Revisiting old friends

 This week I’ve started on re-writing an old novel.  The original is around thirty years old, and there’s no way it would work in its original form today.

The main character in that book is a starship coder creating a sentient AI,  I wrote the original before AIs really existed, and before coding became something ordinary people learned to do.  I had my coder marvelling at the wonderful sentient creature she’s created, and that just wouldn’t get a book sold today.  Today sentient AIs are commonplace in SF narratives, and authors rarely describe much about their creation.

Gareth L Powell’s Trouble Dog is a sentient warship with an organic processor.  Shes’s part-human and part-canine.  But her creation isn’t described in great detail, it’s just mentioned to explain her pack loyalty to other warships.

Becky Chambers’ Lovelace is another sentient AI installed in a starship.  This one is in love with her comp tech.  Chambers puts Lovelace into a human-type body for her second book, and we see the AI struggling with the restricted vision which being in a body gives her, and with lack of access to feeds.   Aliette de Bodard has a sentient ship AI interacting with her clients via her avatar.

All these books treat AIs as commonplace in their story worlds.  Their sentience is recognised, even if they are still discriminated against sometimes.  So when I came to re-write my old novel I knew I had to up my game.

So now my sentient AI, Tiger’s Eye, also has some organic brain matter.  And because I’m a fan of big cats, I’ve had her grown from the cells of a big cat species.  I’ve twisted it a little, making her creation illegal biotech.  The man who now owns the ship knows her background, and rescued her from destruction.

Which leads me to the other big re-vamp of the story.  My starship coder has now become a pilot with a secret.  She’s an unregistered telepath.  Shes’s also working under a false identity so that her family can’t find her and drag her home.  Her employer Hyam has his own secrets.  He also operates under a false identity.  He is running from his jealous younger brother, who has spent his lifetime trying to track Hyam down and kill him.

This theme of secrets will run all the way through the book and drive the plot.  In the original book I have five villains.  In this one I’ll have two.  That will give me a main plot and a sub plot, both driven by the characters’ secrets,  and will be far more focused than the unwieldy original.

I have a cast of characters and a setting I know well, and I’m fitting them into an updated context.  I started this rewrite deciding that I wasn’t going to worry about what the market wanted any more.  It’s never wanted anything I’ve written so far, so I’m just going to have fun with this novel and write what I want.