The Demons

I’m deep into the rough draft of The Demons. I have at least 30 more scenes to complete. I suspect there will be additional scenes added to glue the story together better. That many scenes should come out to an additional 50,000 to 60,000 words. This means that the final draft will end up at 130k… maybe. It’s going to be a heavy read, which is good.

Desperate Action

This book is still priced at 99 cents. I’m still contemplating running an Ad on Facebook about it. I might just run a short Ad (like a week or maybe two weeks) to see how it’ll perform. If I do that, it’ll be a loss because there are no follow-on books at the moment. I’ll be able to get metrics on how many clicks it takes to make a sale, but read-through will be impossible until I publish the next book. According to the reviews that it’s received so far, it appears to be a good candidate for a long series.

If you’ve read the book (no real spoilers here), you’ll discover that I’ve used a trope that appears in some SciFi, like the reimaged version of Battlestar Galactica. The trope is that the computers used on the protagonist’s ships are all wimpy. In BG’s case, they downgraded their data systems because Cylons were able to easily hack into high-end computers and networks. In the case of Desperate Action, I used an excuse that Earth has been devastated and chip manufacturing was crushed during that time. Their society is trying to rebuild, but it will take some years before they are up to the production level that they need for all the ships that are being built.

So why incorporate this trope? Well, it allows for a ship full of humans that perform a lot of jobs. Like a navy ship. Warships will typically have a manual operation of devices in addition to automated systems. If the power goes out during a battle, it’s better to be able to do things manually, even if it’s inferior, than to roll over and die. I can imagine that futuristic ships will have advanced data systems with AI that can diagnose and self-repair systems during battle. With the addition of robots, an entire ship could be completely automated, or maybe there is a tiny crew that makes high-level battle decisions.

In the case of a computerized ship, we’re talking about something like the Enterprise on Star Trek. Though, they have far too many people for a ship that should have advanced computer AI. Then again, they have ready-made excuses for the exclusion of robots, so maybe that’s where the humans have to be.

If a ship were completely automated, leaving only a tiny crew of commanders, maybe the weapons systems are coordinated by the computers and all the commanders have to do is decide what target to attack, or just give the command to attack. Then the AI takes over and runs the entire ship, maximizing the performance of the attack. On the next level down, maybe the commanders will decide what type of attack, or what weapons to use.

All of this means that the story is completely different. Someday, I might write a series that uses ships of such advanced technology. It would be interesting to come up with battle scenarios that such an arrogant shipbuilder could get into that would cause them grief. It could become the trope of the series, that they go into battle thinking their “smart ships” will deal a knockout blow, but it all comes crashing down due to something tiny they never thought of.

Anyway, The Traveler series uses ships that could be more automated, but I’ve written scenes around the fact that some consoles are missing, processors are not installed, or things are manual because they just can’t get their hands on the chips. There are also references to the fact that Earth used to have more advanced androids (and the book does contain some of those, but only the rich can get them), but currently society is on a downward technology spiral due to the constant war with alien invaders.

Ah, good times!