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Bill DeSmedt

Goodreads Author

Born

Passaic NJ, The United States

Website

http://www.billdesmedt.com

Genre

Science Fiction & Fantasy, Mystery & Thrillers

Influences

Larry Niven, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Blish

Member Since

August 2008

URL

https://www.goodreads.com/billdesmedt

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Bill DeSmedt has spent his life living by his wits and his words. In his time, and as the spirit has moved him, he’s been: a Soviet Area expert and Soviet exchange student, a computer programmer and system designer, a consultant to startups and the Fortune 500, an Artificial Intelligence researcher, an omnivorous reader with a soft spot for science fiction and science non-fiction, and now, Lord help us, a novelist!

Bill's first novel, SINGULARITY (2004), won Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Award for Science Fiction and the Independent Publisher Group's IPPY for Best Science Fiction. The free podcast of SINGULARITY, available on the web at Podiobooks.com, has gone on to be named an SFFaudio Essential, while SINGULARITY itself has evolved ...more

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Popular Answered Questions

Hi Bill, I'm reading 'Singularity' at the moment (and loving it). I was wondering what inspired the novel? I know you've mentioned living in Russia for some time. Did you ever get to see the site of the Tunguska event?

Bill DeSmedt Hi, Khira -- Glad you're enjoying Singularity. And thanks for the questions!

Sadly, my academic-exchange sojourn in the USSR was spent exclusively in M…moreHi, Khira -- Glad you're enjoying Singularity. And thanks for the questions!

Sadly, my academic-exchange sojourn in the USSR was spent exclusively in Moscow, some five time zones to the west of the Stony Tunguska River basin, and travel was pretty restricted back in the Brezhnev era. All of which is a longwinded way of saying no, I never got there. Also, at the time, I would've had no compelling reason to go, since the seed that years later would grow into Singularity had yet to germinate.

As to how that happened, thereby hangs a tale, one that was first told in the "Further Reading" afterword to the original Per Aspera edition.

Since that section is missing from the WordFire Press reissue, though, I’ll reproduce the salient portion below:

* * *

It was years back, a rainy Saturday afternoon in mid-summer. I was sitting around watching a rerun of Cosmos, Episode IV: “Heaven and Hell” — the episode that deals with meteor and cometary impacts.

So, about midway through, Carl gets around to the Tunguska Event. And from there to the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis: that the Event was a collision between the earth and an atom-sized black hole. And then he’s refuting J&R, citing the standard missing exit-event objection — namely, that the black hole should have cut through the earth like a knife through morning mist, and come exploding up out of the North Atlantic about an hour later, wreaking all manner of havoc. Never happened. QED. And, next thing you know Carl’s gone on to Meteor Crater in Arizona or some such.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting there, staring at the TV. “But, Carl,” I say slowly, “What if the damn thing never came out?”

Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then. The idea wouldn’t leave me in peace. It kept rattling around in my hind-brain, gradually accreting mass as more and more pieces from my personal history fell into place: my background in Sovietology, my career as a consultant, just enough physics to glimpse what the KGB might want to do with a captive black hole... Over the next couple years, that one minuscule germ of an idea metastasized into a plotline.

Finally, on an equally rainy Saturday over a lost Memorial Day weekend, I sat down at the word processor, and Singularity began to write itself!(less)

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I much appreciate your terrific writing as well as your generosity to fellow creatives -- would you please guest blog post for my site? if you’re so inclined, here’s a link to general guidelines: https://wp.me/p6OZAy-1eQ - wishing you the best with all your endeavors - da-AL

Bill DeSmedt Hi, da -- apologies for the long lead-time, but I've been absent from GoodReads (and much of social media generally) for the last few years.

That said,…moreHi, da -- apologies for the long lead-time, but I've been absent from GoodReads (and much of social media generally) for the last few years.

That said, I appreciate the opportunity to guest-post on your blog. Could I perhaps take a raincheck until later this year, when hopefully my third Archon Sequence novel, Triploidy, will be nearer its launch date?

Best and stay safe,
Bill(less)

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Bill DeSmedt’s books

Average rating: 3.96 · 714 ratings · 62 reviews · 9 distinct works • Similar authors

	Singularity (The Archon Sequence #1) 3.96 avg rating — 625 ratings — published 2004 — 9 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Dualism (The Archon Sequence #2) 4.13 avg rating — 38 ratings — published 2014 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Singularity Files (Audiobook & Science Seminars) 3.74 avg rating — 35 ratings — published 2012	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Triploidy (The Archon Sequence Book 3) 4.38 avg rating — 13 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Science Behind Singularity really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 3 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Archon Sequence Box Set 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Singularity (The Archon Sequence) by Bill DeSmedt (2005-09-03) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Singularity: Archon Sequence, Book 1 by Bill DeSmedt (Goodreads Author), Laura Petersen (narrator), WordFire Press LLC (publisher) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Singularity (The Archon Sequence) by Bill DeSmedt (2005-09-01) by Bill DeSmedt (Goodreads Author), Unknown Author 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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46 posts
Bill DeSmedt's Blog: The Accidental Author

Dualism Redux!

Celebrating (if that's the word for it) the tenth anniversary of my technothriller Dualism, I was moved to bare the philosophical underbelly of that work on Academia.edu.

A foretaste:

Though admittedly a tough nut to crack, I’ve never been a big fan of the “interactionist” objection to Cartesian dualism (a.k.a. substance dualism) — even going so far as to design a thought experiment aimed at challen Read more of this blog post »

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Published on January 03, 2024 10:40

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Series by Bill DeSmedt

The Archon Sequence (2 books)
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Bill DeSmedt (Goodreads Author)

3.97 avg rating — 663 ratings

Bill is Currently Reading

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Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere: A Portal Fantasy for Second Chances (Tales from the Alterwhere Book 1)

by Gene Turnbow (Goodreads Author)

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Nemesis (Orphan X, #10)

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The Last Orphan (Orphan X #8)

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Quotes by Bill DeSmedt (?)

“The future remains unwritten, but I'm writing as fast as I can!”
― Bill DeSmedt

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Bill’s Quotes

“The future remains unwritten, but I'm writing as fast as I can!”
― Bill DeSmedt

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“Sturgis had now become involved in a long story of his early manhood, and even had Soapy been less distrait he might have found it difficult to enjoy it to the full. It was about an acquaintance of his who had kept rabbits, and it suffered in lucidity from his unfortunate habit of pronouncing rabbits 'roberts', combined with the fact that by a singular coincidence the acquaintance had been a Mr. Roberts. Roberts, it seemed, had been deeply attached to roberts. In fact, his practice of keeping roberts in his bedroom had led to trouble with Mrs. Roberts, and in the end Mrs. Roberts had drowned the roberts in the pond and Roberts, who thought the world of his roberts and not quite so highly of Mrs. Roberts, had never forgiven her.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

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“Bream Mortimer was tall and thin. He had small bright eyes and a sharply curving nose. He looked much more like a parrot than most parrots do. It gave strangers a momentary shock of surprise when they saw Bream Mortimer in restaurants, eating roast beef. They had the feeling that he would have preferred sunflower seeds.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Girl on the Boat

tags: humor

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