CONVENTION APPEARANCES Miscon 2011, around Memorial Day, Missoula MT, CJ/Jane. Radcon 2011, Feb 14 ca., Red Lion in Pasco Wa, CJ, Jane, OSG. Note:ConDor, San Diego, CA, was a great con, and we may very well go back, if not in 2011, then in 2012. We are also considering Midsouthcon in 2011.
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Gene Wars Universe: Spoiler Alert
There is the general spoiler page for general questions.
I’m making this set of pages for more specific questions.
The rule is: do not ask or comment about a book until it has been at least a month in issue. I think that will make everybody happy re spoilers.
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I’ll write the first post to this thread. Why was the series called “Gene Wars”? Genetics has not so far played much of a role in the story, unless the nanoceles are DNA-programmed, but that’s never been mentioned.
Partly it was because my editors wanted a catchy series title, and the situation is the result of a war that ended up threatening, from Earth’s viewpoint, to alter the human genome and everything else in the environment. The nanoceles are bots of a sort, but collectively forming a bio-machine, they can alter their own structure, cannibalize their fellow bots, disengage, and reassociate. This gives them an analog of Darwinian process, and no off-switch. DNA is only one of a number of chemistries they’re capable of affecting. They do have a rest cycle, and are capable of going quiet during a period of chemical scarcity, but given a chemical supply, they’re aggressive.
The culture uses nanotech to do mundane things, like the food processor, like cosmetics, like making fabric and so on. The nanoceles, actually a constantly changing association of self-modifying bots, have, if not intelligence, at least a survival mandate or inclination, and that’s what makes them dangerous. They’re sort of like quicksilver, to use an analogy: swat them and they break up and then recombine, undamaged. Heat causes them to break up, cold slows them down, but given a chance—they’re back.
It remains a question how humans exposed to them get along with them,though they have not yet done what Earth fears will happen: it remains a question as to whether there is some trigger that will cause them to do it, but the fact that attempts to eradicate them have failed and that they are constantly changing has kept Marak’s world in quarantine.
Any hope of another book in this series?
(not that it would be my first priority… Foreigner books first, of course! But I did enjoy the Hammerfall books greatly!)
I’d like to. As aforesaid, the minute I can make a total living off CC, or even a good portion of one, many universes may open back up.
At some level part of me tries to see this as a far-flung future of the AU timeline, where the AU form the Inner Sphere of Humanity, and Earth at the very center…but then, I’m probably wrong.