I’ve become obsessed with a place in my imagination. It’s called Placid Point and it is a space station, packed to the gunwhales with computers, and inhabited by a huge number of uploaded human minds. It started life on Earth before moving into Earth orbit, then to solar orbit (at L1) and then around another star as it moved farther and farther away, leaving Earth behind.
I first began writing about Placid Point in mid-2008, when I wrote the short story “In the Dark of Second Sleep”. It was about an alien race having a very strange close encounter with transhumans who had left Placid Point. Immediately, the transhumans I had created invaded my imagination. For a while I thought about nothing else but where they had come from, where they were going, and what might be the many individual stories that marked their journey.
Every now and then, one of those stories demanded to be written. I realised, as I elaborated this world, that becoming transhuman would not be the slick transition some futurists imagine, that we would take with us into this new way of being, much of what ties us to our past, and that the Universe would continue to shape and mould us in the same way it always has, that the economics of survival don’t care what form your body or mind might take. More than this, it seemed, the pioneers of transhumanity would face difficulties as emotionally challenging as any human has ever faced, as they pried themselves free of their ancient biological heritage.
After ‘In the Dark of Second Sleep’, I wrote ‘Last Christmas’, leaping from the middle of the story to the end. Then ‘All the Way’, groping my way back to the beginning, a time when Placid Point was known as Omega Point. With ‘Jim’sWorld’ I finally had my creation myth, along with a couple of characters I knew would be appearing again and again. Martin Lanham in particular would play a key role. He became an important character in my first novel set squarely in the Placid Point universe, The Credulity Nexus. ‘The Whispering Dead’, another story from the early days, features Lanham, although his name is not mentioned, and the narrator in ‘Murathera’s Orgy’, set far into the future, is probably not him, although it could be.
I have written a number of novels in the same future ‘world’ – whether Placid Point features largely in them or not. The Credulity Nexus, set just seventy years from now, I have already mentioned. My Emissaries series, set three hundred years in the future, is in the same ‘world’ but barely mentions Omega Point (as it was called then). However, the transhumans of Placid Point play a much more prominent role in the sequel to that series, Deep Fracture, set ten thousand years in the future.
Maybe I should put all these shorts in a collection and self-publish them?
Well I’m hooked.
Have you already sold them to magazines? Might be worth trying to sell them first, then put them into an e-book.
A couple of them have been sold (‘Murathera’s Orgy’ and ‘All the Way’) and ‘Last Christmas’ has been up on the Web for over a year now (so why would a magazine buy it?) But not the others. Thing is, I’m really focused on writing novels these days and I haven’t sent a story out to a magazine for months. The last short I wrote was ‘Party Time’.
I like short stories – writing them and reading them – but it is a royal pain in the arse sending them to magazines, or anthologies – most of which pay peanuts for them anyway. Seems to me I might as well just get them out there and forget about the mags.
I agree with Merrilee: I’m hooked too! It sounds like an interesting concept.
Graham, get them out there please – they sound fascinating. The whole Placid Point world has me hooked too!
Thanks Tony (I’ve just subscribed to your blog by the way). Thanks Scribs. I’m pretty sure I will put them out as a cheap – or free – ebook, but first…
Well, first I’d like to get a publisher for the novel. Then the collection of shorts has a role as an adjunct, part of the book publicity and marketing plan, as it were. Experience tells me if I just drop it on its own into the marketplace, it will hardly be noticed.
(Of course, the argument against this is to release the stories as a way of building a market for the novel. But I don’t really have the hubris to suppose that would happen.)