Production Notes: ACT 1

First entry, yay! I thought I would write up some of my thoughts on the creation of “My Little Apprentice”, since I didn’t think they the coherent presentation of those thoughts have any baring on the story I’m trying to tell, and thus don’t belong in the author’s notes as anything more than a URL pointing to this location. I apologize in advance for any typos or errors in my presentation here. This blog entry hasn’t been edited or pre-read like my story is and is thus bound to have some mistakes.

On, and apparently there was some sort of glitch where some of you saw chapter nine had been posted when it really hadn’t been. It’s a good thing too, since chapter 8 hasn’t been posted yet either. I’m sorry for the confusion and/or disappointment that may’ve caused. At this point Saturday/Tuesday is my release schedule, usually around 12:00 MST, though that varies somewhat depending on when I actually wake up, and may be a few hours earlier or later on those days.

But personally, I didn’t think it would be much fun to talk about sources of creativity and inspiration and still confine myself to such a rigid formula. This blog is as much for my own purposes as any curious reader. If nobody reads this entry, I won’t be nearly so terribly disappointed as I would be if nobody read the story. It’s just a blog entry, after all.

I’m not sure if anyone is even interested in this sort of thing. I suppose if absolutely nobody reads this, then I’ll know that future works and future additions to my present work will not warrant the effort to express my thoughts so and this will be the only entry on the blog here. Guess we’ll find out.

So, what inspired My Little Apprentice? That question cannot be easily answered. I suppose it began when I stumbled into this site, and wandered into the works of Chatoyance and her take on the Conversion Bureau. There was on the one hand such an interesting and vibrant universe there. At the same time, however, I was personally dissatisfied on two counts.

1. Most severely, it seemed like the humans of that world weren’t accurate to my understanding of human nature, of which I’ve made myself somewhat a student in my own small way. Rather, they seemed to me a single character in a Bioware RPG where the player is purposefully making all the most evil available choices because they’re going for the achievement with maximum renegade points. It was a “what if”, but not in the way I like to ask that question in writing. Her universe seemed to me the question of “What if whenever given any possible choice, mankind chose the worst possible option? What would the world be like? Well she’s written over a million words about it, so no need for me to add anything there.

That was my original plan, way back when. To write another TCB universe story, set in her world specifically. As late as my drafting of chapter 1 this was still my intention, and it was one not wholy abandoned until the draft of chapter two was complete and my mind began to finally settle into the patterns that MLA (not story, not the boring one) would take.

2. The ponies and their universe did not seem accurate either. While humanity always took the worst possible choices, it seems that ponykind in her universe could not help but make the best ones, at least when taken as a group. Granted just as there proved later on to be some humans with good traits in her stories, there were some bad ponies too (usually former humans). But the show and Universe I loved was not that way. It was complex, with ponies whose personalities are so human that it’s easy for a human audience to project characters and actions to things from their own lives. I wanted to capture this feeling, a feeling of almost eerie parallel between Equestria and Earth. The question of “Why is Equestria so familiar to us?” Has been answered before in many ways, but I wanted my own take, one that mimicked my own understanding of physics as closely as possible.

I freely admit that I am by profession a student Programmer and not Physicist however, and thus my understanding of the advanced concepts I describe is not to be taken as perfectly sound. I have done my utmost to be consistent with both the nature of mankind and the depiction of the ponies in the show. I intend not to skirt around the best and worst in each. To illustrate the Gurrings and the Sombras as well as the many more content to simply live their lives. Only the story’s completion will prove the success or failure of that endeavor.

I will now attempt to list, in some order, the different themes and works and events that inspired MLA (again, the story). I warn you that some of these things were taken quite directly and thus there may be some concepts spoiled here. Glimpsing behind the curtain may spoil the magic for some. If you are one of those, I suggest you stop reading here. If anyone is even reading here to read me here.

1. TCB as envisioned by Chatoyance. While I have entirely abandoned her universe as the location of this story and strongly disagree with her on many points, reading her work was the single greatest motivation for me to write my own. Some of her concepts and ideas may still survive into this story, albeit heavily modified by my different way of seeing both worlds.
2. The works of Carl Sagan. Some of his more popular quotations that find expression in this story are: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” and “We can’t just conclude that science puts too much power into the hands of morally feeble technologists or corrupt, power-crazed politicians and decide to get rid of it. Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. Advances in transportation, communication, and entertainment have transformed the world. The sword of science is double-edged.”
3. The concept of the Singularity:
4. For the technology of the pony world, I was heavily inspired by some of the wonderful inventions of the victorian era and the old west. See Babbages Difference Engine: . I suppose this was bound to rub off on some of my perceptions of their culture as well. By no means did I want the ponies depicted as primitives, though the humans in this universe would be many strides ahead.
5. This paper published by Max Tedmark of MIT. was taken out of context and to its maximum logical extreme for this story
6. For the future of the human world I had many ideas upon which I based my predictions, and patterns upon which I artisticly patterned them. After all, creating the humans of this story was as much a work of art as it was plotting some possible directions for the growth of our own present-day earth.
• Artistically, I was most interested in the societies of Ghost in the Shell and Deus Ex, both of which describe the impact of very likely future technologies on society. How does mankind react to bodies that can be switched and replaced on a whim?

• Bioware’s Mass Effect universe paints an optimistic picture of man’s future, and is also quite beautiful. The estute reader may notice parallels between the Earth of ME3 prior to the reaper invasion and the one Second Chance sees in her visions.
• For how human beings behave in large groups, no work was more seminal to me than Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy. I wanted something rooted in historical facts and not goals and ideals, and this fit the bill nicely.
7. The idea of the Omega Point: IE: When time is viewed from a non-linear perspective, the universe has Already reached a point of maximum complexity of consciousness. When viewed from our linear perspective, it is this future attainment that draws on a sort of universal evolution toward that point, which can and must occur. There are many interesting ramifications from this idea, the most notable of which is viewing the universe and all its parts as a gigantic macroorganism. This view renders everything, from the stars to earth societies, as organs and cells within this organism, which is steadily evolving and growing toward an end that it has already reached. Unfortunately, we are aware of only three dimensions and are thus unable to perceive it.
8. Technology. I wanted to build a future world for humans made up of advancements that seem likely in our forseeable future (with the exception of the way to travel between universes, which is required for the story but for which there is no real precedent or even predictions of one that I know of) Such advancements as:

• P=NP?
• Nanotechnology
• Microfabrication
• Moore’s Law vs The Power Wall
• Nuclear Fusion
• Artificial Intelligence. Our final invention?
• Nuclear Pulse Propulsion

This list does not contain interesting but as-of-yet entirely infeasible things like energy-shields and matter transporters or faster-than-light travel. While it might be possible that ways to do these things in the real world might one day be discovered, as of yet those discoveries are unmade and thus these things are not present in this story. With the possible exception that unicorn magic can do all three of these things, and I have tried to remain as true to the cannon of the show as possible.

Except for Equestria Girls. Love it or hate it, its existence removes many of the interesting things that the introduction of a human can bring for a story and so I have ignored it entirely when writing this. As of yet the events of the story have taken place after season 3 but prior to season 4. There will begin to be more of an overlap with present show cannon as the story goes on, more particularly as I move out of Act 1 and into Act 2. Act 1 as I understand it will end with chapter 9. I suppose this means the story will be about 27 chapters long? That’s a very approximate measurement. At the present rate of chapters being released that means we should be done with the story in two more months.

I’m still not sure if I can keep up the present release schedule, however. I’m doing fine for the moment, but posting as often as I do requires I complete a NANOWRIMO every single month while the story is in development. I have thus far managed to keep that up, but there’s no telling if my creative energy will keep up for that long.

It hasn’t been a problem so far, and I’m several chapters ahead of present release. My stockpile in the event of some sort of educational emergency with my real career I guess. I wish FimFiction let me schedule chapter publication, because that would be simply wonderful. That way I could get hit by a bus and the chapters would still be released on time, at whatever time I decided that “on time” meant.

I wonder if that feature is planned for sometime in the foreseeable future.

Also, feel free to make suggestions for what you want to see in the story/from the future of the story. I do take these quite seriously, as some of you may’ve noticed. Well, you won’t have actually known, but I have already made changes to the direction of the story based on some of your suggestions and ideas. If I haven’t posted the chapter yet, then it isn’t written in stone, and I do take what people say pretty seriously. As long as it’s constructive, that is.

And that’s enough rambling for now. I suppose I’ll see if anyone cares before I do anything like this again for Act 2 or future, yet-unwritten stories. My present plan is to write two novel-length stories (MLA being the first) and one shorter novella to go between them and connect them. We’ll see if my plans actually end up happening.