THE DARK COURT
Vyvyan Evans
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GENRE: Science Fiction
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BLURB:
Five
years after the Great Language Outage, lang-laws have been repealed, but world
affairs have only gotten worse. The new automation agenda has resulted in a
social caste system based on IQ. Manual employment is a thing of the past, and
the lowest soc-ed class, the Unskills, are forced into permanent unemployment.
In
a world on the brink of civil war, a deadly insomnia pandemic threatens to kill
billions. Lilith King, Interpol’s most celebrated detective, is assigned to the
case.
Together
with a sleep specialist, Dr. Kace Westwood, Lilith must figure out who or what
is behind this new threat. Could the pandemic be the result of the upskilling
vagus chips being offered to the lowest soc-ed class? Or are language chips
being hacked? And what of the viral conspiracy theories by the mysterious Dark
Court, sweeping the globe? Lilith must work every possible angle, and quickly:
she is running out of time!
While
attempting to stop a vast conspiracy on an intergalactic scale, Lilith also
faces shocking revelations about her origin, coming to terms with her own
destiny.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Excerpt:
Her father then turned back to Lilith, gazing at her with
the kindness she loved. “I have to go away.” He gulped. “You must be very
brave, Lily. Because what I’m doing is for you. You’re very special. I believe
you will change everything. Not just here, but everywhere.” With that he
reached into his jacket and pulled out a small bracelet from inside his breast
pocket. He handed it to Lilith.
“Another gift?” she asked, with cautious excitement. Lilith
turned it over in her hand. It was silver, with a small, strange-looking screen
on the outer side. The screen was narrow and black, and numbers were spinning
in iridescent green, fleetingly across the screen.
“I guess it is. This is a SwissSecure bracelet. It will live
with you, expanding as you grow.”
“Is it alive?” Lilith asked.
Her father chuckled. “In a way, I suppose it is. When you’re
older, after you’re chipped, the numbers will stop spinning. And then you’ll
receive a message from me—two, in fact.”
“Memoclips?” Lilith asked, confused. She knew that was what
the chipped adults called them.
Her father dipped his head. “Actually, faceclips. They will
explain things … when the time is right. For one thing, where the music comes
from, the Nunciature Evangelion—the Tower of Songs.”
“Music?”
“It will come to you, later today. This music will help you
become your potential, but it will also be your one Achilles heel …”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Book website (including ‘Buy’ links): http://www.songs-of-the-sage.com
Author website: https://www.vyvevans.net/
Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@vyvevans
Twitter: https://twitter.com/VyvEvans
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Vyvyan.Evans.Author
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nephilim_publishing/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Today on Teatime and Books I’d love to welcome, Vyvyan Evans Ph.D. We are so delighted you could join us today.
VE: Thank you for hosting me.
What or who inspired you to become an author?
VE: I first knew I wanted to be an author at the age of nine—when
I won a children’s poetry competition in a local newspaper celebrating the
UNESCO International Year of the Child. I had always devoured books as a child,
from the Roald Dahl books to C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, weaving
enchanting tales of talking animals reached through a surprisingly large
wardrobe.
And since then, that is what I set out to do via a somewhat
circuitous route. I found myself, in my early twenties, in Paris, France, with
qualifications as a teacher of English to adults of other languages. By a twist
of fate, I ended up in Florida doing a Masters degree in linguistics, and later
in Washington D.C., at Georgetown University where I completed a PhD. This led
to a research and teaching career in universities where I was able to combine
my insatiable curiosity about communication and others interact, with my desire
to communicate through writing.
My first books were technical in nature, focusing on the mechanics
of language and communication, written for other academics, before I branched
out in textbooks for students before authoring popular science books on
language and communication for lay readers.
But it was the non-fiction books in popular science, that led me
to write the Songs of the Sage book series (The Dark Court is book #2). These
books are works of science fiction exploring the nature and future of language,
in the face of humanity’s increasing reliance on AI and technology.
The Songs of the Sage books represents a natural evolution, in my
authorial life, as I continue to explore the power and significance of
language, and how it is the hallmark of what it means to be human.
What sort of research did you do to write this book?
VE: I have a background in linguistics and cognitive science, with a PhD from
Georgetown University and having worked for many years as a professor of
linguistics. In The Dark Court, and the other Songs of the Sage books, I
explore one possible future for language, if the current research trajectory on
neurotechnology continues. My prediction is that by the beginning of the next
century, the technology will exist, to enable humans, in principle, to stream language
direct to neural implants in our heads. This would mean that, in principle,
language need no longer be learned.
I find science fiction to be appealing as a genre, as it really is
an advantage to be a subject matter expert. To write convincingly, it is
important to have relevant background in the story and the ideas being
conveyed. And it seems to me that this cannot be adequately replicated without
some meaningful level of expertise.
What are you working on now? Any chance of a sequel?
VE: The Dark Court is the second book in the ‘Songs of the Sage’
sci-fi book series. There will be six books in total, which, in increasing
turns, examine the role and nature of language and communication. The thematic
premise is that, in the wrong hands, language can serve as a weapon of mass
destruction. This overarching motif is explored, across the six books, both from
Earth-bound and galaxies-wide bases.
As language involves symbol use and processing, the book series,
perhaps naturally, also dwells on other aspects of human imagination and
symbolic behavior, including religious experience and belief systems,
themselves made possible by language.
The second book in the series, The Dark Court, is set five years
after the events of the great language outage depicted in The Babel Apocalypse
(book #1). It explores how the language chips in people’s heads can themselves
be hacked, leading to a global insomnia pandemic.
Are you a pantser or a plotter? Or a mix of the two?
VE: I’m a bit of both. I plot and then pants within the outline
plot, reworking ideas many times, cutting, adding, revising. Basically, I plan,
then start writing, then change my plan! Every revision makes the story richer
and the writing better.
Which type of genre do you love most, and why?
VE: My creative writing is
best suited to science fiction, the literary genre of ideas. Science fiction
has a long and illustrious habit of predicting the future. In 1940, with his
first in the Robot series of stories, Isaac Asimov predicted some of the
ethical issues that would arise as artificial intelligence comes to have a more
pervasive influence in our daily lives.
Today in the twentieth
first century, we are on the brink of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, sometimes
dubbed 4IR. This is where automation and connectivity, via the internet, will
dramatically alter the way in which we interact with each other, as well as
everything around us, in our increasingly joined-up technological environment.
And I predict, in less than one hundred years from now, this new technology
will transform many aspects of our daily lives that we currently take for
granted, including language itself.
Indeed, in 2015, many of
the world’s leading scientists warned, in an Open Letter and accompanying
report, against the new dangers of AI, as a consequence of 4IR. This Open
Letter was issued in response to new breakthroughs in AI that, without adequate
control, might pose short and long-term existential threats to humans.
But potential dangers come
not just from the use of AI, in the sense of, for instance, The Terminator
series of movies, in which AI seeks to wage war and destroy humans. New
implantable devices, that will enhance how we as humans can interact with our
new tech-landscape, will also give rise to potential dangers. Language is,
arguably, the single trait that is the hallmark of what it is to be human. And
yet, in the near-future, language-chipped humans, or ‘transhumans’, will have
enhanced abilities that bring new opportunities, as well as posing ethical
challenges and even threats.
These challenges and
dangers are what are predicted in my science fiction books. They warn of the
dangers of humans giving up on language, quite literally having something akin
to ChatGPT in our heads. When lose language, humanity loses.
What’s your favorite novel of all time, and why?
VE: Dune by Frank Herbert. The novel is an epic that provides a
perfect balance between science fiction and fantasy. It evokes Tolkien with
attention to the history, language and culture of the story-world, while also
providing detailed and well-worked out technical descriptions of advanced
scientific concepts.
What fellow author do you recommend reading, and why?
VE: There are two authors that stand
out for me, in terms of ingeniously exploring the impact of language on how we
think and experience (illustrated through the conceit of a protagonist learning
an entirely new, and alien, language).
The first is Samuel R. Delany who
wrote the novel: Babel-17. The book was first published in 1966 and was joint
winner of the Nebula Award for best science-fiction novel in 1967.
The eponymous Babel-17 is a language
that alters the perceptions and world-view of any who speak it. This is a
conceit that draws upon the principle of linguistic relativity.
Linguistic Relativity holds that
divergence in the grammatical organization and lexical structure of the
language we speak alters the habitual perception of the world around us, even
dramatically changing how we think. As an example, we now know that the brains
of Greek speakers perceive certain colours differently from speakers of English
because of how Greek labels for colour divide up the colour spectrum. This is
an unconscious consequence of speaking Greek versus English.
In the novel, Babel-17 is the language
spoken by Invaders, as they wage an interstellar war against the Alliance. The
novel’s protagonist, Rydra Wong, is a linguist and cryptographer who possesses
a rare ability to learn languages. She is recruited by the Alliance to try and
decode the language of the invaders, Babel-17, to uncover clues for attack
vectors.
Babel-17 is an exemplar of a very
high-concept conceit. When Delany was writing the novel, linguistic relativity
was still only a hypothesis, first dubbed the Spair-Whorf hypothesis in 1954.
Delany asks a classic ‘what if’
question: What if the language we speak fundamentally changes the way we see
the world, the way we feel, our belief systems, the way we act? Babel-17 then
explores the logical, and extreme consequences of this proposition.
In the novel, as Rydra Wong learns the
strange, alien tongue, she starts to see the world, and think as the invaders
do. And the consequence is that she starts to become one of them. She
ultimately betrays her own command and her government, acting as an agent of
the Invaders.
And in this way, Delany shows that in
the context of warfare, when the notion of linguistic relativity is taken to
its logical extreme, language can serve as the most powerful weapon of all.
The second writer is Ted Chiang,
author of the novella, ‘Story of Your Life, and first published in 1998. This
story was subsequently adapted as the major motion picture: Arrival.
Again, this story features a linguist
as its main protagonist, Dr. Louise Banks. The story involves Banks narrating
the events that led to the arrival of her new-born daughter. In so doing, she
explains how her work, translating the language of the alien Heptapod species,
led her to understanding time in a new way, where she could perceive her past
and future simultaneously.
The consequence is that as learning a
new (alien) language transforms thought, the novella explores issues relating
to linguistic relativity, determinism and freewill.
When you’re not writing, how do you spend your time?
VE: I enjoy sport (running, swimming), going to music and cultural
events, and travel.
Do you listen to music when writing? If so, what type?
VE: I do. I have eclectic tastes, and what I listen to needs to
fit my mood. And the music might range from Led Zeppelin, to Mike Oldfield, to
Beethoven.
Any advice you have for a blossoming author?
VE: Keep practicing your craft. Write what you know, and research
the rest. Never give up!
Just for Fun:
Do you like tea or coffee?
VE: Coffee—we all need a boost for our creativity.
Do you have any pets?
VE: Two (very naughty) cats
What’s your favorite color?
VE: Red
What’s your favorite season?
VE: Autumn
What’s your favorite movie?
VE: Blade Runner (the original, directed by Ridley Scott).
This was so much fun! Thank you, Vyvyan Evans, for joining us. We wish you all
the best on your continued writing journey and we are looking forward to your
next book.
VE: Thank you!
GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER
CODE
Vyvyan Evans will award a randomly drawn winner paperback copies of both book 1 and book 2 on the series - a Rafflecopter giveaway
Thank you for hosting "The Dark Court" today!
ReplyDelete