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gfish's fault. Really...
See, Fishy posted this vignette about autonomous, self-reproducing steampunk clockwork vultures (really, niche-wise, clockwork crows). I thought that was really cool, but thought it didn't really pass as hard-steampunk — a clockwork brain powerful enough to control an autonomous agent that is going to survive in a hostile environment would have to be huge, and thus either stationary or built into a large vehicle like a train or major naval vessel. And then there's the bootstrapping problem: whatever it is, it has to have begun as something built by humans on purpose.
Well, that got me thinking, about what other components a survival-autonomous entity controlled by an even slightly realistic Babbage-class clockwork would have to include, and why anyone would want to create such a system (or a system that could become such a system)... and that grew into an idea for a sort of mashup of Wargames and Oliver Twist... and A Deepness in the Sky and Don Quixote and The Three Musketeers and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and...
I'm going to have to do a lot of background reading for this one, aren't I?
Our story is a steampunk/cyberpunk alternate history taking off from the work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. I know, it's been done — and I'm not sure whether I should include The Difference Engine in my background reading list or whether I should pointedly avoid it. I'll be taking a different point of departure and sticking to an (I think) slightly more plausible vision of what the technology is capable of. Instead of collapsing the time between 1825 and 1995, omitting all the war, and fast-forwarding to the information age, we're going to collapse the time between 1870 and 1970, omitting all the peace, and fast-forward to the Cold War. It goes something like this:
Ada Lovelace doesn't die of cancer in 1852, but survives to help Babbage continue his research and to help convince Parliament to fund it, leading to an ENIAC-like mainframe which is put to good use in the Crimean War (early computers were mainly used for ballistics calculations, very useful in the age of artillery).
Without really changing the outcome of that war, this contributes to changes in the political landscape in England (I think the key change here is that the 1868 Disraeli government doesn't collapse, but I need to study more to figure out if that'll do what I want), and the diplomatic landscape on the continent, such that England enters the Franco-Prussian War as an ally of France. The British don't send troops — they still despise the French too much for that — but they do send an advanced, and highly classified, experimental mainframe to help coordinate the defense of Paris. Ada Lovelace personally accompanies it as chief programmer. The mainframe comes programmed with routines for ballistics, logistics, game theory, and signals coding. As a result of this intervention, the siege of Paris... doesn't end, and we fast forward directly to the Cold War. Ada and company are trapped in a besieged Ile de France, and coordinate a defense that increasingly depends on the increasingly upgraded mainframe.
Meanwhile, refugees from Prussian-occupied Alsace are accumulating in Paris and trying to make themselves useful — especially, Jewish merchant families (like that of Alfred Dreyfus, who will probably make a personal appearance later in the plot). One Jewish watchmaker has a son (I may call him Joshua, in a nod to Wargames) who's an autistic savant — he can deal with words, numbers, machines, and animals, but not with people as such. The watchmaker is judged trustworthy (i.e. anti-Prussian) enough to be hired as part of the maintenance team for the mainframe, and he brings his son with him.
Later, the father is killed in an artillery strike, and the son retreats to a complete attachment to the mainframe and to Ada, whom he regards as components of a single entity. In reality, it's Joshua who begins to effectively merge with the machine — because he's more comfortable thinking machinishly, he rapidly becomes the most skilled programmer, and because he doesn't care about much else, he's able to supervise the machine and direct it's operation until he becomes dangerously indispensible. He also trains a population of pet rats to the point where they can be used for search-and-rescue and limited reconnaissance, and builds little rat-sized consoles that allow them to report directly to the mainframe.
Then, finally, the war ends. Because of the terms of the peace, and the political situation in France, the British technical team has to leave immediately, and the mainframe has been walled into an underground bunker (the beginnings of the Paris Metro, started earlier for the express purpose of having military supply lines safe from artillery) and can't be moved. Ada feels responsible for Joshua, and plans to see that he ends up in a good situation, but somehow he slips through the cracks... in fact, he runs away, back to the mainframe without which he feels helpless...
(My rant about emergent AI systems:) If a system which is designed to do a job accidentally becomes self-aware, its personality should be grounded in the job for which it was designed — you won't automatically get a paranoid, passive-aggressive control freak! Only, in this case, since we're dealing with a computer which has been programmed to mastermind the defense of an impossible siege, we will get the genre-standard paranoid control freak chessmaster AI character-type. (End of rant.)
Fast forward a few years to a newspaper headline about police plans to crack down on Paris's population of street orphans in response to a wave of thefts... strangely, the only things being stolen are watches. Yep, it's the rats, stealing watches which Joshua will adapt into spare memory for the mainframe (also stealing food and coal, but that's less noticeable). One particularly clever gang of urchins decide to get to the bottom of this with the vague intention of proving their own innocence, and follow a mysteriously well-groomed and clever rat into the secret underground, to find a strange, frightened young man who seems to think that he is part of a computer named LOVELACE.
Moved by pity and curiosity, the street kids manage to befriend Joshua/LOVELACE and join its "army". Eventually they are able to extract enough information to leap to the romantic conclusion that Joshua can be saved (from despair, not necessarily from being a cyborg) if they can contact the real Ada Lovelace and convince her to convince LOVELACE that the war is over. Together, they work with Joshua/LOVELACE to plan a series of missions — this raises Joshua's spirits considerably — with the eventual goal of traveling to England or (more likely) sending a series of telegrams. This will probably involve such adventures as trying to get in touch with Alfred Dreyfus, whose father would have known Joshua's father, earning money as street performers with their circus of very clever trained rats (code-named "Artful Dodger" and "Oliver Twist" — Oliver is the smaller one with the twisted tail), and other YA-Victorian-fiction-stuff like that.
Eventually, they succeed. Ada returns to Paris, and the Joshua/LOVELACE system emerges from its paranoid depression — but it proves impossible to separate them. Joshua goes to England with Ada to live happily ever after as a classified military AI.
Comments policy: I've started a number of labeled comment threads myself. In order to keep comments which pertain to background research for the novel well-organized and separate from general squeeing, please read the subject headings and post your comments in reply to the appropriate thread. Thank you.
Also, please share this link with people who might be able to help with research but don't normally read my journal.
gfish's fault. Really...See, Fishy posted this vignette about autonomous, self-reproducing steampunk clockwork vultures (really, niche-wise, clockwork crows). I thought that was really cool, but thought it didn't really pass as hard-steampunk — a clockwork brain powerful enough to control an autonomous agent that is going to survive in a hostile environment would have to be huge, and thus either stationary or built into a large vehicle like a train or major naval vessel. And then there's the bootstrapping problem: whatever it is, it has to have begun as something built by humans on purpose.
Well, that got me thinking, about what other components a survival-autonomous entity controlled by an even slightly realistic Babbage-class clockwork would have to include, and why anyone would want to create such a system (or a system that could become such a system)... and that grew into an idea for a sort of mashup of Wargames and Oliver Twist... and A Deepness in the Sky and Don Quixote and The Three Musketeers and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and...
I'm going to have to do a lot of background reading for this one, aren't I?
Our story is a steampunk/cyberpunk alternate history taking off from the work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. I know, it's been done — and I'm not sure whether I should include The Difference Engine in my background reading list or whether I should pointedly avoid it. I'll be taking a different point of departure and sticking to an (I think) slightly more plausible vision of what the technology is capable of. Instead of collapsing the time between 1825 and 1995, omitting all the war, and fast-forwarding to the information age, we're going to collapse the time between 1870 and 1970, omitting all the peace, and fast-forward to the Cold War. It goes something like this:
Ada Lovelace doesn't die of cancer in 1852, but survives to help Babbage continue his research and to help convince Parliament to fund it, leading to an ENIAC-like mainframe which is put to good use in the Crimean War (early computers were mainly used for ballistics calculations, very useful in the age of artillery).
Without really changing the outcome of that war, this contributes to changes in the political landscape in England (I think the key change here is that the 1868 Disraeli government doesn't collapse, but I need to study more to figure out if that'll do what I want), and the diplomatic landscape on the continent, such that England enters the Franco-Prussian War as an ally of France. The British don't send troops — they still despise the French too much for that — but they do send an advanced, and highly classified, experimental mainframe to help coordinate the defense of Paris. Ada Lovelace personally accompanies it as chief programmer. The mainframe comes programmed with routines for ballistics, logistics, game theory, and signals coding. As a result of this intervention, the siege of Paris... doesn't end, and we fast forward directly to the Cold War. Ada and company are trapped in a besieged Ile de France, and coordinate a defense that increasingly depends on the increasingly upgraded mainframe.
Meanwhile, refugees from Prussian-occupied Alsace are accumulating in Paris and trying to make themselves useful — especially, Jewish merchant families (like that of Alfred Dreyfus, who will probably make a personal appearance later in the plot). One Jewish watchmaker has a son (I may call him Joshua, in a nod to Wargames) who's an autistic savant — he can deal with words, numbers, machines, and animals, but not with people as such. The watchmaker is judged trustworthy (i.e. anti-Prussian) enough to be hired as part of the maintenance team for the mainframe, and he brings his son with him.
Later, the father is killed in an artillery strike, and the son retreats to a complete attachment to the mainframe and to Ada, whom he regards as components of a single entity. In reality, it's Joshua who begins to effectively merge with the machine — because he's more comfortable thinking machinishly, he rapidly becomes the most skilled programmer, and because he doesn't care about much else, he's able to supervise the machine and direct it's operation until he becomes dangerously indispensible. He also trains a population of pet rats to the point where they can be used for search-and-rescue and limited reconnaissance, and builds little rat-sized consoles that allow them to report directly to the mainframe.
Then, finally, the war ends. Because of the terms of the peace, and the political situation in France, the British technical team has to leave immediately, and the mainframe has been walled into an underground bunker (the beginnings of the Paris Metro, started earlier for the express purpose of having military supply lines safe from artillery) and can't be moved. Ada feels responsible for Joshua, and plans to see that he ends up in a good situation, but somehow he slips through the cracks... in fact, he runs away, back to the mainframe without which he feels helpless...
(My rant about emergent AI systems:) If a system which is designed to do a job accidentally becomes self-aware, its personality should be grounded in the job for which it was designed — you won't automatically get a paranoid, passive-aggressive control freak! Only, in this case, since we're dealing with a computer which has been programmed to mastermind the defense of an impossible siege, we will get the genre-standard paranoid control freak chessmaster AI character-type. (End of rant.)
Fast forward a few years to a newspaper headline about police plans to crack down on Paris's population of street orphans in response to a wave of thefts... strangely, the only things being stolen are watches. Yep, it's the rats, stealing watches which Joshua will adapt into spare memory for the mainframe (also stealing food and coal, but that's less noticeable). One particularly clever gang of urchins decide to get to the bottom of this with the vague intention of proving their own innocence, and follow a mysteriously well-groomed and clever rat into the secret underground, to find a strange, frightened young man who seems to think that he is part of a computer named LOVELACE.
Moved by pity and curiosity, the street kids manage to befriend Joshua/LOVELACE and join its "army". Eventually they are able to extract enough information to leap to the romantic conclusion that Joshua can be saved (from despair, not necessarily from being a cyborg) if they can contact the real Ada Lovelace and convince her to convince LOVELACE that the war is over. Together, they work with Joshua/LOVELACE to plan a series of missions — this raises Joshua's spirits considerably — with the eventual goal of traveling to England or (more likely) sending a series of telegrams. This will probably involve such adventures as trying to get in touch with Alfred Dreyfus, whose father would have known Joshua's father, earning money as street performers with their circus of very clever trained rats (code-named "Artful Dodger" and "Oliver Twist" — Oliver is the smaller one with the twisted tail), and other YA-Victorian-fiction-stuff like that.
Eventually, they succeed. Ada returns to Paris, and the Joshua/LOVELACE system emerges from its paranoid depression — but it proves impossible to separate them. Joshua goes to England with Ada to live happily ever after as a classified military AI.
Comments policy: I've started a number of labeled comment threads myself. In order to keep comments which pertain to background research for the novel well-organized and separate from general squeeing, please read the subject headings and post your comments in reply to the appropriate thread. Thank you.
Also, please share this link with people who might be able to help with research but don't normally read my journal.
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Historical background — military and political
Date: 2010-02-05 08:37 pm (UTC)Re: Historical background — military and political
Date: 2010-02-06 12:53 am (UTC)Of course, with the Prussian Army ringing the city and cutting off supplies (it's a siege, after all), that's less of an issue; sure, what supplies the city has can be efficiently ferried back and forth, but eventually the city is going to starve.
Or not. On further thought, we can run with your Cold War analogy and introduce the Berlin Airlift: a Royal Navy-led operation to supply Paris through the use of ironclad blockade runners escorted by river monitors up the Seine from Entente-held Rouen. At that point, efficient distribution of the barely-adequate supplies (both to feed the civilian population and to keep the army functional enough to keep the Prussians out) becomes critical, and enter the mainframe, a top secret project, solving the complex problems of rationing and distributing food, coal, etc.
Historical background — technical
Date: 2010-02-05 08:43 pm (UTC)Re: Historical background — technical
Date: 2010-02-05 08:58 pm (UTC)Training rats
Date: 2010-02-05 08:50 pm (UTC)Autism
Date: 2010-02-05 08:56 pm (UTC)Period literature
Date: 2010-02-05 09:06 pm (UTC)What novels should Joshua have read? They must have been available in French in 1870. (Joshua is the son of an Alsacian Jew, but merchants often know several languages, and Joshua is a fast language learner as long as he doesn't have to actually talk to other people). I'm pretty sure about Don Quixote, The Three Musketeers, and Oliver Twist. Any other suggestions?
Re: Period literature
Date: 2010-02-05 10:26 pm (UTC)Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo, 1866
Five Weeks in a Balloon by Jules Verne 1863
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was published in French translation by Henri Bué Aventures d'Alice au pays des merveilles 1869
(unfortunately Flatland was not published until 1884)
Re: Period literature
Date: 2010-02-05 11:50 pm (UTC)Methinks a lot of Verne features in Joshua's diet...
Other novels worth considering:
Victor Hugo: Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, at least.
Voltaire: Probably Candide. Especially for the "window into the lives of normal people" thing.
Shelley: Frankenstein was translated by 1821. Probably important.
Anything by Poe. Baudelaire translated much of Poe, and he (Baudelaire) died before 1870, so that's all fair game.
Re: Period literature
Date: 2010-02-06 12:50 am (UTC)Re: Period literature
Date: 2010-02-07 03:13 am (UTC)Re: Period literature
Date: 2010-02-06 12:45 am (UTC)General comments
Date: 2010-02-05 09:07 pm (UTC)Re: General comments
Date: 2010-02-06 12:55 am (UTC)Re: General comments
Date: 2010-02-07 12:43 am (UTC)The acronym as we know it was invented at Bell Labs in the 1960s, but something similar has existed in Hebrew since Talmudic times. An autistic savant with somewhat of a Jewish upbringing might have come up with something of the sort (only, why in English?). If the acronym is used in the novel, which it may well not be, it will be Joshua's invention, and he won't be satisfied with it, so we'll probably see multiple versions.
Re: General comments
Date: 2010-02-07 11:54 am (UTC)Possibly in tribute to the original Lovelace, but you could also just have the "pretend it was equally clever in the original French" suspension of disbelief.
Raw squeeing
Date: 2010-02-05 09:08 pm (UTC)Re: Raw squeeing
Date: 2010-02-11 12:58 am (UTC)