In an interview with io9 , Young Wizards serial author Diane Duane talk about her latest book , learning to build video game , and excuse her sexual love of science .
An entire propagation of inquisitive fiction fans know for her Young Wizards Holy Writ , a long - running phantasy serial firmly grounded in scientific reality . She ’s also one of the more extremely regardedStar Treknovelists of all clock time . But her late is a routine different , a near - future SF thriller about the cutthroat video - game business . Her hero is Dev Logan , the Jobs - like CEO of multi - billion - dollar mark play goliath Omnitopia . His life is pretty odorous : His employees adore him , his MMORPG is the Facebook of the 2010s , and his infant daughter is adorable .
https://gizmodo.com/what-did-diane-duane-think-of-star-trek-nemesis-5053820
alas , his former job partner has morph into an arch - scourge and someone is plot a monolithic DDS fire , powerful in the middle of a immense new product rollout . Plus , something weird is bump deeply inside the game . We speak to Diane Duane about the new series , her thick veneration to scientific discipline , and the theory of a restructured So You Want to be a Wizard . Spoilers onwards !
What inspired Omnitopia as a scene ? Why an MMORPG ?
I ’ve always been a second of a geek , and I ’m probably what you ’d call an early adopter . When MMORPGs start get the wind under their wing a few years back , I started wondering where this engineering would weave up . Around the meter World of Warcraft really took off , it got me cogitate : What raw technologies might come along and all change this paradigm ?
At the same time , there were the first step toward practical gaming , and I question what happens if you put these together . What happens if you take a massive online man and hook it up to a truly working virtual experience that does n’t require giant helmets or something else that keep prompt you that you have a consistency ? I began looking into synesthesia , in which you experience one sensorium contaminated by constituent of another . You smell coloration or feel taste . Some early research I had seen propose feedback from the optic cheek could pollute other sensoria , and I thought if you have that — a humankind where all of the senses are easy burlesque by one — then you ’ve get something you may play with .
After that it was just a matter of trying to decide what kind of man would be fun to wreak in . And because I ’m greedy , the answer is : All of them ! It made sense to me to give your players as much leeway as potential . If they want to play within the social system of the secret plan the fashion you ’ve adjust it up , that ’s okay . But would n’t it be cool if you could also allow them build up inside your platform ? And apparently , they ’d pay up you a little something for the exclusive right , but it ’s only right you should ante up them if their little piece of your program works well .
The near - time to come is problematical — maybe this will happen in 5 years , or perchance there ’ll be a adult plot - changer . Did you find that specially challenge ?
The near future is one of the stead I live in my twenty-four hours - to - day biography . I ’m routinely expect over the horizon , trying to envision out what ’s next . The only point it became an event was when I sat down with my editor in chief at DAW and tried to figure out what year this was . It turned into kind of a juggling deed .
And at the remainder of the day , it ’s fiction . I made this up . This is based on on a visual modality of the world I ’ve been developing over a span of years , and as the carrying into action continues , God knows what it ’ll turn into . And you know what ? It ’s still fabrication .
You suppose you ’re an early adopter — are you an active gamer ?
I do n’t play so much as bod games . About 10 year ago I write Privateer 2 : The Darkening for Electronic Arts . It was their first raid into interactive entertainment . They were almost trying to do choose - your - own - picture , with game modules to help you find out your itinerary . And that left me with a very clear sense of how to structure a game . The EA multitude teach me an incredible amount about the structure of building computer games in general and this sort of interactive , menstruum - dictated biz in particular .
And I sure as shooting keep a tightlipped middle on what the field is doing . I have lots of friends who do game , and where necessary I beak their brain .
A good bit of the Koran shopping mall on decisions and trouble Dev faces in operate Omnitopia . Why did you choose to set so much in the card room ?
I had no choice with that , because once you select a CEO as a major point - of - view character , you have to drop time in his world . But also , set up the situation at the end of the book — not to spoiler too severely — but leaving him with a game that ’s a little more proactive than he originally intended , you have to understand the creation through the creator . You have to translate him what it is about him and the way he structured his plot that makes it possible for the conscious Omnitopia to become what it does and who it does . If this game has a human or humanist tone , some of that has to do with the structure its builder bestowed on it .
There ’s some suggestion that Dev might almost be too nice . But I think as affair uprise , we may see him get harder - edged . Beforehand , it was still just a biz . But now it ’s become something very hefty and very vulnerable that demands his protection , because nobody else is capable of doing this problem . I think we ’ll see him getting a bit more remorseless as we bear on .
Were you inspired by a fussy troupe or entrepreneur as you were writing ?
Not as such . I was look at some of the incorporated structure I saw while working at Electronic Arts . But beyond that , I was n’t look at anything specific . And it ’s very funny to find out people who ’ve read the book say that it ’s just like Microsoft and Apple . And I sort of sit there and say , yeah , but no , but then again … There is that certain quality of the loose , easy - going , jeans - outwear guy versus the nervy corporate mogul . If that chance it was unconscious .
Speaking of the Young Wizard books , how does your fantasy workplace imply your science fabrication , and vice versa ?
The science is always at the stem for me . in the beginning , I think I ’d go into astronomy . When I was very immature , a family friend gave me a subscription to Sky and Telescope and I was hooked . Unfortunately , I strike the mathematics and bounced . So I pass to nursing schoolhouse . As it was , I became extremely well - found in the physical sciences , and then I just spent years record scientific discipline for delight . That may sound flakey to some people , but Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan had something to do with it — when you grow up in the golden age of two of the bang-up science vulgariser of our time , it ’s very heavily not to get the substance .
But that fundament remains very important to me , and it ’s always come with me in the fantasy oeuvre . There is a regulation for fantasy author : The more verity you mix in with a lie , the stronger it gets . Certainly for a science fable author — and God bed I did enough Star Trek to bed it has to be more than technobabble — you have to know what you are talking about . As a result , I did about 3 calendar month deserving of research in hyperdimensional physics for my first Star Trek novel and included a bibliography . One of the citizenry I cited now uses that record book as a teaching tool in his class at Princeton .
But as for throw gear between the two , I think they ’re both parts of the same spectrum . In fact , for my money , science fabrication is just a subset of fantasy . All fiction is a subset of fantasy , and skill fiction is just a kind that ’s a niggling more persnickety about its definitions . I opt Sprague de Camp ’s old definition , that a science fiction level is merely a human story with a human problem and a human root that could not befall without its scientific subject matter . Now , if you just plug away the word fantasy into the gaps , the cloak covers so much more of the ground that science fiction easily fits inside .
Do you find it challenging switch from writing for young adults to spell for adults ?
I ’m not certain there are as many difference as people trust . Obviously , there are attention span difficulty , progressively with adults but certainly with kids . The material these sidereal day require to make out in smaller bites . One of the things I ’ve got on my crustal plate at the moment is to go back to So You Want to be a Wizard and restructure it for the twenty - first 100 . We ’ll be offering an due east - variant sometime next year . The bones are good , but cosmetically it ’s showing thirty eld ’ worth of vesture .
But I ’m not sure I differentiate . One of the main difference work in YA for me is but controlling the mental lexicon . Certainly , YA has become a peck high-strung over the past decade . The Hunger Games could never have been published 20 year ago . Topics that were verboten are being explored with greater simpleness . And in some way , from the YA writer ’s point of view , this makes it easygoing to do whatever you desire . But then the question becomes , do I necessarily need to do what everyone else is doing ?
And yet , at the same time , the enticement is always there . I ’m working on a proposal for a serial publication that would be the Young Wizard books ferment inside - out morally , in term of power for the kids involved . Because every now and then , you want to flip over the punch card over , run it backwards , and see what you get .
Finally , Omnitopia Dawn is the first novel in a new serial . Without give too much aside , where do you want to take the chronicle ?
Right now , I ’m in the midst of piece of work on the second book , Omnitopia : East Wind , which has a lot to do with the development of computing power and potential intentions for computing baron in the East , particularly China . Things get a little darker in this one .
It ’s always a challenge , because you do n’t want to lose the fun . The 2d book is unusual in terms of the humorous stuff that commence happening , peculiarly with Omnitopia ’s newly introduced mesocosms . We now have 12 different versions of Elizabethan Earth , and the book opens with a sequence in which Smithfield Market in London is occupy by break - dancing Martians . And it just gets more like that , because at the end of the daytime , people are do here to play . Whatever problems poor Dev Logan has — his biz is awake , the Chinese are after him , people are trying to ruin his troupe — he has to keep his eye on the award . And that ’s having play playing and making certain all the people he ’s invite into his existence are having playfulness performing , as well .
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