The Gaming Outpost

Christopher Schmitz dropped me a nice note and then mailed me a copy of the pre-edit draft of his forthcoming book, Grinden Proselyte, first in a promised series entitled The Kakos Realm.  He is hoping that I would enjoy it, and write a few positive words about it which can be used to help promote it.  I find it difficult for me to imagine that my endorsement of a book would make much difference to it, but the compliment is appreciated, and I did enjoy the book, once I overcame some of its problems.

The principle problem with reviewing a pre-edit copy of any book is that it is done with the full knowledge that someone, presumably with significant skill as an editor, is going to propose hundreds and perhaps thousands of corrections and changes.  When I dropped the author a note concerning this aspect, he was already making hundreds of those.  Having the pre-correction copy means, at least in this case, being faced with uncounted errors in spelling, word usage, and punctuation, all of which will, it is hoped, be fixed before the book reaches the public.  That, though, assumes that the editor is good enough and has the time and the fortitude to catch them all, and that no others arise in the editing process.  Editing a book, after all, is more than merely fixing spelling and pronunciation, more even than repairing grammar.  Phrases which are awkward, or which do not say what the author intended of them, must be repaired.  A good editor will insist that you rewrite entire passages, cutting out material you incorrectly thought important, explaining obscure references you believed were perfectly clear, repairing continuity, making characters consistent, and in general improving your book.

In its present form, this book needs much editing.  Possessive apostrophes were so conspicuous by their absence that when the author improperly used “it’s” as possessive it was doubly shocking.  Among the most notable of the awkward phrases, “His mother, who was apparently deemed worthy breeding stock, had given birth to him while en route to a new troll-run slave colony, along with several hundred other miserable slaves.”  She ought to be deemed worthy breeding stock for being that productive.  One character of some importance early in the story vacillated between the diction of a nobleman and the cant of a street thug with no rhyme or reason to this inconsistency.  These, however, are all things I expect a decent editor to catch.  Indeed, I would recommend to Mr. Schmitz that in future he read his books aloud to someone, and find a literate friend willing to read through with a red pen, before he starts sending his material to strangers.  It cannot help that I have to attempt to ignore such technically flawed writing, because although I can assume these problems will be fixed, I cannot predict the end product.  Will the occasional dangling participle or prepositional ending be left as they are, irksome to linguistic perfectionists but accepted in common parlance?  Will the missed dots be connected?  Will the editor asked the questions I asked, the questions my wife asked, and will the author give satisfactory answers?  I can’t know that.  I can know that whether those matters are remedied will make a difference to many readers in their enjoyment of the book.

The other problem I had with the book is that I often felt the theology was getting in the way.  There are reasons for this that relate particularly to setting, but also to character and plot; I will discuss those problems later.

That said, the book tells a powerful story in an original fantasy setting that works both as the beginning of an epic and as its own piece.  We are left with both the resolution of the major issues raised here and with the anticipation of the next story.

The setting is a fascinating and reasonably successful attempt to create a credible fantasy world that is connected to reality.  Schmitz does this because he wants the population to be genuinely human, in the “descended from Adam and Eve” sense, and so needs an explanation for how people came from Earth to Kakos (the name means bad or evil in Greek) but why they can neither return nor receive new immigrants.  This he accomplishes by giving Lucifer creative powers, and declaring that at a time several generations before Noah this devil created Kakos as a cross between a mockery of Earth and a lure for humanity.  There was commerce across a bridge between the two worlds, until Noah’s flood blocked the path and it was never reopened.  Even for the residents of Kakos, this is all mythology.  Lucifer holds sway within Kakos, where the dominant religion teaches that he is greater than Yahweh and has made every effort to free us from the tyranny of that oppressive God.

Within this I find my first set of theological issues.  To some degree, the book says too much about this, for it not only gives Lucifer creative powers (a step few theologians would accept), it attributes specific actions and decisions to God.  I have written elsewhere of the problems involved in bringing God into any work of fiction, in that we as writers find ourselves stating what God did and even attributing thoughts and motives to God which we think consistent with Him, but which obviously never happened.  Suffice it that in tying Kakos so closely to Earth, he opens the door to a host of problems theologically.

Although this leads to many other problems which are going to impact both Christian and non-Christian readers, it also gives the book its greatest strength and the focus of its story.  Schmitz wants us to understand that at the end of time the gospel reaches Kakos, and its citizens (those at least who are alive in that day) are given an opportunity to escape Lucifer’s clutches and return to God.

It is easy to imagine through the beginning of the book that this is the story of its central character, Rashnir.  After all, it begins with not one but two back-story accounts, in which we begin with where he is and then learn of how he got there.  This can be a good technique for getting into a story quickly, even for holding the reader’s interest in how it will unfold.  However, before I had finished reading the second such account, I was wondering when the story was actually going to begin and what would be its subject.  There is a sense in which it is about Rashnir.  It tells us how he came to be unjustly disgraced, and in the climactic scenes of the book he is fully vindicated as a great warrior.  However, this is not about Rashnir; nor is it about Kevin, the human who comes from earth accompanied by two angelic warriors to proclaim the gospel, who is led to enlist Rashnir’s aid in his efforts as the story opens.  It is, rather, the story of how the gospel came to Kakos through the efforts of these two men and their companions, and of the growing battle between Christianity and Luciferianism which begins in the city of Grinden.

No one ever asks how it is that all of Kakos speaks the only language known to Kevin, which apparently is English.  In most fantasy books we accept that whatever the humans spoke has been given to us in English, because it does not matter what language they spoke.  In this case, however, it is peculiar that Kevin can communicate freely with these people who have been cut off from Earth for millennia.  This, though, is a small point which most readers will either overlook or forgive.

That is another of the theological quirks.  Schmitz wants to establish a time frame for his epic.  To this end, he builds his story around an eschatology that is not merely premillennial but specifically pretribulationist.  On this basis, he states that sometime in our modern age the Rapture occurred, but that Kevin was asked to carry the gospel to Kakos, and to reach the entire world within seven years, after which Lucifer will be forced to bow to Christ, and the Kakos realm will become the Lake of Fire, destroying all who fail to escape through salvation.  Certainly pretribulationist premillennialism is the most popular eschatology abroad today; however, there are enough Christians who find it unpalatable that tying his story to this specific doctrine is going to create an unnecessary block to the book’s acceptance.  This is the more unfortunate, as it is entirely unnecessary.  What matters is that Kevin has been sent to preach the gospel to the Kakos realm, and has seven years before God brings about its destruction.  He need not know, and certainly need not tell us, what happened or is happening on Earth in this time.  Even if Schmitz is committed to this backstory, even if it will matter in a later book, it need not be laid out so didactically up front.  This is apart from the fact that his eschatological connection has closed options for him.  God spared Nineveh because the people repented.  We know that God will not spare the Kakos realm no matter what happens over the coming years.

Another theological issue is raised by the fact that Lucifer created not only the Kakos realm but the fantasy races which populate it.  They are his children by creation; humanity, he claims, are his by adoption.  This makes them irredeemable, or at least probably so.  To achieve this, Schmitz unnecessarily introduces a trichotomist understanding of man, and elevates the soul to a high spiritual value as some inner thing that has to be saved.  The non-human peoples, from orcs and goblins to dwarfs and elves, cannot be saved because they do not have souls.  The gospel is for humans.  This decision seems unfortunate, because it creates an inherent and necessary racism.  The preaching of the Luciferians for tolerance and acceptance of the non-human races is supposed to be seen as evil masquerading as good.  Consorting with goblins is akin to consorting with demons, to some degree; but so, then, is consorting with elves.  It might have been better for Kevin not to know how God’s plan of salvation might relate to these other sentient beings, and to allow the answers to unfold through the books ahead.  A good scriptural argument can be made for extending salvation beyond the descendants of Adam, and even if the ultimate conclusion was as stated, it would have been better resolved through the story than given up front.  I, at least, was offended at the notion that there are intelligent caring volitional beings in the world who are condemned by birth to annihilation.  In fairness, Schmitz does raise the possibility that Kevin is wrong, in bringing a single elf to the side of the Christians near the end of the book.  We can hope that this harbingers salvation for others.  Even here, though, the theology interferes.  The elf’s hope is that he can survive the war and have the opportunity to ask God to give him a soul, so that he can be saved.  The prospect of significant numbers of elves and dwarfs coming into the Kingdom of God is minimal.

The nature of the story also leads inexorably to sermons, as Kevin preaches the gospel first to Rashnir then to many others, ultimately in open-air meetings.  At first, these were annoying intrusions on the story, with too much explanation (something that always opens up the possibility that the reader will think the explanation incorrect and thus irksome).  However, Schmitz, a pastor himself, is very good at this, and as the story progresses these become strong points in the dialogue.  This is enhanced when he turns his pen to writing the sermons of the Luciferians.  Even while letting us know that they are built on lies, he manages to make them eloquent and persuasive, and we understand why so many people believe these.  The battle of words becomes locked and powerful, with the prize the hearts and minds of men, and the book takes us into the thick of it.

Also of note are the descriptions of small-scale combat that appear throughout the book.  From Rashnir’s first and fateful fight with a superior officer in the mercenaries guilds to his one-on-one melee with the Dragon Impervious, the blow-by-blow descriptions capture the action and the violence colorfully and dramatically.  We are there in those fights, sometimes holding our breath, truly wondering who will prevail and at what cost.

Schmitz clearly does have talent for writing.  The descriptive gems that appear scattered through the pages are something that cannot easily be taught, and there are moments when the scenes are brought vividly to life through these.  If his editor does a good job, this could be a superior fantasy novel.  While even some Christians will find the theology heavy-handed, the unfolding story which is very much the Book of Acts In Another Land should carry the reader through the end and into whatever lies in the books ahead.

Vernor Vinge, author of Marooned in Real-Time, The Ungoverned (a short story), True Names, Tatja Grimm’s World, The Peace War, Fire Upon the Deep,  A Deepness in the Sky, Collected Short Stories, and Rainbow’s End is a visionary of uncommon talent and hard work.  He only produces a few books, but they are obviously the result of hard work and deep thought.  This separates him from many other SF writers.

Almost all of them are worth reading, even The Ungoverned as a primer to anarcho-capitalitst thought.  It is otherwise, fairly forgettable except as a background for his hero in Marooned.

His short story, Original Sin, while interesting does reveal some regrettable theories about the existence of sin being something taught to people.  Now granted, the Bible states that the Law taught of Sin to people, but the Bible also states that a knowledge of good and evil is inborn.

His primary focus in his infrequent books is the Technological

Singularity.  Secondarily, he focuses on Anarcho-Capitalism which is an extreme form of Libertarianism where governments cease to exist altogether.

But we are considering the Singularity here.  One common meaning of a singularity is that of a black hole, a stellar mass so large as to draw even light into it by its gravitational strength.  And we on this side, cannot tell anything about what happens on that side.

This was the inspiration for Vinge’s term (although it is not wholly his own idea.  I believe John von Neumann back in 1954 had influence).  However, Vinge probably did the most to create interest in it.

The idea begins with an X-Y chart.  On the X side, we put Time.  On the Y side we put Technological Progress.

We then observe that Progress occurs at a fairly slow centuries apart pace early on. But writing (according to this theory anyways) is invented, and things pick up a bit.  The Rate of Progress rises.  Later still, Gutenberg and progress begins to change lifestyles within the lifetime of the people living.  Modern capitalism, corporations, international banking, and everything else not only improve things, but make it easier and faster to improve things the next time.

Now improvements are coming in "Ages" that last perhaps a decade.

And computers show up.  Moore’s Law (which is not really a law, but it works anyways) kicks in. Every 18-24 months a doubling of processor capability occurs.

And back to the X-Y chart. Now the Rate of Progress is really cooking.  For every time unit we spend, we get much more progress each and every time unit.  In T1 we get P1, in T2 we get P2, in T3 we get P4….

About the year 2010, Moore’s Law predicts we will have computers with the equivalent in chip size as the neurons in the human brain.  This is not to say that they will then wake up, and order a latte.  But it does say that a lot of problems will keep on getting easier and easier to solve, and that this process snowballs.

Eventually, and according to advocates of this theory like Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, in the not too distant future, the Rate of Progress shifts from climbing fast to nearly vertical to vertical.

As Vinge says, after fifty years of nearly vertical progress, where any human goal that is not internally inconsistent can be met, what we will have will be the Singularity. It will be unpredictable.

Why unpredictable? To use one of Vinge’s metaphors, you have a dog and a man.  The dog may be able to learn how to change the channel on the TV, but he will never really understand the TV, nor will he ever be able to make one.

Why mention the man and the dog?  This is why, look below.

In the Singularity, one of the goals met will be to be superhumanly intelligent.  Advocates regularly mention numbers like a trillion IQ (which I find laughable).  To put it in Multiverser terms, the average human or his descendant will have 3@10 intelligence, plus a number of 3@10 skills which will aid that intelligence to make humans vastly more powerful than the Greek gods.

Vinge favors a method of human advancement called IA, which is Intelligence Enhancement.  You hook up to a computer, and become more than human.  And then you upgrade….

There are several Singularity scenarios.

One is the Hard Takeoff: That is, you go to sleep, and while you sleep a Chinese computer ‘wakes up’ and takes over the world.  It might ignore us. It might consider us cockroaches. It might even decide to be helpful to us.  Or it might squish us with a skill and power that would make Skynet green with envy.

The more preferred path is the Softer one where things keep getting more advanced, faster and faster, and people run very hard to keep up, and soon enough we’re all gods.

There is also the nanotech scenario–the Gray Goo scenario. You wake up after a nanotech accident. Your house, your city, everything on the planet made by the hand of man is now a six inch thick lake of goo smeared over the whole planet.

This is unlikely because contrary to popular fiction, general assemblers (or in this case dis-assmblers) like any generalist, are not terribly efficient.

There are some more end-state ideas.

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Now, I like Vinge because contrary to a number of Singulatarians, he seems humane.  Ray Kurzweil, who hit the bestseller list, this year with "The Singularity is Nigh" says that the only thing that can stop the Singularity is a totalitarian government.  I think he is naive.  The engine of progress is a carefully balanced machine.

The Singulatarians offer in their dream various forms of extreme physical longevity (they call it immortality) ranging from having your brain sliced and dice and copied into a computer net to simply living forever, barring extremely freaky accidents.  They also offer superhuman intelligence.  And with the intelligence comes power.

But while there is a Heaven, there are also Hells.  An AI might decide your best use is as a calculating machine, and rewrite your brain to optimize your functionality.

Another note of discord in what some people by the early 90′s were calling the Church of St. Vinge is the remark by Singulatarian author Ken McLeod when he called the Singularity "The Rapture of the Geeks." (Some say "Nerds").

There is a striking similiarity between Singulatarianism and Christianity. And Kurzweil does not think we need God.  Both have Raptures, Heavens, Hells, Perfected Bodies, Immortality.

And according to Kurzweil, by 2050 we should be in the Singularity. Of course, Vinge, some time ago, probably back in the late 80′s was predicting the Singularity by 2030.  This reminds me of the fusion problem where its always ‘thirty years down the road’.

Of course, Singulatarians believe that we are now in, or close to the "ell" in the graph, the point where things start heading seriously stratoscopic.  And they do have a point.

Some of the technologies that are supposed to get us there include biotech, nanotech, and computers.  Kurzweil supposedly has five areas of tech that would do the job, and if it turns out one or two won’t for unforseen reasons, then the others will carry the weight, he is sure.

Incidentally, these ideas are often popular with Extropians which is a social movement.

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Now hopefully, I’ve laid the definition out in enough clarity to be understandable.  And added in some of the sidelights to give some analysis of the social areas, and controversies associated with this phenomenon.

I will now turn to what I’ve done on this.

My first serious adult novel attempt was about a botched Singularity–I still want to write Kingdom of Houses.  This was back in college, a long time ago.

Since then, I’ve written Starsong Systems which has another botched singularity.  This is due as in the KOH novel to an over abundance of pattern-matching skill with a corresponding lack in judgment.

–Note: This is due in part to some skepticism on my part, but also in part to Vinge’s definition of Unknowability.  You cannot write about what you can’t know. So you have to get close, but then swerve off.

Later, I’ve worked on Ascension or Apocalypse which deals with people trying to keep up with the latest tech advances while the society races out of control toward the Singularity. No one knows what is going to happen. Whether they will become superhuman, or whether they will kill themselves off when some bright guy makes antimatter in his basement.

Another work is my article Singularities Heroes.  This was in response to the Joe Haldeman novel Old Twentieth. In OT, the rich decide to get rid of the poor since the poor are not needed as workers anymore.  A targetted virus, and presto.  In Heroes, one man fears such an outcome, and decides to rebuild trust and honor across the society.

I’m also writing a novel on-line on my blog at Gaming Outpost.  The blog and the novel are entitled Singularity’s End.  Because everyone, including super-intelligent ‘gods’ die.

I am hoping to put out a Worldbook, a small one, with a guide article similiar to this one, but not written in as much haste as this, and a number of alternate scenario and/or worlds.

I’m really not sure if we’re heading into a Singularity. I use to be a Singulatarian.  Now, I’m a bit skeptical, in part because I think people are using this as just the latest ‘lets spend money for the poor unemployed scientists’ fund-raising rah-rah. Also, in part, because I see it being used as a weapon against Christianity.  The problem is, despite these flaws (and if it is real, then these flaws are a great disservice because they get in the way of solving pressing problems) that it may be real.

I do remember a few things.

One, my grandfather predicted we would all be driving helicopters to work in the year 2000.

Two, one very bright SF writer said that if you felt like you could predict the future, you should go home, take two aspirin, and lay down until the feeling goes away.

Lets not forget all the bold enviromentalists predictions about how mass starvation was going to overtake us in the eighties, and billions would die, or some such thing.

There is the S-curve, the sigmoid curve.  It starts slow, and then it rockets up, and then it flattens out.  The first ten percent, and the next eighty percent, and the last ten percent all take the same amount of time.  But before you take too much comfort from this, consider that the S curve of today can be supplanted by another S curve. 

Is the Singularity coming? I don’t know. I do know Christ is coming.  And I do know that the Singularity is not dealt with that frequently in gaming, but its a hot topic this last year, and its big in the SF world.

However, let me warn you, many of the SF novels with Singularity in them would have in a different decade been packaged as stories about the inscrutable and ancient galatics.  One method used too much, is to have some wacky strange things happen, for no discernible reason, that are on a vast scale, and automated.  And them trumpet this as your Singularity. 

I can see how its a useful trick, but it become annoying.  I personally prefer the Galactic Level Alien Race.  They are more fun. 

Hmm, well, I guess that is about that for now, for this ROUGH draft.  Questions and clarifications and such can be directed to the Multiverser or Article forum.