Filed under: Architecture, Art, BoingBoing, Book Conservation, Cory Doctorow, Hobbits, movies, Tolkien, Writing stuff
Gotta love this: a collector of J. R. R. Tolkien artifacts needed a small library/museum to house his collection. His architect decided to do the right thing, and go to the source material for inspiration. The result is a wonderful little Hobbit House, straight out of the books:
Asked to design a fitting repository for a client’s valuable collection of J.R.R. Tolkien manuscripts and artifacts, architect Peter Archer went to the source—the fantasy novels that describe the abodes of the diminutive Hobbits.
“I came back my client and said, ‘I’m not going to make this look like Hollywood,’” Archer recalled, choosing to focus instead on a finely-crafted structure embodying a sense of history and tradition.
The site was critical too—and Archer found the perfect one a short walk away from his client’s main house, where an 18th-century dry-laid wall ran through the property. “I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful to build the structure into the wall?”
Now, my wife is an architect, so I know a little about this profession, and having a client willing to go along with such a design is a real boon. And as a rare book and document conservator, I appreciate an architect who went to the trouble to make sure that the environment was appropriately climate controlled for the archives. And as a craftsman, I really appreciate the attention to detail by the contractor and his crew – this isn’t just a facade, it’s well-crafted workmanship.
Wonderful, all the way around. I can’t help but think that J.R.R. would be pleased.
Jim Downey
Via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Expert systems, General Musings, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
Sheesh.
So, I was reading one of my fav online comics today (Dinosaur Comics), and came across a term I wasn’t familiar with, even through I describe it and use it extensively in Communion of Dreams. The term? Augmented Reality.
I posit that the use of expert systems and the integration of computing applications will become so widespread by the time of the novel (2052) that there will be a fairly seemless overlay of additional information on everyday reality for anyone who wants it. In fact, this plays a rather important role in the plot development, and ties in with my vision of what will necessarily delineate the divergent tracks between human intelligence and true Artificial Intelligence (see yesterday’s post).
But I didn’t know that it had a common term. *sigh* I am so out of it sometimes…
Jim Downey
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
“I need a toothpick.”
“No, mom, you had a toothpick after dinner. You picked your teeth for 40 minutes.”
“I need a toothpick!”
“Why?”
“‘Cause there’s something stuck between these front teeth.”
“You just brushed your teeth. There’s nothing there.”
“I can feel it.”
“Let me look.” (Looks. Nothing there.) “There’s nothing there but your gum, swollen from picking at it so long earlier.”
“I need a toothpick!!”
*sigh* Whisper, that only I hear. “Oh, not this again.”
“I need a toothpick!!”
“Mom, there’s nothing there. I just looked. Really.”
“But I can feel it!!”
“No. You picked at it so long…”
“When?”
“After dinner. You had a toothpick for over 40 minutes.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“But there’s something there! I know it.”
“Mom, I just looked. THERE IS NOTHING THERE. You just brushed your teeth, and rinsed…”
“I did? When?”
“Just now. Just two minutes ago.”
“But I know that there’s something stuck there…”
Jim Downey
(Cross-posted from Unscrewing the Inscrutable.)
Barnes & Noble has a nice clip up of an interview with Jim Dale, the wonderful voice talent who did the audio version readings of the Harry Potter books. (I’ve been a huge fan of the Potter books from early on, as I’ve mentioned previously, and have always thought that Dale’s interpretation of the characters is brilliant.) Anyway, the whole thing is fun, but towards the end he has a little bit of advice he offers to young writers. He tells them to “Put everything you can onto paper. It doesn’t matter what you put down onto paper. Get rid of all the garbage. Write it down, let it all flow out of you … get rid of the rubbish, and then the good stuff starts to come out of you.”
Excellent advice, of course, and the basis for why many people think that creative writing programs work: they force the students to write a lot, clearing out a lot of the ‘garbage’.
I’ve done a lot of writing. Was a newspaper columnist (selection can be found here), wrote for graduate school, wrote personal essays off and on for the last 20 years. And Communion of Dreamsisn’t my first novel. No – I wrote another SF novel in the late 70’s while in college, then spent several months after graduation trying to whip it into some semblance of shape for publication. It was a disaster. It deserves the banishment to the attic it has received. Only my wife, bless her, thought it was salvageable. Love is blind, indeed.
Anyway, go enjoy the clip with Jim Dale. He has such a lovely voice.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, General Musings, movies, NYT, Philip K. Dick, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
There’s a pretty good article about Philip K. Dick in yesterday’s New York Times. Odd man. Fine author. Source of a lot of my musings on the subjects of society, artificial intelligence, the human condition – not things I would necessarily point to as being inspirational, but definitely a big part of the mix of attitudes I developed from a premature exposure to lots of science fiction as a kid. As an adult, I came to appreciate more his writing for what it was – inspired, drug-fueled, more than a little scary around the edges.
And as a writer I completely understand his desire for more ‘legitimacy’ – something to which many of us who work in the nebulous genre of SF share, I think. From the NYT piece:
So it’s hard to know what Mr. Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53, would have made of the fact that this month he has arrived at the pinnacle of literary respectability. Four of his novels from the 1960s — “The Man in the High Castle,” “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and “Ubik” — are being reissued by the Library of America in that now-classic Hall of Fame format: full cloth binding, tasseled bookmark, acid-free, Bible-thin paper. He might be pleased, or he might demand to know why his 40-odd other books weren’t so honored.
Take a moment, read the article. And if you haven’t had a chance to do so, dive into some of Dick’s work. It may now be gaining some ‘respectability’, but that’s no reason to avoid it.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Flu, Government, Health, Pandemic, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
[Mild spoiler alert.]
Pandemic flu is at the heart of my novel Communion of Dreams. It is the ‘history’ of the novel, which has shaped the society of 2052 (the setting of the book). And it turns out to be the threat faced by the characters again in the latter third of the book. I won’t go into further detail, in case you haven’t read the book and would like to see how that all plays out.
When I first started formulating the novel, I immediately turned to the model of the 1918 flu pandemic to give me some idea of how I had to cope with the impacts that a renewed pandemic would have on our society. Since then, there have been additional pandemic scares crop up which have allowed me to see new aspects of this (and which, I am convinced, would make the book potentially a best seller, if it was allowed to escape the ‘sci-fi ghetto’). Why? Because pretty much everyone is slowly becoming convinced that we’re due for another pandemic, perhaps a really bad one.
And that fear has public-health officials nervous. Because they know that managing fear during a pandemic will be difficult. One example of this is the current research into whether conventional face masks would be effective or counter-productive in the event of a flu epidemic, and the recently announced guidelines from the CDC about who should wear masks, when.
While I worked in an abulatory surgical center during grad school, I had to wear a surgical mask at all times. You get used to it. And it does help control certain behaviours which can lead to the spread of disease (sneezing, absent-mindedly touching your nose or mouth, et cetera). But masks are not a panacea, and if used improperly or with a false sense of the protection they provide, could actually make matters worse on a societal scale.
It’ll be interesting, from an intellectual standpoint, to see how this plays out. Because I do expect a pandemic flu ‘event’ to happen within my lifetime. Not that I particularly want to actually have to experience it, mind. Mostly, I just hope that I have my book published before it hits, so people don’t think that I am just playing off of the fear and grief of recent history…
Jim Downey
Filed under: Apollo program, General Musings, NASA, Press, Space, Walter Shirra, Writing stuff
I don’t remember much of my childhood. The sudden deaths of my parents, just 18 months apart when I was on the verge of adolescence, was such a shock that most of my childhood was just lost to me.
But I remember the space race. I remember watching the early manned launches. And I remember Walter Shirra, admittedly more for his time working with Walter Cronkite commenting on the news during launches late in the 60s than as an astronaut himself.
Rest in Peace, Mr. Shirra. And thank you for your bravery and intelligence.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, General Musings, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Just a quick note to mention that sometime today we’ll pass the 2,500 download mark of Communion of Dreams. Huzzah! Not too bad, given that it has been available for little more than three months.
And as Mike Keers notes in this post, that may well underestimate the actual number of people who have read the book. Of course, not everyone who downloaded the thing necessarily read it, so who knows. Still, the success of a book is counted in terms of sales, so…
Anyway, thanks to all who have helped to make this endeavour a modest success, and particular thanks to SF author Cory Doctorow, who has by his example shown me that web-publishing is a workable strategy. Yes, I do want to find an agent and conventionally publish the thing, but in many regards it is more important that I have the book out there, being read and enjoyed. And with a little luck, once I do find a publisher, those who read it online will want to have their own hardcopy edition. We’ll see.
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
Communion Of Dreams 