Last Saturday, I had a wonderful time at ICON 49.5. Most often held in Cedar Rapids, the Iowa Scifi Conference, or ICON, took place in Iowa City this year. Poised to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary in 2026, they decided to hold a one-day mini-conference this time, hence 49.5.
Book Signing
Conference organizers allowed me to set up at a table in the Iowa City Book Fair taking place the same day. For six hours, people stopped by to talk, look over my books, and buy some. I enjoyed sharing the table with Tricia Andersen, Darby Harn, and, later, Bree Moore. By watching these experienced authors, I learned more about how to do book signing events.
Indie Publishing Panel
To cap off the mini-conference, I spoke on the subject of Indie Publishing on a panel. Pictured from left to right are Tricia Andersen, Darby Harn, Bree Moore, me, and Rachel Aukes. By rights, I should have sat in the audience, because the other panelists seemed to have graduated summa cum laude from Indie Publishing University where I’d just enrolled as a freshman.
Gratitude
Still, I enjoyed the day’s experience and would like to thank not only the conference programming staff for allowing me to attend, but also my sister for accompanying me and helping me sell books. If there’s one writer who could really use the help, it’s—
What comes after Rock? In my book The Seastead Chronicles, you’ll find a story about the next sound, the coming musical wave.
The world of The Seastead Chronicles shows much of humanity abandoning the land to live in cities on and under the sea. That new environment shapes them and gives rise to new art, new jargon, a new religion. And new music.
Liquisic
They call it liquid music, or liquisic. I introduce it in my story, “Deep Currents.” Like rock, liquisic employs syncopation. Unlike rock’s typical 4/4 rhythm, liquisic uses 6/8. This gives songs a rolling, undulating feel, like waves at sea.
Where rock often features a strong melody and background harmony, liquisic intertwines several equal melodies. This mimics the overlapping nature of ocean waves. No single melody predominates, and all blend harmoniously. Music theory experts might call it counterpoint, or contrapuntal.
Instruments
Liquisic instruments use water to achieve an ethereal, fluid sound. Some of the instruments exist now, and one awaits invention.
The hydraulophone sounds and works like a pipe organ, but uses water rather than air.
The glass armonica takes the sound you make when rubbing a wet finger around a wine glass, and expands the idea to a full “keyboard.” You get haunting, mysterious tones.
As for the fluidrum, I made up the name, but water-based drums exist in Africa, Asia, and among Native American tribes. Germans gave it a different name, the wassertrommel. In India, they play the Jal Tarang. Whatever fluidrums are, they provide rhythm for the liquisic group.
The aquatar might serve as the star of the group, but I have no idea what it looks like, how it works, or what it sounds like. I leave that for readers to imagine. Perhaps the strings stretch within flexible, water-filled membranes. A player would strum them with fingers, not picks. Maybe you could see through the aquatar’s transparent body to the colored water sloshing around inside, with lights illuminating it.
There. I’ve done the hard work—naming the music genre, coming up with its characteristics, and proposing the instruments. All you have to do is get a band together, practice, do some concerts, and make your fortune. My story “Deep Currents” in The Seastead Chronicles offers a name for your band and several ideas for song titles.
One more thing. After you hit it big with liquisic, show a little love to—
Both books (1) contain the word “Chronicles” in their titles, (2) concern colonization, (3) belong in the science fiction genre, and (4) could be classified as fix-ups. I’m hard pressed to think of more similarities. On to the differences.
Creative Intent
Bradbury wrote all the short stories for TMC separately, with no intent of combining them. A publisher suggested the Chronicles idea to him. Bradbury then revised the stories to fit better, and added bridging narratives to form a consistent overall story.
I wrote a seastead short story with no initial plan to write more. After that, my muse suggested other stories and the notion of combining them took over. For that reason, TSC stories required no revision, and no bridging material to get them to mesh. Rather than calling it a fix-up novel, you could call TSC a “short story cycle.”
Plot Structure
Bradbury ordered his stories in a logical sequence and divided them into three sections, each occurring over specific designated years. Stories in the first part concerned exploration and initial contact with Martians, the second part with colonization and war, and the third part with the aftermath of what’s happened to humans on Earth and to Martians on Mars.
Although stories in The Seastead Chronicles appear in sequential order, I didn’t group them into parts, nor mention any specific years. The early stories depict initial seasteads and the search for seabed resources. The middle stories show the spread of aquastates and war between them as colonization proceeds. Later stories portray the blossoming of a new, oceanic culture.
Themes
Any discussion of story themes becomes subjective, since readers interpret tales in individual ways. Bradbury explored many deep themes in TMC, but overall I believe he intended a comparison of the colonization of Mars to the 19th Century conquest of indigenous people in the American West. The stories promote living in harmony with nature and suggest that those who don’t do so end up destroying nature and themselves.
For TSC, readers can draw their own conclusions. However, I intended to focus on humanity’s creative impulses, rather than its destructive ones. Though moving to a new environment introduces dangers, it also promotes new ways of thinking. From those, new cultures can arise, including fresh art, music, language, and religious beliefs. If you’re looking for real-life parallels, consider that all historical colonization efforts have changed the colonizers as they adapted to their new home.
Style
Bradbury wrote in a poetic, lyrical style, rich in imagery and metaphor. You can tell he loved the sound and rhythm of words. Few science fiction authors of his time wrote that way, so his prose stands out. By contrast, I’d characterize mine as plain and unadorned. I strive to make my sentences descriptive and easy to read.
Influences
The Wikipedia article on TMC lists several people whose works inspired Bradbury, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sherwood Anderson, and John Steinbeck. Editor Walter Bradbury (no relation) at Doubleday gave him the idea of combining his Martian-themed short stories into a single book.
For TSC, my influences start with Andrew Gudgel, who heard about seasteads and mentioned them to me. As general science fiction influences, I’d cite Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury.
Final Thoughts
In this brief blogpost, I’ve missed some similarities and differences. To perform your own comparison, you’ll have to read both books and decide for yourself. Don’t take the word of—
Sometimes science fiction authors create religions for their stories. According to Wikipedia, they do this to satirize, to propose better belief systems, to criticize real religions, to speculate on alien religions, to serve as stand-ins for real religions, or other reasons.
Examples
I could cite many cases of this, but I’m most familiar with the following:
Church of Science – Foundation (1951) by Isaac Asimov
Church of All Worlds – Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) by Robert A. Heinlein. Note: This book inspired the creation of a real religion by the same name.
Bokononism – Cat’s Cradle (1963) by Kurt Vonnegut
Bene Gesserit – Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert
Earthseed – Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents, (1998) by Octavia Butler
Oceanism
For my new book, The Seastead Chronicles, I created the religion of Oceanism. It begins with one man’s revelation and spreads through the seasteading community of aquastates. In some of the book’s stories, I mention certain aspects of Oceanism, but never describe it in full detail. Oceanism serves the purposes of the stories, not the other way around.
I don’t mean to make Oceanism sound like a fully-formed religion, complete in every aspect. Few writers, least of all me, would go to that much trouble. I created more features of it than appear in the stories, but not much more.
Aspects
All religions, even fictional ones, share certain basic attributes. Here’s how Oceanism addresses several of these aspects.
Belief in a higher power—For Oceanists, that’s their god: Oceanus.
Rules for living a virtuous life—Oceanists seek to obey the 5 Orders and avoid committing the 5 Sins
Sacred Texts—Oceanists call theirs the Tide.
Celebrations and Holidays—Oceanism recognizes five sacred days, evenly spaced through the year
Prayer and Meditation—Oceanism advocates daily meditation, while mostly immersed in water.
Rituals—Oceanists participate in the Five Life Events. Of these, Immersion is the most rigorous. During Immersion, adherents undergo permanent dying of their skin to some watery color, webbing of fingers and toes, inking of a forehead tattoo, and choosing an aqua-name.
Symbols and Iconography—the five-armed starfish serves as the main symbol of Oceanism, but adherents may choose any sea creature for their forehead tattoo. The number five contains special significance for Oceanists.
Sacred Spaces—Oceanism services take place in temples. There, worshippers wear bathing suits and sit in saltwater up to their necks.
Leaders who provide guidance—a High Priest leads the religion, with five pentapriests supporting him, and a hierarchy of priests supporting them.
Purpose
Earlier I cited several reasons authors create fictional religions. Oceanism exists to illustrate one of the ways cultures form in new environments. I imagined, if people moved to the sea in large numbers, new sea-based cultures would also arise and catch on, with new artforms, music, jargon, and religious sects. My stories make no judgements about the validity of Oceanism or any other religion. I leave religious satire and criticism to others.
Given what I’ve said about this religion, would you join with Oceanists? If not, does it sound plausible, at least? Feel free to leave a comment for—
Ever read a work of fiction and wish it included a glossary of the book’s unusual terms and names? Or do you think of glossaries as useless wastes?
In General
More common in nonfiction, glossaries sometimes appear in science fiction and fantasy books, to help readers orient to the unfamiliar world of a novel bristling with strange words and numerous proper nouns.
My new book, The Seastead Chronicles, lacks a glossary. I hope readers can pick up terms from context, without needing a reference section.
Readers might discern the meanings of many words even without context. For example, can you guess what the following seasteading slang words from my book might mean?
Here’s your list: blub-blub, blubbing, ebb-tide, flotz and jetz, fluke, kelpee, pelagic, squido, steader, tidal, and up-bubble.
In the book, character actions and dialogue provide context as they use these terms. Even if you couldn’t guess meanings without reading the stories, you’d deduce them without pondering too hard.
While creating the world of my book, I assumed characters would create new slang as they moved to live in ocean-based cities. That seemed likely, since the phenomenon occurs whenever people relocate and settle in a new environment.
Quiz Answers
Ready to find out how well you did at guessing the meanings of my fictional seastead slang? Below, I’ve provided a part of the glossary that doesn’t appear in The Seastead Chronicles. I bet you came close, even without context, to the correct meanings for many of them.
Word/PhraseMeaning
Blub-blub yada yada
Blubbing kidding, joking
Ebb-tide disappointing
Flotz and Jetz nonsense (from flotsam and jetsam)
Fluke swear word/oath
Kelpee kelp tea
Pelagic out/away, as in “I’m going pelagic”
Squido crazy
Steader a resident of a seastead, also Seasteader
Tidal popular, viral
Up-bubble positive, enthusiastic
Grading Yourself
If you couldn’t guess many slang term meanings, I blame myself. I didn’t give you any background material, but readers of The Seastead Chronicles have all the context needed.
I think the book works well without a glossary, but that’s the biased opinion of—
My newest science fiction book, The Seastead Chronicles, launched today. You can purchase the ebook version on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords and soon at Apple Books.
The Seastead Chronicles takes you through the 21st century struggle to colonize the seas, to carve oceans into nations, and to build cities on and under the water.
Spanning decades of time and several generations, these fifteen tales include the early efforts to construct sustainable seasteads, the hostile reaction of land nations, and the scramble for seabed resources. After the pioneers come the settlers, who battle over territory and then form a new, ocean-based culture with fresh music and a new religion.
Seasteads are permanent dwellings located in (what are now) international waters. The word combines “sea” and “homestead.” In my book, seasteads form the cities that comprise “aquastates”—nations in the ocean. Not all seasteads stay put. Some move around, and one (an aquastate by itself) wanders the world. Aquastate borders sometimes change through disputes, or even conflicts, as land borders do.
The stories all take place in this world, our world of the near future, but each follows different characters as they grapple with the challenges of living at sea. As always when humans do something or go someplace new, they bring what’s best and worst about humanity with them.
A huge thank-you goes to Pole to Pole Publishing for accepting this book and for believing in it.
Today, you can only purchase the ebook version. The publisher should release a paperback version soon, and I’ll let you know about that in a future blogpost.
Many of those who reach old age don’t enjoy the condition much. Those who tend to them, their caregivers, often wish they could do something else with their time.
A few years ago, I and (mostly) my wife, served as caregivers for my mother-in-law. As a scifi writer, I wondered if technology might help ease the burden for other caregivers someday.
I wrote a short story, “Its Tender Metal Hand,” about a caregiver robot of the near future. That story appears in the new anthology by Cloaked Press, Spring into Scifi, now available.
The Need
With human lifespans lengthening and the large Baby Boom generation reaching old age, the need for caregivers grows daily. Worsening the problem, the current labor shortage reduces the supply of potential workers in the field. The recent deaths of actor Gene Hackman and his caregiver wife, Betsy Arakawa, showcased the importance of the caregiver role.
The Tasks
A caregiver becomes a jack-of-all-trades, though few tasks rate high in difficulty—for humans. A good caregiver should:
Remind about, and provide, medication;
Navigate the patient around the home and yard;
Provide companionship via conversation;
Play games;
Perform necessary housework;
Clean and bathe the patient;
Monitor symptoms; and
Administer first aid if necessary.
The ideal, more advanced, caregiver might also:
Lift, reposition, and physically move the patient;
Perform medical tasks such as taking vital readings, and drawing blood;
Conduct physical therapy; and
Conduct psychological therapy.
The Current State
No single robot exists today that performs all those tasks. Some robots perform one or a few of the functions, but a true, general purpose caregiver robot awaits future development.
Today’s caregiver robots include: Aibo by Sony, ASIMO by Honda, Baxter by Rethink Robotics, Care-O-Bot 4 by Fraunhofer IPA and Mojin Robotics, Dinsow Mini 2 by CT Robotics, ElliQ by Intuition Robotics, Grace by Hanson Robotics, Human Support Robot (HSR) by Toyota, Mabu by Catalia Health, Mirokaï by Enchanted Tools, Moxi by Diligent Robotics, Nadine by NTU Singapore, NAO by Aldebaran Robotics, Paro by Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Pepper by Aldebaran Robotics, Pria by Pillo Health and Stanley Black & Decker, Ruyi by NaviGait, and Stevie by Akara Robotics.
The Difficulties
Robots have advanced in capability, but still struggle with tasks humans find easy, and excel at some things people find problematic.
Two examples of the latter category occur to me. As mentioned in my previous blogpost, a robot will listen with patience to repeated re-tellings of the same story, and a sturdy robot could lift a heavy patient without spinal strain.
Also, certain tasks, even if robotically possible, present serious consequences if done wrong. For safety reasons, substantial testing must occur before permitting robots to perform medical tasks or to lift patients.
Perhaps the most elusive task for a caregiver robot, the last one to be achieved, will be to exhibit a truly human connection, a deep, sympathetic friendship bond.
Fictional Treatment
Movies have explored the concept of caregiver robots in various ways. Bicentennial Man and I, Robot touch on the idea. Big Hero 6and Robot and Frank delve deeper, with caregiver robots integral to their plots.
My story, “Its Tender Metal Hand,” features a general-purpose caregiver robot capable of most of the tasks mentioned above. However, it lacks an emotional bond, an understanding of the human condition.
But maybe it can learn.
Perhaps an advanced, capable caregiver robot lies in the future for—
Welcome to Spring! Starting today, you can Spring into Scifi by purchasing the new anthology by Cloaked Press, available here. The book contains one of my short stories.
My Story
My tale, “Its Tender Metal Hand,” concerns an aged man, Maleko Koamalu, whose remaining family can’t care for him.
They pay for a caregiver robot.
Maleko hates the robot, but the robot persists in taking care of his needs. Robots can do many things, but can they help an old man reconcile with his child before it’s too late?
If the story’s touching ending prompts a tear or two, well, sorry not sorry.
Inspiration
I wrote it after my wife and I served as caregivers for my mother-in-law. It occurred to me that a well-designed robot could perform all the required tasks. In a couple of ways, a robot might prove superior to a human caregiver. Robots often excel at the things humans struggle with, and vice versa.
Elderly people sometimes repeat themselves, forgetting that they’ve just said the same thing. This can annoy human caregivers, but a robot will listen patiently, over and over, responding each time as if hearing it afresh.
Also, human caregivers often find it difficult to lift and convey heavy patients between bed and wheelchair, or wheelchair and toilet. A well-built robot could do this with ease.
The Anthology
The book contains thirteen other short stories I look forward to reading. Edited by Andrew Ferrell and published by Cloaked Press, this new science fiction anthology, Spring into Scifi, is available here and here so far, with more distributors picking it up soon. As I may have mentioned, it includes a story written by—
Aliens have come a long way. Not real aliens—I don’t even know if they exist. I’m referring to aliens in literature. Inspired by fine articles authored by Ian Simpson and Joelle Renstrom, I’ll describe how aliens evolved with science fiction.
First, though, I’ll emphasize a non-intuitive law of alien literature: Alien stories aren’t about aliens. They’re about humans. Even stories populated only by non-human characters are about humans. A simple reason explains this—people write stories for other people. If we encounter aliens someday, we’ll write stories about them, and perhaps they’ll return the favor…if they write stories. Until then, it’s all about us.
Origins – Humanoids to Visit and Study
In primeval scifi, aliens resembled us. They served as stand-ins for primitive human societies encountered during exploratory voyages. They existed to be noticed and remarked upon, or to serve as metaphors serving the author’s purposes.
Examples include the sun and moon people of Lucian’s True History, the tall lunar Christians of Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone, and the titanic aliens of Voltaire’s Micromégas.
Post-Darwin Evolutionary Branching
Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution showed how animal species evolve from earlier forms and sometimes split into two or more species. This freed writers from the humanoid anatomy, so aliens branched out in all directions, exploding into the universe of fiction. They filled all niches. Their attitudes toward humans ranged from bad, through neutral, to good.
We saw warlike, conquest-driven aliens shaped like giant heads in H.G. Wells’ TheWar of the Worlds. A variety of species populated Mars in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series. God-like aliens appeared in Olaf Stapleton’s Star Maker. C.S. Lewis gave readers otter-like bipeds and insect-frogs in Out of the Silent Planet. E.E. “Doc” Smith’s The Skylark of Space featured non-material aliens. Arthur C. Clarke showed us Satan-like aliens whose purpose was to prepare humanity for its designated future role, in Childhood’s End. In Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein scared us with huge bug-aliens. By contrast, peaceful and philosophical aliens occupied Mars until humans colonized the planet and displaced them in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.
3-D Aliens
Readers loved these aliens, but began asking questions. They wanted more depth. Authors began fleshing out the aliens, thinking through the implications. They gave the aliens backstory, culture, language, politics, art, philosophy, mores, and logical motivations.
In Dune and its sequels, author Frank Herbert supplied a life cycle for the giant sandworms, and integrated them into the values and mythos of the planet.
Larry Niven became the exemplar for fully-imagined aliens, from the puppeteers and Kzinti of Ringworld, to the Moties of The Mote in God’s Eye, to the elephantine Fithp of Footfall (the latter two co-written with Jerry Pournelle). These aliens possessed history, characteristic gestures, distinctive modes of thought, their own behavior patterns—the whole package.
Explanations for Non-Contact
As decades passed and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) failed to detect evidence of aliens, and as the difficulty of interstellar travel became more apparent, writers found it less credible to craft stories teeming with star-voyaging alien life.
Authors had to confront the Fermi Paradox problem of why humans haven’t heard from aliens, and what forms that communication might take. Carl Sagan’s Contact, Robert J. Sawyer’s Rollback, and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” examined these themes in different ways.
Your Alien Story
Like time, evolution marches on. I don’t know what’s next for aliens. Perhaps, in an upcoming story of yours, you’ll tell—
Science fiction literature has provided many fun and interesting technologies that lie beyond our current abilities. Let’s look at a few.
Waterfall, by M.C. Escher
I’m calling these technologies improbable rather than impossible. One person’s impossible often becomes a later person’s accomplishment. The technologies on my list aren’t available now, and some violate known laws of physics, but scientists are researching all of them, and breakthroughs can occur.
Faster than Light (FTL) Travel
This one violates the General Theory of Relativity. That speed limit of c stretches interstellar travel into century or millennium timeframes. If you could exceed light-speed, no policeman could pull you over.
FTL Communication
If relativity forbids pushing matter faster than light, what about information? Sadly, so-called super-luminal communication also violates relativity and nobody has demonstrated it yet. Call me, you Andromedans, just not collect.
Wormhole Transit
The notion of sending matter (including people) through a wormhole connecting distant regions of space sounds appealing. It doesn’t violate relativity or even require FTL. However, nobody has found a wormhole and we don’t know if they exist, or can be created. We should come up with a better name, though.
Teleportation
The movement of macroscopic objects (including people) from one point to another without passing through the space between, as with the Star Trek transporter, might happen one day. The process doesn’t violate physics laws, but would require computational complexity beyond our current means. You’ve got to rearrange all 7 x 1027 atoms in their proper position. So far, scientists can “teleport” information about a single atom across a distance of 3 meters, but that’s all. “Beam me up, Scotty.” “Sorry, I canna do that, Captain.”
Time Travel
From the little I understand, time travel comports with physics laws. However, traveling to the past introduces causality problems, like the Grandfather Paradox. Traveling to the future avoids that difficulty, but remains beyond our technological reach. Except, I believe, for DeLoreans with the advanced options package.
Artificial Gravity and Anti-gravity
Though these are different things, I’ve lumped them together due to their mutual attraction. Artificial gravity, broadly defined, presents no difficulty. Use the centripetal force of a rotating spaceship, or the ship’s linear acceleration, to create it. However, creating gravity itself or eliminating it lies beyond our capability today. Heavy, huh?
Force Fields and Tractor Beams
If we can’t go faster than light, can we at least equip our spaceships with force fields or deflector shields to keep meteors away, and maybe tractor beams to grab things? Perhaps. Scientists are researching these gadgets, but each might consume more energy than they’re worth. Seems like physicists are spoiling all our fun.
Tactile Holograms
Scientists keep telling us no, but they’ll let us have holodecks, like in Star Trek the Next Generation, or hologram doctors, like in Star Trek Voyager, right? Sorry, you can’t touch light. Electromagnetic radiation, as we understand it, doesn’t work that way. Physicists ruin everything.
Lightsaber
Those laser weapons in the Star Wars movies look dangerous but handy. However, they violate what we know about optics and electromagnetic radiation. We can give you a laser, but the beam won’t end in mid-air, and will cross right through your opponent’s laser beam. Also, a laser strong enough to hurt people won’t fit in your hand. Sorry, apprentice Jedi, I’ve got nothing for you.
Invisibility
We’d all love this technology. Think of the practical jokes and the deniability. Optics researchers are working on invisibility using metamaterials, but haven’t seen any practical results. (I should reword that.) Invisibility suffers from an unfortunate downside—blindness. Light passes unseen through a transparent eyeball. A normal, opaque eyeball can see, but also be seen. Don’t look for invisibility any time soon.
Neuralyzer
Maybe I wouldn’t need a lightsaber if I had a neuralyzer, as in the Men in Black movies. Using that gadget, I could make my enemy forget why he wanted to fight. This time, physicists give their consent. However, biologists point out they’ve only demonstrated the technology on mice, and only by implanting fiber optic cables into the mice brains. They’d test it on humans, but nobody has yet volunteered to have their mind wiped.
Suspended Animation
That light speed limit bums me out. If interstellar travel takes centuries, then let me sleep through it, Rip Van Winkle style, and wake me when we get there. Oh, no. Here come those nay-saying biologists They acknowledge suspended animation happens all the time with microorganisms and plant seeds. It’s happened with humans for an hour or two, no more. At light speed, that only takes us one or two billion kilometers. They’d be waking me up before we got to Uranus.
Mind Uploading
The nature of our bodies renders some of these technologies improbable. We could get around that and become immortal if we simply upload our minds into computers. Maybe someday, not today. Here, computational complexity limits us. Work faster, you computer engineers! Why, I have half a mind to…
Cloning Long-Extinct Species
Not known for long-term planning, dinosaurs neglected to leave behind enough intact DNA for us to clone them. Maybe it’s just as well. If we did clone dinosaurs now, in our time, what would they eat?
Conclusion
I’ve teased about scientists spoiling our fun, but they can’t. We can still enjoy reading scifi books about these improbable technologies. They make for fascinating stories. Many scientists love scifi even while they wince at some of the gadgets. Some of these improbable devices even appear in the stories of—
