Tag: hoshi

Why “Liminal Universe”

In the category of, “things that make perfect sense in my brain but no one else’s,” is likely why I call the world where Hoshi and many of my other stories are set the “Liminal Universe.” Here’s the missing info.

liminal | ‘limǝnl |
adjective
1. relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process
2. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold
from Latin limen ‘threshold’

-Oxford American Dictionary

I started developing this universe over 20 years ago. At the time I was extremely interested in the concept of liminality. Okay, so I’m still extremely interested in the concept of liminality. The first novel I wrote in the world was named Liminal. It takes place about 50 years before the upcoming Resonance (55ish years before Hoshi). I still haven’t managed a draft of it I’m happy with, but hope to eventually as it’s the start of the cycle that Resonance and its companion book Revolution complete.

So how does this ‘verse connect with liminality?

Subliminal vs. supraliminal and thresholds of sensation – This is all about the élans, the aliens, the sensation of someone “walking over your grave” and humanity’s fascination with ghosts on the radio. The world of the aliens and the human world are largely subliminal to each other–outside each others’ ability to perceive–but that does not mean unconnected.

Social liminality – The Operators / nauta occupy a liminal position in society, being both valuable and marginalized. As someone who has always existed in liminal spaces, I tend to write about sectors that don’t fit into social norms, that occupy intersectional positions, or that have large amounts of fluidity, such as communities of individuals who are artists, exiles, or illegal.

The liminality of the Mem – The metaverse-cyberspace-virtual world of the Mem is as inherently liminal as our internet. I mean, really, what the heck is this thing? Is it real? Is it a collective dream? A bunch of zeros and ones or the place where we meet and live?

Literal thresholds between dimensional spaces – Although my SF is grounded in real complexity science and social science, I am not a physicist. So my handwavy way of managing space travel is to throw in some thresholds LOL. The places where space farers transition between realspace and dimensionspace are called, officially, Liminalities. For example, “The Stella-Maru crossed the Saturn Liminality from dimspace into the Sol system.”

Paradigmatic transitions and initial stages of first contact – One of the main reasons why I invented this ‘verse was to explore the transitional stages of paradigm shifts. What makes an entire population change its mind about something or see things in a new way? Also, these stories take place in the initial stage of negotiation and understanding between the humans and élans when outcomes still could go in any direction.

New Book Excerpt & Interview on All The Things

I’ll write more–maybe too much–about this as time goes on but here is the very first post squeeeee. I am too excited/terrified. Terricided? Excitified? I am a weirdo. HERE ARE ALL THE THINGS

1. The wonderful folks at Wordgathering interviewed me about disability fiction, Hoshi, my next book in Hoshi’s world, and other cool stuff! Read my interview!

2. They also published an except from said next book in Hoshi’s world! Read the excerpt!

3. Oh, yeah, there is a next book in that world and here is a preview of its cover

Black background. Jupiter and the four Galilean moos are across the top. Beneath them are rainbow waves above a slender male dancer who is keeling in a single spotlight. Sparks come from his hands and arms. At the bottom, the book title is "Resonance" and the author is "Dora M Raymaker"

TERRICITEIFIED and so many thanks to Wordgathering for being awesome!

Read all their stuff!

More to come!

Stories and Media in the Liminal Universe

Hoshi and the Red City Circuit is set in the liminal universe. I call it the “liminal universe” after the first book I wrote about it, which may or may not ever see the light of day. Other stories, though, have seen the light of day, and here is the list so far if you want to play in the ‘verse:

Hoshi and the Red City Circuit is my novel from Argawarga/Autonomous Press. Due to their unique neurology, only the enslaved Operator caste can program the quantum computers that run 26th century Red City. When three of the caste are ritually murdered, it’s up to private investigator Hoshi Archer—herself a recently liberated Operator—to help the police solve the case. Things get complicated when one of the victims turns out to be Hoshi’s ex-girlfriend, and power-hungry bureaucrats and old rivals stir up new problems. An immortal, amoral alien may even be involved. To unwind the plot to take over the city, Hoshi must decipher a deadly computer program and learn to communicate with the alien, before it’s too late for the next victim—and the city. Paperback and ebook available from autpress.com; free ebook with paperback purchase! Also available in paperback and Kindle from amazon.com, from Powell’s City of Books, or ask at your local bookstore.

“Heat Seeking Entities” is a short story set about 30 years prior to Red City Circuit (around when Hoshi was born), and features a very young Caran Watts, who appears in passing in Hoshi in a bit of world history. That story is available in the Spoon Knife 3: Incursions anthology, from Autonomous Press. In the icy-dark of Ganymede’s slums two compromised thieves, both after the same prototype, shelter while law enforcement looks for them. As the troops invade their refuge, each must decide whether to betray for a better chance of individual success—or to risk an incursion into the other’s world and remain hidden. Order direct from Autonomous Press (free ebook with paperback), from Amazon, or ask your local bookstore to order it and carry it!

Pulped Free – I make a free web comic Pulped Free set in the liminal universe when I’m tired of words, and kind of at random. I’m still in “learner mode” with the medium–knowing how to draw and knowing how to write does not automatically make one know how to create graphic stories, heh. But it’s fun for me, and it’s there, and the web site has pages about world concepts that could be of interest by themselves. The comic occurs in the same time period as “Heat Seeking Entities” and, after some intro stuff and a bit more of Caran and his BFF Djen, follows a miserable band of space pirates on a space ship possessed by an unstable élan as they navigate damage and look for loot.

Resonance – Coming later, a new novel exploring the dynamics between hope and fear, set on Jupiter’s Galilean moons. This novel covers the events leading up to the world at the time of Hoshi.

 

 

Lastly, I joke (except it’s true, not a joke, sadly) that I make my own fan art. There are a number of random character drawings from the stories. Also, a little animation of the first few paragraphs from Red City Circuit.

Backstory: Revolutions 1 & 2 and a Post-post-apocalyptic Universe

I joke that the liminal universe, where Hoshi and the Red City Circuit is set, is a “post-post-apoclyptic” universe. But, seriously, it is! Earth dies, almost for good, and everything is awful, but then it (or at least humanity) recovers, and a few centuries pass and there’s space ships and interstellar colonization and everything is awesome. If you’re not an Operator. But, still!

In 2001, I wrote the scene where Earth is almost destroyed. A character stands, shocked, in the burning, ashy rubble of Eastern Metropolis, right about NYC. About three months later the towers came down and I was afraid for a time to write anything else. But I did, and as I developed “why the world is the way it is” I came to this:

When the collapse comes it is neither in a drama of disaster nor in a horror of technological error, but it comes none-the-less. It comes in a slow decline and a contraction of greed. It comes as the haves retreat into corporate campuses and the have-nots are left to starve and sick on the vast, infertile plains between. It comes as segregated corporate nation-states evolve around the remaining resources of revenged Earth, each holding a regional monopoly on quality of life. A network of trade and communication exists through the decaying satellites above, linking the isolated corporate nations, locking them interdependently. The dead fields are left to fallow.

In computing, materials technology stalls the advance of increased processing power, and Moore’s Law collapses. The focus becomes user interface design, and trying to solve the problem of direct brain-wave translation. Technological advances revolve around sustaining the campuses, and tending to the small populations they shelter. Comfort and coolness, and carefully-guarded corporate secrets. Endless refinement on inventions of yesterday.

But out in the dust and the heat, where food is scarce and potable water scarcer, necessity is the mother of invention. In the underground between the corporate islands innovation flourishes. So does a pirate network. Raids are few but effective. Life is hard and short, but it is creative. Art, music, and technology become weapons of subversion.

I’d set the date on that to around 2150, though I’m starting to worry, like the towers, we may end up there a whole lot sooner.

At any rate, there’s a Revolution. The Revolution–a near extinction-level event–imprinted deep cultural trauma, and moral and legal ethos were redefined. The trauma was the Operators’ fault, of course. But everything worked out in the end.

Fast-forward through the next 500 or so years like:

The computational power and creativity of the Operators, along with humanity’s desire to prevent slippage into a dark age, generates an enormous leap in technology. Automation and ubiquitous computing abounds; interstellar transportation becomes feasible; medical advances ensure a largely disease-free 150 year life-span. Culture develops to depend on these advances without acknowledging the slaves who make it possible–visible technology becomes taboo. A network of legal bindings and social programs develop to support the enslavement, training, and selective reproductive program of anyone with the k-mutation. Slaves breaking any law are executed without trial.

The government serves as an intermediary and standardizing/stabilizing unit between individual corporations, which continue to be the primary source of political and economic power. Several independent nations also develop. Inhabited space is divided into developmental classifications, with the Core Worlds of Earth, Luna, Mars, Europa, Ganymede, Cassiopia-Prime, and Emory, and many Emergent worlds, multiple Colonies, and additional resources provided by otherwise unappealing Industrial worlds. Humanity stabilizes and flourishes. The Mem–the concretization of information created by the programs and communications of the Operators and transversed by anything that signals in the EM–develops and matures.

However, humanity does not find any other entities capable of meta-intelligence or second-order emergence of instituions. It is determined that humanity is likely on the front edge of the evolution of meta-intelligence–possibly the first, and alone.

In 2521, the Operators rebel. It is Revolution Number Two.

And that–and the true story of what happened during the first Revolution, plus how humans met the aliens and what happened thereafter–is told in another novel.

Paperback and ebook available from autpress.com; free ebook with paperback purchase! Also available in paperback and Kindle from amazon.com, from Powell’s City of Books, or ask at your local bookstore.

Science in the Fiction: Quantum Computers, Encryption, and Synaesthetic Code Landscapes

At the height of my hacker years, I attended a Damien Conway talk on his Perl module quantum-superpositions. He described how quantum computers work, and exactly what the capacity to perform virtually infinite simultaneous calculations at once could mean for encryption. Nutshell: the best encryption we’ve got = LOL

Around this time, I was talking with a bunch of fellow hackers, and we were bitching about how we hate management interrupting us while coding.

“Yeah, the worst is when I have all my code landscapes lined up, and the colors in the right place, and I’m just about to start moving them around, and ka-pow! Some manager-type comes up behind me and I lose it all,” I moaned.

They, uh, stared blankly.

“You know how you see your code all around you, and you’re about to move it around? Like it’s all set up in your visual field?” Surely they understood?

Alas, this was the moment I discovered that no, not everyone sees their math in synaesthetic landscapes. Oops. The silver lining of which became: I can use the way I “see” (and feel, too) programming in stories, and everyone will think it’s fiction. Bwahaha

The brain-computers used by the Operators in my stories came from a union of these two events, plus research into why we don’t yet have large-scale quantum computers–which comes down to a problem with redundancy and signal degradation. The “nearly noiseless” substance tzaddium solves the redundancy issue. But the more interesting issue to me was the encryption issue, and that is solved by using synaesthetic landscapes for programming. Every Operator’s way of sensing code is unique, and irrationally creative. Thus, not predicable or repeatable via brute force methods from a Turing machine, no matter how many calculations it can make at once.

This is why only individuals with a specific neurological constitution can operate the quantum brain-computers: only they think in synaesthetic code landscapes.

Paperback and ebook available from autpress.com; free ebook with paperback purchase! Also available in paperback and Kindle from amazon.com, from Powell’s City of Books, or ask at your local bookstore.

Backstory: Operators and Civil Rights

When I first started building the world of Hoshi and the Red City Circuit around 2000, I was mostly interested in why our world shits on its artists, scientists, and creatives. Autism and computer science were behind the core concept of the Operators, but autism was less relevant to the civil rights themes I wanted to explore. I wasn’t yet thinking in disability rights terms.

I was radicalized (woke) in the gay rights movement (LGBTQ+) of the 1980’s. I drew chalk bodies on the steps of city hall with Act Up, marched in the (pretty scary, actually) parades, and feared for my life under personal death threats in the town next-over from where Charlie Howard was murdered. I am not cis-gender; I am not hetero-normative; I am not safe in large parts of my own country. I wanted to draw these experiences into story, maybe to connect with others who shared them, maybe as the endless exorcism that those of us with histories of trauma have to endlessly do.

Still, I struggled to write about Operator oppression. The stories lacked focus and clarity. Too subtle, too nuanced, somehow not tied enough to other world-concepts. Why, besides the obvious danger the Operator technology poses and the weirdness of the Operators, were they so hated? Why are those of us in queer bodies, of queer hearts and minds, so hated?

I can be slow to get the point. It wasn’t until I became aware of the disability rights movement around 2005, and that it was my movement too, that I realized that weirdness itself is the reason we are mocked, hated, murdered. Neurodivergent or queer, non-Christian or creative, different is bad in a world where animal reactions go largely unexamined. In theories of altruism, labeling and prejudice is an unconscious means for deciding if people will cooperate predictably or not. Human animals gravitate toward those the most like them. The rest are to be feared–perhaps even killed.

Operator rights gelled around disability rights, fueled by my initiation in gay rights, because in my fictional post-gender, post-sexuality, post-race, post-post-apocalyptic universe (perhaps when humanity is down to barely enough gene pool to survive, such distinctions may, for just enough years to redefine “other,” matter less) the vectors of oppression become ability and occupation. But I hope that readers will see these stories as being for everyone who lives in fear, who is denied opportunity, and who is breathing the yet-unresolved air of institutionalized oppression. And I hope, as Hoshi’s world eventually does, our world too bends toward justice.

Paperback and ebook available from autpress.com; free ebook with paperback purchase! Also available in paperback and Kindle from amazon.com, from Powell’s City of Books, or ask at your local bookstore.

Science in the Fiction: Autism, Neurodivergence, and Idioglossias

No, my characters are not explicitly Autistic. Yes, they are implicitly based on how some of us (myself included) experience autism, the intense world theory, and findings related to the associative nature of autistic intelligence (yes, I know “intelligence” is a troubling concept, but I’m not getting into it here). I invented K-syndrome, to be transparent, because I didn’t want to get into discussions about what autism is or isn’t, or how what I’ve written is not like so-and-so’s experience of autism–and anyway, this is speculative fiction, which means that I get to make stuff up to be convenient to the business of storytelling. In this case, that business was two-fold: 1) from a technological perspective, to meet the needs of the quantum brain computers used by the characters; 2) from a thematic perspective, as a device to explore real-world issues around disability and disability rights.

My characters are explicitly neurodivergent. A genetic difference causes them to perceive and interact with the world and themselves in a way that is not like how most people do. Autism is one of may kinds of neurodiversity. Medically-oriented people classify that diversity into diagnostic bins: autism, schizophrenia, bipolar, attention deficit disorder, learning disability, etc. There are strong arguments for the value of diverse minds in society–just like there are for the value of diverse critters in ecosystems.

From a technological perspective, the neurodivergent connection to the quantum brain computers lies how the characters process language, and their highly associative thinking. At the heart of the characters’ language “impairment” is an idioglossia – a language known to only one’s self. This is both what enables them to create strong encryption in quantum systems, and isolates them, even among their own kind. With respect to associative thought, wrangling complex mathematical structures requires a good deal of nonlinear, pattern-type thinking.

From a thematic perspective, just as in our world, there is a tension between the benefits of neurodivergent minds–“autistic super-powers,” perhaps–and the decency to value people simply as human beings, without need for them to have “powers” or some other thing that mainstream society values more than person-ness. There is a tension between the brilliance and wonder of our experience of the world, and our frustration as we butt up against the limitations of both functional impairment and a society and culture hostile to what we need to survive. And there is a tension between acknowledging what we do better than typical thinkers, and typical thinkers exploiting that–exploiting us–for their own gain. These tensions and oppressions are not fiction.

Paperback and ebook available from autpress.com; free ebook with paperback purchase! Also available in paperback and Kindle from amazon.com, from Powell’s City of Books, or ask at your local bookstore.

Backstory: Invisible Aliens in the EM

The élan vitals–the invisible aliens that inhabit the slow waves of the electromagnetic spectrum and some part of physics we’ve yet to understand–were my invention to play with the notion of: what if ideas were sentient and we could talk to them?

They were then sourced from a jumble of ideas, both scientific and fantastic, plus hands-on play with circuit boards and an Arduino, to work out practical things like, “how could something with fine-tuned control of EM but no corporeality talk out loud?” Just a short list of sources: ghosts, radio broadcasts, shamanism, magnetic resonance imaging, tulpas, Jung’s collective unconscious & archetypes, western hermetic and ceremonial magick, piezoelectricity and multiple other concepts from the study of electricity and magnetism, Lovecraftian horrors, strong artificial intelligence (which cannot be created via computation in the universe of the stories), mushrooms and fairy rings, a wistful childhood fascination for psychic alien companions–

There are a three “kinds” of élan vitals in the liminal universe. There are the huge, complex, ancient, incredibly alien ones like Strange Navigator, few of whom can communicate with humans, and even less of whom have stuck around to do so once they figured out what shits we are. There are smaller, simpler ones that are broken off from these larger ones, like budded semi-fractal offspring; they are new, mobile, and like to hang around with us. Well, some of us. Then there are the ancient ones with a “fixed domain”–they inhabit specific places and are bound to them, like an epic haunting. All élans are shaped by the electromagnetic frequencies of where they are, including ours. The élan vital inhabiting Red City is one of these fixed domain élans–and she’s been there much longer than humans have. One summons an élan vital by generating frequencies it resonates with. Hence the practicality of magick.

The other bit of backstory on the élan vitals is this: I’ve a huge pet peeve about aliens that are just like us. Star Trek is terrible about this–it’s like oh, you took a non-modern-American culture and called it alien and pretended like no one would notice? (I do like Star Trek, I just need to view the aliens as allegories not as aliens.) I thought Farscape did a better job, presenting aliens that at least went by radically non-human social norms. Anyway, I wanted my aliens to be really alien, although not to the point of complete inability to interact with humans (which is done very well in many places, for example, Peter Watts’ Blindsight). What does it mean to exist eternally, outside of mortality, without a body–but with an acute sensitivity, susceptibility to change? What does fear then mean, what does self-preservation become?

Paperback and ebook available from autpress.com; free ebook with paperback purchase! Also available in paperback and Kindle from amazon.com, from Powell’s City of Books, or ask at your local bookstore.

Science in the Fiction: Nonlinear Dynamics and Memes

My doctorate is in systems science. I study general ways to make sense of things that are too complex for the usual analytical approach of “let’s take it apart and see what makes it tick.” And by “complex” I mean non-linear. And by “nonlinear” I mean many things affect each other simultaneously, so instead of getting a behavior that makes a straight line–like if you made a graph of how much you turn the faucet on vs. how much water comes out–you get behavior that makes curves–like the progress of infection in an epidemic over time as it rises exponentially, comes to a peak, and curves down again as it runs out of hosts. In nonlinear systems, wholes are different from the sums of their parts. I study how to study things like weather systems, stock markets, social negotiations, and flocking birds. So chaos theory, game theory, system dynamics (and dynamical systems), systems thinking, and a slew of other shiny systems-y things end up in the sciences underlying my fictions.

I created the alien élan vitals in part out of desire to geek out on nonlinear dynamics and feedback in ecosystems in an entertaining way. Humans influence aliens, as aliens influence humans, and changes in the structure of the relationship between the two can vastly change the behavior of them both and their behavior as a whole. Sometimes this is to the benefit of both parties; other times, not so much. Kind of like the delicate balance between two large predatory species co-inhabiting the same forest.

The other part of why I created the élan vitals was out of long-standing fascination with zeitgeists, and the way that ideas can move large groups of people to action. What gives a meme legs? How can an idea move social consciousness? These questions have become increasingly urgent in today’s informational climate, where we can spread ideas at an instant to millions. So what if ideas were creatures, with ideas of their own, and they could be talked to? What if we were ideas to them, too, ideas they resonate with? What happens as we resonate with, and amplify, each other?

The élan vitals provided me with a means to explore with readers both nonlinear relationships in ecosystems generally, and feedback loops in the ecosystem of society and information. Which, to a systems geek like me, is super-rad!

Paperback and ebook available from autpress.com; free ebook with paperback purchase! Also available in paperback and Kindle from amazon.com, from Powell’s City of Books, or ask at your local bookstore.

Review of Hoshi by Wordgathering

I learned of a lovely review of my novel yesterday. This is my favorite part. This is exactly the sort of conversation I think we need to be having about disability in literature, and what I hope to trouble for mainstream readers:

“By telling the story from an autist’s point of view, Raymaker is able to invert the usual situation in which the main stream point of view is in the driver’s seat. Merely by identifying herself – the story teller – as the Operator, and those who do not share a similar experience of embodiment, as non-Operators, she manages to the put the reader who usually identifies as main stream into the margins.”

For readers who may also be Operators though, my intention is to create more heroes like us.

Also, both my sense of social justice and my ego is partial to this part:

“Science fiction has proven to be one of the most fertile genres for discussion of issues that affect the disability community. Recently, disabled writers have been wresting control of these narratives by authoring work themselves. Even without this context, Hoshi and the Red City Circuit would be a good read, but in that context it is much, much more. It is an important novel that anyone interested in the growth of disability literature should be familiar with.”

Many, many thankyous to Wordgathering: Read the full review.

Theme: Overlay by Kaira 2020 Dora M Raymaker
Portland, Oregon