The third draft of Severed Dreams has finally emerged from the writing group (insert awe inspiring music here).  While the group was pouring over the novel, I brought in a few unconventional readers to give me an opinion on a very specific question.

The novel was always intended to be an adult venture, a kind of nostalgic space opera for grownups, but the nostalgia and the main character’s journey also lent themselves to a young adult storyline.  The novel had one foot in each market.

So, on the advice of a fellow writer, I decided to test the novel on a few YA readers.  Much to my surprise, it worked incredibly well for them.  So well, in fact, that I’ve decided to spend a few months positioning Severed Dreams for the much stronger YA science fiction market.

The change will push the final draft back a few months but it shouldn’t substantially change the plot.  The YA market has undergone a major transformation in recent years, and I think it’s ready for this kind of book.

There is a concept in science fiction called the singularity.  It’s a transformative moment, an event that changes the perception of the world.  In the extreme, a singularity could be a moment where machines become self-aware and attempt to take control of the world (Terminator) or aliens land on the White House lawn (The Day The Earth Stood Still).  You could think of personal computers or cell phones or the Internet as mild forms of a singularity.

In the entertainment world, digital effects have already crossed the threshold that allows us to distinguish movie fantasy from reality.  But what happens when that expensive technique evolves into a cheap tool that can be used create synthetic actors or environments?  What happens when you can no longer trust that the person you’re talking to is real?  Just ask Emily from Image Metrics:

If the tech talk lost you and you skipped ahead, go back and take a second look.  Emily isn’t real.  While you’re thinking about how close to real she looked, let the design engineers over at OTOY show you the type of world you might meet Emily in:

You could run both of these on a standard iPhone, no massive computers required.  The technologies have a way to go, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see a world where you can no longer separate real and virtual content.  We go to big budget movies expecting to be wowed by the impossible, but what about the evening news?  If videogames like World of Warcraft can bring in millions of addicted users, how many will flock to OTOY’s simulated “liveplace” environment?

Contact lens computer displays are already in the early stages of development, and it’s more than likely our children will find it hard to imagine a physical world where the real and imaginary didn’t interact.