Recent blog posts in the category Flight of the Vajra:
For fun I sat down and mentally traced the progress of my earlier SF-space-opera thingy Flight Of The Vajra.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2018/09/09 13:00
We got to talking the other day about how the finished version of a story looks nothing like its original version. For fun I sat down and mentally traced the progress of my earlier SF-space-opera thingy Flight Of The Vajra. Even I was surprised by the number of steps involved, and the evolution along the way.
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Flight of the Vajra
Genji Press
ideas
writing
My SF novel 'Flight Of The Vajra' and my mystery/thriller 'Welcome To The Fold' are available for a limited time as giveaways!
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2018/07/24 17:00
This is my once-every-so-often post about giveaways, freebies, promotions, and other must-haves from Your Friends At Genji Press, which appears for no particular good reason on Tuesday.
My sorta-kinda thriller/mystery novel Welcome To The Fold is available as a free giveaway, for a limited time, by way of Instafreebie. (See other books in the same lot!)
My sorta-kinda space-opera novel Flight Of The Vajra is also available as a free giveaway, for a limited time, by way of Instafreebie. (See other books in the same lot!)
Many other books from other authors are also available in those lots, so go check 'em out as well. There's a good chance an itch you didn't know you had may well be scratched.
If you snag a copy, a review on Goodreads or Amazon.com is greatly appreciated.
Also bear in mind my TYPO BOUNTY! If you find mechanical mistakes in the text (spelling, grammar, etc.), collate as many as you can find, drop me a line and I'll fix it up, and throw you a goodie for your trouble. Limit one goodie per person per book.
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Flight of the Vajra
Genji Press
Welcome to the Fold
giveaways
How 'Flight Of The Vajra' could have begun altogether differently.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2017/09/05 08:00
It's tough finding the right way into a story sometimes. I must have written something like four or five openings for Flight Of The Vajra (my gonzo far-future space opera shindiggythingy) before finally settling on the one I have now. Some of those alternate openings could have been great, but I think if I'd used them as conceived, they would have come at a debilitating cost to the story as a whole.
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Flight of the Vajra
rewriting
writing
How David Bowie and Prince jointly inspired a character of mine.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2016/04/24 10:00
Selfish as it might be to say this, I feel motivated only now to say something about the deaths of David Bowie and Prince because of the way I based a character on an amalgam of them.
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David Bowie
Flight of the Vajra
Prince
characters
ATTENTION READERS/FANS OF MY WRITING AND MOST EVERYONE ELSE TO BOOT: I need your help! I have just submitted my far-future SF fantasia Flight of the Vajra to The Nerdist's new Space Opera competition over at Inkshares: https://www.inkshares.com/books/flight-of-the-vajra Here are...
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2016/02/06 10:00
ATTENTION READERS/FANS OF MY WRITING AND MOST EVERYONE ELSE TO BOOT:
I need your help!
Purchases support this siteI have just submitted my far-future SF fantasia
Flight of the Vajra to
The Nerdist's new Space Opera competition over at Inkshares:https://www.inkshares.com/books/flight-of-the-vajra
Here are the details about the competition:
https://www.inkshares.com/conte…/nerdist-space-opera-contest
What do you need to do?
Simple. Pre-order the book. ($10 at the lowest tier.)
If you've considered buying a copy of this previously, but held off for whatever reason, this is just the excuse you need!
The more pre-orders I score by March 15, 2016, the greater my odds of winning. Winning means I get my book distributed by the Nerdist in their collection, and there may be "an opportunity to co-develop your work into other media such as movies, TV series, and digital productions."
If you can't spare the money to pre-order, at least do me the justice of adding yourself as a reader. The site's easy to set up membership with; you can log in via Facebook or Twitter.
Spread the word, share the links. Help me make this happen!
[Note: For the time being I am leaving the original Amazon product links up for Vajra. However, if the Inkshares folks say yes, I will have to take down my current edition of the book due to their contract. I don't have a problem with this personally; just that if the links go offline at some point later, that'll be why. I'll keep everyone posted should that happen.]
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Flight of the Vajra
Inkshares
The Nerdist
contests
publicity
publishing
real life
"We expect more change than actually happens in the future because we imagine our lives have changed more than they actually have."
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2015/09/14 09:00
Tom Vanderbilt Explains Why We Could Predict Self-Driving Cars, But Not Women in the Workplace
... when I took a subway to a café to write this article and electronically transmit it to a distant editor, I was doing something I could have done in New York City in the 1920s, using that same subway, the Roosevelt Brothers coffee shop, and the telegram, albeit less efficiently. (Whether all that efficiency has helped me personally, or just made me work more for declining wages, is an open question). We expect more change than actually happens in the future because we imagine our lives have changed more than they actually have.
Emphasis mine. Such dilemmas manifested, in my case, in the form of questions about what kind of human behavior to depict in a story about the far future. I decided the best thing I could do, in the case of Flight of the Vajra, was not try to predict too much, but instead to do what any decent SF book does: take what we have now and comment on it by using SF as an interpretive filter.
Vajra was already bordering on obsolete, at least in terms of its technical predictions, by the time it came out. Right in the first sec tion, the main character users a disposable personal drone, and the way I wrote it I implied that this sort of thing was a) common and b) something of an arms race between the people who made such things and the people who try to defend against them. This has already happened, so the future in question already starts to look a little quaint. Ditto the way things like 3D printing or self-assembling materials figure into the story as local color and backdrop. All this stuff just seems hopelessly obvious now, and not very boundary-pushing in terms of asking hard questions about what our lives are going to be like in any number of years. (This isn't why I would want to revise the book, either. Rather, that was more around cleaning up the text itself, on a simple mechanical level.)
But then there are all the things that wouldn't change, most of them rooted in deep-seated parts of human nature. Rather than pin my hopes for the story's success on any one technological prediction, I decided the smarter thing to do would be to make the whole thing revolve around human desire: the impulse to move forward versus the urge to cling to what's familiar. That became the real axis for the story.
I don't think I was completely successful there either, but I hope that element of it has a better chance of meaning something to readers later on down the line than tech gimcrackery already dated by the book's release.
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Flight of the Vajra
Science Fiction Repair Shop
science fiction
Yet more on 'Hieroglyph' and a better future for all who can afford it.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2014/09/09 10:00
More about the other day's post. I'm still stung at the tone I used to describe that stuff — Cory Doctorow in particular — but I suspect it's an abreaction, a consequence of being bombarded by so many we're-going-to-change-the-world-with-our-website types.
Zach Bonelli had his own take on it which is a more reasonably worded version of mine: "I’m not sure which I dislike more—wholesale acceptance of anything technological, or wholesale refusal to admit that anything technological might be of value." Some of that dichotomy was at the heart of Flight of the Vajra, too, although my feeling was that people would tilt towards technology by default anyway, because who really wants to not live with the conveniences offered by same? I was also deeply skeptical of the idea of a "post-scarcity" society, since after a certain point the concept of scarcity is more sociological and psychological than physical, and it becomes hard to tell a real scarcity (no clean water) from merely not being able to keep up with the Joneses (his broadband is 100 MB next to my paltry 20 MB).
Zach is right in that it's not about figuring out which one is right and going that road. It's about a dialogue between the two, something that doesn't end at any given moment, one where (as he put it) "one optimal human society might engage in endless self-reflection and criticism about the proper use of technologies, alongside a scientific arm endlessly churning out new theories and constructs."
My feeling is that no human society will elect to divide itself that neatly, because such a divide — as someone else once put it about good and evil — runs through every human heart. The struggle's going to be incarnate, first and foremost, inside each of us. Every time we wonder about what to put into our car (or our bodies), every time we choose where to live or what kind of job to work at, we're struggling with those things, even if the broader consequences of that struggle would never reveal themselves to any one of us, but only to humanity as a whole a hundred years from now.
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Flight of the Vajra
Science Fiction Repair Shop
futurism
science fiction
technology
