The Demons

First, I want to mention that progress on The Demons is good. I’m over halfway through the rough editing. I’ve done the large story fixes needed to make things consistent. I’m still editing and flipping back and forth to add details to earlier scenes to match the later ones. I expect this editing phase to be done by mid-week next week. Then I’ll run it through the grammar checker and on to the read-out-loud part. The word count is over 126k at the moment. More than I expected.

Books I’m Reading

Of course, I read SciFi. It’s my choice of entertainment. Last week I finished an older book by Philip K. Dick called Ubik. Oh, that was a crazy story. I won’t give any spoilers, but I see early kernels of The Matrix in that story. What I find interesting about older SciFi is that it’s almost steampunk when read today. Ubik was writing in the late ’60s. Therefore microcomputers were not invented yet. The best sound system was a perfectly balanced record player and a tape deck. I’m betting he meant real-to-real tape since the cartridge didn’t come out until the late 70s. He only mentions TVs and remotes, etc. No foresight that TVs would become solid-state (who could have predicted that in the 60s? But they had rockets and hotels on the moon as well as fast air travel (from building to building). The rockets and air travel were automated, so nobody had to control them.

They have precogs as well. Minority Report anyone? The precogs are just a background of a society where mind readers run amok as well as people with anti-mind reading powers. They can negate mind readers. There are anti-precogs, etc.

They also have people in half-life. That means that they died, but their brain is still active for several years and you can go to a place to talk to your loved one. This plays a central part in the story. At first, all these terms are tossed around as if the reader knows what they all are. So it’s a bit fast and loose in the first two scenes. Then things settle into the main story and it gets a bit crazy.

The ending… Yikes.

I managed to pick up a used paperback copy. Amazon has EBooks in various languages, except for English (which I thought was odd, maybe it was buried in the long list of books).

Oh, and just in case you don’t know who Philip K. Dick is, he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Which was made into the movie Blade Runner. Ubik has the same feel as Blade Runner, which makes sense since it was the same author. I suspect most of his books read like that. I’ll have to pick up another one of his works to find out.

I’ve also finished a couple of short stories that were published in Asimov’s SF. I’m trying to get a feel for the type of stories that they publish (I haven’t read Asmov’s SF in years). I submitted The Space Junk Collector to that magazine and received my first rejection (woot!). That’ll probably be the first of many. I figure that someday I’ll stumble onto a story that they like and get it published. It’s kind of a silly goal, but I want to get at least one of my short stories published in Asimov’s.

Anyway, one of the stories, called The Errata, was about a kid, his mom, and their cat that are on their way to a distant star. What I found most interesting about the story was the fact that everyone is limited on how much “stuff” they can bring on board before departing. His mother packed her passions with books. Just books. At the beginning of the story, it seemed pointless to have her cabin stuffed with books, but by the end of the story, it turned out that books were a sought-after commodity. That, of course, was just a subplot to the overall story, but it was quite interesting how the author worked that in.

The second story I read was called Night Running. It was about a guy who took an experimental drug for his Parkinson’s disease and ended up with a side effect that was crazy. Basically, when he was asleep, another personality took over and did stuff. Oh boy, that was crazy. Like waking up in a park at the crack of dawn and realizing that he had run 50 kilometers from where he lived with no wallet, money, phone, etc.

In Hazardous Imaginings (a collection of short stories I bought from Amazon), there’s a story named City of a Thousand Names. The setup for this story was a continent on Earth, in the future, where you had to sign up to be chipped in order to live in the city. Once you’re chipped, you choose which group of people you want to live among and then they program your ship so you can only interact with those people. There are billions of people crowded in the city, but each group only sees a few hundred or maybe a thousand of their own citizens. In the story, which is primarily a futuristic murder/mystery, each group or person can petition to divide down into a smaller, more narrowly defined group of people. Something they share (or an individual that would live alone). Well, as you can imagine, there were about 70 thousand groups. This happened over time because each person became more intolerant as they had the ability to cut off people they didn’t like by forming a new group. I won’t spoil the ending, but it ends with a bang.

Well, back to my writing…