Yes, this blog has a problem. I noticed it yesterday when I put up the post about the Locus magazine review of Pacific Storm. Evidently something changed on the server, because all of my posts older than yesterday now display nonsensical characters where there once was an em-dash, a curly quote, etc.

This is an encoding issue. I’ve been pointed to a resource that describes a potential fix and someday soon I may take on the project — though I’m not convinced it’s worth the effort given that the older posts get very little traffic.

Anyway, I wanted to let you know I’m aware of it.

Locus Magazine is a long-time publication that covers the science fiction field. In the December issue, Russell Letson reviewed Pacific Storm, describing it as “a propulsive intrigue-thriller-disaster format, detailed and textured and specific enough that its progress can be mapped onto contemporary Honolulu, a real garden with imaginary monsters in it.”

That review is now online. Click here to read it in full.

By the way — Russell also selected Pacific Storm as his “Holiday Countdown Staff Pick.” 🙂

Optimal by JM Berger

“The truth is that reality is negotiated by consensus.” —Stanton Lime, in Optimal

For most of us, our lives are deeply entangled with our digital devices, especially our smartphones. Through text messages, social media, and email, our phones keep us connected to our social circles. Engage the right apps, and they can warn us of potential assaults on our personal accounts, nudge us awake in the morning, help us track what we eat during the day, encourage exercise if we’ve been sitting too long, recommend a running route–or a restaurant–and ensure we don’t forget about that critical meeting or a spouse’s birthday. Algorithms, and the prompts they generate, encourage us to act and interact. Some apps offer token rewards or praise for good behavior, others urge us to rate every place we visit. Our responses are observed, our behavior logged, and our preferences deciphered so that we can be presented with ever more customized options, offers, and personally tailored stories ranging from news to entertainment.

It’s a platform that relies on surveillance, feedback, and manipulation. The system is complex, but clumsy and disjointed too, making it vulnerable to bad actors. Alongside the activity of benign self-improvement apps and consumer-analysis bots, political factions wage propaganda wars, seeking to control what people perceive as “reality,” while inducing social antagonisms, illogical behavior, and ultimately, violence in the tangible world.

But what if cyberspace could be transformed into a unitary system–one not ruled by any human master afflicted with inevitable quirks and inherent bigotry, but overseen instead by a benign AI-based information dictatorship? Imagine an AI designed and trained to perfect the task of guiding us through each day, and shaping our perception of reality with the goal of optimizing both our lives, and the world we live in.

That’s the premise behind JM Berger’s debut novel, Optimal.

The future portrayed in Optimal has gone far beyond smartphones. It’s a world of ubiquitous surveillance, with every room, every building, every road, every vehicle, every individual around the globe continuously linked, via an array of sensors, into an advanced artificial intelligence known simply as the System.

The System sees through the eyes of every citizen, it detects their every physiological quirk–but this isn’t sinister. The System’s algorithms are only seeking to optimize day-to-day life for everyone. In the quasi-utopia of the city, happy citizens are guided through each day by friendly prompts that urge them to wake on time, to exercise, to take designated paths to work, to work well, and to eat at suggested restaurants where favorite drinks and appetizers await at an open table as they walk in the door–because the System knows each person so well, it can order for them. No decision-making required. There’s no need to worry about finances either. The System tracks personal funds, while prompting each citizen to live within their means.

No one thinks to object to the constant guidance. Why should they? With the System’s algorithms piloting every individual throughout each day, conflict has been eliminated, poverty is unknown, and everyone has plenty of time to hang out with their friends, or check into Social, or to explore the trusted information contained in Knowledge.

This is a different kind of human/machine teaming than we’re used to seeing. In Optimal, humanity has ceded authority to the System, and by doing so, has finally achieved global peace.

And yet Jack–an average guy who works as an accountant–isn’t quite happy. He feels unfulfilled, both in his relationships and in his working life. Jack flirts with the idea of ignoring his prompts, making his own decisions, finding a new lover and a new career. But surely the System knows what’s best for him?

And then, inexplicably, the System assigns Jack a new task, a very unusual task. Stanton Lime, the chief financial officer of a client corporation, has vanished and Jack is asked to determine whether or not the missing man has made off with corporate funds. Jack soon settles that issue, but the real mystery remains: With every aspect of society observed and recorded, how could anyone disappear?

Jack sets out to answer that question, but every discovery only expands the mystery, leading him to question how the System works, what its real purpose is, and what kind of society it has designed, given its task of keeping the peace.

As Jack’s perception of his world evolves, he’s no longer content with the pablum of constant input the System feeds into his eyes and ears:

He muted as many of the flags and notifications as possible, although they still danced around the periphery of his awareness as new information flowed in and piled up, waiting expectantly for his attention. Even the muted content seemed to press at him intangibly, like the effect of gravity on tides. A world of information just waiting until the mute expired, eagerly counting the seconds until its opportunity to pounce.

He wanted to scream, SHUT UP. How do you expect me to think?

But of course, no one expected him to think.

Jack is not alone in his quest to find the mysterious Stanton Lime. He has the help of friends, and of discontented corporate officer Megumi.

But coercion comes in many forms, and along the way he learns that the System has trained others to accept a very different version of reality. One such individual, in a poignant description of her early life, tells Jack:

What surrounds you defines you, defines your expectations, your perception of what is real and what is possible. It creates boundaries, walls of concrete, that have to be actively smashed, fought tooth and nail, even when you are small, even if your heart by its very nature is filled with color.

Jack is learning to smash those walls, to fight that fight, always wondering just how far he will be allowed to go.

Artificial intelligence, and our electronic assistants, can surely help to optimize our lives. But our entanglement with the digital world leaves us vulnerable to deception and manipulation–and more and more, it exposes us to the unexpected solutions sometimes reached through the opaque, inhuman calculations of artificial intelligence. Optimal is a brilliant exploration of the implications of ceding our personal responsibility and relying on algorithms to teach us how to live.

But more than that, it’s great storytelling.

Highly recommended. Optimal is available at Amazon. (paid link)

This year, in the United States, it feels like New Year’s Day ought to fall on January 20th, when our newly elected president takes office. We have twenty fraught days to endure until then, but I hope in years to come our descendants will be able to look back on January 20, 2021, as the beginning of a new era in which the people of this country and of the world rejected autocrats and learned to work together for the good of one another, and of the planet and its irreplaceable ecosystems. Happy New Year everyone! We can do this.

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And now on to my annual New Year’s Day post in which I list my writing goals for the coming year. When I first started doing this, I was far more ambitious. But I’ve learned to keep the list short, and do-able. So here goes…

1. WRITE AND FINISH A NEW NOVEL
This one is started, though just barely. It’s the third in the Inverted Frontier series, and I’m going to try to come up with a finished draft by year’s end (hopefully sooner!).

2. PUBLISH THE WILD TRILOGY
I’ve talked about this one in an earlier post. This is an older epic-fantasy novel that I revised extensively in 2020, and then divided into three short novels. I’m awaiting cover art, and plan to publish in the spring.

3. WRITE ONE SHORT STORY (OR NOVELLA)
A couple of years ago I resolved to take a long break from writing short fiction. No regrets. I’m a slow writer, so this decision allowed me to focus on novel writing. Pacific Storm would not have been finished in 2020 if I’d spent time writing short fiction. The downside of that resolution is that I still don’t have quite enough stories to publish a third short-fiction collection.

4. PUBLISH A THIRD SHORT-FICTION COLLECTION
I’ve got eight stories and the cover art ready to go. But I need another story to round off the collection. Now you see the importance of my third writing goal? 😉

So that’s my plan. What do you hope to achieve?

Every January I put up a blog post listing my writing goals for the coming year. At the end of the year, I check back to see how I did. That assessment is the subject of this post.

For 2020, I kept my goals to a minimum — but I still didn’t meet them all.

Here are the specifics, with the goals I set for myself in January in all-caps:

1. WRITE AND FINISH A NEW NOVEL
Done! This, of course, was Pacific Storm, published on October 8. Have you read it yet? If not, I hope you’ll check it out. Click here to read the opening chapters online.

2. WRITE, FINISH, AND PUBLISH A NOVELLA
Nope! I post this goal every year, and I never do it. Maybe next year…

3. START OUTLINING A NEW NOVEL
Done! I’ve put together a rough story-map for a third Inverted Frontier novel, and have even started writing the opening.

Two out of three — not bad. But I also accomplished two other long-time goals that did not appear on last year’s list.

• I commissioned a nice book cover for an omnibus edition of the Puzzle Land books. I really like those crazy grimdark fantasy stories! The omnibus is available from Amazon in both print and ebook editions. (paid links)

• I’ve also commissioned covers for my epic fantasy novel The Wild. I spent part of the summer and fall revising and expanding the original novel, and will be re-publishing it as a trilogy in spring 2021. Click here to read more about this project.

I’ll be posting my 2021 goals on January 1 — though I suspect you can already guess what my primary goal will be.
(Hint: see #1 above. 😉 )

This post was originally published in my November 19th newsletter. It’s re-posted here with minor changes. If you haven’t yet signed up for my newsletter, you really, really should. It’s fun, it’s once every four weeks (with an occasional special issue), and it’s the best way to stay in touch. Sign up here.

Several readers have asked if I intend to write a sequel to Pacific Storm. More have asked if I mean to write a third book in the Inverted Frontier series. So how does a writer decide what to work on next?

For myself, it’s a balance of obligation, interest, and income. I feel obliged to finish an unfinished story. Edges ended on a cliff hanger, so a sequel was required, and I’d planned to write one anyway. There was never any question about it. But should I write more? That’s where income comes in. There’s not much point in extending a series that isn’t selling. But Inverted Frontier is selling just well enough to justify another novel. (Thank you again to everyone who’s bought the books!)

I’ve actually started to sketch out three more novels to complete the series, though only time, chance, and the marketplace will determine if they’re ever written.

Pacific Storm is different. I meant it to be a stand-alone when I started. It certainly could become a series, though right now sales don’t justify it. I’ll keep the idea on a back burner.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for more near-future fiction beyond Pacific Storm, I’ve got three more novels you might want to try:

The Last Good Man — Robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence fuel the quest of an army veteran as she risks all to learn the truth behind her son’s last mission.

Limit of Vision — Ethics and evolution collide in this tale of runaway biotechnology set in the steamy Mekong Delta.

Tech-Heaven — A political thriller that imagines the rise of nanotechnology as seen through the eyes of a young woman whose life takes an extraordinary turn when she’s widowed and her husband’s body is cryonically frozen against a time when advancing technology will allow his resurrection.

I’m all about self-publishing. I started in traditional publishing and briefly returned to it with the Red trilogy. And it’s possible that with the right book I might roll the dice and try it again. But overall I’m happier to be self-publishing, handling my own books, and taking a much bigger cut of the list price.

But do I advise other traditionally published writers to take this route? Not necessarily. Everyone’s situation is different, and (assuming the choice exists) everyone needs to make up their own mind.

Not long ago, a friend asked for my thoughts on whether to self-publish a novella or accept a smallish advance. I sketched out what it would take to self-pub, and we both realized that self-publishing works best as a system. After discussing it, the odds of a one-shot venture being worth the necessary investment of time & money seemed pretty low.

To publish even a single work, you’d have to set up an account at Amazon, and at other vendors if you want to “go wide.” You’d need to hire a cover artist and maybe an editor and/or copyeditor. You would need to convert the manuscript into an ebook, and logically, into a print edition — both of which can be done with software if you’re not too fussy, though the software costs a couple hundred dollars (I think). And you’d still have to do all the promotion a traditional publisher would ask you to do. Beyond this minimal investment, you’d eventually need to set up a business and/or a business account, and acquire your own ISBNs.

That’s a lot to pull together for a one-off experiment — and maybe not worth it when measured against the offer of an okay advance?

On the other hand, if the experiment is a first run at a possible career path, then it would be worthwhile to consider upping the bet by writing two or three novels or novellas in a series, and then publishing them in quick succession with lots of publicity. At least I keep hearing that’s the way to make a splash!

Conclusion: There is no best path in the fiction business, but keep in mind that your best option today may not be the best option for your next project.

This post was originally published in my November 19th newsletter. It’s re-posted here with minor changes. If you haven’t yet signed up for my newsletter, you really, really should. It’s fun, it’s once every four weeks (with an occasional special issue), and it’s the best way to stay in touch. Sign up here.

Novelists sometimes talk about a “book of the heart,” by which they mean a novel they needed to write, one that’s especially close to their heart, one they keep returning to, even though the marketplace doesn’t care.

The Wild is my book of the heart. It’s a secondary-world, aka epic, fantasy that has nothing at all to do with my other work. It’s also “noble bright” (as opposed to my grimdark fantasy Stories of the Puzzle Lands).

I wrote the original version of The Wild in the early 2000s. It never sold to the traditional market, but I never forgot about it. Eventually I published it myself as an ebook available only from my website. But when I took down my website store, I also took The Wild off the market.

The book had issues. There were problems with the way it was written. Last summer, when I took a fresh look at the manuscript, those issues became clear to me–but I felt I now had the knowledge and experience that would let me address them. So while waiting for beta-reader and editorial comments on Pacific Storm, I commenced on what proved to be an extensive rewrite of The Wild.

After publishing Pacific Storm, I returned to The Wild, and in late November I finished what I hope will be my final pass through the manuscript. It’s in the hands of a proofreader now, and I think it’s a much better story.

Since it’s a long book, I’m going to divide it into a trilogy of short novels. You can see the original cover above. I love this illustration, but the feedback I’ve received indicates it doesn’t communicate that the book is epic fantasy. So I’ve commissioned a set of new book covers that will hopefully do a better job. Sign up for my newsletter, for a preview of the new artwork!

I included this news in my October 22nd newsletter, but forgot, until now, to post it here. If you haven’t yet signed up for my newsletter, you really, really should. It’s fun, it’s once every four weeks (with an occasional special issue), and it’s the best way to stay in touch.
Sign up here.

My 2013 indie novel, The Red: First Light, marked my return to novel-length science fiction after a hiatus of many years. To the surprise of just about everyone, including me, it became a Nebula-award nominee, and was later re-published by Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press, as the first of a trilogy.

Again to my surprise, it’s just been included on a list of “15 recent sci-fi books that forever shaped the genre.” (Recent as in the last 15 years.) The list appears at the gaming and entertainment website, Polygon.

This list is, of course, just one man’s opinion. (Thank you, Andrew!) I can’t help but observe that the Red trilogy is rather obscure compared to nearly every other included title.

Of those other titles, I’ve read ten and tried two more without finishing them. How about you? How many of the books on this list have you read?

I wish all of you who celebrate the holiday a happy Thanksgiving.

Years ago I would cook the full holiday spread on my own. The in-laws would fly over from Honolulu and spend a couple of weeks with us, giving them time with the grandchildren. But kids grow up and our elders become more frail. Eventually, the migration reversed, and Ron and I started to fly over to Honolulu for Thanksgiving, where we would celebrate with the extended family at a restaurant.

This year, for the first time in many years, we’re staying home and no one’s coming to visit. Still, I’m thankful for all our good fortune. Our family is small, but we keep in close touch, and we all continue to take precautions during the pandemic. I’m thankful for that, and for our good fortune to live in a community where a great majority of the people are willing to work together to stay safe.

Please take care. And let’s hope that by Thanksgiving 2021, we’ll be free to move around the country (and the world!) again.