Our SPSFC 5 Quarterfinalists and Semifinalists

For the last five months, the members of Ground Control to Major Tom have been reading novels to pick our semifinalists that will advance to the next round in the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC). We began in November with a 25-book scout pile to sample, chose six of those novels to read in full as quarterfinalists, and have now chosen two of the books to advance as semifinalists.

Before revealing them, here are the four books that earned their place as our quarterfinalists, in alphabetical order.

Quarterfinalist: Echo of the Larkspur by A.A. Freeman

The sole survivor of a massacre, Dr. Ciro Kwakkenbos, has spent the last six years in intensive therapy. He's finally capable of working with Artificial Intelligence again -- and comes to the Ceres colony determined to prevent robots from committing any future atrocities.

When he arrives, Ciro realizes the robot in charge of the colony's security, SAGE (Sentient Automated Geo-sentinel Engineer), is dangerously close to complete sentience. SAGE is more interested in observing the colonists' everyday lives (and matching them with appropriate musical soundtracks) than following its intended programming. Robots aren't supposed to be charming, kind, or compassionate, either.

But as Ciro investigates, he discovers SAGE has learned how to lie and -- possibly -- harm and kill humans. Worse, SAGE's memories have been hacked, deleting a deadly secret.

Despite the danger SAGE poses, Ciro can't deny the feelings growing between them. Now Ciro must unravel the truth behind the missing memories -- before SAGE and the colony are doomed.

This is a funny character-driven novel about an overbearing AI that has enough processing cycles to simultaneously meddle in the lives of all 163 inhabitants of a science outpost far from Earth: "People had died under Sage's watch before, from natural reasons to accidents. Part of being an all-seeing AI meant having those last moments recorded and placed in sub-folders tucked away deep within him. ... If he had the ability to delete his memories, they would be the first to go. Second would be the numerous recordings of his human companions being intimate -- just embarrassing, if you asked him -- and third would probably go to Thad's existence in general."

There's charm to spare in the meeting of the minds between SAGE and Ciro, who fails so badly at his original job of bringing the rogue AI in line that they end up dating. Freeman manages the trick of writing a breezy novel with an unmistakable sense of foreboding. The feeling slowly builds that something is very, very wrong.

The author's bio calls her an author of science fiction and fantasy "with a hint of romance." This book contains way more than a hint, but that worked on our judges.

Buy Echo of the Larkspur on Kindle

Quarterfinalist: In Spite of the Inevitable by Morgan Biscup

The past isn't the only thing that won't stay dead.

Hiding from his violent history as a revered Void necromancer within the Sparnell Confederation, single father Shane Lawrence has finally built a quiet life. On the freehold planet of Baden he can pour his energy into the only thing that now matters: the safety and upbringing of his precocious son Jake.

All too soon, the Confederation targets Baden for annexation, confronting Shane once more with his treasonous past. Worse, the invading force is led by none other than Shane's manipulative former mentor, Admiral Kydell.

Shane's every instinct screams to run, to hide Jake even further from Sparnell -- but Baden is home. This time he could choose to make a stand and defend the entire planet, not just his son. But that means turning to the very skills he swore he'd leave behind.

One of the questions that arises for SPSFC judges is how much fantasy is acceptable in a novel submitted to a science fiction contest. This space opera has battle mages and vampires and resurrection, but all judges who sampled the book found enough science to vote to read it in full.

This novel has as much worldbuilding as a tabletop roleplaying game, but Biscup puts it to good use by applying an original spin on well-worn tropes. Dead void necromancers are yoked to spaceships to navigate hyperjumps as Afterlife Intelligence. Shane is a live necromancer with a grim past who has gone Good Will Hunting, working as a janitor at a school for mages he's powerful enough to lead. This gets noticed by someone also in hiding who fears he's after them. "If he was a spy, why would he be working as a janitor?" a deserter asks and is told, "To blend in. Obviously. People overlook janitors."

An appealing found family arises around Shane, an anti-hero whose good deeds may never balance the scales against his war crimes. But never say never in a six-book series where death isn't always the end.

Buy In Spite of the Inevitable on Kindle

Quarterfinalist: Insiders by Shannon Knight

In a universe of long-haul truckers, parasite-bearing megalomaniacs, asteroid rustlers and homicidal peace keepers, some people just want to stay alive.

Deep within Kerberos Station, pipe crawler Sachi Inside is dying of the planet-killing Hibravian virus. In a state of delirium, the agoraphobic girl agrees that in exchange for life, she will not only leave her pipes, but even the station. A sentient plant wraps around her, guides her to an exiting ship, and adheres to the hull.

Captain Karasi Kwei is not pleased to discover a stowaway, but the crew thinks there's money to be made on the plant, and the fact that both the Eastern Star Corporation and the Elysium Empire are tracking it confirms its value. However, none of that matters when the entire crew falls sick with the incurable Hibravian.

But Sachi's plant is more than it seems. All they have to do is fight the mercenaries, survive the virus, evade the Elysium Empire, and navigate a fluctuating microwave wall, and they just might save the universe.

It didn't take long for this novel to hook judges with two sympathetic outcasts drawn together by circumstance -- a dying denizen of a space station and a plant that can survive in space: "Whatever she had traveling with her -- be it animal, mineral or vegetable -- they had met deep within the pipes. That made the plant an Insider. Insiders protected each other from outsiders."

Knight writes with a strong voice, patiently unspooling the narrative and an endearing cast of characters aboard a hardscrabble long hauler called the Jacks that is reminiscent of Firefly. Like that crew this one is beset by an escalating series of obstacles. Chapter titles name the viewpoint character for that chapter, including both heroes and the Imperatrix Persephone XII, an entity of such power everyone else is "but dust to her star" in a lovely turn of phrase.

This tale of surviving an intergalactic plague capable of wiping out planets was written before Covid-19, the author notes in a preface. Insiders is "dedicated to the people who have died or become disabled due to the Covid-19 pandemic."

Buy Insiders on Kindle

Quarterfinalist: Rule of Extinction by Geoff Jones

A civilization-ending comet is headed for Earth.

Two days before impact, thousands of mysterious pods land in a swath across North America. When people touch them, the pods open. Anyone who climbs inside is carried away.

No one knows where the pods came from and no one knows where they go, but finding one is David Williams' only chance to save his family from the end of the world.

This book begins with the Spielbergian premise of ordinary people trying frantically to escape their doom, even if it means denying others that opportunity. Characters scramble aboard spaceship pods without a single clue about whether this is a good idea: "Sierra had been glued to the news, which showed the best of humanity, along with the worst, and plenty of gray areas in between. She saw people work together to pack the pods full. She wanted a man in Colorado shoot someone and march through a pile of bodies to claim a pod by himself."

The fortunate few end up somewhere that's practically prehistoric and must fight for their lives a second time. The author's background in videogame writing for franchises such as Star Wars and Conan the Barbarian explains the fast pace and cinematic action.

The central mystery of the novel -- who rescued us and why? -- has a satisfying payoff that leads right into the sequel. Steven would be proud.

Buy Rule of Extinction on Kindle

Judges in SPSFC score books from 1 to 10. The results were so close in this round that a single extra point from one judge would've swapped second and third places. Here are the two novels that our team is advancing to the semifinals of SPSFC, also in alphabetical order.

Semifinalist: ab initio by Jacob Terracina

Raza Mugabi, a biologist turned software engineer, is not sure why this particular tech startup hired him. His track record is far from stellar. In fact, he's not certain what the company ultimately even does. Sometimes it's better to keep your head down and your mouth shut, he figures. At least, until his curiosity gets the better of him.

Eight years later, Raza finds himself as a defendant and key technical witness in a high profile court case. A world-class prosecutor and a woefully inexperienced defense attorney go head-to-head against each other, their clients and their consciences in an effort to answer the question on everyone's mind: Is the startup's invention, legally speaking, human?

The arguments leap between the technical, political, ethical and philosophical consequences of the decision, and as the trial progresses, the many, many secrets of the startup are laid bare.

The most hard SF of our choices, this novel thrilled judges with a skewed but alarmingly plausible take on where artificial intelligence may one day be taking us. Some great classic novels are about trials. This is a layered tale told through multiple characters that begins with a tech startup declaring that it has developed an AI "so impossibly advanced that it deserved all the protections typically reserved for living, breathing humans. Even by tech executive standards, it was a whopper of a claim. Such a whopper, in fact, that the governing bodies across the Greater UN tied themselves into knots deciding which committee of which branch of which division of which agency from which country would be responsible for exposing the obvious lie."

Terracina writes well and with ambition, structuring the story into chapters that cover two timeframes. One is the days of the trial. The other covers eight years in the life of software engineer Raza Mugabi, who embodies a trait common to many protagonists: the ability to find deep trouble without even looking for it.

ab initio is swimming in technical depth, keeping the tale afloat with its characters and humor.

Buy ab initio on Kindle Unlimited

Semifinalist: Time Traitors by Eli Donovan

Dr. Grace Carson is finally reclaiming her career. Two years after blowing the whistle on her scumbag ex-husband for illegal dino-poaching, she's ready to return to what she loves most: researching dinosaurs in their natural habitat 65 million years in the past.

But her comeback mission includes one infuriating complication: time agent Ben Nakamura. He's charming, obnoxiously perceptive, and clearly watching her. The question is, why?

Before Grace can find out, everything blows up. Literally. The poacher crew are back and when Grace refuses to stay quiet, her research station is attacked. She and Ben are forced to flee into the Cretaceous wilds with a busted time machine and no backup. Fixing the machine means a dangerous trek through a predator-infested jungle, but survival might be the easy part. Falling for Ben? That could ruin everything.

Time travel stories aren't to everyone's taste. This book had the good fortune to draw a team of judges who always make time for them.

The ground rules for this romp are that the timeline must not change, no matter how much the dinosaur researchers and dinosaur poachers fubar 70 million years ago: "The official Time Guard rules say we're back here as observers only, no changing the timeline, no alternate realities. And time loops wouldn't work with our time technology anyway."

The novel follows in Michael Crichton's fossilized footprints, assembling a cast of scientific and scurrilous characters, all in danger of becoming dinner. It's a well-paced adventure with rootable characters that builds slowly to an unexpected reveal.

There's also a time paradox when one protagonist becomes two: "They are exactly the same from the way they hold their fork, to the way they chew, how they pick at their MRI tray. ... Yeah, they both started saying the exact same thing at the exact same time. This isn't freaky or unsettling. Nope. Not at all."

Read Time Traitors on Kindle Unlimited

Science Fiction · Books · Spsfc · Spsfc5 · 2026/06/02 · Comment · Link

Judges Wanted for SPSFC 4

The spaceship has been moved to the launch pad and gantries shifted into place. Final preparations are underway for the fourth Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC), a contest where a large group of enthusiastic volunteer readers chooses the best work of self-published SF out of hundreds of entries.

Because some of our judges are returning to their own writing and others are taking a break, we need some new recruits to help us pick the book that will join S.A. Tholin's Iron Truth, Riley August's The Last Gifts of the Universe, and Dave Dobson's Kenai as the novel that rockets into our hearts and wins the competition.

Use this link to let us know you're interested in becoming a judge:

SPSFC 4 Judge Application Form

(The link uses Google Forms and requires a Google account. Let us know in the comments if that prevents you from applying.)

If you want to know more about what is asked of a judge, here are the details.

Each judge is assigned to a team that will all get the same books. Being on a team helps take some of the pressure off because all of the responsibilities are shared.

Before we start, judges look over the list of books to ensure they have no conflicts of interest that would affect their impartiality. If there are, a book is assigned to another team.

During the first round, teams use their own methods to go from the initial scout pile of 20-25 books to a smaller number of books that are read in full by the entire team. Each judge gives those a numeric score and the two highest-average books become that team's semifinalists. This round takes six months.

Next, teams are assigned four of the other teams' semifinalists to read in full over the next two months. They give these scores as well. The six books with the highest scores in the entire contest become the finalists.

For the finals, there is a gathering of the teams. During the next two months, every judge reads the finalists they haven't already read in a prior round. Books are finished, scores are given and there is another great read that has emerged victorious.

Throughout the year that this is taking place, judges share their opinions about contest books on social media, blogs, GoodReads and Amazon. It sometimes occurs that a judge likes a book as much or more than the eventual winner. Reading too many great books is a side effect of taking part in this contest.

So that's how this works. Hope you're interested!

Small print: Your mileage may vary. Batteries not included. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball. Offer not valid on Tralfamadore.

Science Fiction · Books · Spsfc · Spsfc4 · 2024/08/27 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Kurt Vonnegut's Idea for a Reality TV Show

I've been reading commencement speeches by Kurt Vonnegut, which are well-remembered today for mordant wit, dark humor and prophetic warnings about where society was headed. There was no one greater at sending freshly minted college graduates into the world with their skulls full of newfound doubt and grave misgivings.

In his 1974 Hobart and William College commencement speech, Vonnegut talked about the Louds, a family in Santa Barbara, California, who let a documentary crew film their private lives for seven months and turn it into a 10-episode TV series. This was a shocking thing to do in the 1970s.

In his address, Vonnegut pitched his idea for a reality TV show decades before that term was coined:

I suggest to you that the Louds were healthy Earthlings who had everything but a religion in which they could believe. There was nothing to tell them what they should want, what they should shun, what they should do next. Socrates told us that the unexamined life wasn't worth living. The Louds demonstrated that the morally unstructured life is a clunker, too.

Christianity could not nourish the Louds. Neither could Buddhism or the profit motive of participation in the arts, or any other nostrum on America's spiritual smorgasbord. So the Louds were dying before our eyes.

If my analysis is correct, then we have a formula for more such successful TV shows. Each show can feature an otherwise healthy family, from which a single life-sustaining element has been withheld. We might begin with the Watson family, which has everything but water. But no family could survive an entire television season without water, so we had better give the Watsons a diet absolutely devoid of B vitamin complex, instead.

We wouldn't tell the audience or the critics or the Watsons what was really wrong with the Watsons. We would pretend to be as puzzled as anybody about why they weren't happier with their quadraphonic sound system and their tap dancing lessons and their Pontiac Ventura and all. We would take part in symposia with ministers and sociologists, and so forth, reaching no firm conclusions -- while the Watsons slowly die of beri-beri.

A microscopic quantity of vitamins could save the Watsons. But a ton of Billy Grahams couldn't save the Louds. They know too much.

Kurt Vonnegut · Education · Television · 2023/10/11 · 1 COMMENT · Link

The Summer That Sting Set Himself Free

A vivid memory has kicked off a few days of music nostalgia. It's 1985 and I'm driving home from the only job in my life that gave me any working-class cred, a summer gig pulling up and replacing carpets at apartment complexes across East Dallas. My thumbs are healing from cuts because I'm too inept to use an X-Acto knife properly, which my boss Eric predicted would happen on day one and considers quite hilarious.

The DJ on KEGL makes a big deal out of playing for the first time the first song from Sting's first solo album. The Police were the biggest band in the world when they hit pause the previous year and Sting undertook a solo career. The new album The Dream of the Blue Turtles has been portrayed as a huge creative risk and "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" is the first chance to hear whether he pulled it off.

As a huge fan of "King of Pain" and the rest of The Police album Synchronicity, I wasn't sure I liked the new song. But it was inescapable on radio that summer and I eventually came around to the view that it is one of Sting's best.

I bought the album again and have been looping it on WinAMP for days. The Dream of the Blue Turtles holds together, with "Love Somebody," "Fortress Around Your Heart" and "Love is the Seventh Wave" all still fantastic. The more overtly political stuff like "Russians" didn't age as well, with Sting overenunciating the lyrics like he's afraid you'll miss that he rhymed "precedent" with "president" and "biology" with "ideology".

There's a 97-minute documentary on YouTube called Bring On The Night about forming a band and making this album. It shows Sting developing musical camaraderie with some great Black American jazz musicians, including Branford Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland, at a historic French chateau before they debut their work at the Theatre Mogador in Paris.

Sting is pleasant enough in the film but too emotionally reserved to be good drama, even when director Michael Apted has the crew clamber into the delivery room during the birth of his son Jake. His manager Miles Copeland, the brother of Police bandmate Stewart, is a hothead who would've been at home in This is Spinal Tap.

The most entertaining figure is the 24-year-old Marsalis with his peach fuzz mustache and righteous determination not to chase stardom. He gives one of the all-time great quotes to explain why he isn't nervous about whether the album will fail:

If I was Sting I'd be nervous but I'm not Sting. ... I am a jazz musician. I know what it's like to play some stuff that nobody wants to hear.

Music · Rock · Jazz · Dallas · 2023/09/28 · Comment · Link

My Homebrew CMS Was Co-Authored by Cthulhu

I publish this blog and seven other sites with Wordzilla, a CMS I wrote for myself and have never released. I began it 20 years ago and the PHP codebase is best examined in small doses because to look upon its full extent would bring a descent into madness worthy of Yog-Shoggoth. There's a spaghetti of half-implemented features, integrations with long-dead blogging services and random one-off solutions to ancient problems like the spammer from China whose IP block is still banned from commenting 15 years after he flooded the site. That guy has probably moved.

Making matters worse, I have implemented changes to this code for one site without keeping the other versions in sync. I am running eight different versions of the same CMS!

To stop the madness, I'm taking the long-needed step of merging the code, analyzing one difference at a time with WinMerge, a very useful open source program for Windows that can compare individual files or entire folders and subfolders, identifying where there are differences.

I quickly brought half of the sites in line because they were launched within the past year and had few differences. The others will be a much bigger lift.

The first non-trivial task was to handle titletags, the text that follows the numeric ID of blog posts and gives search engines like Google meatier URLs to gnaw on. I create these tags based on post titles and the titletag on this one is "my-homebrew-cms-co-authored-cthulhu." Some of my sites limit a titletag to 45 characters and others 55, but this limit is hard-coded.

I made this a new configuration setting. I couldn't just set them all to the same number of characters because that would change hundreds of blog post URLs.

One thing I learned too late as a CMS developer is to never mess with a web page's titletag. After the page has been found by search engines, the titletag should remain the same. Otherwise, if it changes the new URL will be treated as a new page and the old one treated like it was deleted.

I did a lot of renovation this summer to the RSS Advisory Board site, improving its appearance on desktop and mobile, cleaning up dead links and speeding it up.

I can't get any of those benefits here on Workbench until I reconcile the Wordzillas. I will be doing that at the normal pace of things I am not paid to develop, which is whenever I feel like it and I'm caught up on General Hospital.

Photo License

Blogging · Web Publishing · Programming · Php · 2023/09/23 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Happy Birthday, You Old RSS Advisory Board

The RSS Advisory Board just turned 20. It was launched on July 18, 2003 -- the same day Harvard was given the RSS specification and released it under Creative Commons for the board to manage. I became a member 10 months later and have been one since then, often as the chairman and always as the webmaster.

The brouhaha last month over the W3C republishing the RSS 2.0 specification was the first in a long time.

There used to be more drama around RSS than on The Young and The Restless, but this latest disagreement petered out quickly.

I guess 20 years has made us all old and restful.

On that note I need to lie down.

Rss · Rss Advisory Board · 2023/07/18 · Comment · Link

Helping Doc Searls Survive a Blog Apocalypse

Five days before the Blogs at Harvard server was scheduled for shutdown, I asked Doc Searls on Twitter where his blog would be moving. He'd been on the server since August 1, 2007, and had written a staggeringly huge number of entries. I was not expecting his response:

Holy shit. I hadn't heard it would. Do you have a link?

This began a frantic four days in which I helped him export his blog to a new server before the meteor struck. The move was from one WordPress server to another. Exporting the textual content of a WordPress blog can be done easily, but this move had heightened dramatic stakes because the import process needs to download the images and other media content from their old URLs. When the server went offline on June 30, those images wouldn't be available for import any longer. Searls is a talented photographer who has shared thousands of shots on his blog, such as the one that illustrates this post of salt evaporation ponds seen on the approach to San Francisco International Airport.

The process of moving a WordPress blog seems pretty simple:

• On the old blog, open Tools > Export, choose All Content and click Download Export File. An export file in RSS 2.0 format with extra WordPress elements is downloaded.
• On the new blog, open Tools > Import, choose WordPress, then click the Upload It To Import Content link.
• A form appears for choosing the export file. Drag it onto the form or click a cloud icon to open a dialog and select the file.

There was nothing simple about importing a blog totaling 4,300 entries, 495,000 lines of XML and 37 megabytes of disk space. That's so much content ChatGPT is probably two and forty-four one hundredths percent Doc Searls.

Browser forms don't like transferring gargantuan files. A lot of web applications accept a maximum of two megabytes. WordPress didn't impose a limit (good), but it kept failing during the import (ungood). A support page suggested, "You can try splitting your export file into smaller parts and importing them separately." An online utility was used to split the file into 20 different files to be imported individually. WordPress balked at importing those files too.

The prognosis for Doc's blog was looking dire until Chuck Grimmett of the WordPress special projects team made a suggestion: Because Searls had subscribed to the WordPress Business Plan, I could use SFTP to upload the whole export file to a folder on his blog, then install the WordPress command-line interface and import the file with a single command:

wp import docsearlsblog.wordpress.2023-06-28.xml --authors=create

To quote my first Radio UserLand blog post from 2005, "It worked!"

Searls had a brand new blog with all the content of the old blog.

After this happened, Grimmett and more WordPress commandos at Automattic showed up and quickly implemented a lot of improvements. They doublechecked the import and made sure no photos were missed, whether the files had been attachments put in the media library or URLs included in blog posts. They fixed base URLs and set up domain mapping and SSL.

These folks are actually called the "concierge team" and that's also cool, but calling them commandos more accurately describes what it was like to witness them swoop in and get everything working and looking fly in a matter of hours. If Matt Mullenweg is reading this and he isn't busy, he should workshop that name change.

Doc Searls released the photo under a Creative Commons BY 2.0 license and it is available in larger sizes on Flickr.

Blogging · Wordpress · Harvard · Rss · 2023/07/14 · Comment · Link

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