Cross Pollination: Featured Interview with Greg Prado


Lobster Books is linking me up with other indie authors to do some cross-pollination. Continuing the series, here is an interview with Greg Prado. I have not read his books myself, but hear good things!


Thanks for doing this interview with Lobster Books!
Science fiction authors necessarily spend a lot of time thinking about what might happen. A few standard tropes tend to make their way into the public mindset as well. Of the following more common tropes, which do you think will chronologically come first, and why? Tropes: first contact with aliens, instant (ansible) communication across unlimited distances, teleportation, deep space travel with humans in stasis, colonizing other planets.

I feel like colonizing other planets has to be the first possibility. Outside the extremely random possibility of an alien finding us, I’d say that’s a given. Moon base would likely be first, followed by Mars or Venus, then who knows?

When huge changes in technology occur, they are always accompanied by massive shifts in social aspects of humanity as well. What kind of social impact do you think will happen alongside the next major technological discovery?

I think general AI (unrestricted learning) is going to be the biggest game-changer in our society. People are just naïve enough to allow themselves to be programmed out of a job. I truly hope it is regulated soon. Otherwise cruel men will do what they always do and cut out entire segments of the workforce. I think either way the change will begin to occur soon. I hope we are wise enough to handle the repercussions.

Many sci-fi books and movies rely on a unified Earth government in the face of an alien threat. Do you think something like is possible? Are humans capable of coming together to face an external threat or will our inability to get along en masse be our undoing?

Not at first. I think if a few cities got glassed, we could probably reach an agreement a bit more quickly. I think once we decided to collaborate, we would put aside our differences while the immediate threat passed, while also trying to figure out how to come out on top post-conflict.

What kind of futuristic technology that’s currently being researched fascinates you the most? (Thinking of mentally controlled prosthetics, quantum entanglement, private space flight / tourism, brain augmentation, etc.)

I use mentally controlled technology a lot in my books. I first used it in my book “Darkly” almost ten years ago. I decided on the name Neuralink back then. It is funny because after Elon Musk’s innovation, now everyone is going to think I copied his name.

In my books the interface is mainly used for extremely quick vehicles and exo-suits. This enables the user to naturally control some very difficult to work machinery. I think that it will be a huge challenge to implement well, but I also see some great potential for applications.


Awesome! Thanks for doing this interview!

You can find more about Greg and his books at the links below:
Website: https://www.GregPrado.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gregpradowrites
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/gregpradowrites

A Drake Equation for Hard Science Fiction

In an effort to estimate just how astonishingly rich and famous I am going to become from my Sci-Fi writing, I decided to calculate the potential readership of my books; a sort of Drake Equation for Hard Sci-Fi.

Let’s look at the terms:

R, Number of technically advanced readers
This is the magic number we are looking for; the higher the better!

=

p, Rate of people formation on Planet Earth
As I am new to the market, I don’t need to rely on new people being born, let’s just make this easy and go with the current population of the planet. We do need to remove kids,(25%) so I will go with a nice round 6 Billion.

x

r, Fraction of population who can read
As my books are not translated into other languages, here we need to restrict ourselves to those who can read English. 20% of the world speak English, and of these 75% can read (as with the actual Drake Equation, these figures are estimates). We are down to 900 Million. Looking pretty good! But, just to be on the safe side, I will wait a few more terms before putting in my order for a Lamborghini!

x

f, Fraction of readers where reading of fiction actually occurs
From studies in this area, averaging between men and women, it looks like approximately 50% read at least one book/year.

x

B, Number of books read per year by each reading individual
The numbers are getting less precise, but studying a few articles on the topic, it seems the average reader reports that they read about 4 books/year. About half of these are fiction.

Whoa! We are at 2.2Billion books/year. Forget the Lambo, I’m going to talk to Richard Branson about buying an Island!

x

fs, Fraction of books read that are Science Fiction
Here it gets tricky. We don’t have a very scientific classification system for genres. Some studies claim 25% of people read Sci-Fi, but these often lump in fantasy (which is clearly corrupt!). It seems that out of the ‘Speculative Fiction’ bucket, only 20% is actually science fiction.

x

fhs, Fraction of Sci-Fi readers who enjoy Hard-Science Fiction
We pair-down our readers again here. Of the remaining science fiction readers, the majority seem to head for Science Fantasy (Star Wars) or military space opera. Actual Hard Sci-Fi seems to be about 5% (based on a back of the envelope calculation comparing the sales rank between Science Fiction and Hard Science Fiction on Amazon)
We are still at 2.2 Million books/year.

x

ftw, Fraction who have heard of me (…or you if you use your numbers below)
Unfortunately, this is where things get nasty 🙁
My author page has 1000 likes on Facebook and I have 4500 followers on Twitter. So let’s say 5K out of a potential population of 900 Million. (It’s probably not quite as bad as this as many people will see my posts and tweets and not end up following me. There will also be some word of mouth, this probably scales non-linearly at some point.) To keep it simple that’s about 0.00005% of the population who have heard of me.

6000000000 * 0.2 * 0.75 * 0.5 * 2 * 0.25 * 0.2 * 0.05 * 0.0000005

Substituting these estimates and working through the equation, rounding to the nearest integer because I don’t think we can count half a person, we get 1.

One person.

You!

I hope you bought your copy already!    😉

 

 

Writing Retreat + 2nd Annual Reader Meetup



I’m in Amsterdam all week on my annual writing retreat. I love the city: it’s mist, smoke, architecture, and art; the shops, the people, the cafes, and just the right amounts of professionally-manicured sleaze.

I think I’m done with Book Four – I don’t mean it’s written or anything crazy like that, but I am now almost 100 percent comfortable with what needs to be written. The summit is in sight folks!
(Writing this now, I’m pretty sure I’ve said that before, but… this time I really mean it! Promise!)

Tonight will be the second of our annual reader meet-ups. I’m looking forward to it! I hope to see all the same faces as last year! And hopefully some new ones.

Some words fresh from the tips of my fingers you ask? Proof of work as it were… Sure:

Abhyuday whacked the palm-frond violently across the big brown buttocks before him. A fat horsefly burst into a Pollock of ketchup and mustard against the animals glistening hide.

The bovine who had suffered the bulk of the strike’s collateral damage swung its head lethargically back and gave its assailant a long blank look.

“You are very welcome.” The buffalo herder—aka Abhyuday Narasimhan, head of the Atlantis Academy of Sciences—informed it.





And finally some mood pics: