Friday, August 22, 2014

The Clock Book

While editing Chronopticus Rising, I've started to nickname the book "The Clock Book". There are lots of clocks in the novel, references to time, and attempts by some of the characters to see into the future. I originally had more elaborate designs for the structure of the book, but with everything else going on structurally in the series, I figured I'll save those ideas for another project down the road. Some of the clock references are a little over-the-top, as in, Batman television series "Clock King" type silliness, but considering the gravity of the rest of the story, a little levity was needed.

At the heart of this story is a device that was introduced at the end of the second book, Ionotatron. It is an "all seeing time machine" that its owner claims can see forward and backwards through time (without the use of "precogs" like you find in The Minority Report). More than that, its capabilities are then used to round up potential threats to the stability of the city. In this story, that ends being Christians and some other religious minorities.

This leads to a few important questions.

One, if someone could build a machine that tracks and records all human action, speech, and activity patterns, could they really build an algorithm to predict the future based on that data? Second, would persecution naturally follow as a result of the access to such power? Third, and this comes from an imprisoned mathematician in the story, is sin a fractal? As in, do all types of sin essentially come down to rebellion against God...no matter what the scale? These questions (and others) underpin the entire series.

In regards to the series, in the next week or so the epub versions of Fractal Standard Time and Ionotatron will become available. I expect the third book to be done sometime before November, along with a short story or two.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Four

Just a brief update today.

Over the coming months, I'll be uploading several new works, all of which are in various stages of production as I write this. The short list includes four major works: Chronopticus Rising (Part III of the Chronopticus trilogy), Race the Sky (a standalone novel), The Tesseract Rose (now a standalone novel), and an unnamed short story collection. A short work that will also be coming soon will be titled, "Fermat's Last Theorem of Robotics". This story will be probably be an Amazon Kindle release for the first few months before being made available elsewhere.

I also have several more articles written and to be written that I will post as I get time. If that is not enough, epub versions of Fractal Standard Time and Ionotatron should be made available online in two weeks at Lulu, iTunes, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.