https://diode.zone/videos/watch/b55de3af-feda-4043-9e8d-954dd7a36e9c A discussion of the difficulties involved in writing a novel / series analysing where we are and where we are going with technology when the issues are understood so little. I talk about the origins of the project with the viral success of Facebook in the British West Midlands at around 2006-8. This was taking place when I was very socially marginal and rather paranoid. I talk then about the expansion of the story into a sequence involving a frame narrative. I mention Roger Scruton and the Underground University in Prague as one of the influences of the dissident movement in the series, and talk about some of the other important historical incidents I was drawing upon and the resulting concepts such as deprecation and the "negative space". At time of writing (October, 2018), this is the best place to start to understand the fictional project, Call Them Soldiers. I talk about the intentionally claustrophobic atmosphere of Manchester in the series, and how this posed a problem in the sense that contemporary world events led me to hope to say something about them. It was this that led me to the narrative frame involving the Choctaw Nation. My thinking on the narrative frame was triggered, as I explain here, by an episode of The Irish Passport podcast on The Great Hunger. Currently, Call Them Soldiers is on hold both in terms of the narrative frame, History is on the Make, and book one Think Soldier! Should I discovered there to be a readership (and a market) for it, I will take it on. As I explain in the video, I had began to doubt that, and the theme is heavy enough, and the project ambitious enough, to take on without knowing what will happen with it. Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:05:11 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://diode.zone https://diode.zone/lazy-static/avatars/61b689b7-84d5-43c7-9fa8-e63a7fd1d952.png https://diode.zone/videos/watch/b55de3af-feda-4043-9e8d-954dd7a36e9c All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://diode.zone/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.