Games and Music

It seems the range of science fiction surpasses the novel. With some of the mediums (see my graphic novels) I am co-creator. With others (like the role-playing games GURPS Uplift and Tribes!, the video game Ecco The Dolphin and music by several artists) my work -- especially my Uplift novels -- serves as inspiration. Also, read about my newest forays into CD-Rom games and software.

Echoes of Ecco

I'm told that the wonderful old Dreamcast game -- Ecco the Dolphin -- has been re-issued as a downloadable for the Nintendo Wii. It happens I wrote that game! Or, at least, I wrote the storyline and scenario and introduction. It's terrific. Under-rated.

GURPS Uplift

Steve Jackson Games re-issued GURPS Uplift role-playing game, updated and expanded by the original author-designer, the incredible Stefan Jones! This long sought-after game (high bids on eBay!) will be a perfect match for Contacting Aliens: The Illustrated Guide To Aliens In David Brin's Uplift Universe. To purchase the original game, contact Steve Jackson Games.

For more information, Steve Jackson Games has posted a page for GURPS Uplift.

Tribes!

Announcing: a realistic role-playing game, designed by Steve Jackson and David Brin, called Tribes! Long a legend among gamers (and formerly called "Darwinopoly"), this game has until now only been play-tested at select conventions. Tribes! delivers loads of fun for six to eight players, who follow simple rules to simulate life as it must have been for our ancestors, 50,000 years ago -- hunting, foraging, mating, and occasionally fighting.

Can you figure out how to survive... and have successful offspring... in a world where only your own wits stand between you and harshness of nature? Tribes! has been created with the advice of several prominent anthropologists, as well as one of the most experienced game designers on the planet. For more information see the web site for Steve Jackson Games.

Ecco the Dolphin

For those of you who love video games: Look out for Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future! The scenario (written by yours truly) is special for its emphasis on an interesting science fictional back story. But the real excitement lies in Appaloosa Inc.'s vivid new 3-D worlds and rendering-on-the-fly technology. The underwater worlds of Ecco are truly wonderful to behold, and the game playing is outtasight.

The version featured above is for Playstation 2. Follow these links to purchase Ecco the Dolphin for Sega.

For a great (and impartial) review of Ecco the Dolphin, see the VideoGames review.

Music

Gravity +: The Eric Thompson Project. Have posted cool, experimental music, good guitar work. And free.

Composer Brian Carroll has created a very beautiful symphonic overture inspired by my novel Glory Season.

A series of talented musical composers have come forth to avow that they were inspired by some of the characters and events in my books. "Tytlal Wave" is the latest: an instrumental composition inspired by the personality of that enigmatic Uplift Universe species. You'll find this lovely and whimsical chamber-piece on a CD -- The Ominous Shoreline -- written, performed and recorded by Richard Stoops, under the name of Sidereus. Also featured on the disk are many innovative passages for exotic percussion, orchestra and synthesizers. (An MP3 version of "Tytlal Wave" is now available.)

Matucana, a electronic music group led by German composer Helmuth Schomberg, based half an hour of highly evocative music in their album To Beat The Feeling on the dolphin rhythms, melodics and story lines that Schomberg found in Startide Rising.

A Canadian rock n' roll band, Treebeard, produced a more hard-biting song with lyrics based on the lament of the wounded dolphin captain, Creideiki.

Inspired by an urrish ballad that she found in Brightness Reef, Baltimore composer Katherine Gilliam created yet another work in a completely different musical form -- a haunting a capella choral work called "Starships."

Those of you who like independent works might drop by Indiespace.com, an excellent site where many independent artists and musicians offer samples and sell works directly to the public, bypassing the infamous "labels."

CD-Rom Games

Watch this space for even more exciting news! I am in negotiations with one of the most successful and respected game companies to do an original CD-ROM-based, multi-disk system based on an upcoming novel. It will blow you away, I promise.

My New Software Venture

A hint at things to come: I've begun a new venture in web software!

Yes, the e-bubble has finally burst. Many high-riding venture capitalists are now looking for day jobs. So what am I doing filing for a software patent?

Well, countercyclical theory suggests that now's the time to create the fundamentals for the next wave of internet excitement, when people start to realize that it's a genuine part of life in a new century -- not a fad, but a zone of public life as important as phones became in the Twentieth.

What's it all about? A new and vastly better approach to online realtime text/voice/video communications... a realm that nowadays is all-too often dismissed with the derisive term "chat" -- partly because the clunky teletype-based interface convention is almost unchanged from when I first used a version at Caltech, in 1970!

The only substantial reform that's been attempted so far has been to set up silly cartoon "avatars" that add nothing to functionality or efficiency of human-to human communications. It occurred to me that current systems don't take any advantage of the many techniques that people naturally use in complex conversational spaces, like cocktail parties or business meetings. Take for example the easy way we compress, sift, correlate and remember things that other people say -- skills we've had ever since the Holocene Era began, tens of thousands of years ago. Skills that haven't yet been translated to the Internet.

So I came up with a new approach -- and a tiny startup company to implement it. If my partners and I are right, many people will want to host using this new approach. A demo may be available online soon, so check right here in a few months!

Of course, software is NOT my area of professional expertise! Still, I was once an engineer. And this concept appears to be so much better than the present interface. But I suppose the market will be the final judge of that!