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As I’ve noted before, writing a long work of fiction is a strange thing, at least for me. I spend a lot of time intensely chewing over ideas, doing research, starting to conceptualize a narrative theory for the book, outlining various relationships between images and characters, sorting out what it is I really want to say more than the actual words to use.
Betwixt & between all of this, some honest to goodness writing gets done, then reorganized and shuffled, with plans and outlines changing. More research, more thinking, more feeling my way through the darkness with the only illumination occasional flashes of lightning.
This morning, after a lot of consideration, I downloaded Scrivener. Over the next week or so I’ll play around with it a bit, see whether it will be a useful tool.
And over lunch, some research & reading. It might be interesting, or even telling, what it was that I found. Here’s an excerpt:
The effects aren’t entirely dissimilar. An easy, airy confidence. A transcendental loosening of inhibition. The inchoate stirrings of a subjective moral swagger: the encroaching, and somehow strangely spiritual, realization that hell, who gives a s—, anyway?
There is, however, one notable exception. One glaring, unmistakable difference between this and the effects of alcohol. That’s the lack of attendant sluggishness. The enhancement of attentional acuity and sharpness. An insuperable feeling of heightened, polished awareness. Sure, my conscience certainly feels like it’s on ice, and my anxieties drowned with a half-dozen shots of transcranial magnetic Jack Daniel’s. But, at the same time, my whole way of being feels as if it’s been sumptuously spring-cleaned with light. My soul, or whatever you want to call it, immersed in a spiritual dishwasher.
So this, I think to myself, is how it feels to be a psychopath. To cruise through life knowing that no matter what you say or do, guilt, remorse, shame, pity, fear—all those familiar, everyday warning signals that might normally light up on your psychological dashboard—no longer trouble you.
Interesting, indeed.
And not unlike the high which comes with creating. Or entering a manic phase in my mild bipolar cycle.
Yes, interesting. Quite.
Jim Downey
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Did you know that the first atomic bomb test was called Trinity?
* * * * * * * *
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained” they said
So you played for the winner takes all
And tossed the dice high up and craned your head
To see how the numbers would fall
Al Stewart, Midas Shadow
* * * * * * *
When we first see her …
… it’s clear that we’ve disappeared down the rabbit hole.
* * * * * * *
The old/young man smiled. “You have a glimpse of it.”
“Of?”
“The truth. Or what your mind can grasp of it.” The figure was standing beside the glowing burl. He reached down and seemed to scoop up a handful of the tholin, then lifting it, allowed it to flow from one hand to the other, a gloopy, glowing blue mass.
“You have a glimpse of it. Now, what will you do?”
Instinctively, Jon reached out and put his hand under the flowing tholin, felt its warmth pour into his palm, and settle there, waiting. “You said before that there wasn’t much time. What is going to happen?”
“I cannot see the future. But I can see more deeply into the present than others. Things are . . . changing.”
Chapter 15 of Communion of Dreams.
* * * * * * *
Did you know that the first atomic bomb test was called Trinity?
On Monday morning July 16, 1945, the world was changed forever when the first atomic bomb was tested in an isolated area of the New Mexico desert. Conducted in the final month of World War II by the top-secret Manhattan Engineer District, this test was code named Trinity. The Trinity test took place on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, about 230 miles south of the Manhattan Project’s headquarters at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Today this 3,200 square mile range, partly located in the desolate Jornada del Muerto Valley, is named the White Sands Missile Range and is actively used for non-nuclear weapons testing.
And did you know that there was more than a little debate among the scientists working on the Manhattan Project about what would happen with the test? Yeah, seriously — they weren’t sure:
The observers set up betting pools on the results of the test.[28][29] Predictions ranged from zero (a complete dud) to 45 kilotons of TNT, to destruction of the state of New Mexico, to ignition of the atmosphere and incineration of the entire planet. This last result had been calculated to be almost impossible,[17][18] although for a while it caused some of the scientists some anxiety. Physicist I. I. Rabi won the pool with a prediction of 18 kilotons.[30]
It worked:
Three days remaining on the Kickstarter. Will it work?
I’m still craning my head to see how the numbers will fall.
Jim Downey
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Today is October 8th.
October used to be the 8th month. That it is now the 10th month played havoc with my mind when I was a kid, since I knew damned good and well that “octo” meant “eight”. It wasn’t logical. It didn’t make sense. This may well have been my first conscious awareness that reality was kinda screwed-up. Seriously.
It is also, as it happens, day 8 in our little count-down. No, I didn’t plan it that way.
At least not consciously.
So, that brings us to this:
Have a good Monday.
Jim Downey
*Just in case. And yeah, Jung’s ideas run all through my fiction. Obviously.
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“Could you take care of this for me?” I said. “I find myself surprisingly … attached.”
* * * * * * *
Just a couple pages into Communion of Dreams, there’s this passage:
He picked up a meal at the airport and ate in the car on the way over to his office, relaxing and watching the city roll by around him.
Early in the second chapter there’s this one:
The car he was in threaded through the old suburban streets, past still vacant houses and the occasional empty lot. Following the great death of the fire-flu, many homes had simply been abandoned.
The opening paragraph of Chapter 3:
‘What was it?’ he wondered as the car wound through the streets, stopping before the USSA building. He got out, standing there in the plaza, looking up at the golden plasteel supports and the draping glass fabric.
As a writer, particularly of science fiction, you have to know what to explain and what to just assume. By this I mean you have to explain certain things to the reader, enough to give them a grasp on important story elements, but that you can assume they will fill in the background with other less important elements on their own.
Nowhere in Communion of Dreams do I state that cars are largely self-driving. There’s really no need to. Most readers are used enough to the tropes of science fiction that they can read the above passages, and fill in that detail on their own. It’s a little trick which helps anchor the reality of the book in the mind of the reader quickly.
* * * * * * *
And, honestly, the notion of a self-driving car is only barely science fiction at this point. I mean, one of the primary issues right now is having our legal system play catch-up with the technological changes in this field. From a discussion on the Diane Rehm Show yesterday:
GJELTEN: So the — I guess what — driverless cars have been in development for many years. But the big news this week is this law that passed in California allowing some driving of self-driving cars. Tell us what’s in this law exactly.
LEVANDOWSKI: Well, this law is called SB 1298, and it sets forth the framework for the DMV to set up the guidelines that vehicles will need to adhere to in order to, in the future, be able to drive themselves with or without people inside them. It outlines the type of technical standards, the types of insurance requirements. Everything that you would expect a person to go through when they get their driver’s license, you would expect a vehicle that doesn’t have a driver in it to be able to have.
* * * * * * *
“I do feel that I’m a very lucky, lucky person, in all sorts of ways. And one of the ways in which I’m fortunate is Harry Potter set me free to write whatever I want to write. I don’t — you know, we’re not living hand-to-mouth — I, clearly I can afford to pay all of my bills and now my writing life is a great experience. I can really do whatever I want to do. So I’m a fortunate person — I’m a fortunate writer.”
From JK Rowling’s interview on “Morning Edition” today.
* * * * * * *
“Could you take care of this for me?” I said. “I find myself surprisingly … attached.”
“Sure,” said my wife.
Attached?
Yeah, to my car.
Which is a surprise. Because I don’t usually become attached to things. Oh, I keep some things for sentimental value, because they are somehow connected to an important person or event in my life. But otherwise I tend to be very pragmatic about material things.
I got the car new 20 years ago. A Subaru wagon, which served me well. The last five or six years when it needed work I would weigh the pros and cons of getting the work done — was it worth it? Could I afford it? Could I afford not to?
See, I don’t *really* need a car. I work at home. For a while now when I needed to drive any distance, I took my wife’s car anyway, since it is a few years newer and in substantially better shape.
This past spring it developed some exhaust problems. The work it needed was more than the car was worth. I decided the time had come to just sell it and be done. Consolidating down to one car for the household would be a minor annoyance, but made the most sense.
Well, I made the intellectual decision. The emotional one, I found, wasn’t quite as easy.
Why?
I owned, and drove, that car for more than half the time I’ve had a driver’s license. There was simple ‘time in harness’ associated with it.
But there was more. Specifically, status.
I don’t worry a lot about status. As in, conventional measures of “success” in our society. When you don’t make a lot of money, you learn to not put so much store in such things, or it’ll drive you completely nuts. And as I noted earlier this year, I don’t make a lot of money.
But confronting the hard truth that I can not afford to buy a new car was a bit more than I really wanted to face. And selling my car meant exactly that. Because in our society, if you sell your car, you’re supposed to get another one. Preferably a new one. At the very least, a newer one. To not do so means you’re not successful.
And you should never, ever, under no circumstances, admit that you’re not successful.
So, yeah, the emotional truth was harder to come to terms with. Which would mean that I would be piss-poor at selling my car — at advertising it, at negotiating a sale, all that stuff.
But I’ve come to realize that there are other approaches to defining success, other strategies which can change how you accomplish things. My Kickstarter project is one such, stepping in to crowd-fund what a conventional publishing contract would previously do.
So I asked my wife to take care of it. She didn’t have the same emotional baggage to contend with. And she took care of it in her usual competent & efficient manner: last night the car drove away from our driveway for the last time.
Who knows? Maybe next year, after St. Cybi’s Well is done and available, it’ll be enough of a hit that I’ll be able to afford a new car. One which can partially drive itself. Stranger things have happened. Just ask JK Rowling.
Jim Downey
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Interesting article, all in all. But I particularly had a chuckle over this bit:
Beings with whom you could interact?
Maybe, or maybe I’d just let them go. They’d be living out their lives in an incredibly short amount of time. Maybe I could change the physical laws. I could make them live in places both hospitable and inhospitable. I could make it so that they’re completely alone—perhaps that’s a boundary condition for us, and explains why there are no aliens.
Hehehehehehe. Yeah, maybe it does. Maybe it does.
Kickstarter is almost ready. Watch for an announcement soon.
Jim Downey
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Better get used to it, because things like this are going to become ubiquitous:
A very interesting and somewhat counter-intuitive tech. I love the idea of the dynamic stability, and the fact that what makes the thing work as a viewing platform isn’t what makes it fly, but how the image stream is processed by software. And of course, this is just the start — such things will become tiny enough to effectively become unnoticeable at any distance, and cheap enough that everyone will be able to use them without cost concerns. Talk about ‘augmented reality’…
Fascinating.
Jim Downey
*With apologies to these guys, of course.
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Major “spoiler” warning further down in this post. Skip the rest of the section after the [] warning if you haven’t read the book. It’s OK to watch the video or read the concluding section.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tomorrow, with a little luck, we’ll break 20,000 downloads of the Kindle edition of Communion of Dreams, and could also break 10,000 downloads of the Kindle edition of Her Final Year.
* * * * * * *
This has been making the news the last few days:
Voyager 1 About to Become Interstellar Emissary?
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft may be getting its first taste of interstellar waters beyond our sun’s familiar shores and, like the pioneers that first took to the oceans to explore seas unknown, the 34-year-old robotic spacecraft is about to make history as the first man-made object to venture beyond the known horizon.
This historic announcement was made on Thursday by the team keeping a careful eye on Voyager 1’s particle detectors who noticed an uptick in interstellar cosmic ray counts in recent years. That can mean only one thing: the mission is beginning to leave the outermost regions of the heliosphere — the farthest extent of the sun’s influence.
* * * * * * *
From Chapter 18: [MAJOR SPOILER WARNING.]
“Well, the two of them have been going over all the data coming down from the ship. In addition to the telemetry about the condition of the ship, they’ve had a flood of data about the communications broadcasts that the ship has been receiving since stopping.”
“Communications? I thought your report summary said that we couldn’t broadcast to the ship, that it was on the other side of some kind of barrier?”
“Correct. But on that other side is ample evidence that the universe is teeming with technological civilizations. Klee hasn’t been able to decipher any of the communications yet, but is certain that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of sources. Seems that we’ve been kept in the dark about all of them by this shell of artifacts that surrounds our system.”
* * * * * * *
Yeah, me too.
* * * * * * *
Tomorrow, with a little luck, we’ll break 20,000 downloads of the Kindle edition of Communion of Dreams, and could also break 10,000 downloads of the Kindle edition of Her Final Year. Downloads all day will be free to one and all.
Help spread the word if you can. It’s not like sharing it with an alien civilization or anything, but still it will be appreciated.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Brave New World, Humor, movies, Predictions, Privacy, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech, YouTube | Tags: augmented reality, humor, jim downey, predictions, Science Fiction, technology
Communion of Dreams is set in 2052, and I have a pretty specific vision of what the world will be like as a premise for the book.
For an alternative, hilarious and horrifying look at what is waiting for us in 2052, I direct you to Tom Scott:
A science fiction story about what you see when you die. Or: the Singularity, ruined by lawyers.
Brilliant.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, DARPA, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Titan, Writing stuff | Tags: augmented reality, DARPA, jim downey, predictions, science, Science Fiction, technology, Titan
A friend who recently read Communion of Dreams sent me a link to this item this morning:
DARPA sets sights on high-tech contact lenses
(Phys.org) — A Bellevue, Washington, company specializing in display technology based on eyewear and contact lenses has sealed a deal with DARPA. Innovega, which says its technology can open a “new dimension to virtual and augmented reality applications,” told the BBC earlier this week that it has signed a contract to deliver a prototype of its iOptik display system to DARPA. That system consists of special contact lenses and eyeglasses. The product is touted to be a better solution than bulky heads-up display systems of the past. Screens sit directly on users’ eyeballs and work with a pair of special lightweight glasses.* * *
Users can look at two things at once, both the information projected and the more distant view. The retina receives each image in focus. The engineers used nanoscale techniques to develop the lenses, so that they can work as a focusing device with the glasses. The ability to focus the near-eye image is achieved by embedding optical elements inside the iOptik contact lens, according to Innovega. The micro-components do not interfere with the wearer’s normal vision.
* * *
The company says its system affords the human eye to see near-to-eye micro-display information simultaneously with the surrounding environment. Beyond DARPA, the company anticipates its technology can be used by the general public, but it will take a few years for that to happen. The product is undergoing clinical trials as part of the US FDA approval process. Possible applications might be gaming, watching big-screen 3-D movies, and future augmented reality devices superimposing images on reality. According to Innovega, the technology may be available to the public towards the end of 2014.
There’s also video of how the technology works, using a camera with one of these contacts mounted on the surface of the lens. It’s pretty cool.
Four years ago I wrote about the first big breakthrough with this kind of technology, and noted that the article I was referring to said the technology should reach the stage where DARPA would be able to start testing a functional version in “three to five years.”
Just for fun, here’s a passage from the beginning of Chapter 8 of Communion of Dreams when the main character first descends to the surface of Titan:
Jon nodded, slipped between the seats, through the door of the airlock. Locking it, he started the cycle. He felt a crinkling of his environment suit as it compensated for the increasing pressure, then the indicator light turned green and the hatch opened. He looked out into a thick, dull red fog. In the distance a strobe flashed. Sidwell’s compound.
Jon went out the hatch, down a couple of steps to the ground. As he cleared the small craft, his pc connected to Sidwell’s datastream broadcast. An overlay appeared before his eyes, pale lines of light outlining buildings in the distance. Nodding to the two guards waiting, he followed them toward the compound.
As I’ve said many times before, it’s always fun to see these technologies I envisioned becoming reality.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 