Yes, I understand that the change we made to chapter 2 of A Pleasing Shape complety changes the tenor of the story and that heavy lifting is required. On the other hand, that is no reason to make the current ending so boring. Even if it’s not the ending we’re going to use, it’s still supposed to be competent. I know you feel it would be a waste to keep working after 23,000 words, but still, you could at least try to give me an ending with all three of them content with each other.

On the other hand, thank you so much for the new Yowler story Silent Night With Daggered Books. I’m sure we’ll be able to work it into the schedule somewhere.

I’m sorry, but I felt it necessary to throw away Soul Searcher. The original is lost on an Amiga floppy somewhere, and I was never going to be able to re-write in and recapture that.

And I agree that Wishing Well: Epilogue is nicely finished.

p.s. Your suggestion for Under the Big Gun is interesting, but getting into Leysa’s head right now would be particularly difficult. Didn’t you say you wanted to look at what it would take to make Honest Impulses a retailable novel?

I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say with this story, other than that loneliness sucks and you can overcome it even if you feel like you have very little to offer the world by offering to help someone else out of their loneliness.  Still it’s nice to be writing something again, even if it’s somewhat in my comfort zone.

The book follows the adventures of Freya Nakamichi, a sex ‘droid designed to please her human masters. Unfortunately for Freya, human beings have been extinct for two centuries or so, leaving us with a character with no idea what to do with her life. Most robots designed to serve human beings were cute, anime-like designs for household use, but Freya’s shaped like the real deal, a tall ogre out of place in a world of short bishi and chibi designs. Depressed and despondent, she takes a job as a courier, winds up in all kinds of trouble, and ends up careering around the solar system, gets possessed by the spirit of her dead sisters, and eventually comes face-to-face with the biggest dream and fear every robot has: meeting a real live human being.

Unfortunately, this book falls off the end of the world toward the last chapters. Up until the info-dump where Freya reveals the true nature of robot devotion to human beings, a ham-handed scene if ever there was one (although fortunately the worst of it is ob skene), I was convinced that Charlie was going somewhere interesting with the book. Charlie mentioned that the book is an homage to Robert Heinlein (and the final set piece of the book is set in Heinleingrad, Eris), and the end of the book is as unconvincing as the ending of Freya’s namesake novel, Heinlein’s Friday. At the end of Friday, you might recall, the titular character ends up marrying the guy who raped her at the beginning of the book (”it was just business”) and running away to some far away stellar colony, leaving Earth to collapse under its own corruption. The ending of Saturn’s Children ends with a very similar, and even more serious problem, left unresolved: robots who are honest with themselves about their origins are terrified that H. Sapiens might someday re-emerge and assert their right to rule, disrupting the free will of the machines. It’s presented as the central conflict of the main character, emerging throughout the book, growing in intensity as Freya gets closer and closer to meeting an authentic H. sap, only to be ignored in the final two chapters in favor of pyrotechnics and “aww, aren’t they sweet” moments.

Charlie’s ability to create engaging, intense, and intensely clever tight spots from which his heroine must escape, often with that classic transition, frying pan, fire, is here in all its glory. He does a great job of cranking up both the threat and the resolution, over and over again, while weaving a Sol-spanning conspiracy that should ultimately leave you breathless. Charlie knows how to dress the stage and then set the furniture ablaze a la Jack Bickham, and his technical hard SF knowledge is second to none. But if Saturn’s Children is a Heinlein pastiche and an Asimov homage, it’s also unfortunately got something else: A Neal Stephenson ending.

Appliance Dreams is a short story about a few Pendorians living in and busily restoring a derelict starship. They’ve awakened the AI, but they have no idea where her core is stored, until someone figures it out, leading to one of my favorite lines yet: “You mean, I’m sleeping with the ship’s screensaver?” (Line redacted to avoid spoilers; you can highlight the redacted text to see what’s written there.)

On Ida’s Shores is one of those silly foundational stories I wrote when I was trying to get an idea off the ground. Unfortunately, the idea turned out to be thin indeed, although it does have some establishment shots in it that led to the Sterlings series, so it’s not all bad.

We’ll Always Have… is a bit of a sad romance. I wanted to make more of Oenone’s character; I haven’t done enough with her and she has some compelling background material, but she wasn’t coming together as a character, so I wanted to give her a few episodes and see if I could do her justice. This episode does her some justice.

All of this is very boring, so specialized quasi-conscious AIs are tasked with figuring it all out. The post-human overseers who leave their entertainment realms to manage theses systems are rock stars, wealthy in some way, empowered perhaps to make decisions and dole out favors. The AIs, meanwhile, are looking through the optimization space to make sure the polis they’re programmed to oversee has the best possible deals, maximizing speedups and minimizing slowdowns.

The day comes when someone is called upon to make good on a contract, and fails to deliver. Big. An adventure goes south, pixellated and trashed. And while the adventurers in the game are disappointed, the overseeing AI overreacts and pulls its contracts in, refusing to deal until its neighbors, some of whom are coming into a functional transactional range and others are moving out as orbits proceed, until they demonstrate significantly greater transparency.

Everything goes sour in the time it takes light to traverse the solar system twice as people realize that the promises the AIs have been making have no basis in real deliverables, and the promised adventures aren’t going to happen and, worse, the promised entertainments to be delivered out-system to the manfacturing base that provides maintenance and parts for this bread-and-circuses civilization aren’t going to happen, and the manfacturers either shut down or go slow-and-local. The intra-Mars orbit civilization starts to slow down as more and more resources are dedicated to preservation, and a great depression settles onto Sol.

And then the aliens invade, I suppose. Or something.

One of the premises of these novels is that some super-intelligence in the world is figuring something out, something that (to it) is so compelling that it must be followed to its conclusion. One of the premises of the better mean and nasty variants of this is that “consciousness” and “self introspection” as we humans do it need not be at all similar to what the cybernetic super-intelligence is doing, and we human beings may not understand what’s actually going on inside its systemic thought proceses: the rules under which it operates are more complex than we human beings can get our heads around.

One of the other premises is that, to the survivors, this event is disastrous. That much thinking, that much processing, that much signalling and messaging to do the algorithms the super-intelligence uses, requires huge amounts of resources. Electricity, infrastructure, maintenance. When the event is over, a significant portion of the world’s GDP vanishes into thin air.

Maybe this is what that looks like. The more I look at it, the more it looks to me like the current economic crisis is a failed singularity event. The niche in which this differently-conscious super-intelligence attempted to emerge was just not right (which is something even our DCSI could not predict), and so it collapsed, taking $62 trillion dollars with it.

The next time, we might not be so lucky.

When trying to cold-start Muse, it helps to find something I have that’s half-finished, with which I’m neither happy or unhappy.  Something for which it’s time either to push it, or kill it.  A Pleasing Shape came to me; it’s a love story between a man, his girlfriend, and his robot.  It’s a little weak, mostly because I don’t have much grip on Darzi’s motivations.  He doesn’t want to get rid of Peren and Jouet, but he certainly didn’t invite them into his life.  He just wanted someone to pose for his paintings.  The sex scene I wrote is actually really good, and I enjoyed it because it has lots of moments of cinema verite, like this:

Darzi’s mouth watered with desire for her, a feeling he appreciated even after so many months together, and he was grateful she was on top and he could keep swallowing.  He didn’t want to drool on her, not yet.

I dunno.  Maybe that’s just one of my hang-ups.  Here’s a better scene, one in which Darzi has been forced to separate from Peren during the college’s summer break, and is using Jouet, a robot whose brain has been erased and is now slowly recovering. In the meantime, the AI looking over Jouet has given her to Darzi as a posing mannequin:

“Do you think you’ll be able to return to this pose tomorrow?” he asked her.  She nodded her head only slightly.  “Then let me help you down.”  She relaxed slightly.  He took her arm and guided her back down to the bed.  He touched her cheek, and she tilted her head against his hand.  “Don’t fall over, okay?”  She moved her arm down to the bed to show she could hold herself up just fine.

He looked at his canvas.  A portrait is three things: the patience of the subject, the talent of the artist, and an expression of the relationship between the two. If that was true, as he had told Peren, and as he believed, then what was his painting of Jouet expressing?

He wasn’t sure yet.

He sighed deeply and turned his attention to the kitchen.  He had never been a good cook– for that matter neither was Peren.  Robots were famously good cooks, part of their talent for taking care of the humans they cared about.  He wondered if Jouet would ever be smart enough or whole enough to take care of Peren and himself.

That is, if Peren wanted to accompany him into the future.  He looked back at Jouet and wondered if she would.  If she had a choice in the matter.  When he had acquired her, she’d been empty, blank.  But she was made to learn how to be human.  It just took time.

Anyway, I’ve done about 3,500 words in the past two days on this, including a delightful love scene, Peren’s addiction to nicotine, one of Darzi’s friends being smug because, with Peren back on Pendor visting her parents he’s getting laid much more than Darzi is, and the set-up for Darzi to really start getting it on with Jouet. It’ll be good for both of them. For Peren… not so much.

Seattle was frequently schizophrenic about its obligation to police its citizen’s morals, and might one day embrace an openly kinky and demonstrative space on safer sex play, and the next day go all-out to close the place down for maximum publicity. The city had four major newspapers, two dailies and two weeklies. As the weeklies pushed Seattle’s live-and-let-live, gay-friendly, kink-friendly politically correct individualism, the dailies responded by talking up suburb-ready, livable safe streets, “what will we teach our children” safer-sex politically correct collectivism.

No one knew what role anyone else played along the continuum represented by the four papers (nevermind the wild edginess of the anarchosocialist rags that littered the free boxes with names like Eat the State and Gay City), even in a place like Under the Stairs. Nathan suspected that most Seattleites didn’t know where they themselves fell on that spectrum at any given moment until they opened their mouths and voiced an opinion. Once voiced, they tended to hew to it with surprising stubbornness, even knowing that tomorrow they might feel different. As a result, Seattleites tended to be reserved, even chilly, when facing a stranger.

Probably not an original observation about my city, but I’ve never seen it quite worded that way, nor put quite so at the feet of Dan Savage and Jim Veseley.