- Joined
- Jun 10, 2010
- Messages
- 266
Sort of, at least: Volunteer readers.
I've been an unregistered lurker on the forum for a year, and an occasional visitor from long before that. I've been delighted by the wealth of knowledge and experience here, and the tremendous resources the group has gathered and organized.
More than three decades ago, I kept a Caribbean Reef octopus for several months, and was fascinated with the creature. I'd always been a science enthusiast, and caught this one while diving. The roughly 20-inch armspan animal his in a submerged Clorox bottle, making capture simple -- and we already had a reef tank setup running.
For years, since, my appreciation of these intelligent beings has continued. Last year, I began to do something about it, which brought me back here in earnest. I dug into various papers and articles by folks here or linked from here and elsewhere, and then ... wrote a novel.
It is a fictional story about a society of further-evolved octopuses, set in the sea of a future Earth. I've tried to stick to hard science; this society is intelligent, but they have never discovered fire for example, and have no experience with metal or even wood.
It is yet unpublished, and I am looking for one or more "beta readers" to make sure that it sounds plausible enough to people who really know octopuses and marine biology. These beings -- "octans" in the story -- would still be recognizable as octopuses; their brains are much larger, but their bodies are not much bigger than GPO-sized. I've taken some liberties with attributes of a few different species, and given them color vision which seems to be rare in research so far.
There is a fair amount of involvement with coral, and I could use help/commentary in this area as well. I've had excellent feedback from non-cephalopod beta readers (awkwardly phrased, that -- none of the readers have actually been cephalopods) -- but that's people aspects, not the science side.
My desire is to represent octopuses well, to entertain while implanting information in the reader, sparking additional interest. I'm looking for help. The novel is about 100,000 words; standard science fiction-sized, in other words, and not a Colossal (or even a Giant) book.
Sorry for the verbose first post; I promise to be well-behaved.
I've been an unregistered lurker on the forum for a year, and an occasional visitor from long before that. I've been delighted by the wealth of knowledge and experience here, and the tremendous resources the group has gathered and organized.
More than three decades ago, I kept a Caribbean Reef octopus for several months, and was fascinated with the creature. I'd always been a science enthusiast, and caught this one while diving. The roughly 20-inch armspan animal his in a submerged Clorox bottle, making capture simple -- and we already had a reef tank setup running.
For years, since, my appreciation of these intelligent beings has continued. Last year, I began to do something about it, which brought me back here in earnest. I dug into various papers and articles by folks here or linked from here and elsewhere, and then ... wrote a novel.
It is a fictional story about a society of further-evolved octopuses, set in the sea of a future Earth. I've tried to stick to hard science; this society is intelligent, but they have never discovered fire for example, and have no experience with metal or even wood.
It is yet unpublished, and I am looking for one or more "beta readers" to make sure that it sounds plausible enough to people who really know octopuses and marine biology. These beings -- "octans" in the story -- would still be recognizable as octopuses; their brains are much larger, but their bodies are not much bigger than GPO-sized. I've taken some liberties with attributes of a few different species, and given them color vision which seems to be rare in research so far.
There is a fair amount of involvement with coral, and I could use help/commentary in this area as well. I've had excellent feedback from non-cephalopod beta readers (awkwardly phrased, that -- none of the readers have actually been cephalopods) -- but that's people aspects, not the science side.
My desire is to represent octopuses well, to entertain while implanting information in the reader, sparking additional interest. I'm looking for help. The novel is about 100,000 words; standard science fiction-sized, in other words, and not a Colossal (or even a Giant) book.
Sorry for the verbose first post; I promise to be well-behaved.