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: 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: 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
Filed under: BoingBoing, DARPA, Government, Humor, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech, YouTube
Ah, looking around, seeing the different components of the rise of the machines. Here’s a nice bit from BoingBoing:
And then this news item: Police Drone Crashes into Police
Make that “tired and embarrassed.”
Jim Downey
I’ll be damned – they actually used a miniature. I expected that it’d all be CGI in this day and age.
Full article, and a bunch more images of the model, here: Harry Potter and the film-makers’ magic.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Art, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, Press, Promotion, Publishing, Religion, Science Fiction, tech, Writing stuff
Anticipation no more: the day is here, the article posted. Here’s how it starts:
The future, it has been said, is unwritten.
But this really isn’t so, at least to the degree that gifted local writer Jim Downey has penned a vision of what’s to come in his recent science-fiction novel, “Communion of Dreams.”
Downey once occupied space in these very pages as a Tribune arts columnist. His versatile, incisive writing style has been applied to topics that range from handguns to the humanity seen through the creases of Alzheimer’s disease — in September, features writer Jill Renae Hicks detailed the story of “Her Final Year,” a caregiving memoir Downey co-authored with John Bourke. By approaching the fictional worlds of “Communion” with his well-rounded cadre of concerns, Downey was able to draw out themes related to psychology, religion and spirituality, reminding us that no matter how technologically advanced we might become, our future will be a human one.
There’s more, and all of it very positive (to my eyes, at least.) Take a look, share it, comment on it if you’re a subscriber to the Tribune.
But more importantly, take advantage of today’s Free Kindle Edition promotion, and go download the book. Please. Please please please.
You help me out by doing so, both by pushing up the book’s ranking, and by just reading the thing. Because most people really like it, once they get into it. And if you like it, you’ll probably tell your friends. Or maybe “rate” or “like” the book on Amazon or on Facebook. Or maybe even take the time to write a review (there’s a new review just been posted overnight!). All of these things help me, and I very much appreciate it – why I’m willing to offer the book for free.
So, thanks again! Go forth and download!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Government, Privacy, tech, Wall Street Journal
From the Wall Street Journal:
The Supreme Court’s recent ruling overturning the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices has caused a “sea change” inside the U.S. Justice Department, according to FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann.
Mr. Weissmann, speaking at a University of San Francisco conference called “Big Brother in the 21st Century” on Friday, said that the court ruling prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use.
Good lord. 3,000.
And that’s how many they were *admitting* to. Do you honestly believe that was all of them? Or that there were 3,000 instances where such routine infringement of the rights of Americans was warranted (well, so to speak)?
And, of course, this is just one small aspect of our increasing surveillance society.
Good lord.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Expert systems, Google, Predictions, Science Fiction, tech
This news item is making the rounds:
What’s next? Perhaps throngs of people in thick-framed sunglasses lurching down the streets, cocking and twisting their heads like extras in a zombie movie.
That’s because later this year, Google is expected to start selling eyeglasses that will project information, entertainment and, this being a Google product, advertisements onto the lenses. The glasses are not being designed to be worn constantly — although Google engineers expect some users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed, with the lenses serving as a kind of see-through computer monitor.
Well, they aren’t contact lenses, but they are very much exactly the sort of ‘cyberwear’ tech that I stipulate as standard for the world of Communion of Dreams. And as I mentioned four years ago.
The future’s so bright, you gotta have goggles. Complete with a primitive A-series expert called “Android.”
Jim Downey
I wonder whether this is some small payback from other members of the European Union who resent some of the silly bureaucratic rules which have come out of Brussels.
What is?
The fact that it seems to be impossible for someone who lives in Belgium to download the Kindle version of Communion of Dreams. Oh, plenty of people have downloaded it in the UK. And Germany. And even one person in France. But a fan who ordered a signed copy of the paperback, and lives in Belgium, wanted to also get the Kindle edition. And he can’t. I’ve even tried sending him a ‘gift’ copy of the e-book.
Nothing works. At least nothing that we’ve been able to come up with.
Anyone have any suggestions or work-arounds?
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 