jayroe

As a way to start ramping up my PS efforts, I’m going to start posting status updates once a week. Since it’s Thursday, I’ll shoot for every Thursday. This will not only be for my friends who ask about PS from time to time, but will also be a means of self-motivation. What prompted this after years of apparent inactivity? Well, music of course…

Since starting my personal sci-fi comic project, Particle Sphere, back in 2001, music has been a primary creative influence second only to science fiction itself. Over the years I’ve built a list in my mind of tunes that perfectly express the essence of what I’m trying to capture with my story and characters.

I recently discovered the artist Vienna Teng. Her music just feeds my creative soul. So, when I find material like that, I work my way through it looking for things to latch onto and use for inspiration. One such object is her tune Gravity… if I had to pick a theme song for Particle this would be it. It’s just perfect.

I have wanted to compile a playlist of music that I have used for energy while thinking and working on PS. I’ll start building it and include it in a future PS Status.

The general state of the comic is currently script writing and research. I have more than 16 single-spaced, typed pages of script and sketchbooks full of notes and drawings for the origin story, ParticleSphere.Alpha. I estimate that it will be around 40 pages by the end of the year. My goal is to finish the first draft before Christmas and send it out to friends for feedback.

I have been rapidly nailing down technical conventions and major story points, such as technological capabilities, full character names, plot twists and essential events of the narrative. One of the major conceptual problems I’ve been working on is how to do space battles in a post-Singularity era.

For example, if everything is composed of smart materials and nanotech with AI driven weapons and defense systems, how do you actually damage an opponent? Wouldn’t everything end in stalemate? What I don’t want to do is recreate sea battles in space, the standard issue sci-fi space battle cliché.

I’m going for something really different here.

So I’ve been thinking of basing all the warfare on a chess paradigm. Except instead of 2 dimensions, you’d have several million dimensions both real and synthetic with a wide array of varying environmental physics. And instead of 8 pawns, you’d have a billion… self-assembling, fully sentient AI driven, massively parallel, wormhole traveling quantum reactors using nano-engineered superconducting electromagnetic containment lenses capable of firing multidimensional sub-atomic beams that could cut a planet in half and trained via evolutionary algorithm with every conceivable war tactic and technique both human and alien… or something like that.

I’m sure a nice visual metaphor would sort it all out.

Next week’s status will go into some of the research I’ve been doing, books and source materials.

~ Will

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 2:56 pm and is filed under ParticleSphere. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.