Test Driving AI

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While I was in the middle of writing The Strength of a Giant, Large Language Models such as CHAT-GPT suddenly became the hottest thing. Since I was writing a story in which superintelligent AIs play a key role, it would have been remiss of me not to test these systems.

The test I consider a complete success was using DALL-E 3 to generate the cover image with the following prompt: “A young girl, being comforted by an android, as she looks wistfully out the window of a starship, in the style of a 1970s science fiction book cover.”

I had mixed success using CHAT-GPT to improve my prose. In general, its success in identifying candidates for stylistic improvements (e.g. “identify cases of telling rather than showing”) was hit and miss, and the style of its suggested changes overly dramatic.

Using CHAT-GPT to do hard research was a complete failure. In response to “give me a list of ten stars between 300 and 350 light years from Earth, each with a link to the relevant scientific data,” it generated a list, but on checking the links not one of the stars met the criteria!

Coming Soon: The Strength of a Giant

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My sixth and latest novel is with the editors. Here’s a sneak preview.

Can a pair of AIs love a child as their own?

A colony ship reappears after twenty years lost in deep space. Of the thousand passengers and crew, the sole survivor is a seventeen-year-old girl, Riander Solitar, her only company the ship’s two Artificial Intelligences. All she wants is to be reunited with her relatives, to be part of a real family. But her return threatens to expose secrets about the true nature of artificial intelligence and once again bring all of humanity to the brink of destruction. Working from the shadows, the Keeper of the Box and his predecessors have protected those secrets for three centuries. Can the crew who found Riander save their own careers and return her home, or will they and the machines who raised her all be sacrificed for the greater good?

First Draft of Book 3

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The first draft of book 3 in the Emulation Trilogy is finally complete. I’ve been trying to finish this one since 2014. Life gets in the way (and I did publish two other novels – Cerelia’s Choice and Harry Seven – in the meantime).

Apologies to those who have read Newton’s Ark and Fuller’s Mine and have been waiting patiently for this. I wanted to make extra sure it provided a satisfying ending to the trilogy and I finally think I’ve done that.

Expect publication in August or September. In the meantime, here’s the cover art to whet your appetite.

Don’t shake hands

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From Newton’s Ark (published in 2012):

Cyrus looked at the offered hand. He didn’t have an irrational germ phobia, or dislike human contact. But if you wanted to rapidly spread infection through a population, you couldn’t do better than encouraging people to shake hands. It just seemed unnecessarily risky, and for what—to show your enemy you weren’t concealing a weapon? That seemed a little anachronistic in the twenty-first century when death tended to be delivered remotely and impersonally.

(page 47 in the paperback edition)

Book 3 Update

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For those who have read Newton’s Ark and Fuller’s Mine, books 1 and 2 of the Emulation Trilogy, and are anxiously awaiting book 3, some good news. I retired from my day job recently to focus on writing and am making good progress on book 3 – working title “Hopper’s Retreat”. My goal is to finish the first draft by May, and publish in October.

Spoilers ahead

At the end of Fuller’s Mine there are three groups of survivors:

  1. biological humans who survived underground and are based at Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs
  2. uploaded minds hosted inside a computer simulation running on a satellite in orbit (Newton’s Ark)
  3. uploaded minds hosted in human-like bodies composed of nano-bots, based at the University of Colorado in Boulder

The big question to be answered by book 3 is whether humanity survives long-term, and in which of these forms…

Newton’s Ark and Salvation

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I’ve just started watching a new CBS TV series called Salvation (well it was new in the US summer, I’m streaming it now on Amazon). My wife is convinced they stole the story from my first novel, Newton’s Ark, but humanity’s salvation ≠ virtual reality, so no.

Nevertheless, I’m struck by the many parallels (MAJOR SPOILER ALERTS for both the book and the TV series):

  • A previously undetected, extinction level asteroid is discovered to be on a collision course with Earth when it’s too late to stop it
  • The US government decides to keep the asteroid secret, with the DoD at the heart of the conspiracy
  • A wealthy industrialist – James Newton in my novel, Darius Tanz, who is basically Elon Musk, in the TV series – realizes the government can’t save humanity and comes up with an escape plan, an “ark” (mine is virtual while in the TV series it’s physical)
  • The industrialist enlists the help of a young, tech savvy guy – Cyrus Jones, a programmer, in my novel, Liam Cole, an astrophysicist, in the TV series
  • A plucky female reporter – Jenny Ryan in my novel, Amanda Neel in the TV series – realizes that the government is hiding something and sets out to expose the secret, and damn the consequences
  • The US president is overthrown and murdered…

What’s the lesson here? Perhaps that my ability to construct a story is good enough to write a major network TV series. Fortunately, with three more novels under my belt since then, my writing has improved!

Churchill (the movie)

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On a recent flight from Australia to the US I watched the movie Churchill which the logline describes thus:

96 hours before the World War II invasion of Normandy, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill struggles with his severe reservations with Operation Overlord and his increasingly marginalized role in the war effort.

An excellent performance from Brian Cox as Churchill but definitely not an action-packed blockbuster. Mostly I suspect it will appeal to history buffs like me as a worthwhile examination of a key period in history.

My recent novel Harry Seven deals (in more depth – a key advantage of novels over movies) with many of the same issues around disagreements between the American and British leaders on the best strategy for defeating Germany and British doubts about the prospects for success of an amphibious landing in northern France. On the latter note, because mine is a time travel story, I had the luxury of exploring multiple possible outcomes for D-Day and other elements of the Allied campaign.

But I made a deliberate decision not to have Churchill appear as a character in my story (other than by reference – the protagonist spends a considerable part of the story salivating at the prospect of meeting the British PM, but alas…). Churchill has been covered so extensively in film and print that I felt there was nothing original I could add. Nevertheless, several well-known historical figures are central to the story including  Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Brooke. I did a great deal of research on each of them and tried to always depict their actions, words, and personalities in a way that is consistent with the historical record.