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Boarders Writing A Novel: Volume 14 A Memory of Civility


SpaceChampion

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23 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

Why does the Necromancer always have to be the Bad Guy? :P

Some people have a little bit of a hang up with their Nan's body being used to conquer some insignificant kingdom and turning it into some Necrogarchy(?) can't imagine why though. Necromancers seem like nice chaps, not messing about with the minds of the living and if undead armies are used it means some poor sod farmer doesn't get conscripted and sent off to die.

If Necromancers could just do everyone a favour and put a burlap sack on the head of all their reanimated corpses so you don't have to know that the new member of the garrison is in fact your late beloved uncle David then I imagine everyone would be rather happy living under their tyrannical despotic rule.

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OK...

With Wise Phuul out on 22nd November, my publisher is wondering if any of you would like a free e-book in exchange for an Amazon or Goodreads review posted the day of the release (no need for a *nice* review, of course). If you're at all interested, please message me. :)

Edit - just to clarify, this would be an advance copy. You won't be expected to read the book in a day!

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Sigh.

Insqired Quill rejected my novel again.  On thr bright side, they mentioned this was more to do with their resources to market it than the quality of the work.  I assume thisbis due to it being paranormal mystery rather than urban fantasy, and isnt their speciality.  The only negative feedback was that some areas could do with more description, so at least i seem to havr addressed the problems they highlighted in the previous draft.

 

Also got reject email from Angry Robot.  Stilll waiting to hear from Gollancz re their open submission period in Jan/Feb.  last weeks update suggests my sample is in the 200 second look pile (out of 1800) and should hear back within a few months.

If anyones interested in reading over it, please PM me ad I'll email a copy.  Any more feedback would be greatly appreciated.  I've a version that can be uploaded onto kindles, making ot easier to read; if asking for a copy, please indicate if you plan to use an ereader.

 

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A piece of advice for my fellow board members is that circumstances can change dramatically for you as an author even when you think you're fairly set. This can be both good and bad. For example, my first publisher Permuted Press and I broke ways badly during what has become known as the kerfluffe which is described here.

I was lucky to get out of that right into Amber Cove and Ragnarok Publications who have both been fairly good to me. Amber Cove for getting me the best-selling (on Audible.com) Secrets of Supervillainy and Ragnarok for getting me in stores thanks to their new deal with the IPG.

However, I actually had my swiftest turnaround with Crossroad Press which does Clive Barker and Brian Lumley's audiobooks. They asked me for my books and had the first one of them out today (STRAIGHT OUTTA FANGTON - a comedic vampire story), just a month later with work already ready for other works.

Compared to other publishers I've worked with, they're a smooth oiled machine.

It's why I always advice people submitting works to have word of mouth from their authors as the differences between even good publishers can be amazing.

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I have a research question, that I'm hoping one or two of the bigger brains might be able to help with.

My character, Yoshi, is a geneticist/molecular biologist, working in a secret Japanese military biotech facility, mid-to-late 21st century. This facility is the storage location for all data and materials pertaining to Project Gilgamesh, which has been in mothballs for the past twenty years or so.

In the fifty years he's been captive, Hiroki hasn't aged a day. He can get seriously ill, but it appears he cannot die. They haven't got a clue why. All meaningful research was abandoned after thirty years because tissue analysis was impossible. Within seconds, any samples they took turned literally to dust. Hair, blood, skin, even bone. 

During a conversation with a lay person, Yoshi is asked if she can account for the tissue degradation. She doesn't mention her grandmother's tales of immortals dwelling in the mountains. Instead, she says Hiroki is likely the result of an advanced super-soldier program. But when pressed on how it would be possible to alter biological material to basically undergo thousands of years of decomposition in a matter of seconds, she ...

I have no clue what she says next. I'm not expecting her to answer the question, because, well, it's magic. But I would really love to make her sound like a credible scientist who's at least given it some thought.

Today, we can make apples that last for months and McBurgers that will not rot for years. Presumably, science could take it the other way?

I guess my question is, should Yoshi's hypothesis, however crackpot, be something genetic, something chemical, or a combination of both?

ETA: BTW, I'm not writing a book about a geneticist. Yoshi appears only in the prologue. :D  

 

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I'll give it a go:

A recent physics paper proposed that quantum tunnelling and wormholes are the same thing, linking general relativity to quantum mechanics; that is, quantum entangled particles can be used to create wormholes that open in regions billions of light years away.  Perhaps it could be in different times too, since it is a spacetime effect.  If a person was made of particles that are quantum-entangled with a doppleganger, perhaps like Dorian Gray and his painting, one ages and one is immortal...

 

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Wow. That makes my head hurt. Thanks for giving it some thought. Though, with my limited understanding of physics, I'm struggling to apply the idea to the scenario (since degradation occurs only when the tissue is removed).

What about nanobots?

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14 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

What about nanobots?

Sure, nanobots.  Say they recognize when tissue has been removed and switch the tissue with the quantum entangled doppleganger's billion year old dead tissue.  Say the immortal one doesn't age because he's effectively living his whole life in one second, but spacetime effects makes it look to us like immortality.

This would just be Yoshi's theory, right?  It doesn't have to be remotely plausible because Yoshi is stretching for an answer, and the real answer is magic.

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21 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

Sure, nanobots.  Say they recognize when tissue has been removed and switch the tissue with the quantum entangled doppleganger's billion year old dead tissue.  Say the immortal one doesn't age because he's effectively living his whole life in one second, but spacetime effects makes it look to us like immortality.

This would just be Yoshi's theory, right?  It doesn't have to be remotely plausible because Yoshi is stretching for an answer, and the real answer is magic.

Yeah, she's stretching. Truth be told, she doesn't like to think about it.

I do like the billion-year-old doppelganger idea, though it might just be a tad too crackpot. I mean, how did they get entangled in the first place?

If it helps, Hiroki is an outcast angel. Condemned to walk the earth for a thousand years, he has no power other than his immortality. The dust thingy is a fail-safe, to ensure no angelic blood or body parts fall into the wrong hands (a policy implemented by Heaven following the events of Mark Alder's Son of the Morning :P). 

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55 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

I do like the billion-year-old doppelganger idea, though it might just be a tad too crackpot. I mean, how did they get entangled in the first place?

I figured the doppelganger was created same time the immortal was born and lived backwards in time like Merlin.  Instead of an answer Yoshi theorizes, in the moment she's asked for her theory can she have a "vision" that some other angel / entity gives her to rationalize the immortal, and she just mumbles incoherently about Dorian Grey, Merlin, quantum entanglement and wormholes?  In the vision you describe the theory (it's a false vision meant to avoid the truth), but out loud she's not understood, and the person asking the question just shrugs and never bothers wondering about it ever again.

Then again that's probably more complicated than you want.  :-)

 

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The guy's immortality is provided by some kind of internally-powered stabilising field and anything leaving it immediately decoheres to what it should have been long ago. Possible added detail: theorise that he's from another universe and the matter leaving him is anihillated on contact with our universe's matter.

 

I was going to also suggest some kind of hyper-evolved anti-disease reaction but since she's a biologist/geneticist I don't think that's workable. It should be an explanation that's not quite from her field of expertise.

 

p.s. you do like those fallen angel types, don't you? :P You should totally mythologise that this immediate decay of bodily whatever from angels is in some way behind Rastafarian's refusal to remove or amputate any part of their bodies... but if you don't I'm going to believe it anyway.

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11 hours ago, SpaceChampion said:

I figured the doppelganger was created same time the immortal was born and lived backwards in time like Merlin.  Instead of an answer Yoshi theorizes, in the moment she's asked for her theory can she have a "vision" that some other angel / entity gives her to rationalize the immortal, and she just mumbles incoherently about Dorian Grey, Merlin, quantum entanglement and wormholes?  In the vision you describe the theory (it's a false vision meant to avoid the truth), but out loud she's not understood, and the person asking the question just shrugs and never bothers wondering about it ever again.

Then again that's probably more complicated than you want.  :-)

Well, actually, this vision idea could be just the thing. The 'lay person' is in fact Metatron, posing as a venture-philanthropist, searching for Michael.

Metatron likes to fuck with people, so yeah, he could easily give her some kind of vision. Perhaps he could even give her a glimpse of truth. I like this.

5 hours ago, polishgenius said:

The guy's immortality is provided by some kind of internally-powered stabilising field and anything leaving it immediately decoheres to what it should have been long ago. Possible added detail: theorise that he's from another universe and the matter leaving him is anihillated on contact with our universe's matter.

I was going to also suggest some kind of hyper-evolved anti-disease reaction but since she's a biologist/geneticist I don't think that's workable. It should be an explanation that's not quite from her field of expertise.

p.s. you do like those fallen angel types, don't you? :P You should totally mythologise that this immediate decay of bodily whatever from angels is in some way behind Rastafarian's refusal to remove or amputate any part of their bodies... but if you don't I'm going to believe it anyway.

Substitute an internally-powered stabilising field with an angelic glyph, and that could be exactly what's happening.

I'd like her to perhaps come up with a more grounded explanation, from her own field of expertise. The hyper-evolved anti-disease theory is definitely something I could work with. But how such a thing would be implemented I have no clue. If only one of our fellow boarders was a geneticist/molecular biologist. Wait, hang on a minute... I summon thee, @red snow

And, yeah, I'm a real sucker for the fallen. This is from one of several interlinked stories, all set in the same world.

Anyways, this is all great. I've been struggling with this question for months. I should have asked sooner!

:cheers:

 

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1 hour ago, Spockydog said:

Well, actually, this vision idea could be just the thing. The 'lay person' is in fact Metatron, posing as a venture-philanthropist, searching for Michael.

Metatron likes to fuck with people, so yeah, he could easily give her some kind of vision. Perhaps he could even give her a glimpse of truth. I like this.

Substitute an internally-powered stabilising field with an angelic glyph, and that could be exactly what's happening.

I'd like her to perhaps come up with a more grounded explanation, from her own field of expertise. The hyper-evolved anti-disease theory is definitely something I could work with. But how such a thing would be implemented I have no clue. If only one of our fellow boarders was a geneticist/molecular biologist. Wait, hang on a minute... I summon thee, @red snow

And, yeah, I'm a real sucker for the fallen. This is from one of several interlinked stories, all set in the same world.

Anyways, this is all great. I've been struggling with this question for months. I should have asked sooner!

:cheers:

 

I was wondering why I was being summoned onto this thread as I haven't posted for a while :)

There are loads of ways to get around it via biology/genetics. The current flavour of the month is CRISPR/Cas9 that allows us to edit specific genes - most often used to knock genes out but it can also be used to add genes back in. The weird thing is that there are genes which when removed can cause animals to live longer so that could let people live longer. It wouldn't make them immortal though - that's where the stem cells come in. If there was a way to convince the body to make new stem cells to replace essential parts continuously we'd be able to live a lot longer. Telomerase apparently keeps cells younger for longer so it could be possible to adjust that to get immortal cells (in the sense they will always die bit not immune to damage).

In terms of damage repair reprogramming white blood cells so that they are more active or can target wound sites more efficiently is where we'd probably head into "wolverine" healing factor. There are people at work doing cool things with fly immune cells at the moment. Another friend is working on the potential "wonder-drug" that is using white blood cells to attack anything you want by targetting them with antigens - what they are doing at the moment is teaching the immune system to recognise certain cancer types so that they go in and kill them. The best thing about this is that they will continually kill them if the cancer pops up again (which is the main issue with fighting cancer). The white blood cells could essentially be turned into nanobots once we work out how they are controlled fighting disease and fixing damage wherever they are required.

So I guess a hyper healing system with immortal cells and reprogrammable stem cells could make people hard to kill.

The only caveat I'd add is that with "healing factor" you still need to get the energy so unless they are eating all the time they'd need some source of energy. I've actually just finished an interesting book called "Quantum biology - life on the edge" that hints biology is already harnessing quantum physics and they speculate at the end how we could maybe use this to get even more energy. I guess it also potentially opens the door for crazy stuff with a little extrapolation too. But maybe having super mitochondria or even some chloroplasts would give said person energy to spare.

The book also reminded me about pseudogenes - genes that became mutated to the point they don't function because we no longer required them. Eg we've lost hundreds of odorant receptors. I thought it'd be cool to switch them back on in people using CRISPR/Cas9 and see what happens. But imagine if there was a gene that let us live far longer but was of no use to us as cavemen (no point living to a thousand if you died at 40). You could switch that back on. Afterall lifespan is largely genetic animals tend to have programmed averages eg bigger animals live longer or ones that are hard to kill live longer eg birds and tortoises).

 

That's a coffee fueled brainstorm. I'll have a think if anything else springs to mind and feel free to PM me.

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6 hours ago, red snow said:

I was wondering why I was being summoned onto this thread as I haven't posted for a while :)

There are loads of ways to get around it via biology/genetics. The current flavour of the month is CRISPR/Cas9 that allows us to edit specific genes - most often used to knock genes out but it can also be used to add genes back in. The weird thing is that there are genes which when removed can cause animals to live longer so that could let people live longer. It wouldn't make them immortal though - that's where the stem cells come in. If there was a way to convince the body to make new stem cells to replace essential parts continuously we'd be able to live a lot longer. Telomerase apparently keeps cells younger for longer so it could be possible to adjust that to get immortal cells (in the sense they will always die bit not immune to damage).

In terms of damage repair reprogramming white blood cells so that they are more active or can target wound sites more efficiently is where we'd probably head into "wolverine" healing factor. There are people at work doing cool things with fly immune cells at the moment. Another friend is working on the potential "wonder-drug" that is using white blood cells to attack anything you want by targetting them with antigens - what they are doing at the moment is teaching the immune system to recognise certain cancer types so that they go in and kill them. The best thing about this is that they will continually kill them if the cancer pops up again (which is the main issue with fighting cancer). The white blood cells could essentially be turned into nanobots once we work out how they are controlled fighting disease and fixing damage wherever they are required.

So I guess a hyper healing system with immortal cells and reprogrammable stem cells could make people hard to kill.

The only caveat I'd add is that with "healing factor" you still need to get the energy so unless they are eating all the time they'd need some source of energy. I've actually just finished an interesting book called "Quantum biology - life on the edge" that hints biology is already harnessing quantum physics and they speculate at the end how we could maybe use this to get even more energy. I guess it also potentially opens the door for crazy stuff with a little extrapolation too. But maybe having super mitochondria or even some chloroplasts would give said person energy to spare.

The book also reminded me about pseudogenes - genes that became mutated to the point they don't function because we no longer required them. Eg we've lost hundreds of odorant receptors. I thought it'd be cool to switch them back on in people using CRISPR/Cas9 and see what happens. But imagine if there was a gene that let us live far longer but was of no use to us as cavemen (no point living to a thousand if you died at 40). You could switch that back on. Afterall lifespan is largely genetic animals tend to have programmed averages eg bigger animals live longer or ones that are hard to kill live longer eg birds and tortoises).

 

That's a coffee fueled brainstorm. I'll have a think if anything else springs to mind and feel free to PM me.

Dude, thank you so much for this. I really appreciate you taking the time.

I'd never really intended for the character to explain Hiroki's apparent immortality. But this gives me enough to cobble something together if she decides to offer a thesis. The pseudogene idea is really nice. Provided there are no major breakthroughs in this field before I manage to get this bloody book published, I might go with something like that. :D

What about the hyper-accelerated decomposition? Any idea what she might have to say about that?

 

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58 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Dude, thank you so much for this. I really appreciate you taking the time.

I'd never really intended for the character to explain Hiroki's apparent immortality. But this gives me enough to cobble something together if she decides to offer a thesis. The pseudogene idea is really nice. Provided there are no major breakthroughs in this field before I manage to get this bloody book published, I might go with something like that. :D

What about the hyper-accelerated decomposition? Any idea what she might have to say about that?

 

It's a little trickier coming up with a reason why it would decompose so rapidly after separation. It does feel a bit more physics related like some kind of field maintaining it, as others mentioned. Much like the nanobots you could put it down to disconnection from the white blood cells/macrophages. It would require blood to flow (possibly lymph too) in order for them to do their job so disconnecting a tissue from the blood flow could cause a loss of said maintenance. If the "immortal" cells were actually ageing but being held together by some compensatory mechanism then I guess the cell would revert to dust. Getting into the realm of vampires here...

 

I guess you need the decomposition otherwise there's a potential of clonning happening everytime a cell/batch of tissue is separated :)

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1 minute ago, red snow said:

It's a little trickier coming up with a reason why it would decompose so rapidly after separation. It does feel a bit more physics related like some kind of field maintaining it, as others mentioned. Much like the nanobots you could put it down to disconnection from the white blood cells/macrophages. It would require blood to flow (possibly lymph too) in order for them to do their job so disconnecting a tissue from the blood flow could cause a loss of said maintenance. If the "immortal" cells were actually ageing but being held together by some compensatory mechanism then I guess the cell would revert to dust. Getting into the realm of vampires here...

 

I guess you need the decomposition otherwise there's a potential of clonning happening everytime a cell/batch of tissue is separated :)

You know what, man. That is perfect. With your permission, I could basically just paraphrase that entire paragraph, especially the bit about vampires.

Along with Polish's and SpaceChampion's ideas, I feel I've now got everything I need to write the scene. Cheers, guys.

And yeah, I think I need the decomposition. Originally, I was going to have nothing out of the ordinary in Hiroki's genes and cells. They'd studied the fuck out of him, but just couldn't explain it. They'd also tried to clone him, but their experiments ended in failure, blah, blah, blah.

But blood turning to dust is a bit more sexy.

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Going back to the nanobot theory.  You could say the all nanobots have Hiroki's full blueprint, so when he is hurt they quickly close any wound, but the nanobots in a small sample go nuts trying to rebuild his whole body from that tiny piece and basically burn it up as they don't have enough mass to work with.    So potentially if Hiroki gets cut in half with a enough mass in both pieces the nanobots could generate a clone.  

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5 minutes ago, Leofric said:

Going back to the nanobot theory.  You could say the all nanobots have Hiroki's full blueprint, so when he is hurt they quickly close any wound, but the nanobots in a small sample go nuts trying to rebuild his whole body from that tiny piece and basically burn it up as they don't have enough mass to work with.    So potentially if Hiroki gets cut in half with a enough mass in both pieces the nanobots could generate a clone.  

That's pretty cool too. The nanobots could also be tied in with a person's em signature in a way that's more "plausible" than macrophages responding to a human EM field. Not that you couldn't say there's a biomagnetic field controlling the biology as it's SF afterall. Hiroki's bioelectric field could be unique hence can't be replicated in other humans. It's fun how you can mix all the theories together  to get the same sort of result :)

14 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

You know what, man. That is perfect. With your permission, I could basically just paraphrase that entire paragraph, especially the bit about vampires.

Along with Polish's and SpaceChampion's ideas, I feel I've now got everything I need to write the scene. Cheers, guys.

And yeah, I think I need the decomposition. Originally, I was going to have nothing out of the ordinary in Hiroki's genes and cells. They'd studied the fuck out of him, but just couldn't explain it. They'd also tried to clone him, but their experiments ended in failure, blah, blah, blah.

But blood turning to dust is a bit more sexy.

No problem - I'll just duck and run for cover if a more knowledgeable biologist reads the book and gets upset :P

Glad to help with technobabble justifications - like you said it just helps to have a feel for whether something is in the realm of possibility.

If tying it into blood flow I hope no-one tries to choke Hiroki or stop his heart for more than a few minutes or he may go up in smoke! They could "test" it by tying a ligature around a limb and watching it disintegrate after a few minutes. It should regrow once the ligature is removed though. After which point neither they or Hiroki would be willing to remove blood-flow from his head.

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Just thought of another angle for decomposition. If the character really was a product of genetic engineering then it's plausible the engineer (or company/government) that made it would want to protect the investment. If they have a bunch of custom enymes DNAse, RNAse and proteinases that become active once the tissue is removed (by any of the methods we were discussing) then those enzymes become active and turn the tissue into mush so there's now way of them getting any useful information regarding the test subjects DNA and protein profile. I think it would be more sludge than dust - unless you had some kind of enzyme that was explosive/flammable (pretend they isolated the protein that causes spontaneous human combustion!)

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