metachirality asked:

If Floornight or Almost Nowhere had book covers, what would they look like?

No idea. I don’t really think about this stuff.

cabbagecube asked:

A Floornight audiobook now exists: it's up on A03 under the name '[podfic] Floornight', username Landingtree.

Wow, this is really well-done!! Thank you for making it.

(I haven’t listened to the whole thing yet, but did I listen to a few chapters, and picked ones I thought would be challenging to read aloud.)

For others, here’s the link.

cabbagecube asked:

Hello! I've been working for a little while now on an audiobook of Floornight - if I finish it, which has begun to seem plausible, are you happy for it to be shared? (Also, thank you for writing something so fun to read aloud - for better and worse, this will definitely end up being a case of 'you can tell the narrator is having fun' rather than 'the narrator is standing at a professional distance behind the text.')

I’m flattered! It’s fine with me if you share it when it’s done, as long as you don’t sell it / make money from it.

megasilverfist asked:

Did you know Almost Nowhere has a (very minimal) tv tropes page?

Until getting this ask, I did not!

Did you make it? (Just curious, no need to answer if you don’t want to)

There’s also one for Floornight that’s been around for a while longer.

loving-n0t-heyting asked:

Are we ever going to get an expodump on the relevant math about spinors etc for Almost Nowhere? Or, er, a reading list?

It depends on what you mean, but … I would guess probably not?

Almost Nowhere makes a lot of references to mathematical concepts. It also has some moments of undisguised math/physics pedagogy, aimed at the reader as much as the characters, a la Egan or Stephenson.

All of this is present for a reason – for various reasons – but the exact reasons vary from one instance to the next. The reasons often include

* technobabble verisimilitude: when discussing fictional science, the characters should sound like people discussing real science

* the nature of anomaling rhetoric: the anomalings see their own intuitions mirrored in the structure of reality itself, and often justify those intuitions by saying something like “that’s just how geometry is, so why would you expect otherwise.”

To make this legible, I have to explain that, yes, geometry (or whatever) is in fact like that

* the origins of anomaling rhetoric: the shared conventions used by the anomalings/shades, when they “speak” in English, derive from Azad trying to “translate” data handed to him by physicists in relatively undigested form – and from a period when both species would have been leaning heavily on mathematics as a source of shared reference points.

Everyone got crashed before this “creole” could mature beyond this phase, and it still retains some residues of its origins which freer, more sustained communication would have eventually pruned away

—-

The reader’s instinct for parsimony may lead them to imagine more unity of purpose than I intend. (And, probably, more depth of knowledge than I possess)

As if (to strawman a bit) there were some unpublished mathematical monograph sitting on my computer’s flash drive which is the key to everything, which all the references in the text are gesturing towards, and of which they are mere flickering cave-shadows.

My flash drive doesn’t contain that monograph, any more than it contains Salby’s full 4000-page TNC. More importantly, AN isn’t really about that hypothetical monograph, the way that my TNC is about Salby’s TNC.

Rather, AN is “about mathematics (and physics)” in roughly the same way that Floornight was.

Meaning: it’s a story about made-up science, where the made-up science was inspired by real math and physics concepts, and hence I have to explain the latter to get the former across, sometimes. Also, the characters often talk about the made-up science in a highly technical register, because that’s how scientists would talk if it were a real object of study.

In Floornight, a lot of the made-up science was inspired by MWI and philosophical issues related to it.

And, when I think about it, a reader with that background would probably have an easier time grasping a lot of things at first blush: that an “eigensoul decomposition” might be some way of writing a state in a basis of “eigensouls”; that, when this same term refers to a physical process, it might be something like decoherence into a preferred basis of minimally interacting “eigensouls”; that splitting a soul into such parts is a special case of splitting the whole universe into branches; that, in the implied kind of multiverse, it might be difficult to sensibly count entities/persons for the sake of assigning moral weight; that some physical notion of “branch size,” likely couched in terms of measure theory, might therefore make its way into discussions of human worth; etc, etc.

But if you don’t have these concepts going in to Floornight, the story breezily glosses them for you anyway. Anything much deeper than these glosses is not really useful for understanding the story itself, as opposed to understanding how I came up with it. Reading about eigenbases in QM will tell you where I got the phrase “eigensoul decomposition,” but (if I did my job correctly) all the relevant details should be clear from the text itself when read in full, and hence all the details not on the page should be irrelevant.

Likewise, with Almost Nowhere, a reader who knows the measure theoretic term in the title will probably have an intuition for how it might relate to discreteness and continua, which are main themes in the story. Insofar as this is important, it will be glossed in the text itself – but the glosses may look less like a math tutorial, and more like the brief discussion of related ideas in Floornight, which you might not even recognize as “mathematical” unless you already knew its inspiration.

argmin-gravitas-blog asked:

My friend made an unusual kind of Floornight fanfic: a data science puzzle! lesswrongdotcom/ posts/ NZvFostjy8gu5mEnc/ d-and-d-sci-fi-june-2021-the-duel-with-earwax

Ooh, thanks for letting me know!

enye-word asked:

its been a while since you said anything about it but id still listen the heck out of an audiobook version of floornight

Good to know, thanks.

For context, I started recording a Floornight audiobook years ago, got 2 chapters in, realized I’m not very good at narrating audiobooks, and stopped.

I welcome any attempts by other people to make audiobooks out of Floornight.

azdoine asked:

a Floornight question, if you remember where your thoughts were during the story and you don't mind me asking: how does branching and reintegration work for the New Citizens and the Heteropneums?

azdoine:

nostalgebraist:

(continued in a 2nd ask)

normally when you split a single soul, it also causes the “timeline” to branch, and then all but one of those timelines are discarded upon reintegration, right? but the Teeming are seemingly able to permeate souls within the same dimension as themselves, and the New Citizens seem to have some way for multiple shards of a single soul (or multiple branching timelines?) to coexist at the same time within their society.

Thanks for asking!

Yeah, it’s been a long time, and I can no longer fully recall what I had in mind with things like this. (Much of it was pretty vague even in my head, TBH.) But, here goes:

—-

In Floornight, something like the many-worlds interpretation of QM is true. (Probably something different involving new physics, but similar in outline to MWI.)

IIRC, I was reading some David Wallace at the time and that was an influence. Reading this paper would provide a good feel for the “flavor” of multiverse I had in mind.

Distinct individual “worlds” and “branches” are merely emergent. At the bottom level, there’s just some cloud of probability/amplitude fluid smeared across all possible arrangements of matter. But it’s unevenly distributed – some configurations have much more of the fluid (“higher measure”) than others, and this picks out distinct mutually exclusive “worlds” on the macro scale.

At small scales – i.e. when we think about the relationships between very similar parts of configuration space – there’s cross-talk between the different parts, analogous to quantum effects. Just as in MWI, many things that physically happen in “the world” are really the result of multiple very similar worlds interacting. (And what we call “the world” is really something like “a collection of sufficiently similar worlds,” here)

The souls are supposed to be an instance of this, intrinsically. Souls are smeared out a bit across configuration space, with the different “eigensouls” in slightly different universes. But these soul pieces communicate and make up a unified entity.

TBH I never had a super clear picture of exactly what the soul forking/reintegration process looked like, in terms of the above. It’s probably something like “the different eigensouls get forced into further-off, lower measure regions, and then later they’re snapped back into to the region they came from.”

Or more precisely… I think the exact “world,” or subworld – the precise conjunction of facts – that the soul ends up in after reintegration is determined by two things. All the eigensouls need to end up in very similar configurations (the normal state for parts of a soul). And higher-measure configurations are “more likely.” So, many of the eigensouls will have wandered off into low-measure situations, while some have remained close to the high-measure “core.” Someone has to make a jump to someone else’s region, an the low –> high measure transition is vastly more probable than the reverse.

—-

Anyway, there’s a some room here to be meaningfully “branched” without that being as obstructive as is it is in the dramatic early examples, with people experiencing whole unreal timelines.

The [Teeming] are a different kind of soul, but even normal souls are naturally smeared out in configuration space. When bits of the [Teeming] interact with bits of your soul, it’s weird, but it’s merely a weird version of the way the bits of your soul are always interacting with each other.

With the New City, I think I was simply imagining a society that had fully adapted to the weirdness of unreal timelines. They’ve developed branch management into a very exact science. The citizens are used to being forked all the time, and consequently having a bunch of ultimately “unreal” experiences. But they’ve found a way to manage this so they can reap the benefits while keeping everyone safely close to the main timeline. Everyone knows how it works as second nature, and it’s always clear what’s going on and what’s real.

(Note how that New Citizens often refer to forks as being “benign” or “controlled.” I never had precise definitions of these in mind, but I intended to convey a sense that the New City had ways of making forking more “safe,” and that they weren’t OK with just any arbitrary forking.)

fascinating!

do you remember if there was anything unique about the physics of the New City timeline - in the same way that the Heteropneums are unique to the Sphere timeline - behind the Wild Children? or is the ability to emotionally excite adolescent souls in that way just something that Salim and Hermetia covered up in the Sphere timeline?

likewise, how accurate is the Nation of Ab’s oral history? my impression from reading it is that Salim and Hermetia couldn’t keep a lid on soul “magic”, it caused an apocalypse because they didn’t realize that people who used it would eventually Witch out, and then Miranda eventually figured how to tame it and build the New City. but it’s obviously hard to tell how much of that was illustrative metaphor versus complete fabrication.

(IIRC…)

The New City timeline didn’t have special physics, no. It’s a normal universe.

In the New City timeline, the coupling between souls and the material world was discovered much earlier on. Long before the development of modern science, in many independent re-discovery events. Various surface manifestations of the underlying physics were exploited here and there for material gain, long before anyone could fully grasp the physics itself.

In other words, "pneumatech” was used there long before it was systematically understood – like medicinal plants, or any number of other features of own own world. Low-level “magic” of various kinds was regularly practiced. I remember thinking of their pre-modern history as “sword and sorcery.”

The abilities of the Wild Children are not just something anyone can do by nature, but they are something that can be cultivated by anyone, and the kind of thing that societies figure out sooner or later.

This didn’t happen in the Sphere world, due to some combination of

- The [Teeming] prevented it by, somehow, carefully affecting the course of history. They did this to delay the reintegration until it the time it was “supposed to” occur. (based on this post from 2015)

- The different physics in the Sphere universe extended to human pneumas, and affected them in a way that (somehow) made these sorts of abilities harder to access or less potent. (I think this was closer to the original idea I had early on, but I never developed it further. Fits with Herm’s proto-Salbian feeling that the Sphere world is fundamentally “wrong” and its inhabitants are “cursed.”)

—-

I don’t think I intended the Nation of Ab’s oral history to be very accurate, although the broad strokes come from somewhere.

I think it’s best understood as a memory, centuries after the fact, of a transition from a populous and continually war-torn world (not unlike our world at most points in its history) to a mostly barren, but technically peaceful, world under the absolute control of a single, reclusive superpower.