Walker Day is coming, the gulls are getting fat, please put a credit in the PI’s hat…
Greetings Picklesversians!
The Ides of December are upon us, and it’s beginning to look a lot like Walker Day!
It’s hard to believe 2024 is almost over. Whether you’re an ArkTech employee-citizen sewing wreaths for Walker Day, or if you’re looking forward to more traditional celebrations like Hogmanay*, I’m sending my warmest wishes to all of you.
Here’s what I’ve got for you this month:
🗞️ A brief roundup of news from the Picklesverse,
🤔 A spoiler-free discussion question about Artificial Selection,
🤓 Researching the future – some reflections,
🕵️♀️ Ben’s curiosity corner – separating fact from fiction in the ArkTech Territory,
🎁 A token of my appreciation – Happy Walker Day!
Let’s get stuck in!
*Wikipedia will tell you that Hogmanay refers to “the celebration of the New Year in the Scottish manner.” In case you’re wondering, that largely involves heavy drinking.
🗞️ News roundup
News about Artificial Selection
🎧 The big news this month is that the audiobook of Artificial Selection, narrated by the fabulous Kristin Atherton, is now available. Hurray! Here’s a link to eight stores where you can find it: https://linktr.ee/artificialselectionaudiobooks
⭐️ Reviews, ratings, and feedback have been coming in across Amazon, Goodreads, Facebook and email. Thanks so much to everyone who’s been in touch – it means a lot.
📆 Special date: I’ve realised it’s an anniversary this month because I started writing Artificial Selection almost exactly a year ago.
News about Time Hack
👩💻 Re-drafting is going well. For anyone not familiar with the background, I wrote Time Hack a couple of years ago and it won first prize in a competition. Last November, I realised it should actually be three books if I wanted to do the story justice. So I wrote Artificial Selection, which introduces the world and the characters, and now I’ve gone back to editing Time Hack. I’m so glad I made that decision. I think the story works far better this way, and it’s all coming along nicely.
So what’s Time Hack about anyway? If you don’t want to know anything about the plot, look away now…
The book takes place a few months after the events of Artificial Selection, during the run up to Walker Day and ArkTech’s 40-year anniversary as a company. Charlotte is investigating another of Ben’s Awkward Questions and the case brings her face to face with her estranged adoptive father Mel Narrow. She finds out about a new technology that lets people add more hours into their day… intrigue ensues!
What would you do if you could have more hours in the day? Feel free to let me know… My answer would of course be… finish Time Hack!
🤔 Discussion question
If you’ve finished reading Artificial Selection, you may have noticed the ten discussion questions at the back of the book. I put those there because thinking through the ideas presented in a novel is something I enjoy very much as a reader.
I thought it might be fun to pose one of those questions to you this month. Here’s the one I’ve chosen:
Question 5: Would you like to live in the ArkTech Territory? Why or why not? Do you think ArkTech society is utopian, dystopian, or something else?
(OK, OK, I know… that’s actually three questions, but they’re interconnected. And anyway, this is English, not Maths… )
I would absolutely LOVE to hear what you think about the question(s) above. Needless to say, it doesn’t have a right or wrong answer. (Or does it?! *)
Feel free to email me a sentence, an essay, or to keep your thoughts to yourself, as you prefer.
*It doesn’t.
🤓 Researching the future
There are different schools of thought about the best way to handle research in fiction. There’s no right or wrong answer – it’s all about preferences, and genre comes into play, too – but I’d like to tell you how I see it.
Back in 2009, I had the opportunity to see the author Robert Harris give a talk at the Classical Association’s annual conference – he was the honorary president that year.* The talk was on his historical fiction books about Cicero. I found it fascinating when he explained that only a small percentage of what he’d learned during his research phase ended up in his books. Anything that wasn’t in service of the story didn’t make the cut.
I have a lot of respect for that approach. As a reader, I’m not a huge fan of anything that feels like filler. Of course, everyone has their own definition of what’s enjoyable and what earns its place on the page. For example, a lot of people are captivated by the lengthy descriptions of shrubs in Tolkien’s books, or by the exhaustive depictions of banners in George RR Martin’s work. The historical fiction equivalent of this might be an extended aside about the history of urn-making in a novel which is otherwise about political intrigue. And the sci-fi equivalent might be if I were to give you a detailed info-dump about the properties, uses, and development of graphene.
(This is something I could’ve done in Artificial Selection, but I’m sure we’re all glad that I didn’t.)
In the universe of my books, Solar Shard batteries were invented by ArkTech in the 2070s and they were key in resolving the post-Melt energy crisis. Solar Shards are a type of flow battery. Flow batteries are used today for long-term, large-scale energy storage, but they take up a lot of space. ArkTech makes them from graphene, instead of vanadium, so they’re much, much smaller and more efficient than comparable present day solutions.
Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms which has many potential practical applications due to its strength, its conductivity, its light weight and its two-dimensional structure. The main blocker to the widespread use of graphene is our lack of a method for producing it efficiently on a large scale. If and when that issue gets resolved, graphene could revolutionise everything from computer chips to… well… flow batteries used in power grids to store renewable energy.
While creating the ArkTech Territory, I read way more about graphene (and lots of other things) than I ever would have otherwise. (In fact, my phone won’t stop telling me about it. Here’s an article from just this week.) Having done so much research, the big question became how much to include in the books.
I came to the same conclusion as Robert Harris: not too much.
A piece of advice that often comes up on writing courses is “kill your darlings.” This means being willing to kill off any sentence that doesn’t pull its weight. It encourages writers to consider what they’ve written critically and from a reader’s perspective. Does that information need to be there? Does it develop the characters? Does it further the plot? Does it develop the theme, or help to establish the setting? I might have written the most accurate description of how a flow battery works that has ever been penned, but if it doesn’t serve the story then it shouldn’t be there.
That’s what I aspire to, anyway.
Ben, on the other hand, has asked me to tell you that if you’d like to hear a detailed treatise on the history of the ArkTech Territory from a cultural, technological, and socio-economic perspective, he’d be more than happy to regale you with it. The estimated run time is forty-two days, but he’s happy to organise the information into bite-sized twelve-hour chunks to make it more digestible. He’s helpful like that.
Anyway, if you’ve read Artificial Selection and there was something about the world you’re dying to know, please do email me any Awkward Questions you might have about it. If it’s not something I’m planning to bring into the books themselves, I can always do a special feature about it in an Ides email to sate your curiosity and stop you suffering any unpleasant infinite loops.
*In 2009, I was actually living in Munich, and I travelled all the way to Glasgow just because attending a classics conference was my idea of a good time when I was 23. My plane was delayed, but thankfully I arrived just in time to see Mary Beard’s plenary. I now live in Cambridgeshire and sometimes see her on the train. I’ve never accosted her to tell her this story… perhaps I will next time.**
**However, a friend of mine does have a great story about accosting Mary Beard on a train. My friend was finding a seat, and she saw a lady she recognised. “Oh, hello!” she said, with excessive warmth and enthusiasm. “Hello!” replied the lady, in an equally exuberant fashion. At that moment, my friend realised this wasn’t a work colleague after all, but was, in fact, Mary Beard, the famous classics professor she’d seen on TV. At which point, she looked down and shuffled away awkwardly, as we Brits are so adept at doing.
🕵️♀️ Ben’s curiosity corner
Having banged on about not wanting to bore you with research details within the novel itself, please allow me to bore you with some research details! Hurray! Over the past few months, I’ve been passing on some fun facts about which parts of Artificial Selection are inspired by facts and which are entirely fictional. I’m making this section spoiler-free, for any of you who are still reading.
We’ve already covered:
- Automated buildings (FACT)
- Mabel’s mug (FACT)
- The HyperBullet network (FICTION, inspired by FACT)
Today’s topic is:
- Seagulls stealing potato-based snacks.
🐦 Potato-obsessed seagulls – FACT
OK, this one is entirely frivolous, but I wanted to make up for all the talk about graphene earlier.
The observant among you will have noticed a couple of references within Artificial Selection to seagulls, or gulls, and their passion for crisps or chips. (If you don’t remember this, all the more reason to read it again ).
I grew up near Aberdeen, where the seagulls are the size of pit bull terriers and twice as aggressive. Fine, I’m exaggerating. But it’s entirely true to say that if an Aberdonian seagull goes after your chips, you’ve got a choice between losing the chips or losing a finger.
Don’t believe me? The image below is a photo from 2007 of Sam the Seagull stealing a packet of crisps from a newsagent’s on Union Street. You can also find a video here from 2016 of a seagull being chased out of a shop for the same crime. And from this year, evidence that even Costa Coffee isn’t safe.
As the ArkTech Territory is off the east coast, it made sense to me that seagulls would be a fixture, probably sneaking inside the Wreck from time to time to visit the food court.
🎁 Signed bookplates
Some of you have asked me how you can get signed copies of my books, which prompted me to do some thinking (dangerous), as well as some research (even more dangerous).
Here’s what I’ve come up with. If you’ve bought a copy of the hardback from The Great British Book Shop (which is currently only available in the UK, I’m afraid, because the postage abroad is obscene… I’m investigating other international options) and you would like me to sign it, simply email me a picture of your receipt along with a street address and I’ll post you a signed bookplate (as shown above). I’m happy to personalise it – just let me know whose name to write.
This does mean you’ll have to give me your address, but:
- I’ll treat all personal data in accordance with the privacy policy on my website (meaning I won’t share it with anyone, and I certainly won’t sell it to a Chinese company who will then send you an endless stream of plastic tat as part of a “brushing scam” as once happened to me…).
- You could always give me your work address or something if the bullet point above wasn’t sufficiently reassuring.
Right… that’s all from me this month. I hope all’s well in your own personal universes.
Wishing you all a merry, safe, and happy Walker Day!
Until the Ides,
Marianne