This story took shape over the course of years that became, ahem, decades. I completed an early version that attracted the backhanded comment that “You certainly can write, but you need to learn how to write commercial fiction” from someone who knew what he was talking about. This publisher advised me to read some “how to write a novel” books. This short period of research ruined reading for me for many years as it revealed the rather obvious formula for creating material that publishers thought might make them money. Thus educated, I found that much fiction that I had formerly read with pleasure I now found entirely predictable. I stopped writing.

The urge to tell this story did not go away, though, and while deployed to Germany to “fly” (control) a large unmanned aircraft orbiting in Afghanistan in the harrowing days after September 11, 2001, I had another go. Something started to emerge and for a while it seemed that the story would get told. Before I returned to the states, I got rid of my paper copy and flew home with floppy discs. Somehow, the best of the writing was not properly saved and I went into a sulk that lasted too long.

The world moved on, and fascinatingly, the world of artificial intelligence that had seemed so imminent in the 1990s suddenly bloomed after 2010.  Other projects like restoring an old airplane, raising two kids, and being in a high tech startup kept the book on the sidelines. But in my mind, the story was getting clearer. Finally, I realized that self-publishing was a real option and I found my excuses exhausted.

After all those years, Delilah was waiting for me, growing in power and complexity, and ready for a fight. Tacitus Nix had evolved many times. It was time for the two of them to engage. I found that there was no way to control the process of writing it out. Several times I tried to outline the plot but invariably the story wrote itself without referencing my attempts to impose a preordained structure. The creative process that gripped me is apparently immune to planning as most of the time words flowed out of me in some kind of fugue state that is perhaps living mostly beneath my conscious brain.

Enough about me.

Is Artificial Intelligence going to be a boon or a curse ?

Are the programmers, industrialists, or militarists the right people to be responsible for bringing it into being? What will happen when a new form of sentience explodes into awareness? These are all wonderful questions that I have tried to bring to life so that you may pass your own judgments.

None of the characters in this story are based on real people. My time at Edwards Air Force Base performing flight test on advanced unmanned aircraft was punctuated by AI technology that did NOT work but we never put weapons onboard. I admit to spending some hours in the offices of very senior people (Generals, Admirals, Executives) in the Pentagon, who almost always were tremendously impressive (the folks who were in charge of making sure I behaved in those meetings were even more impressive). I also admit to spending a glorious period at the Naval War College getting a wonderful education in strategy. I was given an entirely different education during a period where my company was in Silicon Valley looking for investment. The venture capital world is populated by fiercely bright people that can cut to the heart of a proposed business idea with a single question. I drew freely from these experiences to create some of the story lines and atmospherics in Sliver.