The Three-Bragger Problem
Preamble: OK, I lied. Said last time that this time was gonna be about science, and no more of this fluffy promo bullshit. And I meant well. But this time, the fluffy promo is about me. And it’s cool. And more to the point, I don’t have to spend hours doing research on things I don’t actually know much about, so it’s fast. When you’re writing to deadline, fast is good.
Brag 1.
So check this out:
I have a small hand in this universe. I’m developing some of its Lore. I am not allowed to give you any details, but none of you will be surprised to learn that said Lore contains certain, shall we say, Darwinian elements.
I think it’s going to rock.
Brag 2.
There’s something I’m allowed to share even fewer details about than EVE. In fact, I’m not even allowed to say that I am involved in it, although the trailer dropped earlier than EVE’s and the curtain rises sooner. I am allowed to paste promo copy from a certain corporate entity about a certain project—in effect, to place someone else’s generic ad copy onto the ‘Crawl without explaining its relevance. This is an opportunity I must regretfully decline.
A shame, though. From what I’ve seen, it’s gonna be awesome. Stay tuned.
Brag 3.
And this—this—may be the least significant item in terms of pop culture, but it is, by far, the closest to my heart. It is an honor that generally accrues only to the likes of Gary Larson, Greta Thunberg, and Radiohead.
Niko Kasalo & Josip Skejo have named a tribe of Australian Pygmy Grasshoppers after me.
I mean, not me personally, but one of my novels. The Tribe is Echopraxiini; the genus is Echopraxia; the species is E. Hasenpuschi. And should any of you point out that correlation is not causation, and that there might be any number of reasons why someone might name a taxon after the neurological malady without even knowing about my novel, I’ve got you covered:
The paper in its entirety is paywalled, but I have uploaded a copy for your forensic edification just in case you think I’m full of shit. After reading it you may still conclude that I faked the whole manuscript, which offhand I cannot disprove. But if I did, you gotta admit I did a bang-up job.
Anyway: now you have some idea of the stuff I’ve been doing when I haven’t been writing Echopraxia Omniscience. I haven’t just been lying around jerking off all these months.
Well, not exclusively.
Next up: science. Definitely[1].
Probably. ↑
Hey Peter! Long time since I checked in with your goings-on. Congrats on your grasshopper namesake (though the Quasimodini grasshopper is intriguing)!
Denise? Denise Fleener?
It’s been decades? How are you doing?
I used to be very into EVE Online, glad to see you getting into that.
Also “Anyway: now you have some idea of the stuff I’ve been doing when I haven’t been writing Echopraxia.”
You mean untitled 3rd Firefall book?
I though that the name is Omniscience?
Rrrrrrrr.
Fixed.
Man i used to love EVE back in the day, Wormhole Space and the Sleepers always gave me a Wattsian vibe.
Sadly EVE is a game that you more or less have to center your life on if you want to be part of the stuff that is really fun, so i havent been playing for years.
Is that still true? I’ve heard that it’s very different than it was ages ago. I loved it back then, but at the time it felt too much like a job, and the travel times were so extensive I referred to it as the best screensaver I ever bought.
That was before you could actually get out of a ship, though. It was also before this news, which is a pretty big draw for me.
I rightly dont know for sure. I guess there is a lot of PvE stuff you could do on your own time, but the meat and butter and EXCITING stuff was always the PvP. (For others it may have been market manipulation or something)
The first time me and my group ambushed a carrier in lowsec and it escalated into a big space battle is one of the most exciting moments i ever had in gaming. Our fleet captain was some foul mouthed Irish-Man who taught us all some interesting curses.
But for every second of immeasurable excitement there are minutes, if not hours of not much happening, spinning your ship in the hangar, hunting for targets, that kind of stuff.
And if you want to be an active part of the big alliances duking it out in nullsec you are essentially on call like for work.
I guess with how much true freedom the game grants you,this is part of the appeal. You can really influence and change things on a scale not possible in any other MMO, but well. You have to put in the time (and the social skills i guess)
Also the game was cut-throat to a degree no other game i know of is allowing. Scamming, swindling, and killing other players through trickery even in the safe zones is explicitly allowed, and in the lawless places like W-Space and Nullsec, anything goes.
I wonder if they will keep it that lawless with real money (some kind of crypto as i understand it) being involved.
‘Niko Kasalo & Josip Skejo have named a tribe of Australian Pygmy Grasshoppers after me.’
Truly one of the greatest honors anyone can attain. Congratulations!
It’s so cool that they named the grasshopper after your book. Congratulations!
Congratulations! I hope you are feeling suitably chuffed.
When it comes to “mercenary” work, i wish someone would pick up the very old ip of Subwar 2050, and hire you to write the lore and story.
Alas, its not very likely this would ever happen. I mean, i wonder does anyone here even remember that old DOS/amiga scifi “fighter submarine” simulator where you fought for ugly corporate interests in dystopian future as PMC pilot “flying” semi-realistic one-man fighter sub ? It was damn unique game, sadly limited by 1994s era technology.
Sounds vaguely similar to Subnautica, and also to the old (but less old than yours) Irem game Sub Rebellion.
Scientific American just included Blindsight as a staff favorite. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-fiction-books-scientific-americans-staff-love/
And, unlike _Too Like the Lightning_, its title was not misspelled! (Hopefully not too many people will give up after looking for _Too Like the Lighting_, a nonexistent novel about people killing each other over antique fluorescent tubes.)
Hi, Peter! Just found information about your unknown story Peter Pan that was published only on Polish lang in 2015. Do you save original english version? If yes, is it possible to post it on some website or your blog?
Okay, people keep asking about this: the legendary Watts story “Peter Pan”, written in 2011, available only in Polish. It got so out of hand that even my Russian publishers (back when we were talking to each other) wanted to include it in one of their collections.
Well, it exists. But not the way anyone thinks.
Back in 2011 I attended an absolutely awesome con in Poland (actually I attended two absolutely awesome cons; this was the first); during the blow-out party on the last night, I was approached to write a story up on stage while everyone around me was dancing and drinking and setting their thumbs on fire. I don’t exactly remember the context: maybe they wanted a cute headline for their newsletter, maybe it was a lottery prize for someone, maybe they know what a complete spastic Kermit I was on the dance floor so they conspired to keep me otherwise occupied. Anyway, I wrote “Peter Pan” under those conditions; it was exactly two sentences long, I don’t know if it ever did get printed anywhere, and I reproduce it here for posterity and in the hopes that people stop bugging me about it:
*
Peter Pan
by
Peter Watts
Following the guide-line to the Orbital Hilton’s guest airlock, thirteen-year old Alvin Katz had time for one last thought as the micrometeorite punched through his faceplate, his face, and the back of his head on its return to the eternal void:
This had to be the worst bar-mitzvah ever.
*
There. You have almost a year to nominate it for a Hugo.
I feel that the internet is now obligated to write the sequel, entitled “Peter Watts”, authorship attributed to “Peter Pan”. Of comparable length and structure.
At the same time, would the class please commence a discussion concerning whether the preceding microficteorite (entitled “Peter Pan”, by Peter Watts) is one or two sentences long.
Since it was I who
madecommissioned Peter to write that story while supplying him with a colorful diet of alcoholic drinks from the bar, I feel obliged to expand upon this topic a bit. This story was originally intented to be printed in our newspaper that we put out every day during the con and indeed it was the headliner in the Sunday edition (in its original English). In 2015 it was reprinted in our local sff club’s annual anthology, translated into Polish by me.Forget the Hugo, that masterpiece is worthy of the Nobel!
> I am allowed to paste promo copy from a certain corporate entity about a certain project—in effect, to place someone else’s generic ad copy onto the ‘Crawl without explaining its relevance.
Is the fact that you have just clearly signposted its relevance causal to the fact that you must regretfully decline to place it?
Or are the two merely presented in linguistic proximity, despite being on different causal branches?
Answering might violate my NDA. My ass, which likes being covered, would prefer to keep things vague.
Congratulations on having a species named after you and your work. Bet it feels good af.
And please don’t apologise about bragging in your own blog, you’re the boss here!
Cheers,
CHIMP
Okay, you’re not working on Omniscience… does that mean you are working on the followup to the Strategic Retreat/Remora fiblet..?
Asking for a friend.
Kinda, yeah.
Although I haven’t seen the revised contract yet.
Peter – congratulations on having a new insect named after your book! I did read through the copy of the paper you uploaded (thank you for helping avoid the paywall for those of us who just spectate science).
I was honesty hoping to find they were named not only in honor of your book, but because of some behavioral reason as well (i.e. they were somehow mimicking the behavior of another animal – conscious or not). Unfortunately that perfect trifecta appears not to be the case.
Nonetheless, this is very cool, as is the news that you are still working on
EchopraxiaOmniscience! 😉I for one, cannot wait for a new entry in the Blindsight universe!
Very happy for you, Mr. Watts! I think you’ve mentioned before that a lot of video game projects that you received invitation for didn’t work out for various reasons, so, fingers crossed!
In other insect-related news…
Drosophila connectome!
Now where’s our Portia connectome…?!
We might be this close to being able to Plato’s-Cave something that has reflective cognition!
Cool news on the grasshoppers!
And as a species name it sounds much cooler than Stateofgrace hasenpuschi mighta.
Unrelated tidbit. Wanted to pass on this article in The Guardian about comb jellies fusing together in case you missed it.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/07/comb-jellies-fuse-together-when-injured-study-finds
Huh.
Huh!
I have a hard time imagining that injured ctenophores just happen to bump into each other all that often in the wild. Which would mean that either a) injured ctenos actively seek each other out to fuse for some reason, or b) more likely, this is just some atavistic trait that persisted from super-early inn their history, that never got weeded out because it was selectively neutral. Like, maybe these guys are so primitive they’re just big balls of stem cells or something…
Like many others, no doubt, I suddenly can’t wait to find out what they do for an immune system.
As told by one of the authors, their experiment was inspired when he happened to spot a pair which actually had bumped together and fused. Not in the wild, but not with knowing human assistance either, suggesting that perhaps it might happen more often than you think.
It’s so intriguing because it doesn’t really look like a “trait” at all, but rather just something that happens unless there’s a mechanism to specifically prevent it. A trait which is the absence of a trait possessed by everything more “advanced”. Your Thing, in the flesh.
And just like Dishbrain was learning to minimise those annoying Pong point concessions, the fused nervous system of these reverse-Siamese-twin critters apparently learns within a few hours to coordinate itself. I’ll be entirely unsurprised to hear confirmation that it does so by following the exact same principle.
These guys also have a really strange nervous system. I’ve always wanted to ask, was there a particular species that inspired your life form in The island?
And have you ever used lack of allorecognition in any of your stories?
Oops, I guess The thing would more than qualify. Mind you, the chimeras did not survive for long and had to keep jumping hosts.
Chimera: An organism, organ, or part consisting of two or more tissues of different genetic composition, produced as a result of organ transplant, grafting, or genetic engineering.
Yup. Definitely a lot of genetic engineering in your work.
Does the writer contract allow any help with ideas from anonymous third parties?
Depends on the context. Actual media corporate entities are pretty leery of such things for fear of nuisance lawsuits. On a personal authorial basis, though, I frequently pester experts for their opinions in exchange for killing them horribly in future stories.
Brag 2 is maddeningly vague.
It is. But I get to talk about it in December.
I fucking better, at least.
So, this is a wild stab, but does the name of the project start with an “E”?
Well, the EVE one does, certainly.
The other, not so much.
Thanks. Wishful thinking.
Hey Peter!
I just finished reading Blindsight (like 10 min ago) and I was going through the notes and found my way to your site and this post.
I absolutely loved Blindsight and will be ordering Echopraxia from my local book store very soon.
I’ve also been playing EVE online off and on since 2012 so I was REALLY excited to see you’re working on the lore.
Thanks for making awesome stuff.
Is brag 2 video game or movie?
I spent 6 years playing Eve a LOT. Before kids came along. Well, the second one anyway. Love your work Peter. Might log back in and take peak. When you gonna visit us down here in NZ? Look me up!
I would love to come to NZ (although granted, I would have preferred to visit before Ardern got hounded from office). It’s supposed to be one of the safest places to wait out the collapse (which is, I suppose, why I’ll never get a chance to move there: the world’s oligarchs have apparently bought up all the best real estate). I’m told the climate is very close to BC’s.
But never say never. Maybe there’s some kind of con down there that could invite me as a GoH…