Thursday, October 5, 2017

First Impressions Guest Blog with Collin Piprell


People often ask where a writer’s ideas come from. Sometimes, in my experience, the initial inspiration appears pretty trivial; at other times it arises from grander issues.

For example the origins of Kicking Dogs, my second and in some ways most successful novel,* were radically different from those of Genesis 2.0.

Kicking Dogs. I owe this book in large part to a bus ride through Bangkok’s Chinatown, where I spotted a red-and-gold sign identifying a little shophouse business as Wong Wei Ltd. Partnership. For some reason, I jotted that bit of color down in my pocket notebook, together with a fictitious name: Wrong-way Willie Wong. No doubt this was because I happened at the time to be re-reading Damon Runyon for the first time since I was a kid, and laughing just as much as I had first time around.

Not long after that, while teaching a writing class at a local university, I sketched an extemporaneous noir scene on the blackboard as an exercise for the students. And so was born “Tommy Two-toes,” a nicely Runyonesque mate for Wrong-way Willie Wong. Within minutes, spinning ideas at my desk even as the writing class did their exercise, I also found the voice for one Jack Shackaway, who became my story’s main protagonist.

Genesis 2.0. The origins of Genesis 2.0 and the rest of the Magic Circles series bore no obvious resemblance to that process. These novels owe their birth to my coming across the notion of the grey goo scenario.**

In terms of bad shit, this prospect tops asteroid strikes, nuclear wars and disturbed children at the helms of global superpowers. Before I knew it, I’d married the emergence of qubital computing to nanotech, and whole new worlds began taking shape as I wrote MOM, the first novel in the series.

I hadn’t written much science fiction – only a few short stories – and never imagined myself spinning a sci-fi novel. But next thing I knew, I had characters and a setting (a barely failed grey-goo scenario), and something began to take shape. Not that this process was straightforward. Far from it. It involved a long and sometimes painful process of banging my head against the draft bits as the plot gradually emerged. I was surprised and hugely relieved when I finally managed to bring MOM to a successful conclusion.

But woe betide me, eh? Because this conclusion demanded that more of the story be told. And little did I realize that Genesis 2.0, the sequel, would be at least twice as hard. Not to mention twice as long and, according to some, twice as interesting.
Resurrections, the third in the series, promises to be at least as demanding to write, though I’m trying to keep that one shorter.

Never mind. There have been compensations. In MOM, I established a variety of fictional worlds. When I started writing Genesis 2.0, I was delighted to find that, rather than creating worlds, it was more like I was exploring worlds that were already there. Implicit in the settings that underlay the dramatic action in MOM, I found all kinds of new features and dimensions. The same thing is proving true now, as I work on Resurrections.

Much of the pleasure of writing Magic Circles, one reward for all the hard work, has been this excitement at learning what happens next and where those developments are going to lead.
*
Kicking Dogs just lifted off from that bus ride and the subsequent writing class, and I wasn’t too bothered, as I spun this yarn, that the story’s structure and destination remained a mystery. I was having fun. I often found myself laughing out loud even as I drafted it. (The first chapter was short-listed for a Paris Review humor prize.)

With MOM, on the other hand, and even more so with Genesis 2.0, I had to fight my way into it, wrestle with it, hack at it till it worked. And I could never have anticipated the way things turned out in the end.

Actually, I suppose, the same was true of Kicking Dogs. And this relates to two opposing schools of thought on how you should plot your novel. See, e.g., ‘Story: A conversation with the page’ http://www.collinpiprell.com/story-a-conversation-with-the-page/; ‘Two hats: Darwinian yarning’ and ‘The Muse Wears Black Leather.’ http://www.collinpiprell.com/the-muse-wears-black-leather/ 

* Kicking Dogs (Bangkok: Asia Books, 2000; bookSiam, 1995; Editions Duang Kamol, 1991; Amazon Kindle and CreateSpace print on demand, 2015), a comic thriller set in Bangkok.

** The gray goo scenario: Two days to convert the entire planet into blur dust. All you needed was one little disassembler-assembler nanobot, one “blur,” to escape the lab or for terrorists to let one out into the wild. Just one feral bot so tiny you’d need a powerful microscope to see it. 

* Back from one brink to teeter on the edge of another, and another (700 words)
GENESIS 2.0 is a 189,000-word science-fiction novel set partly in the dystopian aftermath of a stalled grey-goo scenario.

In part, this is the story of three young survivors of the PlagueBot, a voracious global nanobot superorganism. They join forces with both a 113-year-old evil genius and the machine intelligence that replaced him as the most powerful individual on Earth in a struggle to hold the forces of chaos at bay, achieve a couple of workable ménages à trois, and help shape a human-transhuman renaissance on the basis of a curiously evolved version of the PlagueBot itself.

The three young heroes — a survivalist hunter and “real man” from Outside and two test pilots of generated realities from the Malls — run an epic gauntlet through a series of settings:  the harsh wastelands of the opening sections; Aeolia, a hyper-real generated reality; Happy Chillin, a cryogenic facility buried deep under a mountain in Utah; and The Land, a renewed planetary biosphere-plus. They wind up defying the gods — the Olympian inhabitants of Aeolia — to establish  uncertain grounds for a human renaissance. In the world’s end may lie a new beginning.

Though the Magic Circles novels comprise a single story, each is meant to standalone, They may be read in any order.

The background to the series includes an account of the most astonishing evolutionary developments since life itself emerged from only rudimentarily sentient nature. This is evolution on steroids and crack cocaine.

The series takes its name from the cognitive sphere of narrative coherence, a familiar universe historically and psychologically cognate with the circle of light and companionability thrown by the primordial campfire. It also refers to the area within which it is both technically and economically feasible to maintain a generated reality from any given standpoint.

MOM
All it took was a single self-replicator to escape into the wild. Within a day or two, most of the Earth’s surface was converted into a zillion zillion nanobots, each no bigger than a large molecule. The gray-goo scenario. The horror. The self-replicating disassembler-assemblers, the “blurs,” stripped anything more complex than themselves down to its atoms and used those components to build more of themselves. And that was it. The whole name of the game.

Except that before they finished the job of turning the entire planet into dust, the blurs themselves, collectively and unconsciously, gave rise to the Boogoo.
The Boogoo, a failed gray-goo scenario, scarfed up nearly everything in the world, including the Malls and all the sweet little marshmallow mallsters inside them. And small loss, the way things were going. But in the world’s end lay a new beginning. 

Far from spelling the end of the human story, the Boogoo represented the start of a radically new phase, the most recent novel emergence in a succession of emergences that has included life itself, consciousness, intelligence, language and culture.

Genesis 2.0
The Boogoo evolves into the basis for a new and improved Gaia II, while Son, a young survivalist, evolves in tandem as an essential element of this novel emergence, and, together with his companions, also establishes the basis for a human renaissance.

The Land, the Boogoo’s successor, provides the grounds for a vastly richer and more fruitful existence at the same time it harbors the seeds of much conflict to come — perhaps a necessary element of any progressive creative emergence.
The story eventually proposes novel developments at least as revolutionary as the rise of life itself, or of cultural evolution’s supersession of biological evolution. That thread is developed more surely as the story unfolds in Genesis 2.0 and Resurrections and beyond.

Throughout MOM and the novels that follow, there’s also much play with the variety of ways we can experience “reality.”


Genesis 2.0
Magic Circles Series
Book 2
Collin Piprell

Genre: Sci-Fi, Mystery Thriller

Publisher: Common Deer Press

Date of Publication: October 5, 2017

ISBN: 9781988761039

Number of pages: 660

Cover Artist: Ellie Sipila

Book Description:

A nanobot superorganism lays waste to the Earth. Is this the apocalypse? Or does the world’s end harbor new beginnings?

Life will always find a way. Though some ways are better than others.

Evolution on steroids and crack cocaine —the most significant development since inanimate matter first gave rise to life.

You can’t predict novel evolutionary developments, you recognize them only after they emerge.

Then you have to deal with them.



Excerpt 2 (445 words)
despatch from hell ~ chickenman’s brag
FIRST I should introduce myself.
The name is Brian Finister, sometimes known in the old days as Brian the Evil Canadian. And that was quite some time ago, because I’m a hundred and thirteen years old. Can you believe it? I look no more than forty. Same as back in Worlds UnLtd which, after all, was Aeolia’s predecessor, I can present myself as any age I want.
Or any ages, come to that. Back in the Worlds, I was a dab hand at running two teleps at once. Telepresent Ebee Projections Were Us, eh? Same-same in the mallster holotanks. Aside from Sky herself, nobody could do it the way I did. I was here, I was there, I was nearly everyfuckingwhere, with no one ever the wiser.
“Chicken Man!”
That was Sweetie. I’ve recorded her interjection because I’m going to have to explain all this later. For the record, I’ve replied thusly:
“Shut the fuck up, Sweetie.”
“Hee, hee.’ Her again.
Boilerplate response: “Shut the fuck up, Sweetie.”
I was talking about running multiple teleps at the same time. What I’m doing here is all that and more.
Get this. Right now I’m lurking here in my hideyhole, snug as a bug in a rug. Safely nowhere that is anywhere, while another me sits downstairs in Boon Doc’s Bar, my headquarters these past eighty years or more, one hand on a beer glass and the other on one of Keeow’s tits.
Anybody goes looking for me, it’s the scendent Brian downstairs they’re going to find. Meanwhile, the better part of scendent me is parked upstairs here in this counterfeit La-Z-Boy with what looks like a PC on my lap. In fact this is a contraband GeezEeezee writer/editor keyboard that ascended to Aeolia along with me and the rest of Soi Awol circa Bangkok 1984. Never mind this GeezEeezee All-in-one Instant Author is an anomaly — it didn’t come on the market till forty-odd years after 1984 — it’s an obsolete piece of shit nobody’s used for thirty years. Still, I like the feel of the thing. Sometimes the old ways are just better.
So why bother writing this stuff? These despatches are a history, an account of things Aeolian for readers I can’t even imagine sometime down the road. What creatures, in what future world, are ever going to read it? Maybe machines. Or cockroaches. Probably nobody.
Wallpaper can’t read. And the posits don’t want to. Don’t need to, they think.
That’s here in Aeolia. Call it Genesis Take Two, eh? Godhood gone to Sky’s head. Never mind there are bugs in the heavenly ointment, only some of which she recognizes.




About the Author:

Collin Piprell is a Canadian writer resident in Thailand. He has also lived in England, where he did graduate work as a Canada Council Doctoral Fellow (later, a Social Sciences and Humanities Fellow) in politics and philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford; and in Kuwait, where he learned to sail, water-ski and make a credible red wine in plastic garbage bins.

In earlier years, he worked at a wide variety of occupations, including four jobs as a driller and stope leader in mines and tunnels in Ontario and Quebec. In later years he taught writing courses at Thammasat University, Bangkok, freelanced as a writer and editor, and published hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics (most of these pieces are pre-digital, hence effectively written on the wind). He is also the author of short stories that appeared in Asian anthologies and magazines, as well as five novels (a sixth forthcoming in 2018), a collection of short stories, a collection of occasional pieces, a diving guide to Thailand, another book on diving, and a book on Thailand’s coral reefs. He has also co-authored a book on Thailand’s national parks.

Common Deer Press is publishing the first three novels in his futuristic Magic Circles series.

Collin has another short novel nearly ready to go, something he only reluctantly describes as magic realism. Less nearly ready to go are novels he describes as a series of metaphysical thrillers. Not to mention several Jack Shackaway comic thrillers, follow-ups to Kicking Dogs. He also has a half-finished letter to his grandmother, dated 10 October 1991, saying thanks for the birthday gift.

Website/blog: www.collinpiprell.com






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2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thank you for hosting Collin and Genesis 2.0!

Jenn
Common Deer Press

Unknown said...

Many thanks, Winona.

I sent an email earlier saying I couldn't find the comments box. Now, it seems, my eyes have been opened, and I've found it. So I'll say thanks again -- much appreciated.

Cheers,

Collin