Whew. That was work. Earlier today, I finished the epilogue to The Everything Machine, the big drumlins novel, which I have worked on in fits and starts (and slogs) since 2006.
The first draft is now structurally complete. It isn’t finished, exactly. I’m still rewriting much of Chapter 57, which just didn’t turn out right. And there is a lot of other work to do. The first draft now stands at 128,000 words. I’m hoping to get it down to 125,000 and probably will. That edit pass is still to come.
The idea dates back to 1997, when I got the ideas for both The Everything Machine and The Cunning Blood in one bizarre evening. I was sitting on the edge of our pool with Carol when my brain just suddenly boiled over with ideas. I was days taking notes. What I had was a whole new universe to write in and about. I had a little more concept on The Cunning Blood, so I began that novel first, under the original title No Way in Hell. A publishing colleague warned me that bookstores might not shelve a book with “hell” in the title, so I thought of The Cunning Blood and went with it. Not long thereafter, I was in our local Bookstar store (RIP) and while browsing stumbled across a book called F—k Yes! (minus the hyphens) by the unlikely Wing F. Fing. Face-out, already. So much for bookstores being afraid of the word “hell.”
That was ok; I quickly decided I liked “The Cunning Blood” as a title a whole lot more. I finished it in 1999 and tried to shop it to the big NY SF imprints, without any serious luck. (The editor of one press said, “I came real close on this” which at the time made me feel a little better.) While shopping it I wrote a novelette on the other concept called “Drumlin Boiler.” I sold that to Asimov’s SF in 2000, and it was published in April 2002.
That was about the time that Coriolis went under. I was depressed for a couple of years and didn’t write much fiction. I finally sold The Cunning Blood to a small press in 2005, and it reviewed well in several places, including Analog and Instapundit. In 2006 I started some conceptual work on a novel I called The Anything Machine. I wrote concept scenes and tried to get some momentum going, to no avail. I started Ten Gentle Opportunities about that time, which sucked up most of my creative energy for a couple of years. In 2011 I got together with my friend Jim Strickland and we did a tete-beche double novel with two short novels set on the drumlins planet, as a tribute to the legendary Ace Doubles I had grown up on in the 1960s.
I tried to get a novel-length plot together here and there in the teens, without much success. I published Ten Gentle Opprtunities in 2016, and Dreamhealer in 2020. Finally, on January 5, 2021, I created a new document and got underway. I changed the title from The Anything Machine to The Everything Machine for reasons you’ll understand once you read it. (Keep in mind that I took a year off the project to rewrite my assembly book for X64.)
I used an edited and slightly enlarged version of “Drumlin Boiiler” as the first part of the novel. It introduces the concept of the thingmakers and the drumlins they create, plus several key characters. I drew on the background work I did in Drumlin Circus in 2011, particularly the Bitspace Institute and its three ruling consuls. One consul died in Drumlin Circus, so I was left with Alvah McKinnon and David Orsi. That was enough to light a fire under the main conflict of the book, in which David Orsi goes savagely insane to the point of murdering his own people. Oh, and I threw in airships, because airships are dramatic—and burn spectacularly.
The Everything Machine is by all measure the most complex story I’ve ever told. I had had some faint hopes of writing a whole series of novels about the drumlins world, which I originally named Valinor and later changed to Valeron. (The Tolkien estate has lawyers; Doc Smith (as best I can tell) does not.) But toward the end I got a feeling I didn’t expect: Good as it was, I was getting a little tired of the drumlins concept. I’m 72 and healthy, but I’m also a realist. I don’t necessarily have another 15 or 20 years to slowly reveal the mystery of the thingmakers. So I tossed everything into the pot and across the book explain the whole shebang, with maybe just a couple of minor exceptions that might serve as hooks into future sequels, should I choose to (and are able to) write them.
Today was only the first hurdle of many. I still need to finish rewriting Chapter 57. I then need to do an intensive “continuity pass” to make sure un-shadowed foreshadowings are deleted, names of things don’t change along the way (I spelled McKinnon as MacKinnon here and there) and then timeline problems, yikes. Covers, double yikes. I know what I have to do. I’ve done it before. It will be done.
So the adventure continues. In the meantime, meditate on the number 2E256. That’s roughly the number of atoms in the observable universe. It’s also the number of things that the thingmakers can produce, given a 256-bit binary code tapped on two pillars. That’s a lot of things to make. Where do all those designs come from?
You’ll be surprised. Promise.
