About
Hi!!! 😃 I'm Yuki, the novel author and creator of this blog.
Let's see, what can I say about myself... 🤔 I'm a Gen-X nerd person (transgender, non-binary 🏳️⚧️, pronouns: she/they) who had an early exposure to anime and Sci-Fi around the early '90s. Among the most influential were Bubblegum Crisis, Ghost in the Shell, and Johnny Mnemonic.
Since then, I've been fascinated with these amazing stories about robots, androids, hackers and I love how movies explore the topics of ethics and use and misuse of technology in society. There's a particular phrase from William Gibson (the author of Neuromancer), that says "The street finds its own uses for things."
Among my favorite Sci-Fi works (novels, movies, series and videogames) are, in no particular order:
Books:
- Burning Chrome
- Cryptonomicon
- Foundation Trilogy by Asimov
- Hyperion
- I, Robot
- Idoru
- Neuromancer
- Virtual Light
Movies and Live Action series:
- Blade Runner
- Hackers
- Johnny Mnemonic
- Mr. Robot
- The Matrix
- Robocop
- Sneakers
Anime:
- Akira
- Burn up W
- Chobits
- Cybercity Oedo 808
- Ghost in the Shell
- Parasite Dolls
- Saber Marionette J
- Snatchers
- Time of Eve
Videogames:
- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
- DEX
- Snatchers
- Technobabylon
... just to name a few.
It wasn't until much later that I learned about the term "cyberpunk", and the idea that technology wasn't the salvation of humanity, but a tool that could be used for good or evil, that was a big, huge concept for me.
The new ideas presented in movies like Ghost in the Shell also fascinated me. If you get your brain digitized, what makes you, "you"? Is it your memories? Is it some unknown characteristic in how your brain developed? Is it your body? What happens when your brain gets duplicated? Who is the real you? Do androids have rights? At what point do we determine that an artificial intelligence is someone deserving their own inalienable rights? Is a servant race compatible with human dignity?
There's tons of topics to discuss about science fiction, but my favorite topic was Artificial Intelligences and Androids. Yeah, you could say I have a thing for androids 😅 so I loved to explore this. A question that often came up to me while writing, was: Which would I prefer? To have a hot robot girlfriend, or to BE a hot robot girlfriend? I still can't decide, tee hee!
One of the things I wanted to try out was combining Asimov's three robotic laws with Robocop's OCP directives. I began to think... if people tried to do this ethically, there would need to be some kind of governing body that made sure only authorized people would try to modify an android's directives. Mixing that with the idea of digital certificates from today's internet, made me create the concept of the Cyberpol and Android Managers. Of course we also needed a more covert / informal organization in charge or dealing with rogue androids, and that became the Rogue Hunter association. My very own Blade Runners, but ruthless and many with little sense of ethics. It's been a very interesting journey coming up with all these concepts and seeing them come to life and interact between each other in my novels.
I really hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. Thanks for dropping by!