If anyone with a science degree wants to pick this apart for me, please do. It’s the opening pars from a later chapter in The Forever Dead. I spent hours researching it today, but I’m not a science guy so there may be howlers. A billion years before self-replicating molecules emerged from the organic soup of Earth’s primordial oceans, two protostars were born within the cradle of a molecular cloud, thousands of light years away. Vast quantities of hydrogen atoms collided under immense pressure, transforming into helium and releasing torrents of energy with each ecstatic embrace. After many millions of years, during which time, some of the emergent organic molecules on faraway Earth had begun to replicate themselves imperfectly, leading to variations in their sequences, the cores of the two impossibly distant protostars ignited with brilliance and fury, flooding the lonesome void around them with fiery trails of light.
Well since you've explicitly invited a thorough nitpicking 😂, I'll have a go - though more along the lines of other stuff you arguably should mention, rather than stuff that is wrong. The pair of protostars you mention is fusing hydrogen to helium. That's the usual thing for stars to do, so all good so far. However, fusing hydrogen isn't all they do. The fact that we live on a chunk of rock is proof of this. As stars get older they start to take on more and more ambitious fusion projects, ie fusing the helium together, and then fusing all the other elements as well. But just to be clear, they are still also fusing hydrogen at this stage. And then when they do the big firework (sorry, just can't get Douglas Adams out of my brain) they scatter all these various elements in all directions. Enough of this scattered matter is hydrogen that a new generation of stars can form. IIRC they think it actually takes several generations of dead stars to get the seriously heavy metals like the ones people hurl at each other on battlefields. Looks like you want to lean on the simplicity metaphor for what these stars are up to, by contrast with the messy organics happening elsewhere, on Earth. Getting into the details of the elemental abundance problem probably detracts from that, so I guess you probably don't really want to go there, so don't mind me if so :).
Are they named after the town in Italy? Or maybe Saint Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint of students (he kept failing his entrance exams to join the Franciscans) and pilots (he was too simple-minded to know that humans can't levitate, so he did, reportedly). Or even the city in California where commercial real estate is almost impossible to get hold of due to the dominance of one company in particular :).
I think Apple could conceivably acquire Disney (not that I'm saying it's likely, mind. this is absolutely definitely not investment advice!), but re Microsoft and Google are more likely to just render them unnecessary, rather than acquire them 😁. They might also want to acquire Sirius Cybernetics, but would immediately fire the entire marketing department.
I think you've covered all the scientz there. You might need scientists in more than one discipline.
Being mainly a chemist type science guy, I can't see any howlers, and I read it twice to make sure.
I think the main issue is that it feels clunky, probably because you have tried to fit all the science in, or at least tried to cram some wide ranging and big big concepts into a few paras.
Anyway, I thought hard science was for other people.
I can't see any stand-out howlers, but I'd check the "1 billion years" benchmark before the self-replicators: that sounds about right but might be on the long side.
I'm more concerned that you jumped straight from cell membrane to multi-cellular and intelligence, skipping all of the cool single-cell-but-mobile critters. Mobility and agency are crucial, IMO.
So not my field, but I post knowlegeable on teh interwebs.... Looking forward to the book...
Huh?
Well since you've explicitly invited a thorough nitpicking 😂, I'll have a go - though more along the lines of other stuff you arguably should mention, rather than stuff that is wrong. The pair of protostars you mention is fusing hydrogen to helium. That's the usual thing for stars to do, so all good so far. However, fusing hydrogen isn't all they do. The fact that we live on a chunk of rock is proof of this. As stars get older they start to take on more and more ambitious fusion projects, ie fusing the helium together, and then fusing all the other elements as well. But just to be clear, they are still also fusing hydrogen at this stage. And then when they do the big firework (sorry, just can't get Douglas Adams out of my brain) they scatter all these various elements in all directions. Enough of this scattered matter is hydrogen that a new generation of stars can form. IIRC they think it actually takes several generations of dead stars to get the seriously heavy metals like the ones people hurl at each other on battlefields. Looks like you want to lean on the simplicity metaphor for what these stars are up to, by contrast with the messy organics happening elsewhere, on Earth. Getting into the details of the elemental abundance problem probably detracts from that, so I guess you probably don't really want to go there, so don't mind me if so :).
Are they named after the town in Italy? Or maybe Saint Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint of students (he kept failing his entrance exams to join the Franciscans) and pilots (he was too simple-minded to know that humans can't levitate, so he did, reportedly). Or even the city in California where commercial real estate is almost impossible to get hold of due to the dominance of one company in particular :).
I assumed it was named after the city in California and the company that dominates it, knowing JB's technical biases 😀
It’s Apple after they gobble up Microsoft, Google, Disney and the Cyberdine Robot Weapons Corporation
I think Apple could conceivably acquire Disney (not that I'm saying it's likely, mind. this is absolutely definitely not investment advice!), but re Microsoft and Google are more likely to just render them unnecessary, rather than acquire them 😁. They might also want to acquire Sirius Cybernetics, but would immediately fire the entire marketing department.
I think you've covered all the scientz there. You might need scientists in more than one discipline.
Being mainly a chemist type science guy, I can't see any howlers, and I read it twice to make sure.
I think the main issue is that it feels clunky, probably because you have tried to fit all the science in, or at least tried to cram some wide ranging and big big concepts into a few paras.
Anyway, I thought hard science was for other people.
It is, but occasionally I like to channel my inner Peter F Hamilton. The clunkiness I can soothe out. Howlers I gotta cut.
It reads science fine, comes across a bit Cosmos The TV Series (the Neil deGrasse Tyson one rather than the Carl Sagan).
*Steeples fingers*
“Eccellente”.
I can't see any stand-out howlers, but I'd check the "1 billion years" benchmark before the self-replicators: that sounds about right but might be on the long side.
I'm more concerned that you jumped straight from cell membrane to multi-cellular and intelligence, skipping all of the cool single-cell-but-mobile critters. Mobility and agency are crucial, IMO.
So not my field, but I post knowlegeable on teh interwebs.... Looking forward to the book...