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saphaburnell · 9 months
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Pre-Order Char & Ash
Pre-Order the paperback via my publisher to get a signed copy and art card!
The Mystic Realms keep a tenuous peace after centuries of war. Forged into the Realms’ only Judge, demi-god Caleb Mauthisen is both peace maker and executioner of the Mystic Truce. Warrior-priest of preventing collateral damage amongst the Humans’ neutral space of Midgard. When Caleb is called to the charred remains of a scorched Sacred Grove outside Dover, rumours reignite tensions as Ares warns of war’s whisper. High Queen Selyka is hiding something in the roots and petals of her Fae Courts, and it smells of rot and ash.
Someone is burning the Groves planted from the bodies of fallen soldiers, eliminating their chance to rise again as sentient plants: Fae. Blasphemy and act of war in a single matchstick. Is the only Fae-cursed Mystic War Veteran left next in the line of fire? Tuija Draganova, immortal outcast bogatyr fights off the curse consuming her, and stands by Caleb’s side. Lives intertwined by love and shared combat.
Caught between the Mystic Truce, Ares’ demands for answers and concern for his cursed lover’s safety, Caleb descends into a roiling adventure to find the perpetrators and staunch the flow before the Mystic Realms lose faith in him and in peace. Little does he know the perpetrator Stana stole something far more precious than belief in gods and heroes.
Char & Ash is an emotional and captivating mythpunk / godpunk supernatural fantasy and the first novel in the mythic Judge of Mystics Saga.
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saphaburnell · 1 year
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CageWire...
2079. London
Demyan Anastas pulled the asymmetrical collar of his red leather jacket up the back of a shorn neck. The last of his military haircuts, he promised his reflection and the chill London wind, which whipped the ever-present rain sideways and down to moisten his t-shirt. Regardless of the moisture wicking properties of Neo-LinenTM preserving the filtered liquid in a pocket along the bottom, the emancipated man shivered and rounded a side street to the curve and bustle of Piccadilly Circus. 
Gritty holograms spackled between triangulated mirrors & unwashed lenses combated ultrabright neon emblazoned in a cacophony of colour. Ceruleans and emeralds, electric purples swept into magentas so bright his eyes stung and he grabbed for the mirrored comp-glass kept in a thumbprint-locked pocket. The lens of the glasses dimmed enough light to compensate for the explosions of pigmentation, without casting the rest of the world into a dismal shadow. 
A timestamp in the lower left corner counted down in ancient cyrillic numbers, the temperature in the top left, flashes of yellows, oranges and reds alerted Demyan to potential camera angles or stray selfie shots. He searched for a blind spot, a place to wait out the contact. 
Piccadilly was a visual vaporwave sonata catching up to the boom and thunder imprinted in the rubble of Demyan's memories. One hidden earbud buzzed in coded pings to indicate whether he was following the city schematics loaded into his pocket deck. Why here, in Picadilly? 
See where Demyan ends up on his first night in London in the CageWire short story in Future’s Lens.
Want a signed copy? There will be a limited supply of signed paperbacks available, info soon. Want to tide you over? The ebook is live.
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saphaburnell · 2 years
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Contain This! Container Shipment Fundraiser for the Ukraine
Bring on the coffee, tea and energy drinks, my Beautiful Machines! It’s time for a 24 hour fundraising stream!
Compassionate Resource Warehouse is a Canadian charity Vræyda Media Inc (my publisher & employer) worked with personally. We filmed videos for Compassionate Resource Warehouse in the past. They are a charity I trust with every nickel, dime and gold crown, and I know every ounce of the donated funds will go directly to the crises wherever in the world they are.
CRW is fundraising to send two shipments of medical & humanitarian supplies to Poland, in order to help refugees from the Ukraine. I want in on that. As a community, I know we can do fantastic things, and every bit, cheer or dollar can be a gigantic help to volunteer-led charities like CRW.
On March 22nd, we’re banding together as beautiful machines, for a full day of live readings, art, games, video games & music. We aim to entertain, and through that entertainment, raise funds for those containers.
We are mighty and beautiful.
We can and will view the world with compassion, grace and a helping hand. I hope to see all of you on the 22nd.
Vræyda Media Inc has also stepped up. Any purchase made from vraeydamedia.ca will have partial proceeds donated to Compassionate Resource Warehouse. Pick up back-issue or current copies of MacroMicroCosm Literary Journal, or any of Vræyda Literary’s books or pre-orders, and you not only get something amazing to read, but you know it directly helped others. To combine with this, all orders of any of my books from vraeydamedia.ca will come with a signed card & message from yours truly.
If you would like to donate directly to Compassionate Resource Warehouse, please visit their website & make sure you designate your donations to ‘Ukrainian Refugees’.
Featured Streamers (Seeking more Streamers):
Donation Perks (Seeking Perks):
Donate on the day of, or show proof of donation to CRW, and you can receive the following perks! If you are a streamer, or creator and want to donate items, downloads or services to the event, please contact Sapha directly.
$2
A back-issue digital copy of MacroMicroCosm Literary Journal.
$5
An .epub or .pdf copy of NEON Lieben or Son of Abel.
$10
A personal thank you message & the above.
TBD
$100
A personal live reading evening (either in person if donated within Southern British Columbia, or virtual via discord/twitch/youtube/zoom elsewhere) with Sapha Burnell
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saphaburnell · 2 years
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Sapha After Sunset: Mature Only Workshop Stream
Once a month, our weekly Tuesday Workshop stream takes a short break, then comes back as Mature Only.
Sapha After Sunset lets us discuss themes for mature audiences, with literature meant for the adults in the room. Come join us on Twitch. If you have work you want to have looked at, please sign up on the spreadsheet at the button below.
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saphaburnell · 2 years
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The Magdalene Feast Reading Series: December 2021
Inspired by the life and myths surrounding Mary Magdalene, cyberpunk author & poet Sapha Burnell hosts a monthly reading series via YouTube & Twitch on the last weekend of every month dedicated to the feminine and the strange.
This December, we’re featuring Łukasz Drobnik and his English-language debut novel Vostok, Sapha Burnell with NEON Lieben & another author for an hour of readings, discussion & celebration of the strange!
About Łukasz Drobnik
Łukasz Drobnik is a genre-bending Polish writer. His favourite pastime is taking the literary and blending it with the speculative. As a huge flash fiction fan, he loves the succinct but doesn’t shy away from longer forms. He’s the author of a collection of interlinked stories /Nocturine/ (Fathom Books). His prose has been featured, among others, in HAD, Fractured Lit, Atticus Review, Pithead Chapel, Lighthouse, Foglifter, and X‑R‑A‑Y Literary Magazine. One of his stories made the Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions longlist. He lives in Kraków, a city of pigeons, smog, and the best zapiekankas on earth.
About Sapha Burnell
“Sapha is like a young Wolfgang Pauli, in every laboratory he went, there was a little explosion.” David Roomy
Sapha Burnell teethed on images of the Berlin Wall falling down. The product of Vancouver’s multiculturalism, Sapha steeped in divergent cultures, religious experiences and gender roles, until battling with traditional opinions became a daily war. On hiatus from the written word, she volunteered in West Africa, and returned to Canada with an international perspective.
Sapha’s 2014 debut poetry collection Usurper Kings was viewed by Huffington Post author & poet Kevin Hogan as “a work of jaw-droppingly beautiful discovery”, the magic realism novella Son of Abel (first of the Judge of Mystics Saga) was published in 2017 to inspect the rich mythological tapestry of our world. And what happens when a Leprechaun gets lost in Vancouver without a Bus Pass. Serving on the National Council of The Writers Union of Canada for three years, Sapha’s term concluded May 2019.
The first novel in her cyberpunk series Neon Lieben hit August 2021, and has been called “a hauntingly beautiful work”.
RL Arenz III, author of Aegis defines Sapha’s style with his signature aplomb. “What she manages to do is tiptoe you on that line of emotional, gut wrenching scenes which can bring you to the brink of hysteria. And with a sentence from a character she offers that breath of humour that pulls you back from the brink. Then dropkicks you over the ledge when you thought you were safe. An insane, diabolical, kick-ass rollercoaster.”
Sapha lives in BC with their spouse and speaks on gender roles, cyberpunk, martial arts, comparative mythology & religion, when the #hallowesfam isn’t chatting it up on discord or twitch.
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saphaburnell · 2 years
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Twitch Writers Network: Open Mic
Come out to Twitch & Discord for an afternoon of live readings from writers & authors from the Twitch Writers Network!
I’ll be there reading from my latest, cyberpunk sci-fi novel Neon Lieben.
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saphaburnell · 2 years
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Twitch Writers Network: Open Mic
Come out to Twitch & Discord for an afternoon of live readings from writers & authors from the Twitch Writers Network!
I’ll be there reading from my latest, cyberpunk sci-fi novel Neon Lieben.
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saphaburnell · 2 years
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Artificial Artistry: The Next Rembrandt
Brown eyes stare from a pale, near eyebrow-less face. The scratch of a blond moustache. A dutch ruff with lazy pleats in white and cream paint, fragments of ‘lace’ peek from brush strokes muted in layers. The canvas behind, a dull taupe-grey, looks artificial. So does the lace. As I stare at The Next Rembrandt, I can’t help picking out those smoothed strokes, which seem utter artifice upon closer inspection of one who dabbles in oil painting, from behind the safety of my computer screen.
The Next Rembrandt is an absolute masterpiece.
Engineers, software designers and artificial intelligence experts collaborated with ING, Microsoft, TU Delft and Mauritshuis to create an artificially intelligent ‘artist ghost’, Rembrandt centuries after his death. The limited AI plucked and picked at his life’s work, emptied every sworl, stroke, portrait and painting until it deconstructed the elements of Rembrandt down to the artistic quark. Machine learning algorithms broke Rembrandt’s career down to most prevalent subject matter, median lines of skin tone, clothing style, expression. Down further, into the intimate and microscopic ridges of paint layers and their vertices, chemical make-up of the paint applied and how that reflected in the tones and colours.
The limited AI “distilled the artistic DNA from his work” (nextrembrandt.com), with aid from its’ human team of researchers, who pared down to Rembrandt’s most prevalent type of painting, that of “a portrait of a Caucasian male with facial hair, between the ages of thirty and forty, wearing black clothes with a white collar and a hat, facing to the right” (nextrembrandt.com). With the guidelines of the human caretakers in place, the machine could compile and 3D print its’ magnum opus.
When I first saw The Next Rembrandt project, it brought me back to the excitement of writing science fiction. In NEON Lieben, we have the foundations for what future books in the Lieben Cycle call ‘International Treasures’. People whose craft, talents or arts were too important to lose, and thus were brought back again and again. In my manuscripts, cloning and genetic memory handle the transference of skill and knowledge. This idea is spawned in its’ infancy in NEON Lieben and developed by Isle of Noises (Book 3, in development).
It would be such a simple switch, to turn genetic knowledge into a virtual genome, a set of algorithms and patterns, which approximate the touch and feel of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway. Creators, whose lives were cut short could continue that half-constructed masterpiece, steady in variation. What would it be like to have several portraits, potential reconstructions grown by computers purpose built to endure past artist’s lifetimes? Could artists work with limited AI to develop their algorithms, pass the torch of their continued work a century or more after they were gone?  Who would own the copyright of such works, the engineers and programmers of the algorithmic machine, or the artist’s estate who inspired it?
As Rutger University’s AICAN generates art, it filters past art history to extrapolate a future progression via increased output of abstraction. Art naturally through human history ventures from totemic, to figurative realism, to abstraction in a similar method to a child’s burgeoning creativity. The search for accuracy, for realism in one’s art often leads away from perfection toward greater levels of abstraction as one continues on. I wonder how much of Artificial Intelligence created art will push past our current state and human limitations, to create art for itself, for other AI? Do we take the advance of such artistic pieces as a nouveau gospel?
The inevitability of humanity’s artistic progression, or one interpretation amongst many?
My mind skips past hazy, disjointed non-faces in portraits painted via algorithm back to The Next Rembrandt. His eyes are vivid because he has basis within the artistic integrity of a pre-existing human influence. Until we teach our machines to attach, to recognize emotion within us and thus the shadow of such within themselves, I don’t believe computer generated art will take over more from the perspective of nostalgia than aesthetics. Yes, narrow AI now can create aesthetically pleasing images, but art is interpretation as much as implementation. Interpretation is for now, inherently human, as is financial value.
But the idea of holding onto someone’s electronic ghost fascinates me. It coils into my fiction-work and digs deep into what Lieben can achieve with her Havens and International Treasures. But who chooses which people deserve such immortality? Does time? Expense? Privilege?
Does an algorithmic intellect choose, based on the same extrapolations as La Famille de Belamy as interpreted by GAN? Either way, I look forward to inspecting the lace 3D printed into the ruffs.
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saphaburnell · 2 years
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Virtual Live Reading with Ravens & Roses
I'm stoked to be working with Confessions of a Writerholic Discord server to do an hour long live reading of NEON Lieben this Thursday, 3pm PST! We’ll be going through a few readings from NEON Lieben and having fun doing it.
I believe afterwards the reading will be available on various social media platforms.
About Neon Lieben
AI meets gene-splicers, when the Idless & the Conglom fight to define Lieben and thus, the world. Seven decades later, Aderastos sets the human race against its’ next stage in evolution, if he can survive long enough to rescue his fellows, and Max. Two interconnected storylines intersect. Will Lieben help, or hinder? Find out in Sapha’s new cyberpunk adventure.
The Server: https://discord.gg/JX6NcdVE
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saphaburnell · 3 years
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Dragons and Shapeshifting Trees: Character Builds in Sci-Fi
"Cillian stepped out of the shade of the ship, the expendable raptor sniffed at salt and seaweed and petrol and bone. Pale skin shone in the dim sun, stippled of shadow and light. Freckles yet to form. Texture like dinosaur skin dotted along the bare arms shown by sleeves rolled to the elbows like Letopaxa. His chest heaved, eyes shut to see the pale sun shined red beyond his eyelids. Rachel’s draconic form loped beside him, the chitinous scales of her back and body tingled in the faded dawn. Elongating, Rachel pushed up on her hind legs, and slowly, with the dawn and well of sensation Cillian consumed, took the form Aderastos knew she feared most. Bi-pedal, humanoid-limbed. Her scales retreated to create a form of armour along her body like clothes. Rachel’s hair swung back and forth as a dragon’s tail, silver skin caught and reflected the light. Her arms twined around Cillian’s ribcage. “I can’t go back inside.”"  -- NEON Lieben by Sapha Burnell
When I was musing on the Assets in NEON Lieben, the world of genetic engineering opened to an overactive imagination. What sorts of creatures would genetic scientists create, if a sentient artificial intelligence in the shape of a feminine android de-weaponized the human race? Welcome to the premise of the Lieben Cycle.
No missiles, no drones, no planes with automated weapons systems. Robot soldiers walked en masse off the killing fields and set their weapons to slag. Nothing more advanced than a firearm, a stick and blade. What collection of humanity would accept the Mama Machine’s hand over their toys, like a stern hausfrau, without fighting back? In the tenuous truce created by Lieben’s Haven Epoch, the Conglomerate dove into gene-splicing to create biological machines. Where else could their intellects and ingenuity take them, but the realms of biological engineering?
What would I get, when I mixed wolf DNA with a velociraptor? Cillian stands in the sun for the first time, humanoid but other. The scale of his skin similar but alien. Rachel shifts from the reptilian and draconic to the humanoid. Both built from similar DNA strains, clipped and sutured by design.
The mystery is the strain of humanity in the machine, when we build upon nature, how much of the old strains push through? As an author, how far can I pull that chord between human and inhuman, between a biological machine and the shaken man, who can’t voluntarily venture back inside?
Prior to the Global Situation, NEON Lieben was meant to launch in 2020. The Launch is August 22nd, 2021.
The human condition’s play between accepting grace and fighting for control drives the Conglomerate to maneuver past the kibosh on technological weaponry by creating genetically modified organisms as profound as Rachel’s draconic shapeshift and the raptor-wolf Pack. But, as geneticists are learning today, genetic manipulation does not equate to pure input-output. The genes might be spliced together, but their expression lies beyond the skeleton of genetic code. Genetics and Epigenetics together require investigation, when we are taking further steps into building bespoke beings.
We can build genomes and modify extraordinary things with technology like CRISPR, but the interpretation of said genes remains firmly within the burgeoning science of epigenetics. How a series of genes are expressed is often through heritable changes, or DNA methylation instead of the base sequence. Nurture matters. Regardless of the DNA laid down, the theories behind epigenetics correlate one’s heredity, the influence of past generations and the conditions of their early experiences on the cells in the parent organism.
"Epigenetic processes are particularly important in early life when cells are first receiving the instructions that will dictate their future development and specialization. These processes can also be initiated or disrupted by environmental factors, such as diet, stress, aging, and pollutants. In 2005, a team of Italian researchers provided the first concrete evidence for the role of environmental epigenetics in explaining why twins with the same genetic background can have vastly different disease susceptibilities.1 The researchers showed that, at birth, pairs of identical twins have similar epigenetic patterns, including DNA methylation and histone modifications. However, over time, the epigenetic patterns of individuals become different, even in twins. Since identical twins are the same genetically, the differences are thought to result from a combination of different environmental influences that each individual experiences over a lifetime."  -- National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
To me, this epigenetic powder keg is the true explosive within the genetic revolution. As much as we edit, our previous generations continue an influence on future iterations of organisms. It’s a fascination of mine to study whether circumstances are caused by genetic factors, or the more likely epigenetic. Where does that take a character created from genetic offal?
For NEON Lieben, it meant an investigation into genetic memory, instinct and the expression of the geneticists’ wonder at potential outcomes. The character Dr. Phil Rykstra is the representative of this struggle in the book, and he was both fun and uncomfortable to write in equal measure. How far do we go from an ethical standpoint into the furrowed brows of genetic engineering for war’s sake? For humanity’s sake? Will we eventually lose ourselves in Homo Augmentum, the way the Neanderthals lost their dominance?
As an author, I feel such real-world quandaries are necessary to drive the authenticity of a work of science fiction. While sci-fi can exchange ‘quantum’ for ‘magic’ and hand-wave a female shapeshifting tree into being, if there is a solid basis for extrapolation, it strengthens the work. Using the constraints of ‘plausibility’, while potentially awkward, allows most readers to relax into the beauty of our collectively presented imaginations.
And when the biological machines do ascend upon us, how much of their development will hearken back to the generations before, carried over like baggage in a train car? Ultimately, I hope if you want to see this exploration in detail, you read NEON Lieben.
"“By Einstein’s shaggy topknot…” Phil plunked down on a chair on the Bridge and stared.It was enough to pull Rammage’s eyes off the being currently running laps like Jesus and stare back at the scientist. “How much of this is news to you, Doctor? You helped design these freaks of nature, why the fuck are you surprised at what they can do?” A shrill thread of pure worry sewed through his spinal column at the idea, the sheer thought. Twelve bio engineered mechanisms were beyond. Beyond the cognizance of the scientific team who built them. Beyond the infinite imagination of the human organism. Beyond control. When it came time to snuff them out, Rammage worried that too was beyond."  -- NEON Lieben by Sapha Burnell
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saphaburnell · 3 years
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Quantum Unicorns, A Plea: Rarity of Quantum Mechanics in Science Fiction
An article I wrote on Medium
‘Quantum’. A buzz-word for ages, ‘quantum’ powered the Orville’s engines, became the bedrock of instantaneous communication and filled the gap of magic in a scientific or futurist setting. Don’t know how something works? Call it a quantum device. Need a word for plausibility? Try quantum. Quantum fiction, a phrase coined in 1996 by Vanna Bonta, reinforces the concept of the quantum realm acting as a form of conduit, or techno-magic in science fiction.
The quantum realm remains elusive as the medieval Unicorn [who] Rests in the Garden from the Unicorn Tapestries. We might build a gate around the idea of quantum mechanics from our modern vantage point. As the perspective of The Unicorn Tapestries is skewed, so too is our infantile acknowledgements of what precisely, quantum mechanics can solve. We further skew the quantum realm by our ‘anything goes’ attitude as authors and creators.
But what is it?
Quantum mechanics functions with the microcosmic, where classical Newtonian Laws are insufficient. It’s an issue in scale, take two girders holding up a building’s ceiling, and as long as the girders are proportionally sturdy to the force of the materials pressing down the ceiling, the building stands. We can scale that down, and down, but once we reach the quantum scale of atoms and subatomic particles, the rule no longer applies. This uncertainty pairs with objects characterized as both waves and particles, and the quantization of measures to create something most of us don’t understand… and the people who do, if honest, don’t understand quantum mechanics completely, either. There’s so much to learn the potential maintains the source of magic.
When writing NEON Lieben, the idea behind a general artificial intelligence created in tandem with a quantum computer seemed as magical as the above trapped unicorn. Through the development time in NEON Lieben (eight years to write, edit and be bound before you in paperback, hardcover or ebook), the practically magical quality of quantum computing became bathed in a more feasible set of functions. If we could anchor the data from the quantum realm, the sheer amount of computing which can be done is legendary. Earth-shattering. The fantasy in the build comes with Lieben’s general AI personality. The beauty in the machine.
Quantum states were as much about faith as hard equations, their usefulness a paltry concern without the belief in their sovereignty. Superposition, the state of yes and no and, confounded scientists for decades in a theoretical springboard of strings and inter-dimensions he couldn’t fathom until…
Until, the Holy Until.
The moment the box opened and shut to any semblance of a normal life. A system in one quantum state, with the possibility of multiple configurations was definite and supposed. The complexity of a system created superpositions, until Dieter saw no separation between concept and function. All choices in simultaneous chorus, until a solo emerged in potential.
As a man was father, lover, scientist, worker, driver, cook, desperate and sated simultaneously, the anchoring of such potentials did not require an elimination of any one part. Father, lover, murderer, scientist, war hero, worker drone, grief, consolation, satiation, desperation.
The key to ensuring the human race betrayed its’ constant attempts to species suicide lied not in an infant Christ, or the chant of a mantra thousands of years removed from the man who saw suffering in the street.
The future of the human race relied on its integration with quantum superimposed intelligence so vast and holy it saw and it understood, and it loved. Simultaneous, all and naught. Separated but integrated as a light on the hilltop or salt in the hand.
NEON Lieben by Sapha Burnell
Science fiction can deke across potentialities of soft and hard science in its’ execution, and the link between the two needs to be a functional, and whimsical part of scientific fact. If we as authors use something still un-knowable, elusive, science fiction is as analogous as fantasy. Quantum becomes the word for magic, a hand waved at the sincere potentialities of the barely explored realm of quantum mechanics as we understand it now.  But should we put quantum in front of something, for the illusion’s sake?
Yesterday, I passed a van advertising Quantum Roofing. I’d rather my roof followed Classical Physics on such a macro scale, thanks! Uncertainty and Shrödinger-shingles during the Vancouver rains don’t give me confidence in a new quantum roof, without carrying an umbrella inside for those ‘teleporting’ raindrops. So too, some uses of the concept ‘quantum’ seem misplaced.
But for NEON Lieben, the idea of decoherence and superposition fascinated and drove the fiction. What if a brilliant but tortured scientist discovered a practical way of grounding data from the quantum realm of superposition and anchor it in a way to engage with it in the natural, vastly newtonian, world? It’s that battle against decoherence, the fight against fracturing unity which drives NEON Lieben’s complex character interactions, and Lieben’s artificial life.
Purpose in the quantum machine.
To my fellow authors, I implore you, do use quantum mechanics in your prose, but do so with at least plausible validity before the word ‘quantum’ is lost in the meaningless mire of the ‘over abundant, under-defined’. Our quantum unicorns (to coin a concept from Madeleine L’Engle) flicker in and out of believability with every strike of key and dash or dot on the page.
Soon, quantum could be jack-knived into the same vocabulary wasteland as ‘just, really, very, like, seems, actually, to be honest, cool, neat, actual fact, however… had…’. Functional words once, which lost all effect in their overabundance in our prose (and for me, the catch of conversation). If the use of ‘quantum’ in your world-build could be replaced with ‘magic’ with no less oblige, perhaps another dive into the science behind the sci-fi. After all, how many more unicorns can we wrangle?
Meet you on the one side. Meet you on the zero side.  Meet you on the 0/1/ side.
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saphaburnell · 3 years
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NEON Lieben Virtual Launch Party
THE NOVEL IS HERE.
NEON Lieben is out in the world today and I am one proud author.
If you can, please join us on Twitch & Discord for the launch party starting at:
Twitch.tv/Usurperkings
4pm PST
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saphaburnell · 3 years
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NEON Lieben: Preface
NEON Lieben originated from a deep love for three fundamentals.  
One. Star Trek: The Next Generation, which my grandmother turned on, because the TV Guide mentioned a story about a boy named Wesley (Will Wheaton), whose mother was a doctor on a ship. In her innocence, Grandma thought it would be a nice story for my wild-child brother to see a well behaved boy, with a mother in the same trade. It didn’t matter our Mum was a nurse, a single parent in the medical field was enough. We became firm sci-fi tv absorbers, much to Grandma’s future chagrin. I fell in love with Data (Brent Spiner), in the way a seven year old who couldn’t remember her father’s face looked up to a distant influence. Star Trek: TNG became the bedrock of sci-fi. Followed avidly by DS9, with its grit (Sisco punches Q) and the Federation at war. 
Two. In the summer before grade 12, I and a gaggle of other keen English students at our academy decided sacrificing a few weeks of summer was worth being in Mr. Rauser’s last English 12 class, before he moved away. We spent hours in a deep dive of sci-fi. Studied Amadeus, Blade Runner and AI: Artificial Intelligence on the large tube television wheeled into class on a matte black cart. The day we read Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson and discussed Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick, my eyes opened. Those short stories were the apple on my Edenic tree, and with a firm crunch between my teeth, I knew science fiction was the blood in my veins. Prior to this, my education included the usual children’s classics. The Chronicles of Narnia, Where the Red Ferns Grow, a healthy dose of Shakespeare and Zone en Français. At the end, he handed me a dogeared copy of Count Zero by William Gibson, with a word about how much he thought I’d dig it.  
William Gibson is my favourite author to this day.  
The last lifelong influence is the Spiritual Machines album by Our Lady Peace. As young teens, my older brother and I kept our musical tastes hidden from well-meaning but strict Christian grandparents & our Mum. No rock, but a ‘be careful little ears what you hear’ whenever the music got too far away from Southern Gospel or ‘but Mum it’s Christian I promise, see? They’re singing about God’. When my brother got his driver’s license, our world opened drastically. On the drive to school, there was Metallica, Live, Matthew Good Band. And Our Lady Peace. Clumsy was the first song I heard, or maybe it was Naveed, but Clumsy and Superman’s Dead were the ones I remember prior to Spiritual Machines. Our greatest fear was forgetting to take the CD out of the player in Mum’s car, lest we get a firm tongue lashing and another whispered ‘be careful little ears what you hear’. What I heard was the transcendence of artificial intelligence, the ability to turn ‘pulp’ into literature. A sci-fi image into high art.  In university, I’d sit in my car listening to the entire album, usually with a theatre major in the passenger seat or sprawled out in the back. We’d watch the massive old growth trees beside the arts building sway as Raine Maida sang. Can artifice become sapient? Is everything going to be alright?  
In Repair remains one of my favourite songs in the history of music. It lives beside Henry Purcell, David Bowie, JS Bach, Matthew Good, Soen & Fleshgod Apocalypse.  
Without these influences over my formative years, I would be a proponent of ‘literary fiction’. Realism-drowned narratives. Poetry based on the sorts of poets you learn about if you get off the ‘regular path’ and dive into academics as a life’s pursuit. Science Fiction ruined me. Taught me to dive not into the allusions of an 18th Century poet with myriad well-read connections, but to square up and take a punch into quantum computing, artificial intelligence, epigenetics versus genetics (what happens when you mix lupine DNA with a velociraptor) wrapped in neon signs and purple hair.  
I became the wild one. The untamed child of a straight-laced family, too much like that father I heard about but never saw growing up. The one who holds a PS4 controller and talks the birth of sci-fi, while pondering the last scene. The one with the guns in white plastic tunnels. I did not take a tumble down the perfectly respectable Shakespearean rabbit hole to an academic wonderland filled with Aphra Behn and discussions on James Joyce. I could have, the foundations were built for that house, too. I quite loved performing Shakespeare, Beatrice was my favourite role.  There is nothing wrong with academia. I learned I was too wild for it, too much like the Fastidious Horses in Vysotsky’s rumbling soviet song. I could dive into the academic side of sci-fi, argue the value of artifice and imagination to teach readers to view their current world in a different light. 
Instead I dove frenetic and untamed into the Sprawl, swinging a mean left hook. Broke above the console cowboys of the Matrix. Watched electric dreams and learned what faster-than-light travel meant when you captained the Starship Enterprise. All in, NEON Lieben is an expression of these myriad influences. Of Jungian archetypes and a vivid imagination strong enough in physics to dip my toe into the realm of quantum computing (with help from my intelligent friend, who has degrees in the stuff). It’s an inspection to the spiritual foundation of my younger days, of practices and meditations on the Sefirot, I and my spouse steep into our home.  
Two stories intertwine. GMO soldier Aderastos discovers humanity and little harmless Max Allard has to bring AD-001 back before the ubiquitous ‘all’ is lost. The grieving scientist 70 years prior, who built an android to combat the death gnawing at his heartstrings. The path to artificial sapience lies not in a fleet of work-saving robots, but a group of anarchists who refuse labels with religious aplomb.  
I finished what I thought was the first novel of this series 8 years ago. Handed it to my editor (who was working on Son of Abel) and she nodded, paused, hummed, and came back in a couple of weeks to smack me upside the head and say ‘write the first one first’. Hedonism Wholesale Inc remains in the vault, and Teagan was right.  
Any good science fiction piece requires an origin point. A Genesis Machine to ground the future stories within a world uniquely of our own designs.  Welcome to my origin story. The birthplace of Aderastos, Max Allard and the Android Queen who called herself Mother sometime between creation and the day Aderastos washed up on the shore of Ucluelet’s Carolina Sound.
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saphaburnell · 3 years
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Ridicule the Strangeness: A musing on Hildegaard
"Now I deliberately hid the difference in me, away from the eyes of men in the outer world who might guess, intrude, and ridicule the strangeness in me. Then, for a while, its silence became shaming, and I began to seek it only in the times just before and after the offices and the singing of the Mass, when the sound of the chant would lend its own auditory beauty, clarity and spiritual power to bring my silent world into liturgical time."  -- The Journal of Hildegaard von Bingen by Barbara Lachman
Reading Hildegaard’s journals, as imagined by Barbara Lachman, my silenced shames seem pedantic. Elementary, or non-essential. A woman in Twelfth Century Germany receiving visions clung to, as if they were a hidden second blood pumping through her heart. Theorists wonder at whether she suffered from migraines or synesthesia as a cause, but Hildegaard knew her strangeness. For Hildegaard, in the powerless garb and form of a woman, she lived on the good graces of the Catholic Church and the patriarchs enrobed within. Too vocal a woman, too obscene or outside the veil, would she be seen as a demonic influence? A heretic thrown from every security she’s known? What possible complaint could I possess, born and raised in North America’s 20th & 21st Centuries?
My childhood world was one of constant daydreaming, imaginative plays in my inner world until Gran huffed and inevitably told me to stop pretending. Stop being so dramatic. There seemed an eternal veil between my widened eyes and compatriot children in class, a veil which remained outside junior academics. The disconnect between a wealthy imaginative life and the realities of a society built to create harmonic, everyday life tore at my soul like clothes, which never fit. Sweater sets bought by a mother, who dressed me like her, jeans fought for in younger days, t-shirts instead of blouses. I could and did put on the appropriate attire for the occasion, suits and suit dresses, skirts, kilts, uniforms.
I hid and reacted to reality as if from behind fractured glass, distorted and astounding. Like Hildegaard, I feared ridicule of my strangeness. Covered my creativity and gender fluidity in a self-shamed silence until it took more years to write a book like NEON Lieben than all its’ predecessors waiting their turn. Perhaps NEON Lieben is too revelatory of my inner complications, of characters who are villain, hero, faulty people in mind-bending situations constantly seeking redefinition.
Now, purple and pink hair, a masculine cut to my suits and open authorship, the shames and traumas of the past need to crumble. How can one both hide in shame of their non-traditional self, and encourage others to read a book, which also struggles with like identities? As Lieben discovers her sense of independent self, so may I. As Fester’s body shifts from the shame of boyhood to the glory of her rightful female self, so may I stand in androgyny and be blessed. As the Assets Kate, Clive, Arun choose their gender like clothes, so may I relish the fluidity of gender’s concepts and allow the shame of silence to shift in an ever present hope beyond Hildegaard’s ‘liturgical time’.
Yet, the freedom to choose one’s representation of gender is still not sacred. Women are not equals, people within the LGBTQA community are not free in all places in this world. The microcosm I grew up in was not accommodating to gender identity crises beyond the power of prayer to ‘fix’ one, or the promised joys of marriage, babies and a quiet life. I kept silent, let the cause of my shame be covered over with bizarre, but lonely behaviours. Words, which shouted, locked behind silence.
Hildegaard’s strangeness brought her through history, a woman who commanded her presence (within the patriarchy) and eventually allowed her strangeness to drive generations of spiritual seekers. Be my muse, Hildegaard. Attack me with the reversion of silence, to allow our strangeness no shame.
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saphaburnell · 3 years
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NEON Lieben Book Trailer #1
A month from NEON Lieben’s release, I’ve held the books in my hands. Flipped pages on my Author’s Copies. Reviews haven’t hit yet, and I wait in trepidation for the tidal pull of stars on sites. Questions in my head. Will they ‘get it’? Is NEON Lieben too niche an audience?
Who wants cyberpunk science fiction, with an android who decides the world needs a Mom?
Last chance… this just got real.
2085. Dr. Karnak & Baiko’s beloved android Lieben is in danger of becoming mother of the Conglomerate’s artificial slave race. With the Chairman’s assassin Tara’s sights on them, Baiko steals the secret to Lieben’s artificial intelligence and runs to the Idless, anti-label anarchists, who believe Lieben is the key to free the world. Will Baiko get to Lieben in time, or will Tara?
2155. Accidentally awakened gene-spliced bio-machine Aderastos wades to shore in Ucluelet, BC to the hum of the Mater Machine Lieben’s Hymn Electric. Harmless Lt. Max Allard is tasked to drag him back to the CGM Ithavoll, before Lieben claims ‘it’ for her own, and Aderastos’ fellow Assets are destroyed.
AI meets gene-splicers, when the Idless & the Conglom fight to define artificially intelligent android Lieben and thus, the world. Seven decades later, Aderastos sets the human race against its’ next stage in evolution, if he can survive long enough to rescue his fellows. Two interconnected storylines intersect. Will Lieben help, or hinder?
‘Come at your leisure. My love is free. My abundance is yours.'
NEON Lieben will be available for purchase in print and ebook formats upon its official release.
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saphaburnell · 3 years
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Praise for NEON Lieben from RL Arenz III
She will rip your heart out, but then give you chest compressions and chocolates.
What she manages to do is tiptoe you on that line of emotional, gut wrenching scenes that can bring you to the brink of hysteria. And with a sentence from a character she offers that breath of humour that pulls you back from the brink.
Then dropkicks you over the ledge when you thought you were safe. An insane, diabolical, kick-ass rollercoaster.
RL Arenz III…
… is the author of Aegis, a superheroic adventure. Some heroes shatter. Few rebuild. Watch Kyle “Aegis” Ross rebuild his fractured shield in Aegis.
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saphaburnell · 3 years
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NEON Lieben Hardcover Art!
Full credit to Marissa Wagner at Vræyda Literary for the cover art design.
From the colour palette to the perspective pull pitching me both toward and away from the ghostly plastic-shrouded women, this cover gives me massive feels.
NEON Lieben feels, and maybe moreso than the paperback and eBook cover, this art inspects the sensations of womanhood trapped behind artificial barriers. Where the paperback cover is one of artifice in mid-genesis, the hardcover visually represents the women in the novel, who act within their power despite repressive circumstance.
Baiko, the intern who holds Dr. Karnak’s vision in her heart, and escapes to continue his work.
Mog, a mother who rolls up her sleeves to keep the others round her focused on their duties, even as she sacrifices and brings distance.
Fester, whose transition is celebrated by her lovers. Whose discovery of womanhood may be different than Mog’s, but has parallel value and place.
Adelia, who uses craft and ingenuity to keep the Retreat together in dangerous times.
KT-002, who chooses the name Kate and a woman’s body after acting to free her fellows locked in the bowels of the ship.
and Lieben, the android created by Dr. Karnak’s disgust at death, who rises out of her transparent prison to eventually become Queen and Mater of us all.
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