Filed under: Marketing, movies, Music, Ridley Scott, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Violence, YouTube
So, anyone and everyone (well, in the “Love movies/science fiction/spectacles” crowd) spent much of the last couple of days talking about the new Prometheus trailer. This one:
At the time I write this, some 3,894,928 people have viewed said trailer on YouTube. And little wonder that it has so many people talking – it’s just about perfect for a blockbuster Hollywood spectacle, with massive explosions, plenty of violence and special effects, and a soundtrack that’ll make your ears bleed.
I’m a big fan of Alien, and Ridley Scott in general. And the above Prometheus trailer is pretty damned exciting.
But you know, I’d rather see this movie:
Yeah, that’s also a trailer for Prometheus. But it’s the UK trailer. It’s slower paced. More emphasis on telling a story. Literally quieter. The first explosion doesn’t show up until about 3/4 into the trailer.
Interesting difference in marketing. Using the same tech, many of the same clips/images from the movie (well, as much as you can depend on any trailer to use actual clips from the movie), even mostly the same music, the UK trailer manages to create a substantially different mood.
Like I said, I know which movie I’d rather see. And I know which crew I would rather see turn Communion of Dreams into a movie.
Well, I can dream, can’t I?
Jim Downey
Via Topless Robot.
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Health, Hospice, Kindle, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction
Just wanted to pass along some nuts & bolts stuff.
First, the Kindle promotion yesterday for Her Final Year was quite successful. Total, we had 409 downloads of the memoir, and that breaks down to 385 in the US, 23 in the UK, and one in Italy. Not bad at all – and thanks to all those who were kind enough to help spread the word.
If you missed your chance to download the book for free yesterday, never fear: we’re going to repeat the promotion this coming Sunday!
And here’s a bit of news: I’m going to offer a promotion for a free download of the Kindle edition of Communion of Dreams the weekend of March 31/April 1. And in conjunction with that, I will also have a small contest/drawing for a signed copy of the paperback – watch for details!
Lastly, I want to note another excellent review of Communion of Dreams now up on Amazon. Here’s an excerpt:
As an SF devotee since the 1950’s, I’ve read the best and the worst in the genre. Communion of Dreams definitely ranks among the best. Combining believeable “hard” science with a profound humanism, the story and the characters — especially Seth — engaged me fully from start to finish.
Check out the whole thing.
More later. Probably. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night due to raccoon-chewing-on-the-house problems. So we’ll see.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Civil Rights, Constitution, Government, Music, Predictions, Privacy, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Wired, Writing stuff
Hmm. Quoting a lot of music lately. Wonder why that is.
It’s not explicit in the book, but there is an implication that the Experts of the government have access to pretty much *all* private conversations and communications in 2052. Having true Artificial Intelligences makes it fairly easy to break most routine security, and that’s why you have things like ‘privacy screens’ and military-grade isolation fields – it’s an attempt to maintain some level of privacy. There are also some explicit passages like this one from the beginning of Chapter Nine:
“After he experienced several instances of unusual dream activity, Jon asked my thin-film counterpart back on Earth to collect data on the subject. Reports in discussion groups, news sources, and public postings on any significant change in the
frequency of dreams or their content. My dup went back through the last year’s datafiles to establish a baseline for the study, then I compared that to activity for the last few weeks. There is a significant deviation from the norm.”
Think about that – Seth, Jon’s ‘Expert’, can casually go back through all the material of the previous year looking for a specific pattern to conversations. That is an immense amount of data, and a similarly immense amount of computing power.
And that’s the world we live in today. If you have any illusions that you have some modicum of privacy from our government, read this:
The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
* * *
In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.
* * *
Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. “We questioned it one time,” says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. “Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys.” According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, “You’ve got to build this thing because we just don’t have the capability of doing the code-breaking.” It was a candid admission. In the long war between the code breakers and the code makers—the tens of thousands of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industry—the code breakers were admitting defeat.
* * *
In addition to giving the NSA access to a tremendous amount of Americans’ personal data, such an advance would also open a window on a trove of foreign secrets. While today most sensitive communications use the strongest encryption, much of the older data stored by the NSA, including a great deal of what will be transferred to Bluffdale once the center is complete, is encrypted with more vulnerable ciphers. “Remember,” says the former intelligence official, “a lot of foreign government stuff we’ve never been able to break is 128 or less. Break all that and you’ll find out a lot more of what you didn’t know—stuff we’ve already stored—so there’s an enormous amount of information still in there.”
The article is long, but informative. And frightening. That is, if you have any illusions that you have some modicum of privacy. As they also say in the article: “Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. ‘We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,’ he says.”
But are we even that far?
Again, I almost regret that “I . . . see . . . things.”
Jim Downey
*Don’t say words you’re gonna regret
Don’t let the fire rush to your head
I’ve heard the accusation before
And I ain’t gonna take any more
Believe me
The sun in your Eyes
Made some of the lies worth believing
I’ve said before that there is some kind of environmental effect behind the rising obesity rates worldwide over the last several decades. It could be a virus. It could be change in our gut flora. It could just be a response to rising stress levels in our society. It could be some kind of leeching plastics, or the use of HFC, or any number of other factors individually or in combination.
Or, perhaps it is the air we breathe:
Could Air Pollution Be Making Us Fat?
Steadily rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be affecting brain chemistry, increasing appetite and contributing to the obesity epidemic, according to a new hypothesis, which still awaits rigorous testing and inevitable debate.
The idea proposes that breathing in extra CO2 makes blood more acidic, which in turn causes neurons that regulate appetite, sleep and metabolism to fire more frequently. As a result, we might be eating more, sleeping less and gaining more weight, partly as a result of the air we breathe.
Major studies are in the works to test the hypothesis, which is still very much in the what-if stage. But if the link pans out, the research would offer yet another reason to reduce the CO2 we produce, while also potentially inspiring new obesity treatments.
OK, as the article stresses, this is *not* proven yet. But there is enough preliminary data and a plausible mechanism to warrant some serious investigation. And it tracks well with the rapid spread of obesity rates – CO2 levels have about doubled in the last 50 years.
Still, I’d rather have to fight fat than Reavers.
Jim Downey
*http://firefly.wikia.com/wiki/G-23_Paxilon_Hydrochlorate
Filed under: Blade Runner, Guns, Marketing, movies, Ridley Scott, Science Fiction
One of my most popular blog posts is this one: Model 2019 Detective Special
Well, you still have a few hours to get one of these, just $10 plus shipping:
Why yes, I have ordered one already.
Jim Downey
From late in Chapter Two:
“All right. Let’s get her inside and get Seth working with her. By the way, what’s her name?”
“Chu Ling.”
Jon nodded his head, touched the wafer under his ear. “Seth, download the record of the last few minutes from my pc. Then make the necessary arrangements for us to get inside with the girl. I’ll meet you in the conference room; since she isn’t wired, you’ll have to conduct the tests from the holo projector there. And tell Magurshak I’m on my way to lunch.”
“Understood.”
“Let’s go.” Jon looked to Gish and the young girl.
“Oh, and Seth . . . ”
“Yes?”
“Prepare a Mandarin language program for me, OK?”
“It’s waiting for you.”
From this past Monday:
Microsoft unveils universal translator that converts your voice into another language
Microsoft Research has shown off software that translates your spoken words into another language while preserving the accent, timbre, and intonation of your actual voice.
In a demo of the prototype software (starts around the 12 minute mark), Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s chief research officer, says a long sentence in English, and then has it translated into Spanish, Italian, and Mandarin. You can definitely hear an edge of digitized “Microsoft Sam,” but overall it’s remarkable how the three translations still sound just like Rashid.
In order for the translation system to do its work it needs about an hour of training, which allows it to create a model of your voice. This model is then mushed into Microsoft’s standard text-to-speech model for the target translation language. For example, Microsoft’s standard model of Spanish will have a default “S” (ess) sound, but the training process replaces it with your “S” sound. This is done for every individual sound (phoneme) in Microsoft’s text-to-speech model for Spanish. The creator of the software, Frank Soong, says that this approach can be used to translate between all 26 languages supported by the Microsoft Speech Platform, which covers most of the world’s major languages.
OK, first thing: this is *NOT* the universal translator from Star Trek.
But it is *exactly* what I had envisioned as the tech that Jon asks Seth to use in the excerpt from Communion of Dreams quoted above. The idea is that Seth would have such a wide selection of Jon’s phonemes in his knowledge base that it would be simple for him to use that for translation. In this case, all he would have to do is install the necessary program files into Jon’s embedded personal pc – so that Jon could use it to communicate with the girl whether or not Seth was ‘present’.
So, yeah, another prediction nailed.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction
One of those weird little quirks of mine: so far* this month I’ve given away some 5,277 copies of Communion of Dreams. Actually, that doesn’t include another half dozen or so hard copies sent to various reviewer and press outlets. This doesn’t bother me in the slightest – it’s all good promotion, and an investment in the eventual success of my novel.
And yet, the fact that 8 of the people who bought the Kindle edition of the book this month have “returned” the book and had their purchase price refunded, bugs me.
No, it doesn’t make any sense. There is no difference whatsoever between those people just getting a refund, and having not paid for it in the first place. I said it was a weird little quirk, didn’t I? I’m entitled to a few of those.
Jim Downey
*Yeah, so far. Watch this space for announcement of another free Kindle promotion day, coming soon!
Filed under: Pandemic, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
Unsurprisingly, I have been thinking a lot about St. Cybi’s Well, the prequel to Communion of Dreams I have had simmering for some years. I say ‘unsurprisingly’ because more than a few folks have been asking what the next book will be and when it will be available. Some quotes from the Amazon reviews to illustrate this point:
“I’m looking forward to his next book.”
“The worst thing about buying this book is now I’m waiting for a sequel!”
“I hope Downey will return to this alternate future history and tell us more about the deeds and dreams of the people who live there.”
* * * * * * *
He got down to the main street, turned left and continued. On his side of the street were some small office buildings, then the large city park he’d noticed on the drive in. Then he came to the long, tall wall. Pausing for a moment, he pulled the uniPod out of his satchel, removed the wireless earpiece and pushed it into his left ear. Then he fiddled with the uni, tapping a series of commands on the screen, until the machine found the local hotspot and downloaded the audio tour.
“The park wall, just in front of you, was part of the effort of the 3rd Marquess of Bute, John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, to rehabilitate the old castle grounds in the late 19th century. As you move along the wall, you will see it is adorned with totems of various animals in a realistic depiction, climbing over the wall as though to escape. This was The Lord Bute’s response to being denied the creation of a zoo in this park by the city fathers at the time. As you move along the wall you’ll soon see the looming Clock Tower, a favorite of the Lord Bute. Working with his architect, the renown yet whimsical William Burges, the two men sought to bring to life a bit of what they thought the middle ages should have been.
“This is the casual tour guide. More detailed descriptions and an in-depth discussion of any and all topics related to this site are available. Just select the level of information you require.”
That’s an excerpt from Chapter 1 of St. Cybi’s Well. The book is set in 2012, the protagonist is Darnell Sidwell (the “he” in the above excerpt), and concerns the onset of the fire-flu. Obviously, all of this is part of the ‘backstory’ for Communion of Dreams.
Seems pretty straight-forward, right? Tech feels good for the present day. Why did I choose the term “uniPod” though? Just to get around Apple’s trademark or something?
Nope. It’s because I wrote that on November 29, 2005. I know that because of the “date modified” info in the WordPerfect file.
The iPad was introduced in April, 2010.
* * * * * * *
A friend posted this comment to his Facebook wall yesterday:
I’ve been thinking about So-and-so’s post and subsequent thread the other day regarding the inarguable expansion of militias. Living here in Paradise Lost, it’s sometimes easy to lose sense of the prevailing winds of sentiment sweeping across the American landscape elsewhere. But it’s apparent that there are a lot of pissed-off people on both sides of the ideological fence and that each faction is seemingly preparing itself for more – and ever escalating – confrontations. And so I have to ask: Do you think we’re heading for a civil war? (And yes, I am being serious)
I sent him a link to this blog post from two years ago: Playing with fire.
And from page one of Communion of Dreams:
The Commons had been borne of the fire-flu, with so few people left out in the great northern plains after it was finally all over that it was a relatively simple matter to just turn things back over to nature. Effectively, that happened a few short years after the flu swept around the globe. According to law, it was codified almost a decade later in the late Twenties, after the Restoration was complete and the country was once again whole — expanded, actually, to include what had been Canada, minus independent Quebec. Hard to believe that was more than twenty years ago.
* * * * * * *
This is from the end of Chapter 9 in Communion of Dreams:
Jon thought he should clarify. “Jackie’s got the gist of it, but let me try and explain a little more completely. Sometime during the chaos of the post-flu, there were two marginal groups that got together. One was the heir of something called The Order, a reactionary offshoot of the old Aryan Nation.”
“Ah, neo-Nazis. Yes, I know them.”
“Thought so. The other group was a splinter of the radical environmental organization Earthfirst!, sort of like the far-left fringe of the Greens. They managed to create a hybrid belief system: that true adherence to God’s natural law would bring man back to a state of grace, suitable to be readmitted to the Garden of Eden. To promote this belief, they want to see a complete restoration of the Earth’s biosphere to a natural state, with humans having almost no environmental impact.”
Via a MetaFilter thread I came across this morning, a link to this movie: END:CIV
In a quote promoting the film on that website:
“In END:CIV, Franklin López does a refreshingly thorough and well packaged job of laying out the inherently self-destructive nature of westernized civilization and the ineptitude of peaceful reform. Using Derrick Jensen’s Endgame as a lose framework, López not only identifies root causes of systemic oppression and exploitation, but also exposes the deceptive nature of reformism and green-washing, instead spotlighting examples of indigenous resistance and the Earth Liberation Front. By the end of the film, passionate viewers will no longer just be questioning not whether western civilization is justified, but what they themselves can do to help bring it down.”
-Leslie James Pickering
Former spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front
* * * * * * *
I write about this not to tout my prophetic abilities. No, just to illustrate that for anyone who is paying close attention to both technological and sociological trends, certain things seem to be pretty obvious. As I told the Tribune:
“I’ve tried to anchor the world of 2052 firmly in what our world today is really like, but extending trends we have seen operate in the last 40 years,” he said. “Toss in a few wildcard events, some unexpected discoveries, and then cross your fingers.
“And to a certain extent, this is why I don’t really think of ‘Communion of Dreams’ as a typical ‘science fiction’ book — it is solidly grounded in known science and built from the reality around us,” he added. “The people in it are all real people, not unlike folks you know or would find in any mainstream novel. In this sense, it is just another work of fiction, though one which is a bit more speculative.”
Oh, and to say that pretty much everything I had written six or seven years ago as background material for St. Cybi’s Well has to be thrown out. The fictional world I came up with for 2012 has, largely, come into being. Or seems to be pretty damned close to happening just as I foresaw. Granted, there hasn’t been a theocratic regime come to power in the US – but can you honestly look at the current Republican rhetoric and not say that we’re close to that?
Gods, I just hope I’m not right about the onset of the pandemic flu . . .
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Diane Rehm, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, Press, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
Marketing a self-published book is the single biggest hurdle any author faces. Well, perhaps other than all the other hurdles such as writing the book in the first place, competently editing it, getting it put into an attractive format with a nice cover, …
Anyway, marketing is a huge problem. That’s why I did the KDP Select program, with the ability to offer special promotions. It’s why I blog & tweet and generally blow my own horn. It’s why I bug my friends and fans and ask that they help to spread the word. It’s why I leverage any connections I might have into any press outlets. It’s marketing. And you’re never sure what works or what doesn’t.
And I thought I would share one more item I’m trying: direct communication with the Diane Rehm Show. Here’s the text from a letter I am sending them with copies of Communion of Dreams and Her Final Year:
Diane Rehm Show
WAMU 88.5 American University Radio
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20016-8082Greetings,
I’ve long been a listener of the Diane Rehm show, and know that Ms. Rehm is a fan of intelligent, thoughtful science/speculative fiction. My recently published novel is generally considered to fall into that genre, and has been generating considerable interest. I am enclosing an article from this past weekend’s local newspaper supporting this claim, and a check of the reviews on Amazon will do likewise.
I am also enclosing a memoir published last year, which deals with another issue I know Ms. Rehm has covered and seems to care about: care-giving for a loved one. In this case it was Alzheimer’s, and the memoir is a joint effort of myself and another man, along with our spouses. We were each care providers for our respective mothers-in-law, a relatively unusual role in our society, but one which is going to become increasingly common (and necessary) in the coming years. The book is based on each of our writings as we went through the multi-year experience, and includes blog posts and email communications.
I understand that Ms. Rehm, and likely the entire staff there, are probably overwhelmed with story suggestions and books to be considered. But I hope that you will find time to take a look at either or both of these books. The matter of care-giving for someone with dementia is extremely important to me, and I would like to see more people aware of the role that men play concerning this. And the novel which I wrote during my time as a care provider tells another story, one of how unexpected discoveries sometimes show us what really matters. I think it is easy to see how these two things may be connected.
Thank you for your time,
James Downey
Will it do *any* good? No idea. Maybe. If you would like to help get them to consider it, post a note on their Facebook page. Send ’em a tweet. Drop them an email through the ‘contact us’ form on their site. It might help.
It might not.
That’s marketing, at least as a small, self-published author.
If you have any other ideas or suggestions, or know other outlets/individuals which might be open to providing coverage, let me know.
Thanks.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech
Since Sunday’s big promotion I’ve been hearing from people who have read Communion of Dreams about how much they enjoyed it. Which is incredibly gratifying, and also extremely kind. Thank you, everyone – I do very much appreciate your letting me know what you thought of the novel.
But please, if at all possible, don’t just let me know. Tell your friends. Post it on your Facebook or LiveJournal or G+ status, with a link to the homepage for the book. Mention it in your Twitter feed. Even better, go post a review on Amazon or at least “like” the book there.
I know this is a bit of a pain-in-the-ass. But it can *really* help me out. More people will hear about the book that way. More people will see that others like it. And maybe, just maybe, more people will actually buy the thing. Because while I am perfectly happy to give away promotional copies of the book, the goal is for me to be able to be compensated for the years of my life which are invested in this. I can’t afford the kind of advertising that big publishing houses sink into promoting books by famous people, and making them more famous. But I can ask my friends, and my fans, to just help spread the word.
Thank you!
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 