#SciFiSeptember day 30 Gotta shout out Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. It's so deep and wide: cultures with customs and history and clothes all meshing together, and at the same time many DIFFERENT ones that all get fleshed out.

#SciFiSeptember day 30: LAST DAY!! What's a book or series you've loved with great worldbuilding? Or maybe several, we've got time and I've really been enjoying this month long conversation we've been having 💙

Generally don't insult yourself or the people you are asking to give you money. Pretend you feel normal about it in public or you'll cause people to mute you because your self promo makes them feel yucky. This is so freaking important. If you learn nothing else, stop apologizing for needing money.

#SciFiSeptember Depends on the world! Bisection: I would find Kinaru nice for a tour, but I wouldn't stay. Shatak would be a good place to live. Imperial Mars: Mars and Earth are both terrible, but I'd happily go to Venus. Invasive: I definitely don't belong there and would get eaten by a tree.

#SciFiSeptember day 29: would you go to the world you've made?

#SciFiSeptember day 28 Here's a bit from one of the philosophical dialogues in The Blue Poppy. I don't know if these will make it into the final draft but I just love to write the main couple chatting about what it means to be a person.

#SciFiSeptember day 28: a snippet with ARTIFICIAL or something about a robot!

#SciFiSeptember On the station, giving so many non-sentient robots rights has led to people thinking the whole idea is a joke. Some people believe robots can be sentient and some don't, but everybody knows that any given robot probably isn't. Some people think the word "robot" is insensitive.

#SciFiSeptember day 27: attitude toward robots. Do people love them? Hate them? Think the whole idea is implausible?

#SciFiSeptember One of the big themes of my WIP is that becoming a person is a process, and it requires being treated like a person, existing in the world as people do. So the robots don't become people in the training lab, they were never programmed to be people.

#SciFiSeptember day 26: can an existing meaning develop intelligence? Or do they have to be made sentient to begin with?

#SciFiSeptember day 25 In The Blue Poppy, it's a big problem because some robots definitely seem to experience something like human consciousness, and some definitely don't, but there's no actual test or way to be sure.

#SciFiSeptember day 25: do robots have rights? What is the legal status of a sentient robot?

This is encouraging. I was thinking the other day about fears that they will come after those of us who criticize him. But at this point, there are too many of us. Logistically, they can't! The goal must be to scare us into self censoring. So.... let's not.

The good news: the Black Sails to Sunward ebook is live! Bad news: I've lost all my reviews and sales rank. It was actually pretty popular for a bit, in the top ten in its category, and now it has no rank and no reviews. This is just to say, if you've read it before, PLEASE go leave a review!

#SciFiSeptember day 24 On the space station, bots are created as perfect replicas of humans. But on the planet below, bots are purpose-built, with bodies specifically designed for their jobs. So there are spider shaped repair bots and citywide networked AIs.

#SciFiSeptember day 24: AI that isn't in a robot body. Usually TV has androids as much like humans as possible, but if machine intelligence did exist, there's no reason it would correlate with looking human. Have you got any ship minds or other non-embodied artificial intelligence?

#SciFiSeptember day 23 I started Blue Poppy expecting it to be about the dashing spy robot but no, turns out the unexpected charmer is the disembodied AI named Traffic Control. Poppy took TC from her server building and plopped her into a robot body to save her from a mob. TC is FURIOUS about it.

#SciFiSeptember day 23: robot characters. Got any charming robots, computer voices, roombas with personality? Tell us about one!

I have taken the Tylenol that was in the medicine cabinet and which they think probably is the reason you like trains forgive me but that’s bullshit you got autism from your dad

In my finished novels, only Bisection has an AI. But my WIP, The Blue Poppy, deals heavily with AIs, both self-aware and not. The invention of the quantum core made it possible for AI to become as complex and unpredictable as a human mind. Trouble is, you can't always tell how self aware one is.

#SciFiSeptember day 22: is there REAL artificial intelligence? Not a language model, but a self-aware machine intelligence? How common is it in your universe?

I'm slowly getting the Imperial Mars books up. The ebook of Black Sails to Sunward will be live on the 24th. Then the paperback as soon as it's ready. The Sea of Clouds still needs its cover redone, thanks to me receiving nothing from the publisher but a flat pdf with a big typo on it.

#SciFiSeptember day 21 Apparently I don't use the word "device" very much! So here's a bit where a historian explains what things were like in the more technologically-advanced past.

#SciFiSeptember day 21: share a snippet with the word "device" or something about a cool gadget in your universe!

#SciFiSeptember day 20 This is huge in Imperial Mars because electricity is almost completely banned. It affects just about everything: communication, military strategy, and the engineering of the ships. The law was put in place after a Singularity killed millions.

#SciFiSeptember day 20: forbidden tech What technology exists in your world, but is forbidden to use? Do people do it anyway?

#SciFiSeptember In Invasive, even standard Terran agriculture has a devastating cost they don't recognize at once. In my WIP, creating robots of all kinds has wreaked havoc with things like the labor market, personal freedoms, and even dating.

#SciFiSeptember day 19: tech with a harmful cost. In fantasy, sometimes magic has some kind of cost or damage it does. But that can happen in sci-fi too: cybernetic upgrades that damage the body, warp drives that distort space. What tradeoffs do your characters have to make?

#SciFiSeptember day 18 In Invasive, the characters get to the planet in a hundred-year-old refurbished ship. It's practically falling apart on the way. In my WIP, the space station is slapped together over generations, so there are nice parts and then parts where the gravity only sometimes works.

#SciFiSeptember day 18: janky gadgets. You know how the Star Wars universe is full of cool inventions, but Han is driving a grody old ship? Often our characters don't have access to the best there is. They make do with old, broken, or out-of-date machines.

#SciFiSeptember day 17 You know, none of my books so far have anything of the kind! I'm kind of skeeved out by it tbh, but I can definitely see applications that would be handy. I have an idea I haven't written yet where people choose to network their minds together to become essentially one.

#SciFiSeptember day 17: body alterations and cyborg implants Are there ways people can upgrade their own bodies with tech? Are there side effects to doing that? What are society's opinions about it?

Inevitable The future Get on board or left behind This is not going away The genie is out of the bottle

#SciFiSeptember day 16: Kinds of media. Do your characters watch TV, or is it all holograms? What's the most popular media going around in your world, and how do they access it?

#SciFiSeptember day 15 In both Bisection and Invasive, there's no faster than light communication. This means our characters are on their own to solve their problems—no help from back home. One little fold jump is enough to get Tria fully out of touch with the ship she started on.

#SciFiSeptember day 15: long-distance communication! Getting into tech, we can talk about how people call home when they're lightyears away. Or can they at all?

#SciFiSeptember day 14. Thinking about how aliens aren't really that strange, it's only a matter of perspective.

#SciFiSeptember day 14 Snippet: STRANGE or an excerpt with aliens!

#SciFiSeptember The ecosystem on Eos is very mutually interdependent. The big white trees shelter the smaller plants, while tiny mycelia detect any gap in the big trees and send signals for them to produce seeds. Meanwhile the people are hunters who prevent herbivores from overgrazing.

#SciFiSeptember day 13: whole alien ecosystems! How do alien plants, animals, and people interact? Alternatively, if you've gone into that enough already, you can explain why you make the choices with aliens that you do. Do they symbolize anything?

#SciFiSeptember Invasive is full of different alien plants and animals! My favorite are probably the huge white trees with dark purple leaves. They reproduce, as most of the plants on Eos do, by releasing buglike seeds which eat ravenously to store up energy before planting themselves in the ground.

#SciFiSeptember day 12: alien animals and plants. Enough about the sapients, are there any interesting critters? Plants unlike anything on Earth? Things that aren't exactly either one?

#wordgamewednesday It's Thursday and this is more than a sentence but 🤷 Talking about robots that say they're sentient and aren't. It's not easy to tell which are which, but sometimes it's obvious.

#SciFiSeptember day 11 In Bisection, they have a convenient translator earbud, which was programmed when the Shatakazan fed in the radio transmissions they had overheard. There are some things it misses, and it relies on both people having one—which makes it inadequate for getting by on Earth.

#SciFiSeptember day 11: interspecies communication. How do people speak with aliens? Is there some kind of universal translator, or do they have to learn each other's language bit by bit? Are there things they still struggle to convey?

#SciFiSeptember I'm always torn on this, because creatively, the weirder the better, but in practice, the weirder they are, the harder they are to write about. If the alien is a main character, I'm going to have to work out every detail of the narration to fit.

#SciFiSeptember day 10: how different are the aliens from humans? Do you stick with funny foreheads or go all the way to ineffable space clouds? Why do you make that choice?

#SciFiSeptember I accidentally told y'all about all my main aliens yesterday, so today how about the aliens in the world I've been slowly making up for a future series? My favorites so far are the Rel'path, who are like gazelles in terms of their evolutionary niche, but socially like bees.

#SciFiSeptember day 9: different kinds of aliens Oh dear, this one has a lot of overlap with yesterday. You can tell us about specific kinds, or just how much variety is in your universe. Are there more aliens on the edges of your world who don't get much screen time?