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I had to take a break from Twitter to sort out my plans for the next year. The disastrous e******n and the looming threat of totalitarianism didn't help my anxiety and dread. So far, 2021 is simultaneously the best and worst year I've had.
Unlike a certain tradpup purse puppy, I didn't let a disastrous political defeat demoralize and paralyze me. I got serious about my next book, instead of waiting for the ideas to come to me, and made a lot of progress in working out the plot.
I've always hated cyberpunk and thought Alfred Bester did it earlier and better. I took a common cyberpunk trope, the idea of "uploading your brain" into a computer-generated afterlife, and "demolished" it (pun intended) with help from Bester.
NIGHLAND RACER has a "City of the Dead" where the people tried to cheat death by creating a technological afterlife ... and went insane. Inspiration from the horrifying Skoptsy sect in The Stars My Destination, and from a brilliant Bester story called "Hell is Forever"...
in which a man is given his own universe to play God in, and ends up as a sort of insane Demiurge. Additional inspiration from PKD's "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon."
I made progress in working out the mythology of the book. I decided that the stars are alive and sentient, and a black hole is an insane star that tried to extend its life cycle and cheat death by absorbing mass from its neighbors.
The idea was inspired by three different John C. Wright works. The Nothing Sophotech from The Golden Oecumene, which sends people to a Hell inside a black hole; the vampiric worlds and vampiric stars from Superluminary; ...
and the idea of the Sun and/or the Earth emanating a mysterious form of life energy that keeps monsters from the outer dark at bay, found in both Superluminary and Awake in the Night Land.
Will tackle the 1st draft by the end of February.
Will tackle the 1st draft by the end of February.
