Hey Nicholas,
Is there any chance you would be willing to consider selling your content on other platforms such as Kobo?
If you are willing, would the kindle unlimited contract prevent you from selling the entire Prison Ship Sheol series on these platforms or only the first 2 books?
Best Regards,
A fan
So is there a captain's launch? Like a fancy shuttle for the captain to use. Its mostly a western navy tradition so maybe it doesn't carry over but im running out of non spoiler questions.
There could be any number of things they haven't found yet. Clever way to sneak an idea in you'd like to see, though. :D
btw, would you like to be one of the test readers for the new book or Sheol 3 when it comes out? The LitRPG one I'm trying to get out this year, Sheol 3 will probably be quarter 2 of 2025 if I can really focus in.
So what kind of crimes get you sent to Sheol rather than prison on any given world or station? There are political prisoners and i get that but i thought those were rare high end people but open to being wrong about that. But I guess for no real reason I thought gen pop was mostly mid level enforcer kind of people but we've met no prisoner that fits that type. The Cutters were mindless thugs and kind of a death cult so its makes sense why they're there but the rest of them? I assumed there are no white collar criminal there but I can't point to anything in either book that makes me think that. Take Blue, she seems like she was mostly a thief how does that kind of criminal end up in the darkest hole in the universe? I get the twins, i can't keep …
Each of those is a backstory item that will come up as the characters get more fleshed out in each successive book. All the main girls already have a full story for that. I considered making them short stories unto themselves, but rest assured, nobody the Alliant put on the Sheol is innocent with the exception of the political prisoners who were more "technically" guilty, and they are all there for capital crimes.
The only thing that really differentiates the "good" from the "bad" were the intentions with which they committed their crimes. Lilia's crime is probably the most revealed so far, and book 3 is on her planet so you'll get the full story there. For Reverie, I'll hint at secondary consequences of her actions. The twins I think you can figure out from the context so far, if only in general terms. If Phyra were to be caught and sentenced she'd have all of the war crimes of her people pinned on her. Even Aia has now committed some capital crimes as applied to artificial intelligences.
I i try to keep to things that won't spoil the plot. So is there some kind of rule about fighting robots? If the Astori feed on life wouldn't fighting robot negate that? But it also seems like there are rules around intelligent AI. Seems like some are considered people and some aren't. Like the companions can't be considered people because they get no choice who they serve, which is why if figure Greye couldn't be left in the custody of his mom because she likely couldn't work or be made the guardian of a living person. To that end are artificial allowed to work? could a company just build a workforce of artificial people, I could see there being laws about that. It was said th4e Sheol had drone fighters, but are those AI piloted? or people with joysticks?
So spoiler I want, is Greye going to get some…
The robot issue is complex, but in general terms, an all robot army just has too many vulnerabilities from an electronic warfare standpoint. They're terrifying combatants, but there are ways to either shut them off wholesale, or worse still, turn them back on their operators. (Also, there is a very, very good reason you wouldn't send anything robotic against the Ashtor, but that's not going to come up for at least 3 books). Drones are a bit of a different story as they're simple, cheap, can travel in shielded containers before being launched, and can be utilized in more surgical ways that the enemy may not be ready to deal with.
Even so, you saw what happened to the special forces team that the Alliant sent onto the ship at Zephyr. Fiona took out their tech advantage before they even made contact and in a few cases, used their own technology to murder them. Once they lost the advantage of surprise, their power armor became a serious liability to someone with her technical talents. They'd have a similar problem with someone like Greye, once he has fully shed his soft, civilian mindset.
In space, drones can be spread out wide enough that something like an EMP would affect very few of them and there is nothing to obstruct a directed-laser guidance system, so they could not be easily jammed. There is the problem of speed, though. Chasing something that is nearing relativistic speed makes things like missiles and drones an unlikely weapon. You'd need energy weapons almost exclusively to have any chance of hitting. Fighters, drones, and missiles are more territorial weapon types, for fighting over a planet or space station, for example. Something you want to capture rather than just launch a meteor at from trillions of miles away and obliterate. One of the reason the Ashtor took out the orbital ring on Zephyr so quickly is because they weren't trying to capture it. Blasting it to bits with mass driver fire was fairly easy, seeing as it is stationary, relatively speaking. Atmospheric weaponry is another interesting one. Energy weapons won't breach an atmosphere, they just get diffused away, so you either have to use mass drivers, or a specialized type of plasma weaponry.
All of this also illustrates why nobody could believe that the Sheol still had its mass driver systems. Why would a prison ship need anti-material/planet weapons? It should have been stripped of anything that wasn't primarily for anti-ship defense. You'll get some hints on that one in book 3.
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Artificial workforces are 100% a thing, but there are harsh regulations against allowing a full General AI to embody itself, so they remain limited in their capacity. Most working robots are also highly specialized by necessity, and people are not, so for less common general tasks people are still by far the cheaper option for employers. Why try to program something with a trillion different functions when you can just pay some schmuck minimum wage to go do it instead? Several Alliant species are having population crises, but there are plenty more that are quite the opposite, so they have no shortage of labor. Or they didn't before the war, anyway.
Companions are a bit of a hiccup in that equation, because what they have is not exactly general AI, but also not exactly specialized AI. They are a bit of a mysterious proprietary technology and you're going to learn a lot more about them in book 3. But the short answer is that the corporation that makes them only makes them for the role they've assigned, and they don't share their patents. Leadership within companies and governmental organizations that have tried to reverse engineer their tech for other uses have had a well publicized habit of becoming fatally accident prone until those operations are shut down.
And you are correct, they do not have the right to raise children absent their Host.
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As for Greye's clothes... well, with the Cutters wiped out and their successful escape from the Alliant fleet at Zephyr, problem number one on the ship is resupply. That being said, there are no male Eisheth, so I guess you'll have to wait and see what he comes up with. :P
Hey Nicholas,
Thank you for your response.
Not wanting to lose half of your royalty income that comes from the exclusivity deal makes absolute perfect sense. Especially considering that Amazon currently has the largest market share for ebooks by quite a large margin.
I wanted to reach out because of Amazon’s recent decision to remove the “Download & Transfer via USB” feature. I’ve read far too many horror stories over the years about people losing access to their Amazon accounts, and thus their purchases, or more recently about them removing ebooks without warning from their customer’s libraries. These may very well be fringe cases, but this behavior has made me wary of purchasing ebooks from them. The only reasonable way I can see to safeguard an ebook purchase is to buy from a platform that still allows their customers to keep a copy on their local hard drive so that they can have the option to side-load their purchase onto their devices.
That being said, I have purchased the first two books on Amazon and still intend to purchase your upcoming books either way. As one of your readers, I wanted to express my interest in other ebook platforms, or if there is a possibility, for customers to have the option to get a copy directly from you or Tohmes Books after showing a proof of purchase.
I created a temporary email address if you still would like to contact me. chilltemp97@pm.me
Best Regards,
Chill