expect to do in a setting. Dungeons & Dragons centers around the dungeon crawl. Traveller centers around doing odd jobs to survive on the fringes of interstellar society. Transhuman Space, when we first developed it, was a lovely rich setting that didn’t have a clear answer for “what do the characters do?” and that handicapped it for a long time.

So what will player characters in Fourth Millennium be doing? I think that boils down to the motto for the setting – something that may end up being the core book’s subtitle:

The future is in your hands.

The idea is that player characters will be thoroughly involved in history as it unfolds in this alternative world. They’ll start out as agents for powerful people – an ambitious Roman senator, a powerful post-Minoan priestess-queen, a provincial governor in the Alexandrian empire, that sort of setup. At first they’ll be carrying out missions for their patron – accumulating rewards of wealth and treasure, sure, but also gathering social standing and authority. Eventually they’ll become more independent, becoming movers and shakers in their own right. They’ll feel as if they’re making a mark on the future of the world – although, to be sure, Fate and the gods will have their own say.

So yeah, fighting monsters, but more often human foes: cutpurses and assassins, pirates, brigands, barbarian raiders. Exploring the uncivilized wilderness, traveling in strange foreign lands. Solving mysteries, making scientific discoveries, writing books that everyone wants to read. Making brilliant speeches, intriguing to discredit or eliminate political rivals, persuading people to vote one way or another. Making a fortune in trade or loot, or just collecting the revenue from big land-holdings. Fighting in wars, even commanding armies. Winning elections, holding political office, governing whole provinces. Eventually reaching the top of the social pyramid in whatever republic, kingdom, or empire you call your own. The end-point of a successful long-term campaign might be to gather such fame and glory that people will still be talking about you at the end of the Fourth Millennium.

One major inspiration here might be games like Pendragon or Paladin – games that aren’t just richly imagined settings, but structured campaigns that encourage play across years and even generations.

I know, I know. Ambitious as all hell, especially for a one-person development shop. Well, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. And you never know, maybe the Muses are thinking kindly of me.

Updates to the Progress Bar(s)

Updates to the Progress Bar(s)

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Just a quick note this evening, to point out that I’ve added a new progress-bar widget to the sidebar on this site. The “In Progress” section should now indicate progress both for layout for Architect of Worlds and for the first draft of Twice-Crowned. Those are the two major creative projects right now, and the ones for which I suspect readers and patrons are most interested in seeing the state of play.

The widgets are a little ugly at the moment, for which I apologize. At some point I think I’ll try to streamline that section and try for a neater appearance. For now, at least, the data are up where I can easily update them after each day’s work and my followers can keep track of how things are going.

Planning for February 2023

Planning for February 2023

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January was a good month for working on Architect of Worlds. I started out planning to build a “toy” version of the book, mostly to learn Adobe InDesign techniques and have something to show off for patrons, but plans change. At the moment I’m going all-in on building the book itself, and so far I’ve finished initial layout and design for about the first 22 pages. That’s going to be the primary project for the next few months, I think.

I didn’t get a lot of other creative work done last month, and I do want to make some forward progress on something while I continue to work on Architect. In particular, I’d like to get some fiction written; it’s been a few months since I’ve produced any new stories. Best candidate right now is to write a few more chapters of Twice-Crowned.

All of which makes this month’s priorities pretty straightforward:

  • Top Priority:
    • Architect of Worlds: Continue work to design and lay out the finished book. Tentatively plan to finish through page 60 (out of approximately 180).
  • Second Priority:
    • Danassos: Continue work on the new draft of Twice-Crowned.
    • Danassos: 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 has been consistent for the last few months, 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. There might be a charged release for my patrons this month, if I end up producing enough new items to justify that, but we’ll see how things go.