I have completed my latest novel...

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I have completed my fourth novel, which is the sequel (and hopefully the first of many) to my second novel that I have written.

Congratulations! May the public be generous with its praise. Its money, too.

Hopefully. I'm waiting to get it published until after I finish my Masters thesis.

You just don't strike me as the type to write a novel, Quatermass. Don't take this the wrong way, but are there many torture scenes?

Anyway, congratulations on completing it. Are the others published? Can we get one from Amazon?

No. There is a particularly nasty death, and allusions to what one (extremely unpleasant) character had done, but no torture scenes. Unless you count emotional torture. I killed off one of the main characters in a rather heartbreaking way. It's a more heartbreaking novel than the previous one in the series, because the death toll hits so closely to the main characters. It's a bit like if the Star Trek: TNG episode "Skin of Evil" involved not only Tasha Yar's death, but also Riker's and Troi's. And a few redshirts.

And there are only two ways that you could be implying, ascan. Both of them wrong. I don't know how I could take such a comment the right way.

In any case, this novel is a post-apocalyptic story. One where humanity is surviving massive global flooding (although it's less like Waterworld than you'd think, I've made the resultant sea levels far more realistic, so that a good chunk of land mass still sticks above the sea). Humanity has adapted, but there is more to the flood than mere global warming.

As for your comment as to I don't look the type to write a novel, I had been meaning to write one for years, but never completed one until January this year.




Not yet. I've gotta find a publisher, and an agent, for that matter.

I said you don't strike me as the type to write a novel. If you'd said you'd had a paper published in a scientific journal, that would fit, but not a novel. Of course, that just goes to show what an incomplete picture of a person we form from reading a few posts on a website.

The torture comment came to mind as I've frequently seen you post comments about torture, or similar sadism. I'm not implying anything, only alluding to your apparent fixation with it, in order to elicit a response that I (and possibly you) may find entertaining.

Going back to your novel, it does seem interesting, and I've sometimes spent time pondering the consequences of a large, and fairly rapid, increase in sea level. I've even mentally plotted the new shoreline on some detailed contour maps I have of the area I live for various increments above the current level. As an aside, you may know there's a theory floating around that the large-scale release of gas hydrates from ocean sediment could quickly raise sea levels by 10s of metres, before even any greenhouse-type heating kicks in.

I'd find writing a journal article more scary, as I would think that the scientific community has higher standards. I am currently writing a Master's thesis...



My 'fixation' (as you put it, though it's been more of a mild interest) with torture is more to do with morbid curiosity of what man does to one another. Believe me, some of this stuff would put 'cruel and unusual punishment' in a whole new light.

But in fact, you may have confused what I have written about my opinion of what should be done to the worst criminals.



The cause of the rise in sea level will be explained later in the novel series, but it is not global warming, or at least it is not the main factor, though it has significantly contributed. Let us just say that it has a more exotic and sinister explanation. Far more so than gas hydrates.

Unlike Waterworld, where the oceans rose to a level where Mt Everest was now a pleasant island paradise (a ridiculous level), I have made it rise a few hundred meters. This has happened before, but hundreds of millions of years ago. I'm talking sea levels that surpass those even in the Ordovician era. Not ridiculously so, but enough to change the ways of life of people on the Earth.

Do these actually get published? Because surely it's only actually a novel once it's published.

I am intending to get them published.