PRO CONNECT
Epredator / Ian Hughes is a metaverse evangelist, Doctor of Technology and Senior Analyst, IoT at 451 Research. He has worked in unusual and emerging technologies in both a corporate setting and out in startup land. He specialises in using game technology, such as virtual worlds to help people communicate and understand concepts.
Being a techie, and working across many mediums he has used social media since before it was as social as it is now. Blogging and sharing ideas is a core part of who he is.
Science Fiction is a natural genre and his first book was spawned from using and developing software for virtual environments.
He was resident super geek on a UK TV show called The Cool Stuff Collective for 39 episodes from 2011-2011. He was able to share his enthusiasm for new technology with the next generation, as well as working alongside a monkey, a cave girl and a host of other characters. In the third series he got to relive his own saturday morning childhood TV memories by flinging custard pies at people too.
His epredator handle is common across most games and platforms. It is part of his online persona, but heavily integrated with his real life one. Things may be digital but they are still real.
He used to use just Predator because he was good at instinctively hunting down bugs. However, then the 20th Century Fox movie and characters appeared and it became a much more common name and handle. The Yautja offering an honourable and strong character to identify with too. In the late 90's everything was getting e put on the front of it, ebusiness, ecommerce. So in part a joke he added the e. It stuck.
Epredator became a well known handle through the rise of virtual worlds such as Second Life in 2006-2009. By sharing his ideas with colleagues he became known as a metaverse evangelist. Travelling the world explaining why you don't need to travel the world when you can meet in a virtual world full of expression and fun.
He is not all digital though, he is a Head Instructor in the self defence martial art Choi Kwang Do. His wife and two children (the latter are both now black belts too) all practice the art.
“Epredator relates this tale in the irreverent, enthusiastic language of Roisin’s techie subculture—full of coding jargon, pop-culture references, and internet slang—and he manages to explain just enough to make even Luddite readers feel at home.”
– Kirkus Reviews
Epredator (Cont3xt, 2016) tells the story of a young coder who’s suddenly able to manipulate reality in this sci-fi novel.
Roisin Kincade is a programmer who loves to use her code to manipulate the digital world. She doesn’t consider herself a hacker, although she relishes the depictions of hackers in movies and views her work with a significant amount of romanticism. When she accidentally types a Linux command into Twitter instead of into her command-line interface, she expects her tech-savvy Twitter followers to make jokes at her expense. Instead, she receives a message from a mysterious account that seems to be inviting her to hack into a simple text game: “She was hacking, by invitation, but on a public channel. Another memory flowed past of a green screen and the phrase ‘Shall we play a game?’ ”—a reference to the 1983 movie WarGames. The new game contains a list of objects that are strikingly similar to those in Roisin’s own room. It also contains a list of commands, and when she enters one of them to move a virtual “mug” to a new position, she finds that the actual mug in her room has also physically moved. She then dives into the program to see how much she can manipulate reality—a hacker’s dream. What she doesn’t immediately realize is that there may be other entities watching her actions or that she may have unintentionally wandered into a trap. Epredator relates this tale in the irreverent, enthusiastic language of Roisin’s techie subculture—full of coding jargon, pop-culture references, and internet slang—and he manages to explain just enough to make even Luddite readers feel at home. Roisin is a charmingly guileless protagonist, and the overall plot replicates the puzzle-style computer games that are referenced in the text. The story contains just the right combination of paranoia, wonder, and fantasy to make for a fun bit of escapism, and the author even manages to land a satisfying final twist as well.
A short but punchy tale of a techie who gets in too deep.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5187-7284-9
Page count: 312pp
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Reconfigure - What's it all about
Day job
Internet of Things, AR and VR Analyst
Favorite author
William Gibson
Favorite book
Neuromancer
Favorite line from a book
Imagine a cassette, that made its images plain to you, no on off switch or power... we already have such a thing in the printed book
Favorite word
Fascinating
Hometown
Basingstoke
Passion in life
Family, Tech, Choi Kwang Do, Video Games
Unexpected skill or talent
Martial Arts Teacher, Doctor of Technology
Reconfigure: Readers' Favourite - 5 Stars, 2016
Reconfigure: Independent Author Network Book of the year Finalist, 2016
Read Reconfigure, a New Cyberpunk Novel by Metaverse Pioneer Ian "Epredator" Hughes, 2016
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