Maxwell demons in the house

[mmcirvin]

Issue 8 of Nth Degree is out, and with it my strange little story Demons, now also available for reading on their Web site.

Comments

[hemlock-martini.livejournal.com]

Good stuff.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

It's my favorite story that's ever run in Nth Degree that I didn't write.

...OK maybe my favorite ever.

Re:

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I liked "Smoke" a lot.

Re:

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Matt. That means a lot coming from you. I'm still considering sending it to Writers of the Future.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Enjoyable! A very nice implementation of a classical science finction story structure.

I am somewhat BIASED, though, being a huge fan of Maxwell's demon and the whole physics/information theory interface.

I'll leave you with a nice little picture from a short essay I wrote on Maxwell's demon for some physics course, drawn by my flatmate and me:

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Thanks for all the compliments. Personally, I think it needs a rewrite or two, to dissolve some of the expository lumps and make the prose flow better, but as the author I suppose I'd always think that.

It takes me way too long to write a story, though. I wrote the first draft in a couple of days, but I worked out the first version of the plot and wrote an embryonic version of the airport scene while riding on a tour bus in Quebec in the middle of 2002, and it took about a year before I was able to pick out the parts that were deserving of being written.