Category Archives: Seastead Chronicles series

Music of the Seasteading World

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.

Hydraulophone, photo by Glogger

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.

Glass armonica, photo by Glogger

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.

Jal Tarang, photo by Sugnandani on Wikipedia
Water drums, photo by Smalltown Boy on Wikipedia

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.

Astraremi’s liquid-filled guitar

Your Turn

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—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 3, 2025Permalink Leave a comment

Seasteads—Not Just for Billionaires or Libertarians

Search on the internet for “seasteads” and you’ll soon see mentions of billionaires and libertarians. Why is that? Are seasteads only for people in those small groups? Let’s explore the question.

Billionaires

Propeller Island, by Jules Verne

I believe billionaires get mentioned with seasteads for two reasons: (1) Seasteads cost much more to build than houses on land, and (2) Billionaires often chafe at paying high taxes in their home country and long to escape to a low-tax country, of which few exist.

Among the earliest fictional examples of seasteads was Standard Island, a floating, mobile seastead in Propeller Island (or L’Île à hélice) by Jules Verne (1895). American millionaires built it.  

Sealand

In real life, seasteads might not require billionaires at all. Settlers might construct a small one without spending vast sums. They might build on an existing, abandoned platform, as with the Principality of Sealand. Crowdfunding might present another way to pay for a seastead’s construction, with perks of citizenship offered in exchange for contributions.

Libertarians

Seasteading often gets associated with libertarianism because adherents to that political philosophy see few, if any, land nations living up to libertarian principles. Their efforts to influence one or more existing countries to adopt libertarianism have failed. Some now believe the only way to live in a libertarian country is to create a new one.

However, nothing about the seastead concept requires a libertarian governing philosophy. If you build a seastead, declare it a country, and somehow get it recognized as such, you could set up any form of government you please.

The Seastead Chronicles

In my book, The Seastead Chronicles, a brash billionaire builds a seastead and declares ownership of a sector of the ocean. I don’t state the type of government on that seastead, so readers may imagine what they wish.

The fate of that seastead initiates a “gold rush” for oceanic oil and minerals, boom, and other seasteads get established. Most of these locate near known ocean bottom resources to take advantage of seabed mining. They divide the oceans into nations, called aquastates, which other nations and the U.N. recognize. As with land nations, territorial disputes arise, some leading to war. A few aquastates go bankrupt and get absorbed.

Only one story in The Seastead Chronicles mentions the building of a seastead and I gloss over its funding. My stories depict seasteads as existing structures, since my aim is to imagine the effect on people of living at sea. Billionaires might have been involved in funding some of the seasteads, but others might have been built by corporations or crowdfunding.

As for governing systems, they run the gamut. I assumed people would flee their home countries and establish the government they dreamed of at sea. Given a fresh start, they’d set up their own planned utopias. A few might lean libertarian, or start off that way, but I imagined others as solarpunk, anarchic, monarchic, military oligarchic, cooperatively leaderless self-governing, etc.

Up to You

If seastead cities and their aquastates got established in real life, how do you think it would happen? Would only the super-wealthy fund their construction? Would libertarianism dominate their governing philosophies? You might enjoy letting your imagination conjure cities and countries at sea. You could come up with ideas even more outlandish (pun intended) than those of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 27, 2025Permalink Leave a comment

How do the Two Chronicles Compare?

Seventy-five years ago, Doubleday published Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (TMC). One month ago, Pole to Pole Publishing released my book, The Seastead Chronicles (TSC). A comparison of similarities and differences follow.

Similarities

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—

Poseidon’s Scribe

July 6, 2025Permalink Leave a comment

Launch of The Seastead Chronicles

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.

Get ready, readers, for The Seastead Chronicles, by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 17, 2025Permalink Leave a comment