Well, it’s been awhile (for which my apologies), and doubtless many of you have been wondering: What’s up with Frank?
In a nutshell, Frank’s been taking his time figuring out what his adventure might be, and how it might unfold. The good news is that he’s now got that mostly in focus. Here’s what to expect and when.
Long term Frankophiles know that each book includes a short list of common items. They, and their current status for book six, are as follows:
Technical theme: For the first time, I’ll be returning to a technical focus I’ve used before – in this case artificial intelligence (AI). You can also expect a strong dose of robotics, privacy concerns and big data technology and related issues to surface as well. As well as an old nemesis of Frank who you always knew would return some day.
Politics: At this point, I’m not sure how strong the political theme will be. On the one hand, our current parlous times are more worthy of lampooning than ever. But on the other, it’s hard to out-lampoon what’s actually going on in Washington. Not that it will affect my decision, but another issue is that conservative readers of my books can’t seem to understand that I write satire, not advocacy. If you look at my one and two star reviews, almost 100% of them are by readers trashing the perceived “liberal bias” in my books, even in the ones where there’s almost no political commentary at all. More puzzling, some of these same readers go on to read – and trash – several more of my books after supposedly hating the first (why read more of them at all, if you loathed the first one so much?)
It’s interesting that some readers are willing to accept almost any trait in a fictional character – except a political opinion. The moral for an author seems to be that he or she is far smarter to portray Nazis or homicidal maniacs than someone with a liberal opinion. Strange.
Frank’s personal arc: Look for a surprise return of another character from Frank’s past.
An animal: In my first book, readers met Lily, Frank’s mother’s morbidly obese corgi. A surprising number of readers loved the character, and since then in each book I’ve provided a new non-human actor to make those readers happy (it seems that they are). Look for another surprise in this category.
International sub plot: No spoiler warning required on this one – the contemporary international angle involves China. President Yazzi will adopt an idealistic outreach that is much criticized across the aisle.
Currently, I’m about 15,000 words into the draft, which means I’ll be adding lots to these chapters later as the plot evolves and I need to back fill with new characters and events to set up the later developments. Once I have the draft far enough along, I’ll begin posting weekly chapters as I often have before.
A final note: if you’d like to be a beta reader of book six, please let me know.
Meanwhile, if you haven’t read all of the five Frank Adversego books already available, what are you waiting for?
Glad to know that Frank and Friends will return!
Thanks, Doug. I hope your third book continues to go well. Looking forward to reading it in final form.
Egg soylent news!
I want you and Frank to know that there are no rats in DC.
Couple of typos, in this post:
Technical theme: ‘new’ to ‘knew’
Fran’s personal arc: Who is/was Fran? Am I missing some sort of curveball allusion here?
All the best from this side of the pond.
Minrich,
Nice to see you back, and thanks for the typo catches. Fran is Frank – and no, his story arc this time around won’t be a mid-life sexual identity crisis.
Hope all’s well (Brexit aside) with you as well. I’ll be living in London February – May, so perhaps we can meet in person over a pint some time.
ai, bounded hopefully and realistic like advanced expert systems that airplanes, military and researchers use. State of the art perhaps pointing in the right direction but way better than the Star Trek computers as portrayed or perhaps even a little bit of personality somewhere in the logic trees that recognize the vagaries of the english language which non native speakers exhibit. Odd thought, maybe Frank could be a beta tester for a friend’s efforts in the field so he could receive some information downloads on important points and can experience them in real time as a character.
As always I’d love to hang out as a beta reader again. Having emails to read in the morning is one of my happy things and being able to offer some of my explorations and finds makes me feel useful too.
Thanks for all the rapid fire suggestions, as always, Frank. And you would be most welcome as a beta reader – thanks very much for your willingness to help.
Now you got me started;
-iteration, the way the human species improves over time with intuitive leaps from possibly fluid intelligence blessed individuals but usually common understandings upwelling from the distribution of ideas and insight that are then improved by individual interpretation and experience pool. A tool for a patent person would be to assemble at least a digest from publicly available sources which can be tabulated and categorized by machine learning algorithms into a useful summary/pointer/search capability to augment that user’s abilities. Stretch that to the oncoming expert systems that can take 90% of repetitive paperwork and make things a simple comprehensive plain english discovery effort online before a human has to intervene at the subject matter level ie. legal assistant portal.
-convergence of multiple disciplines on intractable problems or projects that need to be researched, broken apart and examined for workable approaches coupled with costing, supply and scope software. There’s lots of specific tools out there in various industries. Back in the eighties the Mac LISA looked like it was going to become my computer of choice @$10K because it integrated all business functions like Microsoft Office eventually did in a dual 8″ floppy set up with 1 megabyte of RAM. Thank goodness for me real life intervened and drained my discretionary funds making me wait until 1985 when the Amiga was released as a 16/32 bit pre-emptive multitasking system in the same 1 megabyte of RAM workspace.
For comparison, pc’s back then went beep boop on very low res color CRT’s while I lived in an environment of 4096 colors, 4 channel stereo sound, scsi drives, an open ended bus to peripherals and so on. That was living ten years in the future for a very long time but eventually things fell apart and like what happened to US Robotics – prices fell and new technology muscled in almost replicating that power. But, you could make the computer talk to you and respond in various ways to clever scripts so you could do Star Trek and have automatic remote actions occur. Ars Technica has series of articles to look all this up.
I dunno how you are gonna beat the corvids and tree rats for an intelligent animal based character this time. I mean the dolphin thing about being rewarded for collecting garbage out of their pool at one of the aquariums and having one catching a seagull and bringing parts one at time for that reward or the hawks in Australia hunting with fire, scooping up burning materials and doing a barbie of an entire grassland field are a bit disconcerting. Trained rats carrying head cams? Just saw a low res familiar camera observation system like on the poles everywhere compared to a little bit bigger than a single joint of a finger that was super hires. Brings to mind the ‘how to’ missives about skirting cameras and then thinking that when people avoid them they line themselves up for dedicated surveillance shots on the real system.
How about a parrot inherited from a great uncle that is already 50 years old? Parrots have a lot of unique intelligent behaviors.
Politics, I’m watching the Greta thing about the now vastly deprecated, Climate Change issue and can only note that she is not being directed at China or India but instead being used to try and shift Western World values to self loathing at the atrocity of AGW being perpetrated by their actions. This AGW model based model is being used by politicians and regulators to shift the economy in a manner that makes some people once again the beneficiaries of it. The IPCC leads the bum’s rush here with its political based reports while science is short shrifted in the the process. From what I’ve read AGW disappears into noise levels when put up against natural cycles and inherent variability.
As for polls I don’t think there is an honest one out there that isn’t driven by someone wanting a narrative. Look how the electorate reacted to that sure thing in the last election. I look to Scott Adams of Dilbert fame’s framing of it as one side watched the results and went to bed knowing their guy won and the other side entered into a grieving denial that hasn’t ended yet and is based on a redo which I think in this context is unsupportable. Trump has been a candidate since he was inaugurated, proper papers filed and all, the rest of the crowd seems locked into 2016. This won’t end well either.
Four books that I’ve read which I feel have informed me about the world,
Rosling:
https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better-ebook/dp/B0756J1LLV/ref=sr_1_1
de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno, Alastair Smith
https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics-ebook/dp/B005GPSLHI/ref=sr_1_1
Riddley:
https://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-Prosperity-Evolves-P-s-ebook/dp/B003QP4BJM/ref=sr_1_1
Klein:
https://www.amazon.com/Shock-Doctrine-Rise-Disaster-Capitalism-ebook/dp/B0031TZC4G/ref=sr_1_1
(ps. this is a 600 page tome)
There finally running down. The flash of ideas and thoughts triggered after I replied to your announcement.
Too much? Not enough? Alternative viewpoints? This is all free without any strings attached but remember all advice or help is worth exactly what you pay for it. I like to think you’ve already paid me far out of proportion with your stories and writing examples and inclusion in the process.
Frank
Frank,
Your fire hose of ideas never ceases to amaze me – thanks for the thoughts. And also for the kind words about my writing.
Good to see Frank riding again. Would be happy to help out again.
Regarding:
“If you look at my one and two star reviews, almost 100% of them are by readers trashing the perceived “liberal bias” in my books, even in the ones where there’s almost no political commentary at all. ”
Trashing a techno-thriller on its “political bias” reminds me of my all-time favorite negative review, “Field and Stream” Magazine’s review of Lady Chatterley’s Lover:
“… this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper.”
“Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping”
http://www.booktryst.com/2011/12/when-field-and-stream-magazine-reviewed.html?m=1
(and I understand that this review was probably an intentional joke)
Good to see Frank riding again. Would be happy to help out again.
Regarding:
“If you look at my one and two star reviews, almost 100% of them are by readers trashing the perceived “liberal bias” in my books, even in the ones where there’s almost no political commentary at all. ”
Trashing a techno-thriller on its “political bias” reminds me of my all-time favourite negative review, “Field and Stream” Magazine’s review of D. H. Lawrence’ famous work “Lady Chatterley’s”:
“… this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper.”
“Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping”
http://www.booktryst.com/2011/12/when-field-and-stream-magazine-reviewed.html?m=1
(and I understand that this review was probably an intentional joke)
Great to hear from you, Rob, and delighted to hear that I’ll be able to call upon you as a beta reader once again. And thanks very much as well for the delightful DHL take down, which I can assure you I will immediately be sharing with others.
By the way, having just checked the link, I’m not the least bit surprised to learn that the author of the “review” was written by Ed Zern, and therefor absolutely tongue in cheek.
I grew up reading Field and Stream (my father was an avid sportsman), and always turned to the last page first, where I knew I would find a feature titled, “Exit, Laughing,” penned by Zern for decades. He was a delightful stylist and many of his pieces were classics.