Dansplaining the Technothrillers
2023-2024
Dansplaining PARADOX Publication 12 June 2024
PARADOX; noun /ˈparədɒks/
A seemingly absurd or contradictory statement or proposition which, when investigated, may prove to be well-founded or true.
Thanks to Google and Oxford Languages Dictionary
Indulge me for a moment while I Dansplain what led me to write a novel about the Moon...
You may have read a thing or two about NASA’s Artemis Program, which is intent on returning astronauts to the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 and then establishing a permanent lunar space station and base there to re-establish a human presence on the Moon with the hope of laying the groundwork for an eventual Mars Mission. The primary location for the ABC – the Artemis Base Camp – is near Shackleton Crater, close to the lunar South Pole. The Moon's South Pole is an attractive target since there is evidence of stores of water ice in the permanently shadowed craters there.
Additionally, various other mineral resources, from magnesium, titanium, and rare earth elements to helium-3, promise commercially viable deposits waiting to be discovered. To allow for commercially viable mining of lunar resources, we would need to find an economical way to return the material to Earth. Today, this is only a dream, but in the case of helium-3, its worth could be... out of this world! [Pardon my pun.] Depending on what source you use, He-3 is a very rare resource and could be worth between 1 and 4 TRILLION US dollars per tonne!
Why do I babble on about the commercial worth of lunar resources? It is only because it is a current goal of many prominent industrialists and technical dreamers to utilise the mineral wealth of the Moon. Of course, that presents a problem concerning who owns the Moon and has the right to profit from these resources. Anthony Grayling’s latest book, “Who Owns the Moon?” speaks directly to these issues.
That same problem – ‘Who owns the Moon?’ – is precisely one of the two underlying questions underlying my latest novel, PARADOX. The other question is, 'How can Homo sapiens be so intelligent and yet seemingly incapable of choosing not to go extinct of our own accord?’ Now, let’s see how we can spin a yarn around these two issues…
The tale of PARADOX begins in Seattle, where Professor Aaron Sawyer meets with an untimely death in a residential fire caused by a short-circuited battery charger plugged into his e-scooter. One of his best friends, Dr Jordan Wheeler, is a geologist-astronaut assigned to Shackleton Outpost, a small research colony near the lunar south pole. Coincidence? Hardly… The Seattle Police quickly learned that Sawyer never owed nor even rode an e-scooter as their forensics team searched the burned rumble for any tell tale evidence of what happened.
PARADOX by Dan Churach
Published 12 June 2024
On the same day, several hundred thousand kilometres away on the surface of the Moon, astronaut Wheeler and his team carry out a routine surface excursion to collect rock samples. They unexpectedly find an out-of-place space probe they cannot identify as being from any known source on Earth. Even more curious, the probe has no visible signs of being a landing craft, just an old "Explorer-type" satellite.
Just imagine that if you can, dear reader… you find an object that seems to have no explanation other than being manufactured by an intelligent life form from somewhere other than Earth. Naturally, you’d want to scream at the top of your lungs and tell everyone what you have found. That’s how Jordi Wheeler and his colleague, Maccas McDonnell, felt, but they quickly realised they needed to keep their finding to themselves.
Before they had barely begun investigating the mysterious object's origin, a group of new astronauts arrived from Earth. One of these newbies is noted GNN investigative reporter Whitney Wainwright, who is on assignment to do a documentary about life at Shackleton Outpost. No sooner does Whitney settle into her new project than she quickly discovers that her Moon-Earth communications are being monitored and that family and friends back on Earth are being watched. Who would be monitoring their communications? Why?
Between the lunar astronauts and NASA data engineers back on Earth, the communications hacking is traced back to Siebert Industries, the largest private contractor contributing much of the knowledge and engineering expertise to the project. Could a commercial partner possibly have ambitions other than scientific knowledge and the betterment of humanity in mind?
For those of you who have followed the trail of Churachian novels over the years, I can hear you say, “Is this like PROOF! all over again? Is Dan writing a book about finding extraterrestrial intelligence and the human need to find something to prove the existence of that life?”
First, if ANY of you connected the two novels, good on you. Second, no, they are way different stories at different times and in different genres. Honestly, PARADOX is much more up to date than PROOF! and goes in a whole different direction.
PARADOX spins a tale about a clash of opposing truths that stretch from the Moon to Washington, DC, to Perth, Australia and Seattle, Washington, and back to the Moon again.
“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”
Oscar Wilde, 1889
Here we go again... Does Dan Churach reflect reality in his latest technothriller or does reality belatedly catch up to Churachian fiction? Aha... a real-life paradoxical question from the outset. PARADOX was published in mid-June 2024 and the flood of news stories that fed into and continue to feed into the storyline is quite impressive. Here are a few news pieces that support much of what our PARADOX heroes face in the novel.
Dansplaining TURTLES Published 7 September 2023
TURTLES has been published! It has lived through an interesting series of twists and turns to get here. A funny thing happened somewhere between Part Two and Part Three of GRANDPA... Close to 27,000 words into the story, a miraculous intervention struck me at 2:30 AM one morning (I frequently jump from bed in the middle of a sound sleep with ideas... Poor Karn!). When I sat down at my computer a few hours later, my tenth novel, GRANDPA, transformed my tenth novel now published as… TURTLES.
Yes, of course there are insect drones in TURTLES. Did you think that a world filled with artificial intelligence would somehow escape nasty little bugs that are piloted by AI?
I’m ‘Dansplaining here, so I can digress for a moment as I hear you ask, “Why did you call it GRANDPA in the first place?” I liked several characters in my 2019 book DREAMS and thought I’d include them in another story someday. I must assure you right from the start – TURTLES IS NOT A SEQUEL TO DREAMS! If you have never even heard of my novel DREAMS, it will not affect your appreciation for the story of TURTLES, dear reader.
Now, I return from my rambling side track by telling you that I have been cogitating about the tale of TURTLES for over a year. I received excellent inspiration and ideas from a two-week visit with wonderful friends from New Hampshire in February and during a circumnavigation of Australia with other mates aboard the Coral Princess in March and April. That led me to begin my work on GRANDPA at the end of April 2023.
So, what’s my latest tale about? Well, in the age of fake news, bogus research, staged photographs, AI-created video clips and publications filled with outright lies, do we stand any chance of returning to the days when most people agreed at least on the basic meaning of what is real? In a nutshell, that’s the central theme of TURTLES. So, I didn’t change the storyline one iota when I made my midway title change. I realised the title TURTLES fit way better than the original GRANDPA. Why TURTLES? I’ll give you a hint by relating this old story that has kicked around for decades and maybe even centuries…
I first heard of it from my favourite childhood science author, Isaac Asimov. Stephen Hawking retold it to millions in his “A Brief History of Time” (1988), but there are many, many people who have shared a similar version of the story over the years. The first reference I can find was from ‘The Father of American Psychology,’ William James, in his book “Rationality, Activity and Faith” (1882). All versions refer to Aristotle’s idea of ‘infinite regress’, a never-ending trip down a rabbit hole in the hope of ending any argument. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes it thus:
“An infinite regress is a series of appropriately related elements with a first member but no last member, where each element leads to or generates the next in some sense. An infinite regress argument is an argument that makes appeal to an infinite regress. Usually, such arguments take the form of objections to a theory, with the fact that the theory implies an infinite regress being taken to be objectionable.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Nowadays, this type of infinite regress is tossed around by tens of millions of conspiracy believers touting everything from flying saucers to anti-vaccines and stolen elections. Enter AI – artificial intelligence. We know AI is global and that its capabilities are powerful. We also know that its ability to self-learn allows AI to grow at dizzying exponential rates. Will AI become Homo sapiens’ saviour or our end?
TURTLES explores the existential threat AI poses to humanity. Many others know much more than I do about artificial intelligence and have warned us to take it slow and easy expanding the reach of artificial intelligence. Some of these people include:
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Stephen Hawking, English theoretical physicist and cosmologist
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Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
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Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind
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Dario Amodei, CEO and Co-Founder at Anthropic
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Geoffrey Hinton, Cognitive psychologist and computer scientist (Turing Award 2019, one of the “godfathers” of modern AI)
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Yoshua Bengio, Computer scientist (Turing Award 2019, one of the “godfathers” of modern AI)
I’ll let you read the novel, but I’ll give you a tease here. One of the protagonists, Dr Elliot Hooper, a data engineer professor at Curtin University here in Perth, delivers my version of the Turtle Story. In Chapter 63 of TURTLES, Hooper speaks to two project teammates, psychologist Akiko Nakamura and medical doctor Leah Ferguson, while dining at a seafood restaurant and enjoying the sunset over the Indian Ocean in Fremantle…
“Yes, yes… the turtle. As I said, it is often used to describe Aristotle’s infinite regress problem you just referred to, whether you know it or not. You’ve heard other stories of the same nature, but probably the most well-known infinite regress we learn as kids is the ‘chicken or the egg’ question. The chicken lays an egg, and the egg becomes a chicken which lays an egg which becomes a chicken which… You get the idea. Kids delight in asking their parents, their teachers, and their friends, which comes first, the chicken or the egg? The so-called ‘answer’ is infinity, which unsatisfactorily leads us to a meaningless argument philosophically.
“Ah, but forget the chickens for a minute and let’s get back to the turtle… The story speaks of a physicist explaining the idea of a sun-centred system where the Earth is a ball that orbits the sun, and the moon is a ball that orbits the Earth. A little old lady interrupts the professor and tells him she believes differently from the Copernican hypothesis. In classical ‘flat-earther’ fashion, she explains that the Earth’s surface is a flat crust resting on the back of a giant turtle. The professor did not want to offend the woman, so he thought he’d try to dissuade her with a question. He asked her what the turtle was standing on. She quickly replied that it stood on the back of another turtle. Naturally, the professor asked her what the second turtle was standing on, and she answered that it was a larger turtle. The physicist no sooner begins to ask the obvious next question, ‘What does that turtle stand on’ when the lady shakes her head quite stubbornly and smiles. ‘No, no… you can’t get me on that one, sir. It’s turtles all the way down.’”
Taken from PART 6, TURTLES by Dan Churach
I’ll finish my Dansplaining rant with a photo taken in July 2023. It shows me in the study grasping a wooden garden decoration given to me a few months ago by my good mate Bill Staunton. Bill’s late wife, Moira, found it in a market somewhere in their travels around Australia. It now hangs next to my desk monitor, and I can channel Moira's inspiration daily. I used those turtle images in designing the book cover for TURTLES.
I hope you enjoy my tale of TURTLES, dear reader.
Cheers –
Dan
TURTLES was published on 7 September 2023. Frankly, I was worried that reality was catching up to my creative fiction so quickly that TURTLES might inadvertently become a journalistic exposé on artificial intelligence. Well, thankfully that didn't happen since my technothriller is now published and it is fiction, but note the release dates on these three AI updates in the local Perth daily newspaper, THE WEST AUSTRALIAN and the NEW YORK TIMES. It almost reads like my fiction...
Who would believe there'd be "fake" scientific journal references? This "fake news" has been repeated by one bloke who has been running for President in America again and again. You can read the entire article at the ABC link below where the editor of the scientific journal reports that the study is fake in America as well as Australia.
Read the whole story at SCIENCE, 19 June 2024
To read the article in its entirety, visit the New York Times...
Dansplaining CLOUDS Publication date 19 February 2023
CLOUDS is becoming an ongoing project that I am determined to complete sometime in early 2023. Surprisingly, I'm already a quarter-to-a-third of the way into writing this novel, but was distracted by first by SOLASTALGIA and wrote that story, the second book in the Ancestor Trilogy. I then picked up writing CLOUDS again the last few months of 2021 before I became distracted with inspirations pushing me to write KAIROS (see Dansplaining the Ancestor Trilogy)). That said, I did get back to CLOUDS this spring (September, October, November 2022) and have now completed it the first
draft before Christmas 2022. Let me give you some insight as to what CLOUDS is all about.
GenoBotics is a new start-up company developed by a couple of Western Australia researchers attempting to use the laws of physics integrated with biomolecular research to develop robotic devices that are as small as molecules. These nanobots can be used medically to deliver drugs to precisely the right place within an individual’s body to help remedy disease. The best example of this technique is in the early stages of development today and will be used to allow oncologists to better treat cancer patients.
Many modern pharmaceuticals intended to fight cancer are designed to interfere inside the targeted malignant cells and cause harm to their DNA. Naturally, the trick is to confine their therapeutic behaviour of the chemo drugs specifically to only the diseased cells making up the tumour. Enter nanorobotics and the guided attack on only unhealthy cells. Enough of the science for now.
GenoBotics shows much promise, but as often is the case with Australian research, the lack of seed money drives GenoBotics into a merger with Gunn Capital, a large California-based company keen on backing this cutting-edge research.
Caution: These are NOT real clouds and only shown to pique your imagination...