Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, Expert systems, Feedback, Predictions, Ray Kurzweil, Science Fiction, Singularity, Singularity Institute, Society, tech, Writing stuff
A good friend of mine, who is a big science fiction fan, read an early version of Communion of Dreams and loved it, providing me some valuable feedback and support. And he was *really* excited when he heard that I was going to write more in the same ‘universe’ as the book, wanting to know what happens after the events portrayed in Communion. When I told him that I would be working on a prequel to the book rather than a sequel, he was disappointed. “But I wanted to know what happens after the Singularity!” he protested.
[Mild Spoiler Alert]
As you are probably aware, the notion of a technological Singularity occuring, when we create the first true artificial intelligence which is superior to human intelligence, has been a popular one in SF for some time, and actually took on the term Singularity following coinage (I think) by Vernor Vinge. In many ways, Communion of Dreams is my take on that moment when humankind crosses this threshhold, embodied in the character of Seth, the expert system who makes this transition.
The folks over at the Singularity Institute are working towards this goal, and wanting to help us prepare for it. Cory Doctorow has a brief blog entry up at BoingBoing this morning about his experience speaking at the Singularity Summit hosted by Ray Kurzweil at Stanford last year, along with links to some vids of that event now hosted at the Institute. It is worth a look.
I am intrigued by the notion of a technological Singularity, but think that it is fundamentally impossible for us to know what happens after such an event has matured. Oh, sure, there’s good reason to speculate, and it is rich and fertile ground for planting ideas as an author, but…
…but I think that in many ways, leaving Communion as the end-point perhaps makes the most sense. It is analogous to ending a book with the death of the character from whom everything is presented as a first-person account. Because just as we do not know what happens after death, we do not know what happens after an event such as a technological Singularity. For, in some very real ways, the same kind of transcendence will take place.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, General Musings, Predictions, Science Fiction, tech, Writing stuff
People are sometimes surprised that I tend to be a late-adopter of most technological gadgets. I suppose that since I envision where tech is likely to go, as seen in Communion, they figure that I must be a real geek, with all the latest toys.
Nope. I didn’t get a cell phone until about a year and a half ago. My computer is five years old. I don’t own a big screen/plasma/HD tv. And just this morning my first MP3 player arrived, a itty-bitty thing the size of my thumb but a bit longer (one of these). A big part of the reason for my late-adopting strategy is that I want to let a technology mature a bit, so the bugs are worked out and the price drops.
Because the price always drops. I first learned that lesson the hard way when I was just a kid, in the early 70’s. I bought one of the first hand-held calculators, a massive thing about the size of decently thick paperback book that had like six functions. I thought it was way cool. Spent some obscene amount of money on it – like what you’d pay for a decent little laptop these days, adjusted for inflation. Of course, within six months, the things were being sold at a huge discount, newer models were out and were both smaller and many times more powerful, et cetera. It was the very beginning of the digital revolution.
Same thing happened with my first personal computer, an IBM clone I got during grad school in the mid 80’s that didn’t have a hard drive (just ran off a pair of floppies), had a single color monitor and dot-matrix printer, and cost me like one-third what I spent on a new car about the same time. And this was even a couple of years after the first ‘personal computers’ had been on the market. Needless to say, the quality of PCs continued to rise dramatically, just as the price continued to plunge, and within a year that computer was more or less obsolete (though I used it for about five years…)
So, I learned to be a bit patient in regards to tech. Like with my new little Walkman. The review I cited above was six months ago, when the things were going for about $200. I just got mine off of Woot for $50. Sure, it’s not as nice as the latest ones, but it will suit my purposes just fine. Once I figure out how it works, of course…
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, General Musings, Predictions, Promotion, Science Fiction, tech, Writing stuff
Sometimes I can be so dense. Got this note from “Mike” in Arizona (will ID him more completely, or let him claim credit in comments, if he wishes) yesterday:
I have been a fan of the UTI site and its several bloggers for some time. I recently became aware of your SF novel ‘A Communion of Dreams’ online thru UTI. I downloaded the book a coupla weeks ago and just completed it. A good read! I have passed it on to several other SF fans as well who are enjoying it. So your estimate of 2000 downloads of the book may be misleadingly low, if others pass on the PDF file as I did. I wanted to thank you for sharing it free ‘online’, and wish you the best in your future efforts.
I found the book entertaining and interesting on several levels, and especially the technology. As with so much else in SF writing, it may well prove visionary. I visited the CoD website and read your comments there–I’d just like to add that Kim Stanley Robinson is my favorite SF author.
Thanx again!
And I have to confess that it hadn’t crossed my mind that people might share the files or hand off printed pages, when the whole thing can be downloaded for free on the Communion of Dreams website. Makes me feel like a complete idiot.
Not that it really matters. Since I’m not worried about getting payments from people for reading the book this way, I don’t care if they share it with others. But I may need to keep open the notion that my stats for downloads (now just under 2,400) might not be an accurate reflection of how many people have read the book.
Jim Downey
Well, sometime over the weekend, we finally passed 2,000 downloads of the novel. Things had slowed down some in the last couple of weeks, but that’s still a thousand downloads last month. But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.
I wanted to talk about something else which happened over the weekend, which has happened to me many times. I was contacted by a young artist, who needed some help with the basics of marketing and professional behaviour.
When I was writing my columns for the newspaper on the art scene locally (some collected here), I would regularly be asked for this kind of help. I always try and respond, though sometimes this just consists of pointing someone at another resource they need to tackle first before I can help them, because I felt that it was a matter of ‘paying my dues’ to the art world. It was likewise my attitude about speaking at college classes and whatnot. And sometimes I even got a good column out of it, such as this one.
How does this relate to Communion? Doesn’t directly. I just feel like how I imagine most agents and publishers feel (the working ones, who still actually work with authors to promote their work, not the ones at the top of the food chain who mostly manage large firms) in terms of helping ‘young’ authors – you want to help, you wish that there were better resources out there for people, you wish that people would available themselves of the resources which are available, and you sometimes feel like you’re the only one paddling. But you do it nonetheless, even when the people who ask you for help (directly or indirectly) don’t seem to value your advice. Because it is either help them or become prematurely cynical and hard-hearted.
Oh, and I wish I was able to transfer the ‘dues paid’ in the art world to the writing world. But unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, General Musings, Promotion, Science Fiction, tech, Writing stuff
Well, Binary Dreams was sure a hit. Based on the number of visitors I got here, on my other website, and in comments due to the BoingBoing coverage, it’s clear that people “get” that particular piece of art.
Which I find both rewarding and extremely curious. The rewarding part is obvious, since any artist or author likes to have their work well received by the public. The ‘curious’ part is that when I made the piece and entered it in an exhibit 14 years ago, almost no one “got” it. Even when I had the work on display in my bindery and then art gallery for years afterward, people would look at it and basically scratch their heads. The temptation, of course, is to say that it took people that long to catch up with me – that I was over a decade ahead of the curve, as it were. Whether or not that is the proper conclusion to draw is another matter.
Ah well. I just hope I don’t have to wait another decade for people to “get” my novel.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, General Musings, NASA, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Writing stuff
On this morning’s Marketplace, Robert Reich had a good commentary about the problem with near-Earth asteroids and the NASA effort to identify and track these potential threats. Being an economist, he took the position that for the cost of one week’s expeditures in Iraq, we could fund this program completely through 2020, and then start thinking about what technologies we might need to deal with such a problem asteroid.
All well and good. But what does it have to do with Communion?
My previous versions of the book contained another bit of ‘history’ in addition to the “Fire-flu”: that an asteroid of about 300 meters diameter had hit in central China in the mid 2020’s. This I used for an explanation for several things in the world that I create: an offset to the effects of global warming; an explanation for what happened to the rise of China as an economic power in coming decades; and as a motivation for humankind’s rapid development of the necessary technologies to get into space in a big way.
I don’t see the matter as at all unlikely, and if you look at the information provided by the scientists involved in the search to identify these near-Earth asteroids, you quickly come to the conclusion that we’re rolling the dice each year to see whether or not we’re gonna get hit.
But this seemed to be the thing that tripped up most of my early readers. The prospect of both a pandemic flu and a meteor strike was just too much – even though the two things are in no way related, and we’re ‘overdue’ for both. I’m not sure whether this was just asking people to suspend their disbelief a bit too much, or whether it was just a little too frightening a prospect, but it was clear that however well it worked to create the “world” of Communion, it had to go.
So I dropped back, thought through the potential ramifications of a pandemic flu, and figured that I could more or less accomplish the same things with saying that the world collapse which followed the Fire-flu leads to some small-scale nuclear wars. In the great scheme of things, I see this as probably just as likely a scenario, I suppose. But it is somehow less satisfying an explanation for me. Ah well.
Jim Downey
Someone early on here suggested that I should podcast chapters of the book, which is a rather interesting idea but outside the scope of my time and tech right now. However, how about a graphic novel adaptation of Communion? I’d have to get someone else to do it, since my artistic skills don’t run that direction, but there are plenty of talented folks out there, in a wide range of styles – from Buck Godot to Buffy. Nominations?
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Feedback, General Musings, Press, Promotion, Writing stuff
I’m tired.
This stems in large part from the fact that the person for whom I am a care-giver (see this post) has a bit of a cold/flu bug, and so needs more care and attention. As a result, I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, and I’m guessing that tonight won’t be a lot better.
So I don’t have a lot of energy. Not for blogging, not for writing, not for doing conservation work. Which creates a certain symmetry with the fact that right now I am largely just waiting for things to happen: waiting to hear back from any of the current crop of agents I’ve contacted, waiting to hear about that article in the newspaper, waiting to get feedback from anyone who is reading/has read the novel. Hits to the site have slowed to just a hundred or so a day, and downloads of the full novel are slowly climbing towards 1900. Everything is on hold, waiting, waiting…
Jim Downey
More feedback from a reader. Sent this comment (spoiler alert):
I had some serious problems with the Ling character. In a society where children are so rare and cherished, the idea that she might be just wandering the streets was a difficult one. That the scientist Gish might just meet her one day and propose she go on an important scientific mission the next … well, it just seemed too abrupt.
To which I replied:
As to some of your questions about character motivation and behaviour (particularly as pertains to Gish & Ling) – good. Those are supposed to make you wonder. It’s starting to build the mystery. People, and things, are not necessarily what they first seem. This is a parallel construction to the initial reports of the artifact, and designed to get the reader wondering. The trick is, of course, in getting the reader to wonder about the nature of reality, of what is really going on, but not about my competency as a story-teller…
Yeah, that’s the trick. And it is also the trick with getting an agent and a publisher. Because when a book is published, and gets recommendations, the reader will naturally assume that any such ‘problems’ are intentional on the part of the author, and plow on. But before then, in the stage where I am now, people don’t have that kind of trust in me. A first-reader at a big agency or a publishing house is going to hit that stuff and say “gah – this idiot can’t even get past these problems. Pass.”
Part of me wants to grab people by the shirt collar and shake them, saying “look, just read the whole damned thing, OK, then come back and tell me what works or doesn’t work.” But that’s not how the game is played. Instead, most agents and publishers want three chapters to look at, and judge you on that basis. To be honest, it’s a big part of my motivation for putting the entire book online in the way I have – so that there’s a greater chance that someone who is potentially interested in my book may sample more than just the first three chapters, and realize that there is perhaps more to what I am doing than is evident in the first couple of chapters.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, Heinlein, James Burke, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
Got an email from someone last evening about the book (he had just finished chapter one), and he made the following observation:
One page 1, you speak of “he – he – he,” but don’t initially give us Jon Thompson’s name or description. I can live with learning his name on page 2, but I wonder if you might consider sliding in some sort of physical description of him in this chapter?
My reply was this:
Um, that was a very conscious decision. Nowhere in the book will you find any real description of him. Tied with a fairly “close” perspective with him, it makes it easier for the reader to subconsciously identify with the character, thereby becoming engaged with what happens that much quicker. And congrats – of all the people who have read it and commented to me so far, you are the first to notice this application of my literary theory. If an editor convinces me otherwise somewhere down the road, I might change it.
And I thought I would elaborate somewhat on this.
There has been a lot of scholarship into how a reader interacts with a text. 20 years ago I studied that as part of my graduate work at the University of Iowa. And while I can no longer cite authors off the top of my head, I do know that I drew several practical conclusions from those studies. This was one of them – that allowing the reader the ability to imagine themselves as a character (in this case, the main character) will help transition the “suspension of disbelief” necessary for a work of fiction, particularly Science Fiction.
Different authors do this in different ways. But for me, the most powerful books were always the ones which allowed me to step into the role of the main character – to imagine myself as Muad’dib or Valentine Michael Smith, learning about a strange world and my place in it. With Jon Thompson in Communion of Dreams, I wanted the reader to do the same thing: speculate upon their own understanding of themselves in a world that is changing around them, not through technology, but through revelation. It is James Burke’s The Day the Universe Changed applied to fiction, and hints somewhat at some of the deeper layers of what the novel is really all about.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 