Invocation is now available free under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND-BA-BA-BOP-SKI-BI-WA-BOP 4.0.
.MOBI for Kindle
.PDF
... or a paperback (UK/US)
Also: the REGENDERED REMIX.
The publisher, CRITICAL DOCUMENTS.
"If JG Ballard had written an Enid Blyton girl's own adventure on Facebook under the influence of mind-altering drugs, he might have ended up with something like Invocation. Or maybe not. Jo L Walton's hallucinatory anti-fantasy fantasy is a kind of Harry Potter for the Contemporary Poet, a neurological black comedy, a Clockwork Orange for the 21st century, a satire in which contemporary Britain dissolves in the acids of the hyperreal, a paranoid critique, a nonsense that constantly threatens an ambush by alarming lucidity. Being like everything, it's not like anything else. 'Anything that is unlike anything else is sad,' says one of Walton's uncharacters. Maybe. But in this case, it's also perilously funny. Did I say it was gloriously written? Perhaps that's how Walton gets away with it. I'm awaiting the final instalment with pleasurable trepidation."
— Alison Croggon
". . . a hyperreal comic thriller and, I’m pretty sure, one of the most urgent, smart and exciting fictional projects of the moment . . ."
— Colin Herd, 3am Magazine
Saturday, June 7, 2014
Thursday, June 5, 2014
All in a Day's Play
I've uploaded two scraps of a paper-in-progress to academia.edu.
Are there any games in game theory?
Work Without Toil
The second one is really about trying to define gamification -- define it in a way that doesn't take the concept of a game for granted, a way that doesn't commit you to believing all that stuff about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (unless you want to), and in a way that accommodates obvious examples of gamification like Khan Academy, but also just about includes non-digital stuff -- basic labour movement accomplishments (eight hour working day, health and safety), improvised coping mechanisms that are pretty much all in the head (like smooshed up mountaineer Joe Simpson's heroically disciplinary descent).
Are there any games in game theory?
Work Without Toil
The second one is really about trying to define gamification -- define it in a way that doesn't take the concept of a game for granted, a way that doesn't commit you to believing all that stuff about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (unless you want to), and in a way that accommodates obvious examples of gamification like Khan Academy, but also just about includes non-digital stuff -- basic labour movement accomplishments (eight hour working day, health and safety), improvised coping mechanisms that are pretty much all in the head (like smooshed up mountaineer Joe Simpson's heroically disciplinary descent).
Monday, May 12, 2014
May: Executive Summary
Some recent posts:
- Imagining collaborative online publishing
- What it's like following thousands of people on Twitter (and what it could be like)
- An extract (ballad), and another (city scene) from a SF work-in-progress
- A short review of Ian Sales's Adrift on the Sea of Rains
- A draft list of all the named characters in Invocation, for inclusion in the second edition
- Invocation: the regendered remix. (The original Invocation is still available as a cheap-as-chips ebook; a new print edition should be out soonish, and a free digital edition eventually)
Online collaborative publishing
Sometimes you sit on the floor covered in ink and staples. Sometimes you email a file to a copyshop and turn up a week later to carry a box of books too heavy for humans to carry. Sometimes you use Lulu or CreateSpace or Lightning Source or the ship replicators.
Anyway, there are choices to make and conversations to have along the way, and at the end of it, hopefully, are some people reading some books.
We are still living through an era of experiments into the possibilities of online crowds and the IRL populations attached to them. We have Wikipedia. We have TaskRabbit and we have Tinder (or they have us).
In some respects, the book has been a major locus of such transformative energies. You know the stuff: the rise of the ebook, of print-on-demand, the transformation of vanity and boutique publishing into indie authorship, the spillover of authorship onto online platforms, various ginormous digitisation projects, crowdfunding patronage, a few intriguing examples of automated authorship and/or publication.
But in other respects, books have yet to receive the full "online collaborative production" treatment (see note 1). There is no online tool which breaks down book production, at a very fine grain, into its various stakeholders and their various capacities and rapacious desires.
Maybe things will stay that way, and maybe it's great that they will.
But, as usual, I'm going to imagine what it could be like if things were to change. (Part of what's interesting about this is extrapolating to production more generally. But I'll stick with publishing, for now anyway).
The Future of Publishing (or whatever)
(1) First the lite version. Imagine you've seen a link; you've taken the bait; you've logged in.
Now you're on the Project Page, where you are invited to participate: as an author, a chief editor, a slushpile reader, a fan, a designer, a typesetter, a copyeditor, a proofreader, a reviewer, a printer, a publicist, a reader, as something else, as several or all of the above. You also have capacity to invite people in your networks onto the project, in a particular capacity if you like.
Maybe some of these options are greyed out. For simplicity, let's say the project is a short story anthology, and you're invited to contribute either as a reader or as an author.
Selecting these options opens an array of other options. If you come in as a reader, you can pledge money, and in return of course you'll get your copy or copies (and perhaps you'll get your Unbound/Kickstarter-style prizes: a signed limited edition, a few pages of the handwritten MS, a freshly-worn item of authorial garb, etc.).
But now it gets interesting. Designers and coaxers have been crafty, so you also get a say in what the book might contain, its format and appearance, its production timescale, etc. I picture there being slider bars: you don't pledge an amount, you pledge a spread.
If you like, you tick a bunch of "nice to have" boxes, and perhaps arrange them in some kind of order of priority. If production goes ahead in a way which conforms closely to your preferences, you'll pay near the top of the spread. If it wasn't quite what you're looking for, you'll pay the cheaper price. That part of the display might be a bit like this:
. . . only different. Everything is accompanied by fruitful bloopy noises, making quantifying and tinkering your consumer preferences, whilst sporting the mingled air of financier, impresario and artistic genius, entirely irresistible.
An "advanced" tab allows you to create preference dependency trees and weight and interrelate your preferences in complex ways. The realm of professional and quasi-professional intermediaries and their bots, perhaps, looking for a way to scoop a few cents out of the process.
In the "advanced" tab you're also exercising your discretion over the project as a whole. Perhaps it is important to you not merely that you get a particular object in the post, but that said object makes a bid for a particular cultural standing: in other words, it's important to you that a certain print run is established, that certain distribution channels are used, and so on. You don't want a book nobody else has read.
What about prospective authors? There's a similar glittering control panel awaiting them. The key dynamic to be captured here is risk (see note 2) and return. What texts and what rights to them are you offering? What value are you placing on editorial feedback, or on receiving reviews or scholarly commentary, or having your work illustrated or responded to in some other way? How many copies of your text do you want to be out there in the world? What royalties are you looking for? Are you willing to support the project financially, or do you perhaps expect upfront financial compensation? Set your sliders and pray for the best!
Obviously, any stakeholder can originate a project: it might be a prospective reader who has a very OTM hankering. Quasi-divine editors and authors may vie to realise the vision implicit in that prospective reader's pang. The site constantly analyses the pledges and preferences of the various stakeholders, trying to figure out a form in which the project can go ahead.
Any function can also subsidise or tax any other function. For instance, as an author, using a bolt-on third party app, your Goodreads tastes could be reflected in the kinds of bids you offer: you automatically reduce the royalties / advances you require, or increase the backing you offer, whenever you might appear alongside your literary heroes. Or you may be willing to sign up to write a certain something on the proviso that a specific person signs up to read it. Or your willingness to write a review may give you a free book and/or influence in the project, unlocking funding streams from other stakeholders' author and editor tabs.
Perhaps the editorial function, rather than accepting or rejecting submissions outright, involves -- that's right -- another slider. You, obscure author, have submitted your terrible story to this high-profile anthology of luminaries, all of them writing at the top of their game. It's not that you've been rejected exactly. It's just that, well, you'd need to be supporting the project to the tune of $20,000 before the effect of your terrible writing and your vague face can be balanced out.
There arise some interesting questions about transparency. Are such editorial rankings public? Are author financial contributions public?
Perhaps the whole system is integrated into a collaborative desktop publishing system too: InDesign meets Google Docs.
(2) Let's take this a little further. In trying to fit a project to a variety of preferences, there's an issue about how bespoke these books should be able to be. A funding threshold may be reached more quickly if multiple versions are produced: reader bloc A wants cover A, reader bloc B wants cover B, so why not make both? If you want to print an anthology of the year's best genre fiction, why not give every reader an anthology of their personal favourite genre authors? Where do we draw the line between a book which exists in several different versions, and a whole range of diverse objects that are grouped together primarily by the finance which underpins them?
There are centripetal and centrifugal forces, and these will partly be expressed in the positions taken by various stakeholders. For instance, an author may set a minimum print run thresholds. They may not be satisfied to have their work dribble out in two copies here, three copies there. A critic or a reviewer also needs a copy of a book which is materially similar to somebody else's copy. So does a fan, in fact! Perhaps the fan stakeholder is partly distinguished from the reader stakeholder insofar as the fan wants a social experience: it's important to the fan that these books don't get too bespoke.
Perhaps there's even an overall slider for project homogeneity per se, that is, a slider for acceptable levels of diffusion from Platonic essence to family resemblance. Interesting questions arise for librarians.
But then again ... we're getting used to the highly bespoke -- or at least highly individuated -- interlaced palimpsests of Twitter and Facebook. Maybe it's enough that we read the same authors, or feeds, or brands, to satisfy the desire to feel part of something larger. Maybe we don't need to also read the same books, or to back the same projects.
So maybe the idea of the "project" can go out the window. And what can come in the window is an Amazon drone bearing an "anthology," in a codex print run of two, that contains two stories by two authors you like, plus another story by an author your neighbour likes (your neighbour just got the other half of the print run), plus another story by a self-appointed (and self-funded) up-and-coming author convinced they're about to hook you, plus a whole bunch of spam and marketing and advertising and stuff, some of it disguised as other stories.
Of course, you are more discerning. You require an originator, a custodian. You would never give your attention, let alone your financial support, to that kind of cheap algorithmic palimpsest, whose entire existence is owed to its mariginal economic feasibility, whose totality has never been sanctioned by human eyes, hands, hearts.
Don't worry, there's a slider for you too.
Note 1: In some ways, "collaborative" is a misnomer, because it carries implications of getting to know your collaborators, working through differences together, persuading your collaborators or allowing yourself to be persuaded, reaching compromises or transcending problems, building solidarity, trust and respect, etc. The kinds of online environments I'm thinking of typically try to minimise this kind of collaboration; they let people collectively contribute to a project without collaborating in the sense just described. They are liberalisations more than democratizations. They develop a particular kind of rule of law which helps to orient liberalised behaviour towards a particular task, architecturally imposing a particular kind of wisdom on the flow of the crowd. They have a close relationship with gamification. Often numerical reputation / experience rankings substitute for more intuitive, informal patterns of trust and obligation. The system outlined above certain implies this Top Trumps reductivism. While the deck of authors, critics, reviewers, editors etc. must of course evolve automatically, I nominate myself to establish the seed values.
Note 2: On some projects, all sales may be advance subscriptions, and opportunities for investment may be negligible. On other projects, financial support could be conditional on opportunities for financial return. Here's one possible model, a kind of tiered structure establishing priority in dividends. Say there are four tiers of investor. Profits are split 50% / 25% / 12.5% / 12.5% until all platinum investors have recouped their costs. Profits are then split 12.5% / 50% / 25% / 12.5% until all gold investors have recouped their costs (although this may have already happened, of course). Profits are then split 12.5% / 12.5% / 50% / 25% until all silver investors have recouped their costs; profits are then split 12.5% / 12.5% / 12.5% / 82.5% until all investors have recouped their costs. Profits thereafter are split in proportion to the amount pledged, and are no longer weighted according to the tiered investment levels. (See note 3). You might set your sliders to specify that you'd be willing to pledge $100 as a platinum level investor, $75 as a gold level investor, $50 as a silver investor, or $25 as a bronze investor.
Note 3: Alternative. There could be a fancier incentive structure, involving reversing the weighting once all investments have been recouped: say, 50% / 75% / 125% / 150% (multiplied of course by the amount you've pledged). So platinum investors recoup their investment more quickly but make less the project proves long-term profitable. Bronze investors risk losing everything, but start to make more serious money once everyone has been paid off. (Under such a system the tiers should probably be labeled differently: bronze just doesn't do justice to the kind of sexy book gambler you are).
Anyway, there are choices to make and conversations to have along the way, and at the end of it, hopefully, are some people reading some books.
We are still living through an era of experiments into the possibilities of online crowds and the IRL populations attached to them. We have Wikipedia. We have TaskRabbit and we have Tinder (or they have us).
In some respects, the book has been a major locus of such transformative energies. You know the stuff: the rise of the ebook, of print-on-demand, the transformation of vanity and boutique publishing into indie authorship, the spillover of authorship onto online platforms, various ginormous digitisation projects, crowdfunding patronage, a few intriguing examples of automated authorship and/or publication.
But in other respects, books have yet to receive the full "online collaborative production" treatment (see note 1). There is no online tool which breaks down book production, at a very fine grain, into its various stakeholders and their various capacities and rapacious desires.
Maybe things will stay that way, and maybe it's great that they will.
But, as usual, I'm going to imagine what it could be like if things were to change. (Part of what's interesting about this is extrapolating to production more generally. But I'll stick with publishing, for now anyway).
The Future of Publishing (or whatever)
(1) First the lite version. Imagine you've seen a link; you've taken the bait; you've logged in.
Now you're on the Project Page, where you are invited to participate: as an author, a chief editor, a slushpile reader, a fan, a designer, a typesetter, a copyeditor, a proofreader, a reviewer, a printer, a publicist, a reader, as something else, as several or all of the above. You also have capacity to invite people in your networks onto the project, in a particular capacity if you like.
Maybe some of these options are greyed out. For simplicity, let's say the project is a short story anthology, and you're invited to contribute either as a reader or as an author.
Selecting these options opens an array of other options. If you come in as a reader, you can pledge money, and in return of course you'll get your copy or copies (and perhaps you'll get your Unbound/Kickstarter-style prizes: a signed limited edition, a few pages of the handwritten MS, a freshly-worn item of authorial garb, etc.).
But now it gets interesting. Designers and coaxers have been crafty, so you also get a say in what the book might contain, its format and appearance, its production timescale, etc. I picture there being slider bars: you don't pledge an amount, you pledge a spread.
If you like, you tick a bunch of "nice to have" boxes, and perhaps arrange them in some kind of order of priority. If production goes ahead in a way which conforms closely to your preferences, you'll pay near the top of the spread. If it wasn't quite what you're looking for, you'll pay the cheaper price. That part of the display might be a bit like this:
. . . only different. Everything is accompanied by fruitful bloopy noises, making quantifying and tinkering your consumer preferences, whilst sporting the mingled air of financier, impresario and artistic genius, entirely irresistible.
An "advanced" tab allows you to create preference dependency trees and weight and interrelate your preferences in complex ways. The realm of professional and quasi-professional intermediaries and their bots, perhaps, looking for a way to scoop a few cents out of the process.
In the "advanced" tab you're also exercising your discretion over the project as a whole. Perhaps it is important to you not merely that you get a particular object in the post, but that said object makes a bid for a particular cultural standing: in other words, it's important to you that a certain print run is established, that certain distribution channels are used, and so on. You don't want a book nobody else has read.
What about prospective authors? There's a similar glittering control panel awaiting them. The key dynamic to be captured here is risk (see note 2) and return. What texts and what rights to them are you offering? What value are you placing on editorial feedback, or on receiving reviews or scholarly commentary, or having your work illustrated or responded to in some other way? How many copies of your text do you want to be out there in the world? What royalties are you looking for? Are you willing to support the project financially, or do you perhaps expect upfront financial compensation? Set your sliders and pray for the best!
Obviously, any stakeholder can originate a project: it might be a prospective reader who has a very OTM hankering. Quasi-divine editors and authors may vie to realise the vision implicit in that prospective reader's pang. The site constantly analyses the pledges and preferences of the various stakeholders, trying to figure out a form in which the project can go ahead.
Any function can also subsidise or tax any other function. For instance, as an author, using a bolt-on third party app, your Goodreads tastes could be reflected in the kinds of bids you offer: you automatically reduce the royalties / advances you require, or increase the backing you offer, whenever you might appear alongside your literary heroes. Or you may be willing to sign up to write a certain something on the proviso that a specific person signs up to read it. Or your willingness to write a review may give you a free book and/or influence in the project, unlocking funding streams from other stakeholders' author and editor tabs.
Perhaps the editorial function, rather than accepting or rejecting submissions outright, involves -- that's right -- another slider. You, obscure author, have submitted your terrible story to this high-profile anthology of luminaries, all of them writing at the top of their game. It's not that you've been rejected exactly. It's just that, well, you'd need to be supporting the project to the tune of $20,000 before the effect of your terrible writing and your vague face can be balanced out.
There arise some interesting questions about transparency. Are such editorial rankings public? Are author financial contributions public?
Perhaps the whole system is integrated into a collaborative desktop publishing system too: InDesign meets Google Docs.
(2) Let's take this a little further. In trying to fit a project to a variety of preferences, there's an issue about how bespoke these books should be able to be. A funding threshold may be reached more quickly if multiple versions are produced: reader bloc A wants cover A, reader bloc B wants cover B, so why not make both? If you want to print an anthology of the year's best genre fiction, why not give every reader an anthology of their personal favourite genre authors? Where do we draw the line between a book which exists in several different versions, and a whole range of diverse objects that are grouped together primarily by the finance which underpins them?
There are centripetal and centrifugal forces, and these will partly be expressed in the positions taken by various stakeholders. For instance, an author may set a minimum print run thresholds. They may not be satisfied to have their work dribble out in two copies here, three copies there. A critic or a reviewer also needs a copy of a book which is materially similar to somebody else's copy. So does a fan, in fact! Perhaps the fan stakeholder is partly distinguished from the reader stakeholder insofar as the fan wants a social experience: it's important to the fan that these books don't get too bespoke.
Perhaps there's even an overall slider for project homogeneity per se, that is, a slider for acceptable levels of diffusion from Platonic essence to family resemblance. Interesting questions arise for librarians.
But then again ... we're getting used to the highly bespoke -- or at least highly individuated -- interlaced palimpsests of Twitter and Facebook. Maybe it's enough that we read the same authors, or feeds, or brands, to satisfy the desire to feel part of something larger. Maybe we don't need to also read the same books, or to back the same projects.
So maybe the idea of the "project" can go out the window. And what can come in the window is an Amazon drone bearing an "anthology," in a codex print run of two, that contains two stories by two authors you like, plus another story by an author your neighbour likes (your neighbour just got the other half of the print run), plus another story by a self-appointed (and self-funded) up-and-coming author convinced they're about to hook you, plus a whole bunch of spam and marketing and advertising and stuff, some of it disguised as other stories.
Of course, you are more discerning. You require an originator, a custodian. You would never give your attention, let alone your financial support, to that kind of cheap algorithmic palimpsest, whose entire existence is owed to its mariginal economic feasibility, whose totality has never been sanctioned by human eyes, hands, hearts.
Don't worry, there's a slider for you too.
*
Note 1: In some ways, "collaborative" is a misnomer, because it carries implications of getting to know your collaborators, working through differences together, persuading your collaborators or allowing yourself to be persuaded, reaching compromises or transcending problems, building solidarity, trust and respect, etc. The kinds of online environments I'm thinking of typically try to minimise this kind of collaboration; they let people collectively contribute to a project without collaborating in the sense just described. They are liberalisations more than democratizations. They develop a particular kind of rule of law which helps to orient liberalised behaviour towards a particular task, architecturally imposing a particular kind of wisdom on the flow of the crowd. They have a close relationship with gamification. Often numerical reputation / experience rankings substitute for more intuitive, informal patterns of trust and obligation. The system outlined above certain implies this Top Trumps reductivism. While the deck of authors, critics, reviewers, editors etc. must of course evolve automatically, I nominate myself to establish the seed values.
Note 2: On some projects, all sales may be advance subscriptions, and opportunities for investment may be negligible. On other projects, financial support could be conditional on opportunities for financial return. Here's one possible model, a kind of tiered structure establishing priority in dividends. Say there are four tiers of investor. Profits are split 50% / 25% / 12.5% / 12.5% until all platinum investors have recouped their costs. Profits are then split 12.5% / 50% / 25% / 12.5% until all gold investors have recouped their costs (although this may have already happened, of course). Profits are then split 12.5% / 12.5% / 50% / 25% until all silver investors have recouped their costs; profits are then split 12.5% / 12.5% / 12.5% / 82.5% until all investors have recouped their costs. Profits thereafter are split in proportion to the amount pledged, and are no longer weighted according to the tiered investment levels. (See note 3). You might set your sliders to specify that you'd be willing to pledge $100 as a platinum level investor, $75 as a gold level investor, $50 as a silver investor, or $25 as a bronze investor.
Note 3: Alternative. There could be a fancier incentive structure, involving reversing the weighting once all investments have been recouped: say, 50% / 75% / 125% / 150% (multiplied of course by the amount you've pledged). So platinum investors recoup their investment more quickly but make less the project proves long-term profitable. Bronze investors risk losing everything, but start to make more serious money once everyone has been paid off. (Under such a system the tiers should probably be labeled differently: bronze just doesn't do justice to the kind of sexy book gambler you are).
Friday, May 9, 2014
Invocation: Dramatis Personae
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Contains spoilers. All the spoilers. Pretty much the whole plot.
Achelois. AKA Ache. Veil touchless muse. Wounded by Jasper Robin during the raid on Veil HQ.
Adika. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School.
Aglet. Veil [caster] muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Akifemwe, Patrick. AKA Paddy. Close friend of Myfanwy. Blazon muse. Chancelhouse callsong Merlin, Veil callsong Fisher King.
Ameonna. Veil [caster] muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Anu. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School.
Asphyxia Noir. Veil [caster] muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Atë. Chancelhouse caster muse.
Bee. Chancelhouse caster muse, loyal to Jasper Robin. Borrowed Moth’s havering talent for the raid on Veil HQ.
Bigwig. Veil [skiller] muse.
Bit. Chancelhouse [caster] muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Black, Sophie. Chancelhouse callsong Melpomene. One of the nine Apollonian elder muses in the first era of Chancelhouse. Sophie Black fled Scotland following the Chancelhouse-Veil split, and was hunted down and killed by Jasper Robin. Blake claimed, untruthfully, that Sophie was the sitter for the portrait in the Chancelhouse library.
Blake. See Quaker, Haduken.
Brocken. Veil decrypt muse. Non-canon.
Buckerton, Simon. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School. Currently the first boy Myfanwy ever kissed.
Bullock, Simedelay. AKA Simi. Callsong Aoide. Arch-Chancellor, Master Mystagogue, Head of Development, Chair of Senatus Acadetmicus, and High Balneator of Chancelhouse. Co-convener, with Blake, of the Chancelhouse All-Ball Tournament. Before the Chancelhouse-Veil split, Aoide was one of the three Boeotian elder muses, along with Meletē and the first Mnemosyne. A lifelong friend of Blake.
Caddy. Chancelhouse caster muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Calliope. One of the nine Apollonian elder muses in the first era of Chancelhouse. She left Chancelhouse and founded Veil, adopting the callsong Germ. She remains the closest Veil comes to having a leader. Originally a mirror muse, she has collected many muse talents.
Cameron, Sarah. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School.
Cithara. Veil muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Clio. AKA Chloe. Close friend to Genevieve Blake. One of the nine Apollonian elder muses in the first era of Chancelhouse. Killed shortly before Chancelhouse-Veil split.
Clone. Veil mirror.
Copycat. Veil mirror.
Cracks. See Yuri.
Cria. Veil muse. A close friend of Scan. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Cricetid. Chancelhouse caster muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Cricket. Veil doolittle muse. It is likely that she and/or Not Cricket convened the flock which attacked Kitty’s rescue party on the beach near Veil HQ.
Croque, Francis. Celebrated Edinburgh-based author.
Crypt. Veil shrouder muse.
Cui. Veil muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Dopple. Veil mirror muse.
Dora JayJay. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School.
Down. Veil [taker-driver] muse.
Drago-Ferrante, Tamara. AKA Mara. Before the founding of Chancelhouse she was a friend of Blake. She was one of the nine Apollinian elder muses in the first era of Chancelhouse, under the callsong Polyhymnia. Following the Chancelhouse-Veil split she joined Veil, adopting the callsong Gaga. She lost her caster talent to Kitty. It was later passed through several muses, embedded in Kitty’s Hegemony Dog, finally winding up with Tallulah. It is unknown whether she has acquired a replacement caster talent, although one of Myfanwy’s comments seems to assume that she has.
Dribble. Veil caster muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Eft. Chancelhouse dryad muse. Shared a corridor with Myfanwy and Kitty.
Egg. See Quaker, Haduken.
Enenra. Veil caster muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Erato. AKA Toby. Caster muse. One of the nine Apollonian elder muses in the first era of Chancelhouse. Fled after the Chancelhouse-Veil split. Whereabouts unknown.
Erinaceine. Veil muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Esi. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School.
Esterhase, Catherine. AKA Kitty. Chancelhouse callsong Nessus. Also briefly went by Anastasia von Enigmengera. Before learning to develop her own, perhaps innate, patterner talent, she acquired a caster talent from Tamara Drago-Ferrante.
Euterpe. See Tar.
Fairfax, Sid. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School. In Myfanwy’s A-Level art class. Friend of Kevin Thomas.
Farmer, Dorothy. Veil muse, callsong Foreigner. A close friend of Scan. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Fisher King. See Akifemwe, Patrick.
Fletcher, Corina. Police officer. Responsible for the death of the activist Molly Miller during the eviction of Bridge Croft.
Flux. Cat. Friend of Rook.
Fontleroy, Detective Inspector. Police officer who tried to interview Myfanwy about Jasper Robin's attempted murder of Mara Drago-Ferrante.
Frances. Friend of Kitty Esterhase.
Frog. Chancelhouse caster muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Gaga. See Drago-Ferrante, Tamara.
Geist. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Gid. Veil muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Glass. Veil mirror muse.
Golem. Chancelhouse driver muse.
Grimalkin. Chancelhouse cloister muse. Shared a corridor with Myfanwy and Kitty. Previously worked in Haduken Blake’s bindery.
Haecceity. Veil [haverer] muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Heptapora. Veil touchless muse.
Hick. Veil [doolittle-caster] muse.
Horae. Chancelhouse cutter muse.
Hypnos. Chancelhouse caster muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Jamie. Cloister muse. Chancelhouse callsong Triffid, Veil callsong Ghoul. Arrived at Chancelhouse not long before Myfanwy and Kitty. Besides Yuri, he was the only Chancelhouse muse known to have known that a conspiracy existed between Blake and Germ.
Jemima. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School. Member of a clique called the Cool Kids AKA the Asians.
Kaiou. Veil caster muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Kermitcrab. Chancelhouse caster muse.
Kojo. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School.
Ladybird. Veil mirror muse.
Lake, Stacy. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School. In Myfanwy’s A-Level art class.
Lap. Chancelhouse caster muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Leech. Veil taker muse.
Lego. Chancelhouse cloister muse.
Lucia. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School. Member of a clique dubbed the Cool Kids or the Asians. Myfanwy has semi-deliberate difficulty remembering her name, thinking of her as Lucinda, Lala, Logan, Cecil, Samphire and Lucy.
MacAonghas, Professor. Kitty’s therapist.
Macleod, Abbas. Veil callsong Vertical. As Thalia, he was one of the nine Apollonian elder muses in the first era of Chancelhouse. Originally a skiller muse. It is possible he has now acquired a doolittle talent: Meletē theorised that he has absorbed significant beast skills.
Mara. See Drago-Ferrante, Tamara.
Marcus. Veil callsong Engrailed. Self-taught muse with skiller and other capabilities. Lends his skateboard to Jasper Robin and his ability to skate to Myfanwy.
Marienbad, Duke. See Quaker, Haduken.
Marinade. See Yuri.
Meletē. A skiller muse. Praetor and Chief Arms Officer at Chancelhouse. Before the Chancelhouse-Veil split, Meletē was one of the three Boeotian elder muses, along with Aoide and the first Mnemosyne.
Melpomeme. Callsong used by approximately two different muses. See Morris, Myfanwy and Black, Sophie.
Merely-Pointy, Valerie. AKA MP. Art teacher at St Jerome’s Senior School.
Merlin. See Akifemwe, Patrick.
Metis. Veil muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Miller, Molly. Activist, killed during an action at Bridge Croft to resist the eviction of a community of travelers.
Mimesis. Veil mirror muse.
Mnemosyne. Callsong used by approximately two different muses. See Morris, Myfanwy and Quaker, Genevieve.
Moo. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School.
Morris, Myfanwy. Caster muse. AKA Myffy, Myffed, Mnemosyne, Melpomeme, Poem.
Morris, Peter. Myfanwy’s father.
Moth. Chancelhouse haverer muse. Arrived at Chancelhouse not long before Myfanwy and Kitty. Lent her talent to Bee during the raid on Veil HQ.
Namond. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School.
Neilo. Chancelhouse caster muse.
Not Cricket. Veil doolittle-caster muse. It is likely that she and/or Cricket convened the flock which attacked Kitty’s rescue party on the beach near Veil HQ.
Nova. Chancelhouse caster muse.
Oni. Veil caster muse.
Oscar. Close friend of Jasper Robin and Genevieve Blake. Previously a worker in Haduken Quaker’s bindery. Present at Bridge Croft. Later swapped bodies with Jasper Robin. Killed by Static during Operation Terpsichore.
Ouzo. Chancelhouse skiller-taker muse.
Paddy. See Akifemwe, Patrick.
Pest. Veil [cloister] muse. Wounded by Jasper Robin during the raid on Veil HQ.
Phan, Bella. A person invented by Haduken Blake. Supposedly the daughter of Mrs Phan.
Phan, Mrs. A person invented by Haduken Blake. Supposedly a neighbour of Chancelhouse.
Polyhymnia. See Drago-Ferrante, Tamara.
Porteous, Lewis. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School. Briefly the boyfriend of Kitty.
Puck. Chancelhouse dryad muse.
Quaker, Genevieve. Fountainhead muse. Chancelhouse callsong Mnemosyne. Daughter of Haduken Quaker. In the first era of Chancelhouse, she was one of the three Boeotian elder muses, along with Aoide and Meletē. Static and Paddy theorised that the first muse in this world may have been the accidental recipient of a hypothetical master taker talent, soon complemented by a master caster talent.
Quaker, Haduken. AKA Blake AKA Duke Marienbad. Founder of Chancelhouse. Father of Genevieve Quaker. Adopted the name Haduken Blake and the callsong Zeus during the first era of Chancelhouse. Following the Chancelhouse-Veil split he changed his Chancelhouse callsong to Seuss. Later he adopted the Veil callsong Egg. Currently occupying the body that was once Yuri’s, whereabouts unknown.
Robin, Jasper. Worker in Haduken Quaker’s bindery. Lover of Genevieve Quaker and Myfanwy Morris. As Terpsichore, he was one of the nine Apollonian elder muses in the first era of Chancelhouse. Also adopted the name Martin Forjacks as a brief and unsuccessful disguise.
Romanoff, Susan. Veil muse, callsong Season. Close friend of Scan. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Rook. Chancelhouse doolittle-caster muse. Several times champion of the Chancelhouse Annual Murder Game.
Rune. Veil muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Scan. Veil blazon muse. Scan was Paddy’s main point of contact within Veil. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Sean. Friend of Kitty Esterhase.
Sequin. Veil caster muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Session. Veil skiller muse. Wounded by Jasper Robin during the raid on Veil HQ.
Seuss. See Quaker, Haduken.
Snow. Veil muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Souphanouvong, Umberto. Taker muse. Chancelhouse callsong Urania. Friend of Blake before the founding of Chancelhouse. One of the nine Apollonian elder muses in the first era of Chancelhouse. Together with Calliope, he founded Veil, adopting the callsong Undine.
Squab. Veil muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Static. Chancelhouse caster muse.
Struct. Veil caster muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Surd. Veil cutter muse.
Surfeit. Veil muse. Whereabouts unknown, perhaps killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Swat. Veil muse. A close friend of Scan. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Sylph. Chancelhouse caster muse.
Tallulah. AKA Looly. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School. Member of a clique dubbed the Cool Kids or the Asians. In Myfanwy’s art class. Wore snails at Kitty’s eighteenth birthday party. Acquired a muse talent and adopted the callsong Tall Order.
Tapas. Veil cutter muse.
Tar. Chancelhouse callsong Euterpe. Tar is a shortening and corruption of Euterpe. She was a friend of Blake before the founding of Chancelhouse. In the first era of Chancelhouse, as Euterpe, she was one of the nine Apollonian elder muses. Following the Chancelhouse-Veil split, she was less centrally involved in Chancelhouse affairs than Blake, Aoide, and Meletē, and gradually became regarded as only an honorary elder. Co-convener, with Blake, of the Chancelhouse Annual Murder Game.
Tase. Chancelhouse haverer muse.
Tax. Veil muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Tea. Veil caster muse.
Te-No-Me. Veil muse. A close friend of Scan. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Thomas, Kevin. Pupil at St Jerome’s Senior School.
Thorn. Chancelhouse driver muse.
Toal. Friend of Kitty Esterhase.
Triceratops. AKA Trice. Chancelhouse cutter muse. In pre-Chancelhouse days he worked in Blake’s bindery.
Triffid. See Jamie.
Turturle. Chancelhouse caster muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Undine. See Souphanouvong, Umberto.
Vaguerat. Veil muse. Killed in the Chancelhouse-Veil purges.
Veitch. Police officer. Constable at the time of the Bridge Croft eviction, risen to Inspector when encountered by Myfanwy. Veitch testified in the trial of Sergeant Corina Fletcher. Despite absorbing Genevieve’s eye-witness memory of the event, Veitch refused to implicate Sergeant Fletcher in Molly Miller’s death.
Yuri. Chancelhouse callsong Marinade. Veil callsong Cracks. Secret Personal Assistant to Haduken Blake. Shrouder muse, posing as a taker muse as per Blake’s instruction.
Zeus. See Quaker, Haduken.
I've drafted this appendix some time after writing the book. It should go in the second edition but I'm a bit scared. If anyone notices any mistakes, there could be some kind of prize.
Friday, May 2, 2014
Followback indies
Quick summary: the way Twitter works, following someone doesn't mean you'll see their tweets. It means that there's a chance you will see their tweets, a chance which grows smaller the more people you follow. But we could imagine various alternative systems, where the principle of chance is replaced by (or hybridised with) the principle of taking turns. I'm focusing on Twitter in this post, but I'm intrigued by extrapolations across other social media platforms. Facebook certainly uses some kind of popularity algorithm to keep certain posts near the top; what if social media were to introduce (and apologies for this mock heroic terminology, but) a principle of social justice into the attention economy?
I'm one of those followback indie writers.
On Twitter, when I follow someone, I'm usually hoping they'll follow back. When I'm eyeballing someone for a possible unfollow, I put a lot of weight on whether they're following me. It doesn't count for everything, but it counts for a lot.
Our plumage is very distinctive. The number of people we follow, and the number of people who follow us, are similar numbers. On close examination, that's because they're mostly the same people. We typically follow, and are followed by, a few thousand accounts.
Ensconcing myself in this followback flock has been a function of a certain kind of online behaviour over time. Your number of followers has more to do with who you do or don't follow than with what you do or don't tweet. This grind could have happened very gradually and entirely manually, or it could have been fully automated, but in my case it's happening fairly slowly, mostly manually, but with sporadic help from bolt-on bells and whistles. Sometimes it's a bit embarrassing. But mostly I just radiate weird swarm node pride.
Why do we act so strangely? Well, we have our reasons. Or at least I have mine. Exploring those reasons is not really the purpose of this post. But in short, joining the followback flock is not primarily about sharking up a vast host of fiercely loyal Twitter accounts with lust for blood in their eyes. It's not about treating a follower count as a game stat with a transparent meaning. It's not even about participating in a community or building an audience.
It is sort of about building a public from which audiences might be drawn. It is sort of about building a public in which little mutually attentive cohorts and gaggles may temporarily coalesce, and the most tenaciously recurring of those could just about be called little communities. And nested within that is some personal digital sociality and even a few weird Twitter friendships (?), although the infrastructure for those is really biological memory -- Twitter is not (unlike Facebook) bursting with digital aides memoire; it's not like the guy whose job it is to murmur in a politician's ear how they're supposed to know the people around them. But for the most part, in this way of using Twitter, a "follow" is just not a big deal -- it's a tentative, minimal contact on which other things might be built, probably only intermittently -- and reciprocity seems like an okay norm to attach to it.
In short, following thousands of people is more a microblogging thing than a social networking thing -- it's probably good not to get too invested in it either: at any time a tweak in the Twitter architecture might mangle those microblogging aspirations (in a way I suspect the Mute function is already doing this).
I hope that's all true. If you were to translate followback indie writer behaviour to IRL it might look pretty obscene -- so fingers crossed something was lost in the translation.
Obviously it's also swell to do the social networking thing instead of the microblogging thing. And in practice the two get very blurred and tangled.
But!
The real purpose of this post is to talk about what it's like to follow so many people, and imagine an app which might transform the experience.
I can get a few hundred tweets a minute on my main timeline. I look at it, but me seeing what you've tweeted is like you winning the lottery, OK buster? Exactly.
On the main timeline, spamming looks less and less like spamming, more and more like talking at a reasonable volume, given the background noise.
Twitter's lists become more and more important the more people you follow.
For people who follow a few dozen or a few hundred accounts, you can get a pretty good idea of whose tweets they're reading. When that number is a few thousand, you no longer know that, because they're probably using lists -- which are often private.
Right now I have a few theme-type lists -- "Scottish hip-hop people," "carefuckers," "Tweeps Included In The Present Classification," etc. -- and it's obvious from other people's public lists that this is a pretty common approach. There's some overlap between using theme-type lists and using hashtags.
But some of my lists aren't really themed, they're just prioritised: the one I check a lot, the one I check when the one I check a lot isn't giving me my fix, the Plan C, the one I only check when there is some important work I desperately need to be doing, etc.
(Other lists aggressively interpellate obviously: "@jolwalton just added you to PEOPLE WHO CORRECTLY ASSUME THAT I ONLY EVER USE ESSENCE OF BECKHAM BODYWASH-34").
The current Twitter list functionality is a little clunky, so list membership tends to be a bit sticky -- I don't move people around as much as I'd really like to. Overall what I know about who I'd like to hear more or less from is very imperfectly reflected in the structure of my lists and my habits in navigating them.
So imagine this app, which could change all that.
Here's how it would work. Say you're following 5,000 accounts. You run the app, and it creates you five lists, assigning the people you follow -- perhaps randomly, perhaps based on your history of interaction -- across the five lists. There's a small, a medium, a large, an extra-large, and a supersize:
Confidants: 145
Buddies: 290
Chums: 580
Pals: 1160
Comrades: 2825
For this example, I chose 145 as a seed number in honour of Robin Dunbar's work on the cognitive limits of stable social relationships. (I left slots for approximately five friends IRL -- my own experience tells me five is the maximum tolerable). However, obviously all parameters should be adjustable. For instance, you might feel you would like to check more or fewer than five lists. You might want the size of the lists to rise less steeply. You might want to adjust the settings depending on whether you follow 5,000 people or 50,000. You would probably want to name the lists yourself, since the names influence what each list means and how you might use it.
So that would be the first important feature. The second would be the ability to promote or relegate an account with a quick click. "More from this user," move up to a less populous list. "Less from this user," shift down into the throngs.
Maybe "favs" could add up to automatic promotions, or to automatic relegation-shields.
One bonus feature could be a setting that keeps the list sizes stable, despite your promotions and relegations. So every time you relegate someone from "confidants," the app randomly chooses someone from "buddies" to swap places with them.
A particularly useful bonus feature would be something which automatically rotated people through the lists. Perhaps there could be a top-up of 40 confidants, freshly picked each day, ten delegates from each of the other lists. Perhaps you would have a slider to adjust the intensity of the rotation.
A particularly clever bonus feature would analyse the frequency with which these people tweet, and the times at which they tweet, and organise the lists according to the speed at which they'll fill up your timeline, rather than the raw number of accounts. Pretty amazing!
Perhaps another bonus feature could even cycle your default display in Twitter -- your "home page" -- through these lists, to make sure you give them all a pretty even eyeballing.
OK, finally, here's a variation, which loses the stratification aspect. I'll stop calling it an app. Call it an alt history Twitter, named, I don't know, Cawer. Valorising the crow. Correctly. The crow.
In this shadow universe, Cawer recognises that it's just impossible to meaningfully follow thousands of accounts without some extensive individual filtering and sorting admin, and yet also recognises it's not just creepy and/or insane to want to follow thousands of accounts, on the basis of a kind of quid pro quo, "let's slightly thicken the connection between us, against the day we may find some real reason for talking"-type basis. Cawer compensates by generating a timeline which is never more than a few hundred users -- a different few hundred, if you click "refresh" -- chosen at random, but weighted according to how you've strewn your secret online karma: chiefly, weighted by you clicking "more from this user" or "less from this user," and also perhaps a little weighted according to your retweets and favs, and perhaps with a kind of inbuilt shake-up tendency.
Cawer never expects you to read a boiling screed of inassimilable others. But it also makes sure that when you follow someone, you've really given them a little bit of your attention -- at least enough to have a chance at gaining more of it.
I feel there's more I could add (for instance, about independent publishing specifically; about prizes; about crows; about social media and wearable computing; about the permeability of the envisioned systems to marketing and monetisation; about how they would compare with various existing algorithmically personalised experiences; about how the "flock" or "horde" metaphors can mislead about the complex networked structures involved; about e-democracy; about violently being forced into cupboards; about the game theory of segregation; about the implicit life-cycles of the followback flocks: the newer inductees, less reliant on lists, supplying proportionately more attention), & I may keep tweaking this thing, so who knows?
§
I'm one of those followback indie writers.
On Twitter, when I follow someone, I'm usually hoping they'll follow back. When I'm eyeballing someone for a possible unfollow, I put a lot of weight on whether they're following me. It doesn't count for everything, but it counts for a lot.
Our plumage is very distinctive. The number of people we follow, and the number of people who follow us, are similar numbers. On close examination, that's because they're mostly the same people. We typically follow, and are followed by, a few thousand accounts.
Ensconcing myself in this followback flock has been a function of a certain kind of online behaviour over time. Your number of followers has more to do with who you do or don't follow than with what you do or don't tweet. This grind could have happened very gradually and entirely manually, or it could have been fully automated, but in my case it's happening fairly slowly, mostly manually, but with sporadic help from bolt-on bells and whistles. Sometimes it's a bit embarrassing. But mostly I just radiate weird swarm node pride.
Why do we act so strangely? Well, we have our reasons. Or at least I have mine. Exploring those reasons is not really the purpose of this post. But in short, joining the followback flock is not primarily about sharking up a vast host of fiercely loyal Twitter accounts with lust for blood in their eyes. It's not about treating a follower count as a game stat with a transparent meaning. It's not even about participating in a community or building an audience.
It is sort of about building a public from which audiences might be drawn. It is sort of about building a public in which little mutually attentive cohorts and gaggles may temporarily coalesce, and the most tenaciously recurring of those could just about be called little communities. And nested within that is some personal digital sociality and even a few weird Twitter friendships (?), although the infrastructure for those is really biological memory -- Twitter is not (unlike Facebook) bursting with digital aides memoire; it's not like the guy whose job it is to murmur in a politician's ear how they're supposed to know the people around them. But for the most part, in this way of using Twitter, a "follow" is just not a big deal -- it's a tentative, minimal contact on which other things might be built, probably only intermittently -- and reciprocity seems like an okay norm to attach to it.
In short, following thousands of people is more a microblogging thing than a social networking thing -- it's probably good not to get too invested in it either: at any time a tweak in the Twitter architecture might mangle those microblogging aspirations (in a way I suspect the Mute function is already doing this).
I hope that's all true. If you were to translate followback indie writer behaviour to IRL it might look pretty obscene -- so fingers crossed something was lost in the translation.
§
Obviously it's also swell to do the social networking thing instead of the microblogging thing. And in practice the two get very blurred and tangled.
§
But!
The real purpose of this post is to talk about what it's like to follow so many people, and imagine an app which might transform the experience.
I can get a few hundred tweets a minute on my main timeline. I look at it, but me seeing what you've tweeted is like you winning the lottery, OK buster? Exactly.
On the main timeline, spamming looks less and less like spamming, more and more like talking at a reasonable volume, given the background noise.
Twitter's lists become more and more important the more people you follow.
For people who follow a few dozen or a few hundred accounts, you can get a pretty good idea of whose tweets they're reading. When that number is a few thousand, you no longer know that, because they're probably using lists -- which are often private.
Right now I have a few theme-type lists -- "Scottish hip-hop people," "carefuckers," "Tweeps Included In The Present Classification," etc. -- and it's obvious from other people's public lists that this is a pretty common approach. There's some overlap between using theme-type lists and using hashtags.
But some of my lists aren't really themed, they're just prioritised: the one I check a lot, the one I check when the one I check a lot isn't giving me my fix, the Plan C, the one I only check when there is some important work I desperately need to be doing, etc.
(Other lists aggressively interpellate obviously: "@jolwalton just added you to PEOPLE WHO CORRECTLY ASSUME THAT I ONLY EVER USE ESSENCE OF BECKHAM BODYWASH-34").
The current Twitter list functionality is a little clunky, so list membership tends to be a bit sticky -- I don't move people around as much as I'd really like to. Overall what I know about who I'd like to hear more or less from is very imperfectly reflected in the structure of my lists and my habits in navigating them.
So imagine this app, which could change all that.
§
Here's how it would work. Say you're following 5,000 accounts. You run the app, and it creates you five lists, assigning the people you follow -- perhaps randomly, perhaps based on your history of interaction -- across the five lists. There's a small, a medium, a large, an extra-large, and a supersize:
Confidants: 145
Buddies: 290
Chums: 580
Pals: 1160
Comrades: 2825
For this example, I chose 145 as a seed number in honour of Robin Dunbar's work on the cognitive limits of stable social relationships. (I left slots for approximately five friends IRL -- my own experience tells me five is the maximum tolerable). However, obviously all parameters should be adjustable. For instance, you might feel you would like to check more or fewer than five lists. You might want the size of the lists to rise less steeply. You might want to adjust the settings depending on whether you follow 5,000 people or 50,000. You would probably want to name the lists yourself, since the names influence what each list means and how you might use it.
So that would be the first important feature. The second would be the ability to promote or relegate an account with a quick click. "More from this user," move up to a less populous list. "Less from this user," shift down into the throngs.
Maybe "favs" could add up to automatic promotions, or to automatic relegation-shields.
One bonus feature could be a setting that keeps the list sizes stable, despite your promotions and relegations. So every time you relegate someone from "confidants," the app randomly chooses someone from "buddies" to swap places with them.
A particularly useful bonus feature would be something which automatically rotated people through the lists. Perhaps there could be a top-up of 40 confidants, freshly picked each day, ten delegates from each of the other lists. Perhaps you would have a slider to adjust the intensity of the rotation.
A particularly clever bonus feature would analyse the frequency with which these people tweet, and the times at which they tweet, and organise the lists according to the speed at which they'll fill up your timeline, rather than the raw number of accounts. Pretty amazing!
Perhaps another bonus feature could even cycle your default display in Twitter -- your "home page" -- through these lists, to make sure you give them all a pretty even eyeballing.
§
OK, finally, here's a variation, which loses the stratification aspect. I'll stop calling it an app. Call it an alt history Twitter, named, I don't know, Cawer. Valorising the crow. Correctly. The crow.
In this shadow universe, Cawer recognises that it's just impossible to meaningfully follow thousands of accounts without some extensive individual filtering and sorting admin, and yet also recognises it's not just creepy and/or insane to want to follow thousands of accounts, on the basis of a kind of quid pro quo, "let's slightly thicken the connection between us, against the day we may find some real reason for talking"-type basis. Cawer compensates by generating a timeline which is never more than a few hundred users -- a different few hundred, if you click "refresh" -- chosen at random, but weighted according to how you've strewn your secret online karma: chiefly, weighted by you clicking "more from this user" or "less from this user," and also perhaps a little weighted according to your retweets and favs, and perhaps with a kind of inbuilt shake-up tendency.
Cawer never expects you to read a boiling screed of inassimilable others. But it also makes sure that when you follow someone, you've really given them a little bit of your attention -- at least enough to have a chance at gaining more of it.
§
I feel there's more I could add (for instance, about independent publishing specifically; about prizes; about crows; about social media and wearable computing; about the permeability of the envisioned systems to marketing and monetisation; about how they would compare with various existing algorithmically personalised experiences; about how the "flock" or "horde" metaphors can mislead about the complex networked structures involved; about e-democracy; about violently being forced into cupboards; about the game theory of segregation; about the implicit life-cycles of the followback flocks: the newer inductees, less reliant on lists, supplying proportionately more attention), & I may keep tweaking this thing, so who knows?
Sunday, April 27, 2014
From "Interlude"
Another extract from a work-in-progress. Earlier: a street scene. Send me examples of your favourite street / crowd / city / Mos Eisley Cantina type scenes? I definitely won't have read them, the only thing I've ever read is Jock of the Bushveld.
This bit's about a ballad.
*
On the wyrdweave web, Cavan shared the ballad she had stolen from the chapman.
I.
O hang-man hold your hand, he cride,
O hold it for a while,
Methinks I see my ain dear faither
Come riding by the stile.
「WTF is」
「shhhhhh. just listen. listen」
O faither haue you brought me gold
For tae set me free?
Or haue you come tae see me hangd
All on this dule aspen tree?
O no I haue not brought thee gold,
And I’ll not set thee free,
For I am come tae see my ain son hangd,
And hanged you shall be.
O the prickly bush, the prickly bush,
It prickd my heart full sair
Euer I get out of that prickly bush
I’ll neuer get in any mair.
「TRUE LOVE SETS YOU FREE,」wove Epeorenthe.
「no. If you listen to the lyrics I think it was a trick to teach him a lesson,」wove Cladha, a girl from the province of Ballywort.
II.
O hang-man, hold your hand, he cride,
O hold it for a while,
Methinks I see my ain dear mither
Come riding by the stile.
O mither, haue you brought me gold
For tae set me free?
Or haue you come tae see me hangd
All on this dule aspen tree?
O no, I haue not brought thee gold,
And I’ll not set thee free,
For I am come tae see my ain son hangd,
And hanged you shall be.
O the prickly bush, the prickly bush,
It prickd my heart full sair
Euer I get out of that prickly bush
I’ll never get in any mair.
「my mother would saue me then kill me,」wove Thandiwe.
「His mother and his father prick his heart till the v. last moment,」wove Cladha of Ballywort.「They prick it & they prick it, but only because they care for him. THEY WANT HIM NEVER IN THE SITUATION AGAIN」
「have you even actually HEARD the ballad? 」Epeorenthe wove back to Ballywort.「ummmm it’s his girlf who saves him, NOT his parents?」
III.
O hang-man, hold your hand, he cride,
O, hold it for a while,
Methinks I see my ain true love,
Come riding by the stile.
O true love haue you brought me gold
For tae set me free?
Or haue you come tae see me hangd
All on this dule aspen tree?
O yes I’ve brought you gold, she cride,
And I will set you free.
For I am come tae see you saud
And saued you shall be.
「no, his parents KNEW his sweetheart was coming, that’s my point. They’re making him afeared on purpose. maybe it was they gave his sweetheart the gold」
「you’re reading too much in,」wove Epeorenthe.
O the prickly bush, the prickly bush,
It prickd my heart full sair
Euer I get out of that prickly bush
I’ll never get in any mair.
「This thing goes deep,」wove Cladha of Ballywort.
「headfuck,」wove Tegwin. 「also: headdesk. so therefore: fuck desks.」
「Ok but wait, dule trees stand at crossroads,」wove Cladha of Ballywort.
「more like DESKS do,」wove Tegwin.
「Why wouldn’t mother and father ride out TOGETHER from the village?」wove Cladha of Ballywort.
「they did only he rode faster – the dad,」wove Epeorenthe.
「no hate each other hate hate hate,」wove Thandiwe.
「REALLY?」insisted Cladha of Ballywort.「his parents hate each other, yet neither willing to support the son, not even to annoy the other? ALSO, why would his true love ride out SO LATE? He would already be hanged, but for the mum and dad. It’s a set-up, yes, the ballad is a set-up」
「at the end it’s like he’s still in the bush?」wove Thandiwe.
「because no, anyone is an idiot if you think you can get killed by a thorn bush,」wove Epeorenthe.「no amount of thorn bushes can kill anyone」
Tegwin wove,「I think the point is more: who can you trust?」
Cladha of Ballywort wove,「To me it is that feeling when you’ve done amiss and you just want one more chance.」
「what crime did he even commit?」wove Thandiwe.
A moment’s pause.
Cladha of Ballywort wove,「Nothing bad. He got in debt and that’s why he needs gold to save him. not murder」
Cavan, who had not been involved, now wove,「No, Cladha of Ballywort. Even if it was murder, the hangman might still be bribed with gold. Cladha, a mere two pricks does not make a heart full sore. Does the man to be hanged have no family but two? If he has a brother or a sister, why aren’t they part of the trick? Methinks because he's slain them. Only his sweetheart could care not he has murdered his kin」
「You’re reading too much in,」wove Cladha of Ballywort.
A moment’s pause.
「what’s dule」
「omg sorrow」
「the style is pointless」
「they have to be in that style it’s a fucking ballad」
「your guys’ credibility on this ballad has taken some massive hits,」wove Cladha of Ballywort.
This bit's about a ballad.
*
On the wyrdweave web, Cavan shared the ballad she had stolen from the chapman.
I.
O hang-man hold your hand, he cride,
O hold it for a while,
Methinks I see my ain dear faither
Come riding by the stile.
「WTF is」
「shhhhhh. just listen. listen」
O faither haue you brought me gold
For tae set me free?
Or haue you come tae see me hangd
All on this dule aspen tree?
O no I haue not brought thee gold,
And I’ll not set thee free,
For I am come tae see my ain son hangd,
And hanged you shall be.
O the prickly bush, the prickly bush,
It prickd my heart full sair
Euer I get out of that prickly bush
I’ll neuer get in any mair.
「TRUE LOVE SETS YOU FREE,」wove Epeorenthe.
「no. If you listen to the lyrics I think it was a trick to teach him a lesson,」wove Cladha, a girl from the province of Ballywort.
II.
O hang-man, hold your hand, he cride,
O hold it for a while,
Methinks I see my ain dear mither
Come riding by the stile.
O mither, haue you brought me gold
For tae set me free?
Or haue you come tae see me hangd
All on this dule aspen tree?
O no, I haue not brought thee gold,
And I’ll not set thee free,
For I am come tae see my ain son hangd,
And hanged you shall be.
O the prickly bush, the prickly bush,
It prickd my heart full sair
Euer I get out of that prickly bush
I’ll never get in any mair.
「my mother would saue me then kill me,」wove Thandiwe.
「His mother and his father prick his heart till the v. last moment,」wove Cladha of Ballywort.「They prick it & they prick it, but only because they care for him. THEY WANT HIM NEVER IN THE SITUATION AGAIN」
「have you even actually HEARD the ballad? 」Epeorenthe wove back to Ballywort.「ummmm it’s his girlf who saves him, NOT his parents?」
III.
O hang-man, hold your hand, he cride,
O, hold it for a while,
Methinks I see my ain true love,
Come riding by the stile.
O true love haue you brought me gold
For tae set me free?
Or haue you come tae see me hangd
All on this dule aspen tree?
O yes I’ve brought you gold, she cride,
And I will set you free.
For I am come tae see you saud
And saued you shall be.
「no, his parents KNEW his sweetheart was coming, that’s my point. They’re making him afeared on purpose. maybe it was they gave his sweetheart the gold」
「you’re reading too much in,」wove Epeorenthe.
O the prickly bush, the prickly bush,
It prickd my heart full sair
Euer I get out of that prickly bush
I’ll never get in any mair.
「This thing goes deep,」wove Cladha of Ballywort.
「headfuck,」wove Tegwin. 「also: headdesk. so therefore: fuck desks.」
「Ok but wait, dule trees stand at crossroads,」wove Cladha of Ballywort.
「more like DESKS do,」wove Tegwin.
「Why wouldn’t mother and father ride out TOGETHER from the village?」wove Cladha of Ballywort.
「they did only he rode faster – the dad,」wove Epeorenthe.
「no hate each other hate hate hate,」wove Thandiwe.
「REALLY?」insisted Cladha of Ballywort.「his parents hate each other, yet neither willing to support the son, not even to annoy the other? ALSO, why would his true love ride out SO LATE? He would already be hanged, but for the mum and dad. It’s a set-up, yes, the ballad is a set-up」
「at the end it’s like he’s still in the bush?」wove Thandiwe.
「because no, anyone is an idiot if you think you can get killed by a thorn bush,」wove Epeorenthe.「no amount of thorn bushes can kill anyone」
Tegwin wove,「I think the point is more: who can you trust?」
Cladha of Ballywort wove,「To me it is that feeling when you’ve done amiss and you just want one more chance.」
「what crime did he even commit?」wove Thandiwe.
A moment’s pause.
Cladha of Ballywort wove,「Nothing bad. He got in debt and that’s why he needs gold to save him. not murder」
Cavan, who had not been involved, now wove,「No, Cladha of Ballywort. Even if it was murder, the hangman might still be bribed with gold. Cladha, a mere two pricks does not make a heart full sore. Does the man to be hanged have no family but two? If he has a brother or a sister, why aren’t they part of the trick? Methinks because he's slain them. Only his sweetheart could care not he has murdered his kin」
「You’re reading too much in,」wove Cladha of Ballywort.
A moment’s pause.
「what’s dule」
「omg sorrow」
「the style is pointless」
「they have to be in that style it’s a fucking ballad」
「your guys’ credibility on this ballad has taken some massive hits,」wove Cladha of Ballywort.
Monday, April 21, 2014
A Riff on the Seeing of Sales
I've been meaning to read Ian Sales's hard SF novella Adrift on the Sea of Rains (independently published: Whippleshield 2012) for a while, whilst also being a bit wary; some puff quotes made me wonder: will I forced to read some numbers, politely pretending to myself they were as interesting as words? Or will I have to read some paragraphs of a physics textbook laid out as dialogue and larded with "But wait, surely ..." / "As you probably know ..." / "Impossible! Because ..."?
It does sometimes read a little bit like research, and perhaps that's a weakness. At the same time, those glittering clusters of acronyms, designations of military hardware series and models, and other techie terminology, are arranged tastefully, lending an appropriate sense of estrangement from an impersonal, hostile beauty. The same linguistic precision and technicity which tends to withdraw its immediate objects of reference to somewhere temporarily out-of-sight leaves behind the cadences, the shapes, the composite of associations, whose abstraction reaches out towards the transhistorical. Almost as if it is the text that is deeply natural, and it is you, dear reader, who are merely well-researched.
That technical vocabulary is also (now I'm sounding very #protip, but anyway) very convincingly rooted in the characters' consciousness; it would be silly to have these astronauts talk in potted popular science explanations.
And I think that's part of how Adrift doesn't flaunt or get hung up on its hardness: the physics reveals itself where relevant, and Adrift doesn't do zero-g somersaults trying to make it relevant all the time. Likewise, though there is what I think is a pretty Golden Age-ish engineering puzzle at the heart of the story, it isn't announced with a big fanfare as the Puzzle at the Heart of the Story; that is it isn't endlessly paraded around so stranded astronauts can throw failed solutions at it like confetti. The characters just get on with it, solving it steadily and quite quickly. What little struggles they have with it are just as much rooted in their distinctive personalities and social dynamics as they are inherent in their subject matter.
(Perhaps this is what many engineering puzzles feel like: you don't really know how fiendish it is until you've solved it, because the process of understanding the puzzle, of mapping it correctly, overlaps significantly with solving it. The puzzle is never something that's splayed out before you, like a crime scene; it's something that accumulates incrementally behind you).
But most importantly, the presiding spirit of Adrift is consistently one of quiet, elite, elegant wit.
The rest of this note is pure spoiler, and Adrift isn't much longer than this post, so if you haven't read it, go on, off you go.
Specifically, I think Adrift conforms very well to the influential early 20C Bradleyian understanding of Shakespearean tragedy (which notoriously Shakespeare seldom does). There is a great hero with an interesting and emo tragic flaw, which leads to his downfall, and actually he's probably brought enough downfall to share with the whole class.
(Perhaps Sales also gives us a hint of the tragic hero being retrospectively aware of what he's done, something else Bradley was also fond of. Peterson will have several hours to meditate on his unprovoked and under-evidenced attack on a space station named "world" and "peace" before he dips low enough to burn up against the atmosphere).
I'm not sure how best to sum up Peterson's tragic flaw: anger? -- or "combustibility" lol? Or "never really getting his head round the 'continuum of force' criterion on his Rules of Engagement card"?
Obvious Peterson has a propensity to a kind of hawkish militaristic tantrum, but there's aesthetic pleasure as well as moralising anger: Peterson's flaw seems to have to do with mistaking the voluptuousness of predation for an irresistible existential revelation. Whether he's ill-advisedly smoking a T-4 or Мир itself, Peterson acts as though his agency has been suspended at the critical moment, as though he were now already an instrument of Fate, a weapon rather than someone with the option of wielding one.
In both cases too there's a kind of macho territorialism: plainly so in the case of the T-4 straying into Canada, and more tenuously in Peterson's proprietorial attitude to the alt-Earth's orbital space. It resonates with Peterson's decision to undertake the mission himself and the growlingly patrician manner in which he imposes that decision.
Finally, Adrift is also a novella which -- despite involving a magic Nazi gateway to dimension X on the moon -- is thinking hard about hard SF. I'm intrigued that Peterson is just about brushing against reality (where, he speculates, they have no Bell). Perhaps reality is a kind of limit condition for hard SF. Perfectly hard SF stops being SF anymore.
Peterson of course would just sacrifice himself and his lunar fraternity by pointlessly ramming this unbreakable fourth wall. What a Мирpet.
"No one ever closes the book with the feeling that man is a poor mean creature. He may be wretched and he may be awful, but he is not small." -- A.C. Bradley
PS: I'm thinking a bit about alternate histories and complex / chaotic causation at the moment, and I've been trying to figure out the significance of covariance for the indicativeness of particular facts or categories of facts. How confident should we be that Мир is our Мир and the timeline our timeline? What would covary with the presence of Мир? How many "alternate paths" are there to having a space station up there named Мир?
PPS: Adrift is the first of a quartet, three of which have been published so far. I'm not sure yet how closely connected they are, or if the current narrative thread has been decisively snipped or not. Maybe Paterson will be rescued by a tragically flawed sexist hallucination of George Clooney after all?
It does sometimes read a little bit like research, and perhaps that's a weakness. At the same time, those glittering clusters of acronyms, designations of military hardware series and models, and other techie terminology, are arranged tastefully, lending an appropriate sense of estrangement from an impersonal, hostile beauty. The same linguistic precision and technicity which tends to withdraw its immediate objects of reference to somewhere temporarily out-of-sight leaves behind the cadences, the shapes, the composite of associations, whose abstraction reaches out towards the transhistorical. Almost as if it is the text that is deeply natural, and it is you, dear reader, who are merely well-researched.
That technical vocabulary is also (now I'm sounding very #protip, but anyway) very convincingly rooted in the characters' consciousness; it would be silly to have these astronauts talk in potted popular science explanations.
And I think that's part of how Adrift doesn't flaunt or get hung up on its hardness: the physics reveals itself where relevant, and Adrift doesn't do zero-g somersaults trying to make it relevant all the time. Likewise, though there is what I think is a pretty Golden Age-ish engineering puzzle at the heart of the story, it isn't announced with a big fanfare as the Puzzle at the Heart of the Story; that is it isn't endlessly paraded around so stranded astronauts can throw failed solutions at it like confetti. The characters just get on with it, solving it steadily and quite quickly. What little struggles they have with it are just as much rooted in their distinctive personalities and social dynamics as they are inherent in their subject matter.
(Perhaps this is what many engineering puzzles feel like: you don't really know how fiendish it is until you've solved it, because the process of understanding the puzzle, of mapping it correctly, overlaps significantly with solving it. The puzzle is never something that's splayed out before you, like a crime scene; it's something that accumulates incrementally behind you).
But most importantly, the presiding spirit of Adrift is consistently one of quiet, elite, elegant wit.
The rest of this note is pure spoiler, and Adrift isn't much longer than this post, so if you haven't read it, go on, off you go.
[...] put his thumb over the "kill" button on the stick and waited for the lock-on tone; and his wizzo protested but he ignored him, and the reticule on the Projected Display flashed, so he pressed with his thumb -- gently, as if it were a hunting rifle's trigger and not simply a button which triggered an electric signal and so fired actuators which pushed hydraulic rams. He heard with satisfaction the grinding of the bay doors opening, the thud of missile release [...] he saw the impact, the sudden blossoming of flame on the T-4's flank, the enemy bomber shedding shattered panels which spun mirror-bright in the sun as they fell, the curving smoke trails of debris as the aircraft broke apart; and his wizzo said, Jesus Christ, you sure as shit should'nt've done that [...] (49)Part of the wit of Adrift is actually a bit more than wit: it is tragedy. The deadpan, weirdly heartbreaking catastrophe of the novella's final moments is dripping (maybe not "dripping" in microgravity -- "spinning off in orbs" or something) with dramatic irony. Peterson has probably come to a Glasnost timeline, so even according to his own peculiarly awful values, his decision to -- to ram the space station Mir? -- is just plain wrong. It is a lamentable waste any way you look at it, and with hard-won salvation finally within his grasp. If only he knew what we, the audience, are pretty sure of!
Specifically, I think Adrift conforms very well to the influential early 20C Bradleyian understanding of Shakespearean tragedy (which notoriously Shakespeare seldom does). There is a great hero with an interesting and emo tragic flaw, which leads to his downfall, and actually he's probably brought enough downfall to share with the whole class.
(Perhaps Sales also gives us a hint of the tragic hero being retrospectively aware of what he's done, something else Bradley was also fond of. Peterson will have several hours to meditate on his unprovoked and under-evidenced attack on a space station named "world" and "peace" before he dips low enough to burn up against the atmosphere).
I'm not sure how best to sum up Peterson's tragic flaw: anger? -- or "combustibility" lol? Or "never really getting his head round the 'continuum of force' criterion on his Rules of Engagement card"?
Obvious Peterson has a propensity to a kind of hawkish militaristic tantrum, but there's aesthetic pleasure as well as moralising anger: Peterson's flaw seems to have to do with mistaking the voluptuousness of predation for an irresistible existential revelation. Whether he's ill-advisedly smoking a T-4 or Мир itself, Peterson acts as though his agency has been suspended at the critical moment, as though he were now already an instrument of Fate, a weapon rather than someone with the option of wielding one.
In both cases too there's a kind of macho territorialism: plainly so in the case of the T-4 straying into Canada, and more tenuously in Peterson's proprietorial attitude to the alt-Earth's orbital space. It resonates with Peterson's decision to undertake the mission himself and the growlingly patrician manner in which he imposes that decision.
Finally, Adrift is also a novella which -- despite involving a magic Nazi gateway to dimension X on the moon -- is thinking hard about hard SF. I'm intrigued that Peterson is just about brushing against reality (where, he speculates, they have no Bell). Perhaps reality is a kind of limit condition for hard SF. Perfectly hard SF stops being SF anymore.
Peterson of course would just sacrifice himself and his lunar fraternity by pointlessly ramming this unbreakable fourth wall. What a Мирpet.
§
"No one ever closes the book with the feeling that man is a poor mean creature. He may be wretched and he may be awful, but he is not small." -- A.C. Bradley
§
PS: I'm thinking a bit about alternate histories and complex / chaotic causation at the moment, and I've been trying to figure out the significance of covariance for the indicativeness of particular facts or categories of facts. How confident should we be that Мир is our Мир and the timeline our timeline? What would covary with the presence of Мир? How many "alternate paths" are there to having a space station up there named Мир?
PPS: Adrift is the first of a quartet, three of which have been published so far. I'm not sure yet how closely connected they are, or if the current narrative thread has been decisively snipped or not. Maybe Paterson will be rescued by a tragically flawed sexist hallucination of George Clooney after all?
Invocation: the regendered remix
I did some quick-and-dirty hacks on the Invocation text, to shuffle around pronouns for all characters roughly at random. Here's the PDF & I will do a Kindle version some time (& maybe even dead trees too).
Some background: when I started writing Invocation, one of the main things I wanted to explore was the relationship between memory and gender. Gendered memory; mneumonic gender; the way both gender and memory relate to performance, inscription, repetition and overdetermination; and I was interested in gender fluidity, but also in a fantastically enabled gender hybridity without necessarily an associated fluidity. Shards of gendered memory materialising in a person by magical authorial fiat. A kind of non-binary gender that wasn't quite post-binary, if that makes sense: the binary is still there, at least provisionally, and the routes out or onward or beyond the binary are not marked, but the binary is Rubick's-shuffled, it's anagrammatized.
Some background: when I started writing Invocation, one of the main things I wanted to explore was the relationship between memory and gender. Gendered memory; mneumonic gender; the way both gender and memory relate to performance, inscription, repetition and overdetermination; and I was interested in gender fluidity, but also in a fantastically enabled gender hybridity without necessarily an associated fluidity. Shards of gendered memory materialising in a person by magical authorial fiat. A kind of non-binary gender that wasn't quite post-binary, if that makes sense: the binary is still there, at least provisionally, and the routes out or onward or beyond the binary are not marked, but the binary is Rubick's-shuffled, it's anagrammatized.
I totally didn't really get round to doing any of that. It was all supposed to be so simple: the soul-anagrams would be a solution to, or an extreme example of (or I guess, in TV Tropes lingo, an averting of) the one really big mystery of paranormal romance: how did the heroine know this supernaturally annoying douche would spasm into a supernaturally decent crush object? But by the time the souls were interfused enough for it to matter, it was late in the book, and I was already amateurishly juggling everything that had emerged along the way, so that certain early aspirations were neglected.
The regendered remix is a gimmick and it doesn't in any way address the rueful abstract above, but I find the way it reads pretty irresistible. It makes an already confusing story even harder to follow, since post-remix subjects and objects are often ambiguous, so who the hell just said that or did that or what's going on whaaat? -- but your negative capability-fu is strong, and you are just not easily posed.
Saturday, April 19, 2014
From "Interlude"
A longish extract from Interlude. A street scene set in Irontown. Who else shall I have?
(Some of these folk may not stay. Not sure about the skin-trees. Anyway, even if they're not mentioned, they're secretly all there).
Also (backchannel, perhaps), any recommendation of city-walk scenes I should read, from any genre?
*
The previous evening Gurm’s stomach was literally thungabungling so she threw on a raggedy-ass mustard-yellow cotton jacket and skated down the teeming hu-t’ung, reciting the jaw-dislocating phrase that probably meant ‘anything for the special, honoured vendor’ over and over under her breath. She could have taken the job with her, but she was on something of a solitude kick just now. Reason for renting the hu-t’ung garret in the first place, right?
It was too crammed, and the hu-t’ung climbed too steeply here, so Gurm sucked her wheels into her shoes. Around the edges of her sensorium she still extruded feelers for Pruri Y but didn’t hold out much hope. Bunnybee – on some serenity kick halfway up a mountain, for fuck’s sake – supposed Pruri Y was a ghost. Gurm knew better, though maybe a ghost would have been easier to find.
Still, Gurm wasn’t exactly paying detailed attention to her surroundings.
If she had, whom could she have discovered? A steadily thickening throng. Hollowcheeked human jakies. §hit junkies. Dataheads. Warp Drives, winking into solidity mid-deranged monologue. Huddled holograms betting on jellylike battle-bots. Illicit AI, automata-dwellers, defiant in daylight. The dying. Half-beggared Fain sherpas scouring for tourists on boda-boda bikes and every manner of honking, smoking, tuk-tech. Fully beggared Fain newcomers, their oozing chitin bodies held together by masking tape. Tomworm (yes! No more of that). Spiny-furred Geffen immigrants, gone all ogee-rigid with cerebral ticks or sitsit §nowscrypt, fretted over by §cryptnet-deputised gendarmes and ransom-seekers. Hard-times piebald Geffen immigrants, vertebrae jutting, fewer teeth than mouths, whimpering polyphonically. Rentxens edging at career changes.
Above the awnings, smart-scaffolding was crawling delicately along the wall, steering for a building site in west Irontown. Three vanilla-furred and jade-scaled raccoon minimals, none any taller than three inches, hitched a ride, grimly hugging rivets as the scaffold performed its perambulatory cat’s cradle. A red-crested pipistrel minimal, several times bigger than the racoon minimals but batbrained, no match for their bravery and wits, perched with thrumming satisfaction, was unsettled, perched again, was again affronted, and so on, across the top of four shop fronts, before finally he flapped off in mortified confusion, eventually tucking himself into a cracked solar panel, to seriously reconsider his direction in life.
Gurm might have discovered a sentient and very formally dressed fragrance, like joss-stick jasmine robed in endlessly hinged reek-garb, floating in the air of a stair-snicket, afraid to waft forth. She might have found the cohort of Alien Aesthetics 366 (PGP) offworld impresarios and artists, academics and impestors, dealers and collectors (and at least two Locklany spies) who’d made the fatal error of booking the cheaper accommodation nearer to the conference centre, almost all of them currently in one sort of complex predicament or another.
Demonosopher veterans left over from glitching wars, semi-obedient to their inlay spam, the voice of Brass having now accrued a querulant and quasi-divine quality. Involuntary and unvoluntary actors, shudderers and tiquers and entities essentially tics all the way down. Mercenaries and bounty hunters, striding tall in spindly, whining exo-rigs. Brigands and kidnappers. Nullbrood sabre-toothed Fain burlesque performers, gossiping territorially from the mouths of back-stage step-snickets, or somehow twitchingly napping just a few steps down.
Gurm's sensorium predicted a path and her shoes morphed back into skates.
Highbinders and civil servants on publicity drives, checking boxes marked “squalor” and “despair” in their sensoriums, gravely crouching or squatting or floomping, dilating their assorted faculties of pointed compassion, chronicle and analysis. Students and smugglers. Swivel-eyed wilderness witnesses. Pushers and stall-keepers. Folks. Drunks who had to be drunk to do what they had to do. One mercenary, rigged up, stepped out of her garret with very little of her usual swagger. A second gangly powered exo-skeleton, slaved to hers, followed her tentative steps exactly, carrying her artillery ops colleague, dead of wounds during the night.
Gurm glid by.
Gurm was skating through something of a bodymod district now, not that she really knew it. Groggy toddlers, fitted with inlays for the first time and apprehensive of the solicitations of their new take-it-slow sensoriums. Stitched-up punks wrestling mortally with medusiform muscle tissues chestbursters, bystanders yelling and gingerly borrowing butchers’ cleavers. Cosplayers and modplayers, the spit of Sylvester Lady of Risk, or the House Locklany golem, or the new Darkspawn Dawnspark, or some other needled-in pin-up, each to their own personal degree of insane devotion and fidelity. A celeb or two, subtly disarrayed, on a double-bluff incognito trip. Tentative tweens, proud and hot beneath new Dally MacFarlane Durians and Banyans, succulent marketing, twisting from their red-raw shoulder-soil, speckled with untaxonimised fungi. Dirigible drones and triple-rotors skirring overhead on deliveries, yawing in shockwaves as corsairs dogfought escorts.
Soon Gurm passed her first fab lab. In its doorway a blue-scaled xen was swaying proprietorially, thin and fluid like an upright serpent, crested with a small, pinstriped crescent, resembling the horns of a ram, and tripedal, with feet resembling boar trotters. Nah. Gurm wanted that crisp, cool, fancy fab lab farther along the mini-map. Dwarflust Enterprises or something.
The xen looked hilariously hopeful. Gurm grinned as she barged past.
Dandyish Curlies wormed painstakingly onward in kid gloves. Shimmering jale and purple Musteds, taking it just as slow, magnificently genteel, wreathed in rictuses, their species claustrophobia thoroughly bottled up itself. Providentialist almoners bounded frantically off the hu-t’ung, clattering down step-snickets after the complicated life stories of bugs and vermin. Second gen Hyder charlatans with plexiglass jars of megascopic ingredience dustbunnies chatted to one another, drawing dry wit from the year’s Repentercurls Games at an infinitesimal grain. Gregarious gladiators strutted and loafed, their proferred flesh all albino, incarnadine or wine-dark with scar tissue, their spectral orreries of overcome foe offal orbiting them in full boast-ghostcast mode. A mobbed purveyor of Geffen meconium kept her customers at bay by brandishing a hacked gladiatorial v-halberd. Sensorium mini-map showed not far now.
Jump Drives nervously phasing in and out as they chatted up tourists and students, and gladiators and sellswords and traumatised vets, self-sabotaging their pick-up artistry with nauseous giggles and erratic, broad-spectrum libidinal investment. Fanfanners. Swivel-eyed wilderness witnesses, AH-gain. Inventive parents. Chibi didappers. Whipjack cons and PUAs posing as Warp and Jump Drives. A-list celebs, B-list celebs, and on down the abedecary and annexes, test-sauntering their newly acquired celebrity identities. Journalists and pundits embedded in their own lives. Cool hunters. Pets. Chibi minimals, nipping from one obvious hiding place to the next, intent on snarfing crumbs of rice, blowing up the beautiful forest-mountain in the heart of Irontown, or seizing the throne of distant Ambershadow.
Crushes. Prowling proto-beloveds. Love’s soldiers bivouacked. Pet-keepers – some petless, their pets now with sitters, walkers, flyers, simulators, vets, bodymodders – conscious of the silliness of certain pet-related feelings. A panicking parent. An elf crone yelping in cluster pidgin about her accelerated heart-rate.
Gamers and workers. Leaderboard junkies grinding task categories. Hatchet-faced Game Theory dogmatists. A pair of bickering macropodine xens, ash-discoloured and the last of their species.
Chefs. Turnspits and sous turnspits. Pulled-pork-and-coleslaw-waffle scoffers and squid-slice scone aficionados. Gunkers, digesting dinner externally. Huffy peace legations of eyestalked lupine minimals, looking like bad taxidermy, their traditional tribal dress flicking in the tuk-tech wind, and their Fain drivers grinning and honking and sirening more than strictly necessary. Imprecators. Cannibals. Hereticastors. Zealots. Fouled and shunned wretches. Xens extending baffling cheer every-which-way via systematically wrong, evolutionarily stable translation interfaces. Wimps. Bigots. A really, really wide range of recruiters and Satans. Fourth Wall panderers and Fourth Wall side-eyers. Fourth Wall frotteurs. Trolls and famicides. Newbies to the Telluric Devolve, the frontier of the §crypt currency zone, stunned in the streets of Irontown, in total thrall to their first §crypt Pelfie, as they checked their balance and recognised for the first time the complexity of the concept of "balance."
Grey robed hominid xens, indeterminate, systematically wandering and huffing out burrs, analysed as inert. Someone should get on that.
Slaves and servants. A few chattel slaves, dressed in the latest smart-casual fashions, collared, glittering rivulets of remote explosives visible like extra veins, plus a few off-duty footxen, heavily powdered inside their hermetic bio-suits – evidence Empire was in town tonight. But mostly humans running errands, at the ends of reins that ran to a closer node, the neighbouring moons of Locklany. Someone should get on that.
That was pretty much it, apart from humblebraggers and attention-gardeners, editors and détraqués. Geeks and winnowers. Fain agent provocateurs, false flag operatives and askefises. Workaholics and ergophiles, obviously. Jubilarian activist gamers, and social worker gamers, annoying, endangering, liberating and propagandizing the slaves who moved about Irontown on their masters’ business. Trail-etchers, criers and whifflers. Replicant androids, banned from having sentience or personalities, mixing along as best as they could manage. Slab-passers. Butchers. The benevolent. Canters, encrypters, bohemians, pyromaniacs and ciplinarians. The tendril-torn, the bruised and split-lipped. Innumerable shades of jobbing bombasters, pandars, cotton-woolsters and situation-defusers. Innumerable shades of jobbing interpreters and translators, inscribers and transcribers, white liars and typhlophiles. Entities spewing sense data for innumerable senses. The overloaded and the ennervated understimulated. Lubricators and labour dispute arbitrators. Fuckers and lovers. Fasters. Luddites and inlay-shunners. The infected and the allergic, the convulsing. Flyting husters, sessile in scaffold lecterns, or fleet upon casterboards. Redemption spotters. Engineers and tech people who definitely knew what the problem probably was now. Bottom-wipers. Clumsy greeters. Dump-tacklers. The thick-skinned skinned raw by the sensuousness of the turn of the seasons. Confidantes on frostiness gambits. The inarticulately vulnerable. Griefstricken. Flâneur prosthetics. Autos-da-fé. Phenomena, including personages, not strictly present, but edited later into collective memory. Developers and terrorists. Spoilt Fain finance brats riding on hella hu-t’ung-inappropriate bounce-orbs, and mammothrept Curlies in crystalline, fairytale carriages, splurging §crypt on sight-lines and personal space. Pheremone lattices. Unexplained luminous sails. Hick fortune-huntsters wading, with sinking hearts, through ominous backlog of chat from backwater kaleyard orbital.
In a pothole, an escape pod smouldering, fringed with melted vegetables.
Indecipherably exotic fugitives.
Sneering second-gen Fain solicitor and engineer aristocracy, fanatically urbane, disrobing the lamentably-disguised minimal freedom fighters, upright leverits and toads, sporting that bad taxidermy look, by means of tiny bespoke tridents, as the Fain whizzed by on diademed street-luges on their way to do something far more important. All manner of debtors. Some debtors but browsing picaroons, dabblers and compers, picking and choosing, perhaps merely pollarding a Hyderworld fasttree infestation first thing this morning, then knocking off till tomorrow when it was time to pass a redeye ambassador of the Poor Empire their Fainshell comb or butcher’s cleaver or baker's rolling cudgel. Other debtors were on the cusp of peonage, able to dent their principal only provided they outcompeted the debtors crowding that cusp alongside them, grasping and struggling, and begging solidarity.
The sky was full of rainbows and machines. Gurm WiPped openly.
(Some of these folk may not stay. Not sure about the skin-trees. Anyway, even if they're not mentioned, they're secretly all there).
Also (backchannel, perhaps), any recommendation of city-walk scenes I should read, from any genre?
*
The previous evening Gurm’s stomach was literally thungabungling so she threw on a raggedy-ass mustard-yellow cotton jacket and skated down the teeming hu-t’ung, reciting the jaw-dislocating phrase that probably meant ‘anything for the special, honoured vendor’ over and over under her breath. She could have taken the job with her, but she was on something of a solitude kick just now. Reason for renting the hu-t’ung garret in the first place, right?
It was too crammed, and the hu-t’ung climbed too steeply here, so Gurm sucked her wheels into her shoes. Around the edges of her sensorium she still extruded feelers for Pruri Y but didn’t hold out much hope. Bunnybee – on some serenity kick halfway up a mountain, for fuck’s sake – supposed Pruri Y was a ghost. Gurm knew better, though maybe a ghost would have been easier to find.
Still, Gurm wasn’t exactly paying detailed attention to her surroundings.
If she had, whom could she have discovered? A steadily thickening throng. Hollowcheeked human jakies. §hit junkies. Dataheads. Warp Drives, winking into solidity mid-deranged monologue. Huddled holograms betting on jellylike battle-bots. Illicit AI, automata-dwellers, defiant in daylight. The dying. Half-beggared Fain sherpas scouring for tourists on boda-boda bikes and every manner of honking, smoking, tuk-tech. Fully beggared Fain newcomers, their oozing chitin bodies held together by masking tape. Tomworm (yes! No more of that). Spiny-furred Geffen immigrants, gone all ogee-rigid with cerebral ticks or sitsit §nowscrypt, fretted over by §cryptnet-deputised gendarmes and ransom-seekers. Hard-times piebald Geffen immigrants, vertebrae jutting, fewer teeth than mouths, whimpering polyphonically. Rentxens edging at career changes.
Above the awnings, smart-scaffolding was crawling delicately along the wall, steering for a building site in west Irontown. Three vanilla-furred and jade-scaled raccoon minimals, none any taller than three inches, hitched a ride, grimly hugging rivets as the scaffold performed its perambulatory cat’s cradle. A red-crested pipistrel minimal, several times bigger than the racoon minimals but batbrained, no match for their bravery and wits, perched with thrumming satisfaction, was unsettled, perched again, was again affronted, and so on, across the top of four shop fronts, before finally he flapped off in mortified confusion, eventually tucking himself into a cracked solar panel, to seriously reconsider his direction in life.
Gurm might have discovered a sentient and very formally dressed fragrance, like joss-stick jasmine robed in endlessly hinged reek-garb, floating in the air of a stair-snicket, afraid to waft forth. She might have found the cohort of Alien Aesthetics 366 (PGP) offworld impresarios and artists, academics and impestors, dealers and collectors (and at least two Locklany spies) who’d made the fatal error of booking the cheaper accommodation nearer to the conference centre, almost all of them currently in one sort of complex predicament or another.
Demonosopher veterans left over from glitching wars, semi-obedient to their inlay spam, the voice of Brass having now accrued a querulant and quasi-divine quality. Involuntary and unvoluntary actors, shudderers and tiquers and entities essentially tics all the way down. Mercenaries and bounty hunters, striding tall in spindly, whining exo-rigs. Brigands and kidnappers. Nullbrood sabre-toothed Fain burlesque performers, gossiping territorially from the mouths of back-stage step-snickets, or somehow twitchingly napping just a few steps down.
Gurm's sensorium predicted a path and her shoes morphed back into skates.
Highbinders and civil servants on publicity drives, checking boxes marked “squalor” and “despair” in their sensoriums, gravely crouching or squatting or floomping, dilating their assorted faculties of pointed compassion, chronicle and analysis. Students and smugglers. Swivel-eyed wilderness witnesses. Pushers and stall-keepers. Folks. Drunks who had to be drunk to do what they had to do. One mercenary, rigged up, stepped out of her garret with very little of her usual swagger. A second gangly powered exo-skeleton, slaved to hers, followed her tentative steps exactly, carrying her artillery ops colleague, dead of wounds during the night.
Gurm glid by.
Gurm was skating through something of a bodymod district now, not that she really knew it. Groggy toddlers, fitted with inlays for the first time and apprehensive of the solicitations of their new take-it-slow sensoriums. Stitched-up punks wrestling mortally with medusiform muscle tissues chestbursters, bystanders yelling and gingerly borrowing butchers’ cleavers. Cosplayers and modplayers, the spit of Sylvester Lady of Risk, or the House Locklany golem, or the new Darkspawn Dawnspark, or some other needled-in pin-up, each to their own personal degree of insane devotion and fidelity. A celeb or two, subtly disarrayed, on a double-bluff incognito trip. Tentative tweens, proud and hot beneath new Dally MacFarlane Durians and Banyans, succulent marketing, twisting from their red-raw shoulder-soil, speckled with untaxonimised fungi. Dirigible drones and triple-rotors skirring overhead on deliveries, yawing in shockwaves as corsairs dogfought escorts.
Soon Gurm passed her first fab lab. In its doorway a blue-scaled xen was swaying proprietorially, thin and fluid like an upright serpent, crested with a small, pinstriped crescent, resembling the horns of a ram, and tripedal, with feet resembling boar trotters. Nah. Gurm wanted that crisp, cool, fancy fab lab farther along the mini-map. Dwarflust Enterprises or something.
The xen looked hilariously hopeful. Gurm grinned as she barged past.
Dandyish Curlies wormed painstakingly onward in kid gloves. Shimmering jale and purple Musteds, taking it just as slow, magnificently genteel, wreathed in rictuses, their species claustrophobia thoroughly bottled up itself. Providentialist almoners bounded frantically off the hu-t’ung, clattering down step-snickets after the complicated life stories of bugs and vermin. Second gen Hyder charlatans with plexiglass jars of megascopic ingredience dustbunnies chatted to one another, drawing dry wit from the year’s Repentercurls Games at an infinitesimal grain. Gregarious gladiators strutted and loafed, their proferred flesh all albino, incarnadine or wine-dark with scar tissue, their spectral orreries of overcome foe offal orbiting them in full boast-ghostcast mode. A mobbed purveyor of Geffen meconium kept her customers at bay by brandishing a hacked gladiatorial v-halberd. Sensorium mini-map showed not far now.
Jump Drives nervously phasing in and out as they chatted up tourists and students, and gladiators and sellswords and traumatised vets, self-sabotaging their pick-up artistry with nauseous giggles and erratic, broad-spectrum libidinal investment. Fanfanners. Swivel-eyed wilderness witnesses, AH-gain. Inventive parents. Chibi didappers. Whipjack cons and PUAs posing as Warp and Jump Drives. A-list celebs, B-list celebs, and on down the abedecary and annexes, test-sauntering their newly acquired celebrity identities. Journalists and pundits embedded in their own lives. Cool hunters. Pets. Chibi minimals, nipping from one obvious hiding place to the next, intent on snarfing crumbs of rice, blowing up the beautiful forest-mountain in the heart of Irontown, or seizing the throne of distant Ambershadow.
Crushes. Prowling proto-beloveds. Love’s soldiers bivouacked. Pet-keepers – some petless, their pets now with sitters, walkers, flyers, simulators, vets, bodymodders – conscious of the silliness of certain pet-related feelings. A panicking parent. An elf crone yelping in cluster pidgin about her accelerated heart-rate.
Gamers and workers. Leaderboard junkies grinding task categories. Hatchet-faced Game Theory dogmatists. A pair of bickering macropodine xens, ash-discoloured and the last of their species.
Chefs. Turnspits and sous turnspits. Pulled-pork-and-coleslaw-waffle scoffers and squid-slice scone aficionados. Gunkers, digesting dinner externally. Huffy peace legations of eyestalked lupine minimals, looking like bad taxidermy, their traditional tribal dress flicking in the tuk-tech wind, and their Fain drivers grinning and honking and sirening more than strictly necessary. Imprecators. Cannibals. Hereticastors. Zealots. Fouled and shunned wretches. Xens extending baffling cheer every-which-way via systematically wrong, evolutionarily stable translation interfaces. Wimps. Bigots. A really, really wide range of recruiters and Satans. Fourth Wall panderers and Fourth Wall side-eyers. Fourth Wall frotteurs. Trolls and famicides. Newbies to the Telluric Devolve, the frontier of the §crypt currency zone, stunned in the streets of Irontown, in total thrall to their first §crypt Pelfie, as they checked their balance and recognised for the first time the complexity of the concept of "balance."
Grey robed hominid xens, indeterminate, systematically wandering and huffing out burrs, analysed as inert. Someone should get on that.
Slaves and servants. A few chattel slaves, dressed in the latest smart-casual fashions, collared, glittering rivulets of remote explosives visible like extra veins, plus a few off-duty footxen, heavily powdered inside their hermetic bio-suits – evidence Empire was in town tonight. But mostly humans running errands, at the ends of reins that ran to a closer node, the neighbouring moons of Locklany. Someone should get on that.
That was pretty much it, apart from humblebraggers and attention-gardeners, editors and détraqués. Geeks and winnowers. Fain agent provocateurs, false flag operatives and askefises. Workaholics and ergophiles, obviously. Jubilarian activist gamers, and social worker gamers, annoying, endangering, liberating and propagandizing the slaves who moved about Irontown on their masters’ business. Trail-etchers, criers and whifflers. Replicant androids, banned from having sentience or personalities, mixing along as best as they could manage. Slab-passers. Butchers. The benevolent. Canters, encrypters, bohemians, pyromaniacs and ciplinarians. The tendril-torn, the bruised and split-lipped. Innumerable shades of jobbing bombasters, pandars, cotton-woolsters and situation-defusers. Innumerable shades of jobbing interpreters and translators, inscribers and transcribers, white liars and typhlophiles. Entities spewing sense data for innumerable senses. The overloaded and the ennervated understimulated. Lubricators and labour dispute arbitrators. Fuckers and lovers. Fasters. Luddites and inlay-shunners. The infected and the allergic, the convulsing. Flyting husters, sessile in scaffold lecterns, or fleet upon casterboards. Redemption spotters. Engineers and tech people who definitely knew what the problem probably was now. Bottom-wipers. Clumsy greeters. Dump-tacklers. The thick-skinned skinned raw by the sensuousness of the turn of the seasons. Confidantes on frostiness gambits. The inarticulately vulnerable. Griefstricken. Flâneur prosthetics. Autos-da-fé. Phenomena, including personages, not strictly present, but edited later into collective memory. Developers and terrorists. Spoilt Fain finance brats riding on hella hu-t’ung-inappropriate bounce-orbs, and mammothrept Curlies in crystalline, fairytale carriages, splurging §crypt on sight-lines and personal space. Pheremone lattices. Unexplained luminous sails. Hick fortune-huntsters wading, with sinking hearts, through ominous backlog of chat from backwater kaleyard orbital.
In a pothole, an escape pod smouldering, fringed with melted vegetables.
Indecipherably exotic fugitives.
Sneering second-gen Fain solicitor and engineer aristocracy, fanatically urbane, disrobing the lamentably-disguised minimal freedom fighters, upright leverits and toads, sporting that bad taxidermy look, by means of tiny bespoke tridents, as the Fain whizzed by on diademed street-luges on their way to do something far more important. All manner of debtors. Some debtors but browsing picaroons, dabblers and compers, picking and choosing, perhaps merely pollarding a Hyderworld fasttree infestation first thing this morning, then knocking off till tomorrow when it was time to pass a redeye ambassador of the Poor Empire their Fainshell comb or butcher’s cleaver or baker's rolling cudgel. Other debtors were on the cusp of peonage, able to dent their principal only provided they outcompeted the debtors crowding that cusp alongside them, grasping and struggling, and begging solidarity.
The sky was full of rainbows and machines. Gurm WiPped openly.
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