Singularity’s Children

SkyWhale

Exciting news, folks! My new book is taking shape! It should be out towards the end of this year (or possibly next depending on how distracted I am by the relentless march of craziness!)

One of the locations is a floating vacuum dirigible—SkyWhale. If you’ve read my previous books, you might recognise the concept. It was on the cover of book 3 but from the angle it’s form still fairly ambiguous.

(Cover by the amazing DoFresh)

As we spend so much time there in the new book,I decided to put some effort into designing the SkyWhale properly…

I got to thinking about the aerodynamics. I decided to make the tail like the wings of a glider (sailplane) with high wing-loading and low-drag. I added multiple sets of forward fin/flukes for maneuvering at low speeds. These flatten against the envelope when the vessel is cruising.

Assuming it’s built with super light materials and nothing inside, it almost looks plausible, right?

Original sketch:

😉

Bitcoin’s Coming…

“The globe’s powers had been rabbits, nibbling shoots on the central reservation of a six-lane highway, aware of, but unconcerned by, the approach of a far-off beam of flickering yellow. They were prepared to make a leisurely lollop to safety if the meandering scooter—which each fully expected would eventually resolve from the glare of the approaching halo—came too close. Far too late, they had understood that the light was not the low-wattage lamp of an approaching electro-cycle, but the single remaining headlight hanging precariously from the rusty cab of an apocalypse-punk, articulated war-lorry fishtailing towards them on eighteen screaming wheels of certain death.”

This is how I described the arrival of the new paradigm in ReImagination. It’s MeshCoin—and it has layers in the Singularity’s Children Worldline—but same difference.

Summer SciFi Musings

It’s summer, it’s hot, I’m in Turkey doing some writing—surrounded by some very pushy cats and startlingly clever Jaybirds.
I got to thinking about non-human intelligence again (a big theme in my books).

Forget about aliens, we already see non-human culture and technology.

Animals are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. We know they are capable of using tools. Some even pass new knowledge onto their offspring and colleagues—technically, this is culture.

In my writing, the ‘BugNet’ allows animals to interact economically with humans. It’s Science Fiction, but it might not be as far off as we think…

I recently read about a group of scientists watching as a population of crows learned to use paper money to purchase treats from a vending machine!

The idea of their study was to see if birds could be incentivized to adapt to a completely new situation. The guinea pigs (flying guinea pigs) in this case were a murder of crows on a small south pacific island. They had already demonstrated they were able to make and use tools to snag bugs out of holes. In this experiment, they were presented with a vending machine and given some spending money. These very special birds quickly learnt that by inserting pieces of paper into the machine they could buy themselves lunch. Going further, when they were given notes which were too big, the crows were able to tear the larger denominations to match the advertised price.

In Siguarity’s Children I have a sequence where a trapped super-AI uses incentives and rewards to enlist wild animals to help it escape. Some of my early readers expressed scepticism that this might be a stretch, but here we have animals using tools, adapting to novel scenarios, and innovating on the fly (no pun intended). This is the same set of skills we might hope to find in a bright human being!

Imagine, if Instead of birds behaving this way, we’d found slug-beasts on another planet, or a population of zeno-chaete swarming beneath the ice of some Galilean moon! We’d be flipping out!

“Our difficulties in understanding or effectuating communication with other animals may arise from our reluctance to grasp unfamiliar ways of dealing with the world.”
― Carl Sagan

Let me know your own examples (or YouTube videos) of animals being unusually smart. I might include them in my upcoming book which (starts under the crust of an ice-moon).

If you want to read more about smart critters working within the human economy to build a better world… check out my Science Fiction!

Cheers, have a good summer!

Toby