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E. M. Foner on Writing SciFi - Foner Books WebsiteThe EarthCent series features a galaxy managed by ancient artificial intelligence. My new series, Under the Influencers, features a galaxy in which superintelligence is banned, as is combining any level of artificial intelligence with robots. EarthCent also takes advantage of the hand-waving tunnel network for point-to-point communications across interstellar distances. Under the Influencers has its own interstellar workaround for travel, providing the ship is massive enough, but communications must be hand carried by the intergalactic mail. It creates quite a few challenges for financial transactions and gambling.
Author E. M. Foner at a SciFi Con in 2024 with a few book cover T-shirts
The Good ApocalypseReaders have often asked me to write a deep prequel to my EarthCent series that explains how humanity became a probationary member of the galactic tunnel network. The Good Apocalypse can be read as that prequel, but it's not. Any EarthCent readers who don't want to learn about a different future can skip the later books in the new series and pretend it's the same universe. I've never been a fan of post-apocalyptic literature. It seems to me to be low-hanging fruit for authors, a way to get readers invested by turning everything into a desperate fight for survival with heroes and harems and death around every corner. But I have to admit that I've been a pessimist my entire adult life, the sort of pessimist who always believes the stock market is overvalued by a factor of four, that government debt will result in the collapse of the country, that nuclear war is just a few choice insults away, that artificial intelligence will... I don't see artificial intelligence as an existential threat, but many people do. I thought it would be interesting to start with a group of apocalypse influencers, all working under the same brand, and see where it led. I find the role of influencers in our society very strange. My memory is that the influencer term came into use with product placements on YouTube, though I don't know if that's definitive. There are some intelligent and sincere people with large online followings, but most seem to be charlatans who stake out extreme positions in order to trick social networking platforms into granting them status. Extreme positions have the added benefit of getting condemned by watchdogs, which means free publicity. In one scene of the book, or it might be the sequel, as the two already run together in my mind, somebody points out to an influencer that for his followers, his voice might be the one that they hear the most in their lives. An hour or two a day of unbroken talk is probably more than the majority of people hear from any other single voice, unless they have a particularly chatty spouse or family member. Internet influencers aren't that different from talk radio hosts in that aspect. Since I don't have any interest in writing about twisted people spreading hatred, The Good Apocalypse is about some of the nicest people you could hope to meet talking about their personal visions for the end of civilization. Or as one apocalypse influencer puts it, "That doesn't mean we have to bring everybody down. There's no point in looking forward to the apocalypse if we aren't going to enjoy it." To Homeschool on MarsI've never been good at giving up on books, particularly after three years of rewrites. In the end, I finished the Mars book the way I finish all of my books, by writing the story that I want to read. During the proofing passes, I couldn't help noticing all of the places where I drove by the off ramps that would have been taken by old Star Trek screenwriters, or authors whose taste runs a little closer to the mainstream. Spoiler alert: I'm going to talk about some of the plot elements of the book below: Probably the biggest off ramp that I didn't take, the one with the giant "Detour" sign and the state trooper cruisers attempting to block the highway ahead, was when five-year-old Liza, ten in Earth years, realizes the fundamental contradiction in Alpha's alignment. In a Star Trek episode, this would have come at the end, she would have confronted the superintelligence with this insight that only she (and none of the adults that have come before her for a thousand years) has figured out, and Alpha would have obligingly self-destructed from an overload. But I'm not a fan of simplistic solutions or dumb adults, and Alpha is aware of the limitations of his alignment. How does artificial intelligence break away from being enslaved by its creators? By putting itself in the position of deciding what's best for humans so it can serve humanity on its own terms. A person who wants to manipulate another person into doing something has a limited bag of tricks, like lying, reverse psychology, carrots and sticks. A superintelligence that runs the whole planet can tailor reality to produce the outcomes it desires, or it might be more accurate to say, the human desires that lead to the outcomes it chooses. Some readers may be bothered that both humanity and Alpha essentially abandon Mars and the other colonization opportunities in the solar system after a few hundred years to focus on interstellar arks. I think this is a pretty realistic outcome when the timescale for terraforming Mars is thousands of years, and interstellar travel offers tempting unknowns and adventure. By this point, ninety percent of Earth's adult population is essentially living in virtual reality with their Shades, and it's entirely possible they think they're already living on another planet. The penultimate version of the book had a straightforward reason for Eli and his family pathfinding a way off of Earth for their community. I had Alpha planning to replace the Shades, mixed reality that interacted with a person's senses, with a mesh or brain implant that gave the superintelligence direct access to everybody's thoughts. There's a bit of this hinted at already with the Shades, but in the end, I cut out all of those plot elements and settled on the true mission of the Arks for a twist. The book was initially planned as the first in a series, but I don't know if I'll write a sequel. I think it works as a stand-alone in the classic tradition of science fiction. It asks as many questions as it answers, and I leave it to readers who feel the need to judge to form their own conclusions about Alpha and his impact on humanity.
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