Sci-Fi intros - A game called HUMAN

+ WKTH news and plans

Oct 14, 2024

Precisely 143 days remain until my next big, weird book, WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? arrives on your eBook device (if you’ve ordered it).

But we’ll get to that in a minute. Here’s the beginning of one of the stories I have been working on for it, A GAME CALLED HUMAN.

A game called HUMAN.

Slin-vek raised a cautionary tentacle before Ruunox’ bulbous head. He was floating upside-down behind her, entering the temple with all the boyish carelessness she had expected. He had spent his teenage years playing Humans, and as such had adopted some of their behaviours, some of their mannerisms, some of their stereotypes. Of course, despite this, Ruunox could never appreciate the true depths of human history like Slin-Vek could. He was simply too young to remember a world before their extinction. He could only hear stories about it, walk the memory caves, toy with old programs. The soul wall, the uploads, the needlessly ceremonial data fires, all of this was pure ornamentation, as much a part of his natural world as the trees or the oceans the humans had left behind. All of this was just something Ruunox’ larval mind accepted. He was born into a world where humans were not really beings, but things. To him they had always been things, little more than characters in a vast and all-encompassing game.

And yet their dead societies continued, zombies in the truest sense, having never realised they were dead. Ruunox had recently played the part of a Mayor, had trimmed his timeline this way and that. The Mayor was to have a heart attack in three Earth weeks which would land him in a sleek modern hospital at the same time an old college flame was completing her medical degree there. This would spark his third affair, and the first the public would hear about. Ruunox’ plan for the Mayor was to orchestrate those twinkling notes of his life in such a way as to delay the construction of a new block of apartments. Without the Mayor’s permission, the park they were to be built on would remain unexcavated, and the discovery of artefacts beneath the fertile, ancient soil would be delayed another five or six years.

Slin-vek could not remember the endgoal to this elaborate manipulation of personal worldlines, but she knew her younger brother had dedicated an unhealthy amount of his time to it. Even the most dedicated players had an emotional detachment from their humans, something Slin-vek herself had struggled to maintain in the past. She had drowned her first human at the end of its life, going so far as to give it prophetic visions of the event for years beforehand, perhaps her childish way of giving it a fighting chance to realise something wasn’t quite right before switching it off.

Ruunox had by now resumed his slow descent into the temple’s depths. With Slin-vek’s careful tentacle rested upon his hulking shoulder, the teenager moved deeper into the shadows, nervously clicking his chitinous beak. All around them the building stretched into snaking passageways, the architecture mirroring the complex interplay between the worldlines of various human characters throughout history.

END

So that’s the one I am working on this week. It’s a story in which the aliens who took over Earth in one of the stories in WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? realise that something is stirring beneath the crust of the planet.

Here’s a bit more, condensed into a tweet.

The Architects universe in WBTH is one of my favourite stories, and I didn’t plan to write a sequel to it, but here we are.

I didn’t actually plan to write sequels to any of them (aside from Stephanie’s universe, which I’d already written), both books in this series can and probably should be treated as standalones, with the links between them showing up like secret levels in video games.

You can see the aspiring game designer in me coming out through these books. The build-your-own adventure style in WBTH, and the dialogue branch style of WKTH combine to make a massive multiverse of stories that will reward re-reads, much like games did before the industry decided they should all be movies with weird platforming attempts between each scene.

My goal, as always, is to make stories more fun.

Anyway. Alien squid. Fake humans. Spears. Cave networks.

And that’s just one story.

Now, where were we?

Time.

Precisely 142 days remain until my next big, weird book, WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? (the book that above excerpt was from) arrives on your eBook device. It’s a collection of Science Fiction, Comedy, and Sci-Fi poetry that plays with the structure of a book to provide an experience that feels alive.

142 days is roughly.

12,268,800 seconds
204,480 minutes
3408 hours

Whilst not technically a sequel to WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?, it does follow on from some universes, introducing new characters whose lives get stranger with each re-read. For example, the excerpt you just read carries on from the Architects universe in WBTH, and answers some questions fans might have about that cosmos.

The comedy stories in WKTH all take place in the same universe, meaning Tin foil Tim and Rod Grasper inhabit the same space, with the same delirious rewriting of the laws of physics, the same strange aliens visiting Earth just to harvest old ladies from thrift stores as pilots.

You can expect psychic crystals, magic horses, and reincarnation jokes in WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? as well as revised and polished versions of stories which never made it into the first book, such as Menhir and March Of The Prayerphage - both of which were cut from WBTH to make room for Nori Furukawa’s huge time travel universe (which as you know has evolved into a trilogy of four books… More on that some other time).

For now, let’s talk WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?

If you pre-order it, the book will be delivered to your device on

MARCH 5, 2025

Unless you’ve not ordered it.

Which you should, because ordering it now makes it cheaper.

The current pre-order price (on Amazon) is:

$2.99

This price will not increase until the book comes out in March 2025, at which point the book will cost:

$4.99

So you can save 40% by ordering it today on Amazon.

The price will never be this low again.

Low price guarantee

When you pre-order an eBook on Amazon, you are charged the lowest listed price about a week before release. This means that if you order at $2.99, but I later drop the price to $1.99, anyone who orders the book, even right now, would only be charged that $1.99 when the book releases in March.

This protects buyers from having the prices shift under their feet.

Here’s Amazon’s explanation.

This means I can guarantee that you will get the book at the pre-order price, or potentially even cheaper (more details on that below).

Order now

Tickling the machines.

Amazon has a weird algorithm, the pulse of which is listened to by media companies to decide which new authors are worth talking about. In fact, if a pre-order doesn’t perform well, it can take weeks or even months for a book to recover, as Amazon decides it isn’t worth talking about and buries it under other books. This happened with WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? and I had to put around $500 into advertising just so people would see it again.

If I can get 1000 pre-orders for WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? then I can potentially be someone worth talking about. If the book gets more attention on release day, then Amazon’s algorithm will promote the book for me, boosting it so that more people can see it. Amazon will know that 1000 people trusted me to send them a high-quality weird Sci-Fi comedy book, and I will be rewarded with an algorithm that shows my book to the people who will appreciate it, people like you.

This is more powerful than any advert you can run, as it happens inside Amazon and cannot be brute-forced by throwing money at the ads dashboard, nor by throwing money at advertising agencies.

Basically, I really need those pre-orders. These are what keep the gears inside Amazon’s brain turning.

If WKTH is a success, any future books have a much better chance at surviving, too.

Future books include:

The Stephanie Glitch - A sci-fi novel about reincarnation
Three separate sci-fi poetry books
The Earthloop Trilogy (plus the prequel novella)
Four upcoming novellas
Three upcoming anthologies
Another anthology from a separate series

That’s 16 books, and it’s not all the books I am working on. There is also:

All the Rod Grasper comedy stories
Even more poetry books
Whatever the novel after The Stephanie Glitch is
A time travel adventure set in the same universe as Earthloop

So we’re talking 30 potential books, the successes of which are hinged upon the success of WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?

How I got here.

I have a massive backlog of sci-fi poetry from university. Somewhere in my room, all around me, are about fifty notebooks filled with somewhere near six hundred poems. Let’s say half of those are awful; I can still publish ten reasonably-sized poetry books.

And if I want to adhere to the standards of the modern instagram poet (I don’t) I could go all homeopathic with my words and splice those ten books into forty or more lopsided ‘spoken word’ albums.

Then we’ve got the sci-fi.

I wrote my first full-length science fiction novel when I was fifteen. It was 2007, one of the best years for Lego’s Bionicle line, and I was rampantly absorbing science fiction short stories from my school library and stubbornly rewriting their endings at home. This, combined with the inspiring sci-fi lyrics of David Bowie and Gary Numan, turned me into a pretty prolific teenager. I finished the second novel a year or so later.

I still have a printout of the first, located about twenty inches to my right as I type this paragraph. It was about an alien looking for more of his kind on a planet filled with countless sentient species. On his quest, he befriends a human telekinetic who was trapped in a cryopod for centuries, an aquatic warrior, and another human who has dedicated his life to figuring out how everyone got to be on that planet.

It got weird, and it was pretty well-written for a teenager’s novel.

Some of its ideas survived long enough to be reborn in WBTH, others will show up in WKTH, in totally new stories.

So I’ve been doing this a while, and I really believe that WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? is going to be the book that fuels the success of the rest.

Is an ‘instant success’ really instant?

Paperback books are now having fake stickers printed onto their covers, calling them a ‘viral sensation’ or an ‘instant tiktok favourite’ which simply is not true. It’s an illusion of media. To say a book actually becomes popular overnight is like saying the people on the TV on the property development show didn’t know the presenters were about to knock on their door.

How come there’s already a camera crew in the front room?

The success of a book relies on its audience, and audiences are smart people. You can’t 3-D print smart people in the evening before a book comes out, you have to find them in the wild. Here’s a list of where I found some of you.

In a cocktail bar above a restaurant, talking about quantum physics
On twitter, debating the trajectory of modern comedy shows
Through Bookfunnel, because you liked one of my books
At book signings, worrying about how your table looked
At my book signing, talking to me at length about robots
On Discord, in a group chat about book cover design
At university, where we considered starting a press together
In a bookshop, grumbling about boring synopses
On Twitch.Tv, where I helped you make a Minecraft machine
On my SciFi Lego instagram, where we talked about storytelling

Building this community has taken about ten years. There are people reading this newsletter who signed up yesterday, and people reading it who have followed me from my very first blog, which I think closed down in 2016. There’s even someone who read my stories in 2009, and it’s likely that I will at some point in the future collaborate with one or two writers who are reading this right now, to create a new anthology in the HalfplanetPress anthology series.

The point being, that if you all got a copy of WKTH sent to you in March 2025, that would make my book look like an instant success, but it would not be. It would be something far better, far more real. If it works, you’ll all know how it happened.

You made it happen.

So what’s in it?

The first book, WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? contained eleven universes which crossed paths as you navigated them. It was a book designed for re-reads, with its heavier stories broken down into disparate chapters so that you could comfortably read it on a train journey or whilst being bothered by a woodland creature. The result is a book that is popular among people with autism and ADHD, and which is consistently getting good reviews from clever people, even four years after publication.

That’s all I wanted; to make heavy concepts fun, and to put together a book that was pure, unrelenting entertainment. It is not enough to employ flowery language or long-winded worldbuilding, for me, a book needs to keep me wanting to turn to the next page, to swing around the next corner, to land on the next planet.

Who Killed The Humans? is going to be more of that.

Clever Sci-Fi that is accessible
Jokes about the end of the world
Time travel
World-ending mushroom trips
Comedy poems that even people who don’t like poetry will enjoy
Magic horse that poops out a scarf that prophecises the end of reality
Possibly a talking microwave (I may edit this one out)
Some more wacky names from the universe of Tin foil Tim
A Rod Grasper adventure, written by the fictional man himself
Reincarnating cats

How much time is left?

The eBook comes out on March 5th 2025.

That means that, at the time this email went out, you have approximately.

12,355,200 seconds
205,920 minutes
3432 hours
143 days
So, 20 weeks and 3 days

Rewards

As you can see from this shiny new banner, if the book gets 1000 pre-orders (that’s 4x the amount of people who usually read these posts) I will make one of my upcoming Sci-Fi novellas free as thanks.

I’d probably make WBTH free again, too, if I can.

Smart pricing?

I also want to reward anyone who talks their friend into ordering, so I’ve come up with this weird idea.

The more people order it now, the cheaper it gets.

If 500 people order before 2025, I will drop the price to $1.99

If all 1000 people order before 2025, I will drop the price to $0.99

That means you will pay that new price upon release.

Pre-order now

Note: At $2.99, I get 70% royalty from Amazon. Any cheaper, I get 35%, so in doing this I am willing to half the amount of royalties I could get from this book just to convince more people to order it. That is how important pre-orders are to this.

I am fully aware I will make a loss on any adverts I run for it at this price. I’ve accepted that. I just want this weird book to do well. I think the WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? series is the purest form of my writing that exists, and for that reason it’s the perfect introduction to what I do, what I am, what I want to be.

It’s 100% human-written literature with a soul inside it.

It’s silly, meaningful, introspective, cosmic, ridiculous, and serious all at once.

It’s me, and I want it to be successful.

I want this to be my job, so I can do more of it, so I can create more books and bookstores and workshops and anthologies and comedy shows and radio things and podcasts and poems and jokes and stories.

There are so many waiting to emerge.

So, will you give this project a chance?

Pre-order WKTH