Solarversia Fanboy Notes, Chapters 27–39

Fanboy Notes for Chapter Twenty-Eight

1. The Super Nova project was inspired by a book called Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal:

Her TED talk on the topic is very interesting too:

2. Nova uses an AR app which overlays a virtual crowd onto her real world running track. The app was based on a real world app called Race Yourself, and is another company that looks to go have gone under, presumably due to the change in direction of Google Glass away from the consumer market toward the commercial one. It was a sweet idea, I just think they were a few years ahead of their time, check out the video:

Fanboy Notes for Chapter Twenty-Nine

1. The length of time players spent travelling space was one of the challenges I faced in the book. If players could reach the other planets quickly it devalued Teleport Tokens and made the game too easy. If it took them too long, they’d find the game boring. I opted for a solution that involved days-worth of travel to each one, but countered the boredom problem by including Games Rooms in the spaceships.

Of the games we see being played aboard the SS Jupiter, my favourite is the Grid Memory Game, which I’d love to see played for real. I’ve been fascinated by the concept of memory palaces ever since learning about them in Derren Brown’s excellent book, Tricks of the Mind:

2. While playing Petanja’s puzzle, we learn that Nova didn’t know what the Arab Spring was:

Her panic intensified. She couldn’t stop looking at the dwindling number of safe spots. Perhaps ‘CRS’ was one of those things that everyone in the entire world knew about except for her. Like the time people had been discussing the ‘Arab Spring’ at school and she’d asked whether it was similar to an ‘Indian Summer’ and they’d laughed in her face until she cried.

It was actually my wife who hadn’t heard of it, quite some months after it was officially a ‘thing’. I did laugh in her face, although not until she cried.

3. The chapter touches on the problem of game addition. Games that I’ve been addicted to in recent times include 2048, Twenty, and the exceptional Monument Valley.

Fanboy Notes for Chapter Thirty

1. While Nova’s at the cave I mention a crowdfunding campaign:

That morning’s White Dwarf had mentioned a crowdfunding campaign where the residents of a small town wanted to repave the high street with hexagonal tiles that worked like the ones in The Game. She hoped it would be successful. She loved it when the virtual world spilled over into the real.

Of course, if something like this happened for real, it would an example of mimesis in action. I was about to comment that my favourite example of a crowdfunding campaign bringing fiction into the real world in some manner was the residents of Detroit getting together to fund a statue of Robocop. Although looking at the comments, it’s been over a year since the last update, and the statue still hasn’t been erected. Boo!

2. In the second scene of the chapter, during the hack attack on Spiralwerks, Carl, the CTO mentions that server 451 is being targeted. The number relates to the fabricant in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Sonmi-451. Mitchell is one of my favourite authors, and Cloud Atlas is simple incredible. The film’s not too shabby, either.

Fanboy Notes for Chapter Thirty-One

1. Nova and Burner board the Amritsar, for their trip to learn about Banjax. Amritsar is a city in India, and the location of a famous massacre (relevant because of what happens in Banjax’s story).
2. When the Amritsar pulls up in Banjax’s corner of the Magisterial Chamber they’re greeted by the sight of a Hangi, which is a traditional New Zealand Māori method of cooking food using heated rocks buried in a pit oven.
3. When I commissioned a piece of concept art for Banjax, the artist put the additional four legs on his head. On reflection, I quite like them there:

4. Ishmael, the fisherman in the story is the protagonist in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

5. At the end of the tale we learn that it’s Ishmael who’s been telling the tale, and that:

I was once that boastful fisherman Ishmael. Still I await my death all these years later, ever fearful that the beast will keep his promise. I have been reduced to living next to my hangi pit, stoking it daily, keeping the coals burning hot and telling my tale to all who stop by.

His re-telling of his tale was inspired by the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as suggested by my editor (invariably the clever / cultural references came from her).

Fanboy Notes for Chapter Thirty-Two

1. In the fangirl notes for chapter 7, part 1, I mentioned that Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? by Dr. Seuss was one of my favourite childhood books. It also provided the inspiration for Nova’s memory about Kiki La Roux’s show:

“You remember when we used to watch Kiki’s show together? And he’d change something toward the end of the program with a click of his fingers?”

“How could I forget? It was the best part of the program. My favourite time was when he attached Vinnie Venassi’s beard to the back of one of his eunuch’s heads and the eunuch dragged Vinnie back to the harem with him.”

2. The Goose Fair in Nottingham is a real world event, except it takes place during the first week of October so I took a slight liberty with the timing.

3. While researching Solarversia I came across the Turkey City Lexicon, which is a list of things to steer clear of if you want to write good sci-fi (or perhaps, fiction, more generally). Having reviewed the list I was amused to find that I was guilty of at least of one of its crimes, Call a Rabbit a Smeerp:

A cheap technique for false exoticism, in which common elements of the real world are re-named for a fantastic milieu without any real alteration in their basic nature or behavior. “Smeerps” are especially common in fantasy worlds, where people often ride exotic steeds that look and act just like horses. (Attributed to James Blish.)

I distinctly refer to zapiers as “little bee-like creatures”, and the exhibition in chapter 32 is even called the Melittology Museum of Art (melittology being the branch of entomology concerning the scientific study of bees). If you’ve ever written a book, how many “turkeys” were you guilty of?

4. Here’s a picture of Spee-Akka Dey Bollarkoo for you:

Fanboy Notes for Chapter Thirty-Three

1. Burner and Jono enjoy playing with an app “that turned anyone they looked at into some kind of caricature” and has a mode that enables you to swap faces with the person opposite you. Again, this kind of technology is already here, even if it’s only in its infancy. I don’t think it will be perfected by 2020, but will certainly be photo realistic by 2030, and isn’t too shabby in 2016 already:

2. When creating Ludi Bioski (whose fairy tale story we hear in this chapter) I thought I was being genuinely inventive and novel. A man who’s white down one half, black down the other! Wrong. As pointed out by Dan Dynneson (you can catch his podcast interview with me here) Ludi shares his physiology with a character called “Zetsu” from a manga called Naruto.

3. Early concept art for Ludi Bioski:

4. The “Card of Eternal Circularity” is of course inspired by the paradoxical works of M.C. Escher:

Fanboy Notes for Chapter Thirty-Four

1. The Acoo-Stickulars (multicoloured waveforms that travelled at 10% of the speed of sound) were inspired by the Soundwaves that appear in Better Than Life. If you like Red Dwarf, I highly recommend it:

2. The word “Acoo-Stickular” is, of course, a fairly weak and obvious play on the word “acoustic”.

3. In the first draft of this chapter I had Burner help Nova through the smashed window of the department store . As my editor correctly pointed out, Nova don’t need no help. It was invaluable having a female editor to look out for slips like this.

4. The word “Huntropellimous” contains the last names of two of my best friends, Rich Hunt and Chris Pell.

Fanboy Notes for Chapter Thirty-Five

1. Charlie calls Nova a film star. I believe that VR will ultimately deliver this promise, making film stars of us all (or at least, the virtual representations of us all). Warhol’s dictum is about to get a supercharged upgrade.

2. I actually used the phrase “livin’ la vida loca” in a conversation with two friends of mine and was rightly admonished. Shame on my name.

3. Zetanja’s Puzzle on Uranus was inspired by the “Doors of Ireland”poster that, Tom Perry II, a mate of mine used to have in his bathroom:

Fanboy Notes for Chapter Thirty-Six

1. The names of the Grid Runner teams (the Wizballs and the Bomb Jacks) are Commodore 64 games:

As you might remember from the fanboy notes for chapter 26, part 3, I made a Commodore 64 mashup video many years ago. In fact, it’s so good that it’s worth posting again. Right guys?

Fanboy Notes for Chapter Thirty-Seven

1. When Nova reaches Grandmaster Brontanja she must play his game, which is different from the rest.

Brontanja’s Puzzle was different to the ones hosted by the other eight Grandmasters. It had to be played last, once you’d played the others and ticked off your Bucket List items for the year, and was the only one that remained the same every time it was played. Even so, there was no way to cheat, for the winning answer depended on the answers given at the time. The puzzle was known as the ‘Lowest Unique Number’, a strategy game that involved a mix of maths and psychology.

I also have Nova think back to 2016:

She tried to cast her mind back to the months after she and Sushi had signed up for Solarversia. It was all about the Golden Grid back then — the ten-by-ten section of the Player’s Grid that had been reserved by Spiralwerks for a series of promotional events. The very first number to have been assigned to any player, anywhere in the world — 993 — was the square located in the bottom right hand corner of the Golden Grid, and it had been appointed using the same game.

Because I’m trying to bring Solarversia to life and have created the Golden Grid for real, square 993 was appointed using that very game. More details in this Medium post, and on my blog. Introducing JStheOriginal:

Fanboy Notes for Chapter Thirty-Eight

1. We discover that Charlie has been encouraging Nova to bet on black for her Minority Winners game, as per his man, Wesley Snipes in Passenger 57:

2. Games like Minority Winners and Lowest Unique number were included because of my love of game theory, which I studied at university. If you’re of a similar disposition I highly recommend checking out a manga called Liar Game, which is packed full of such games:

3. The back-and-fourth discussion that Nova and Charlie have about which colour Nova should choose in the game was inspired by the “Battle of Wits” scene in the Princess Bride:

4. In the fangirl notes for chapter 4, part, I mentioned getting help from the math subreddit for figuring out the numbers on an Ulam Spiral. Those guys came to the rescue again in my “Author needs help with problem: How long would it take someone to plunge to the centre of Pluto from its surface?” problem that I posted there.

I was delighted to note that the name of the reddit user who helped me, wintermute93, was taken from William Gibson’s Neuromancer (wintermute being an AI character therein).

5. Due to my inclusion of Pluto in Solarversia, NASA arranged for their New Horizons spacecraft to perform a flyby a couple of months before the book’s publication, allowing readers to pinpoint the location of the Decision Dome. Bloody good of them.