Filed under: Art, Augmented Reality, Connections, General Musings, Science, Science Fiction | Tags: art, augmented reality, blogging, Communion of Dreams, Daniel Stoupin, Dragon's Egg, jim downey, photography, Robert L. Forward, science, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, video, Vimeo
One of the things which has always really interested me is how the perception/experience of time is so very … plastic. Partly that is because of curiosity about the nature of time itself, but partly it is also because the experience of time is so highly variable between species* and even individuals. Personally, I have been through experiences when subjective time dilation completely changed my perception of reality. There are some hints/references about this interest in Communion of Dreams, and there will be others in St Cybi’s Well, but I have yet to really get into dealing with the notion directly.
Anyway, that’s why things like this always fascinate me:
Jim Downey
*I went to college with one of Dr. Forward’s kids, and had the pleasure to hear him give guest lectures/chat with him prior to his first novel being published.
Filed under: Amazon, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Brave New World, Connections, Expert systems, Feedback, Google, NPR, Predictions, Science Fiction, tech, Wales | Tags: AI, Amazon, augmented reality, blogging, Communion of Dreams, Expert, feedback, jim downey, NPR, predictions, reviews, Science Fiction, Seth, St. Cybi's Well, St. Seiriol’s Well, technology, Wales, Well Hopper, writing
There are over 70 reviews of Communion of Dreams on Amazon, and if you poke around online you’ll find a bunch more. In addition, I’ve heard from countless friends and fans about the book in private messages and chats. And one of the most common things people will note is just how much they like the character of Seth, the Expert/AI executive assistant for the main character, Jon. The book opens with Seth contacting Jon about something which has come up, and you can get a sense of how useful such a virtual assistant could be:
“Sorry to bother you, Jon, but you’ll need to come back immediately. Business. I’ve made the arrangements. Transport waiting for you in town, take you to Denver. Then commercial flight home.” Audio only. That meant a lot. Tighter beam, easier to encode and keep private. Security protocol.
He wondered if something had gone wrong with the Hawking, the experimental long-range ship undergoing trials, based out at Titan. That was about the only thing he could think of that would require his cutting short his first vacation in four years. No use in asking. “All right. Give me a few minutes to pack my things, and I’ll get started.”
“Understood.”
“And contact my family, let them know I’m on my way back. ”
“Will do. Anything else?”
“Not at present. See you when I get there.”
Of course, CoD is set in 2052, and there have been huge advances in technology which allow for a very natural interaction between a human and a computer.
What’s been fun for me in writing St Cybi’s Well, set in our own time (well, actually, in October 2012), is that I get to plant the seeds for the technology which then shows up in Communion of Dreams. And one of those seeds is an Android app which is a ‘virtual assistant’ named Andi. It’s er, not quite up to Seth’s standards:
Darnell sat there, scanned the blog post. As he read, the assistant repeated “The page you requested is displayed on your screen. Do you need something else?”
“Um, yeah. How about a map to St. Seiriol’s Well?”
“A map is now displayed on your screen. You are presently at the location of St. Seiriol’s Well. Do you need something else?”
“I’m not at the Well. I’m in the parking lot. Where is the Well itself?”
“I’m sorry, available maps indicate you are presently at the Well. Do you need something else?”
“Go back to the Well Hopper site.”
“Very good. The page you requested is displayed on your screen. Do you need something else?”
A bit annoying, eh? Well, the people who have been reading the early chapters of the book have certainly thought so. Which was exactly what I was going for. Because technology doesn’t arrive fully developed. It shows up in an early, buggy form, and then gets improved over time. Think back to when we all had dial-up modems: they were annoying, klunky, and expensive … but they also were very, very cool because they allowed us to “get online”.
Anyway, I had to chuckle over a story on NPR yesterday afternoon which reminded me of this. Here’s the intro:
We’re already giving voice instructions to virtual personal assistants, like Apple’s Siri. But artificial intelligence is getting even smarter. The next wave of behavior-changing computing is a technology called anticipatory computing — systems that learn to predict what you need, even before you ask.
Google Now, which is available on tablets and mobile devices, is an early form of this. You can ask it a question like, “Where is the White House?” and get a spoken-word answer. Then, Google Now recognizes any follow-up questions, like “How far is it from here?” as a human would — the system realizes you’re still asking about the White House, even without you mentioning the search term again. It’s an example of how anticipatory computing is moving the way we interact with devices from tapping or typing to predictive voice control.
It wasn’t a prediction on my part to see this development, rather just paying attention to the current technology and tweaking it a bit to fit into the alternate timeline of CoD/SCW. But still, kinda fun to see things going just the way I envision.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Brave New World, Connections, General Musings, Health, NPR, Preparedness, Science, Science Fiction, Scott Simon, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: apps, augmented reality, blogging, health, ideas, jim downey, NPR, Rupal Patel, science, Science Fiction, Scott Simon, speech, St. Cybi's Well, technology, VocalID, writing
A somewhat related item on NPR this morning reminded me of an idea I had a while back. The gist of it:
Come up with a simple computer/smartphone app which would contain a few hundred basic words which you just read aloud and record. Save the file, and later it could be used for basic communication should you not have direct use of your voice for whatever reason.
Speech scientists/therapists could compile the standard list of words (for whatever language), perhaps with “expansion packs” of additional words some people might want to also record. When you have a few free minutes, you just run down the list, say a few words and save it. Then later you could use something like a standard text-message app to compose the words into sentences for ease of communication, and the app would just plug your recorded words into place.
It wouldn’t have the normal sort of nuance of inflection that comes with natural speech (though there may be a simple way around that — I’m not knowledgeable enough to know), but at least it would be in your own voice.
Who would use such a thing? Well, all of us face temporary or permanent loss of our voice throughout our lives, for all kinds of reasons. So there’s that. But I could also see uses where the app could be mated with any email or texting use, so that the recipient could directly hear you “talking” to them with it. I would think that it would have all kinds of uses beyond that, as well.
Just a thought. If someone wants to come up with such a thing, cut me in for a percentage, will you?
Jim Downey
PS: Hmm, I may have to incorporate this kind of tech into St Cybi’s Well. I can think of a few ways it could be useful …
PPS: Following posting this, I contacted one of the speech scientists mentioned in the NPR program this morning, Dr. Rupal Patel. And while it isn’t exactly the same sort of thing I envision, she did share with me the effort she is involved with, which has an app currently in beta testing: http://vocalid.org/ Looks like a very worthwhile endeavor, check it out and ‘donate’ your voice.
Filed under: Amazon, Failure, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, Music, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, feedback, free, Hugh Howey, Jefferson Starship, jim downey, Kickstarter, Kindle, music, promotion, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, Wool, writing
Last week Hugh Howey, the very successful author of the Wool series, published The Report on his AuthorEarnings site which generated more than a little attention across the publishing/self-publishing world.
I’m not going to get into a real discussion of The Report here. I’m in no way qualified to criticize the data or analysis contained in Howey’s post, and others have already done so with thoroughness. If you’re interested whether or not Howey’s post holds up to scrutiny, I’d recommend reading those.
Howey has had huge success, and seems to have managed that arc of success very well. By his own admission, he has been extremely fortunate with self-publishing, and his success is very much *not* what the vast majority of self-published authors will experience. But his success has made him something of an evangelist for self-publishing, and that is reflected in The Report. Hence the title of this blog post — Howey very much advocates self-publishing for authors at every level, and in using the power which self-publishing has to force changes in the traditional publishing industry to benefit authors.
While I actually largely agree with Howey about the benefits of self-publishing, I thought I would offer my own contrasting experience as a self-published genre author who has had only moderate success.
After years of ‘close calls’ in almost getting Communion of Dreams conventionally published (including what would have been a nightmare – losing the rights to the book when a small publisher went under), in January of 2012 I self-published it. Since then, some 27,000 copies of the book have been downloaded, and about 200 paperback copies have been sold.
Looks pretty good, right?
Well, 80% or more of those downloads were promotional. Which is to say, free. And in addition to the paperback copies sold, I gave away about as many.
No complaints from me — this is using the tools available through Amazon, and I knew what I was doing. But that necessarily means that I didn’t earn any money off those books directly.
So in all of 2012, actual sales generated decent, but modest, income. Not enough to buy even an economy car new, but easily 3 or 4 times the advance that the Publisher Who Shall Not Be Named was going to give me. Then last year residual sales were less than $1000. If you add in my successful Kickstarter (after deducting expenses associated with that), all told I was able to stop doing most freelance writing last year and get to work on the next novel. Of course, while still trying to do enough book conservation work to stay afloat, and almost managing.
I consider this success. It’s not Hugh Howey level success. It’s not even ‘mid-list authors a decade ago’ level sucess. It isn’t enough to live on.
But the first novel is out there, and has been well received. And I’m well on the way to having the next one out later this year.
Which is a hell of a lot better than banging my head against the gates of traditional publishing houses.
Jim Downey
*Reference, for those who are wondering. I’ve been considering doing a series of blog posts getting into rock music with a SF theme, looking at the development of that sub-genre over time. I still have a lot on my plate with SCW, so it’ll probably be a while, but if anyone wants to comment with suggested songs/albums/performers, feel free.
Filed under: Writing stuff | Tags: Gravity's Rainbow, humor, jim downey, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, Thomas Pynchon, writing
Excerpt:
Huw reached down, picked up a glass, then held it up for Darnell to see. Then he turned to the sink in the counter behind him, turned a tap and filled the glass. Again he held it up for Darnell’s consideration. “If I tell you that only the water that comes out of this tap is safe to drink, and I control the tap, then you have to ask me for water – on my terms. Then I control you.”
“Yeah.”
“But what if you knew you could just step outside to the stream from the falls and drink that water?”
Darnell nodded. “Or if I had my own well.”
“Or even,” smiled Huw, “if you knew where there were other wells available for the free use of all.”
“Understood. But if I don’t know about the other wells or streams, or think that they’re not safe to drink from …”
“Correct,” said Huw. “I don’t have to control all the water in order to control you. I just need to distract you from noticing that there are other sources.”
The writing continues.
Jim Downey
*A small homage to this: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”
Filed under: Bipolar, Connections, Failure, Feedback, NPR, Science Fiction, Scott Simon, Writing stuff | Tags: bipolar, blogging, Communion of Dreams, feedback, jim downey, literature, Marcel Theroux, NPR, Paul Theroux, Science Fiction, Scott Simon, St. Cybi's Well, Weekend Edition, writing
A good segment on this morning’s Weekend Edition Saturday with writer Marcel Theroux (son of Paul Theroux). I recommend the whole thing, but two particular bits stood out for me. The first is included on the ‘highlights’ page for the show:
I was trying to be as free as possible. I don’t really think about genre … to be honest. I find it constraining. And I know there’s a certain embarrassment about talking about science fiction in polite company, so some people prefer to call it “speculative fiction” instead.
And the second is my transcription from the actual interview (at about the 5:00 mark):
Anyone who has written a long work of fiction just knows that your mood goes up and down and at times it seems baffling and you feel that you should be doing something that is of value to the human race, not sitting on your own in a room churning out words. Or not churning out words.
Boy, howdy. I am happily churning out words at present, but sometimes it just feels so … self indulgent. And that doesn’t include the moments of complete panic that everyone will be disappointed in the prequel to Communion of Dreams because it isn’t science-fictiony enough or the writing isn’t any good or something.
*Sigh*
Back to work. It’s all I can do.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Brave New World, Connections, Humor, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Space, Stephen Hawking | Tags: augmented reality, black holes, blogging, Communion of Dreams, humor, jim downey, physics, predictions, science, Science Fiction, singularity, space, St. Cybi's Well, Stephen Hawking, technology, writing
From Chapter 3 of Communion of Dreams:
Apparent Gravity was the third major application of the theories set forth in Hawking’s Conundrum, the great opus of
Stephen Hawking which was not published until after his death in the earlier part of the century. He hadn’t released the work because evidently even he couldn’t really believe that it made any sense. It was, essentially, both too simple and too complex. And since he had died just shortly before the Fire-flu, with the chaos that brought, there had been a lag in his theory being fully understood and starting to be applied.But it did account for all the established data, including much of the stuff that seemed valid but didn’t fit inside the previous paradigms. Using his theories, scientists and engineers learned that the structure of space itself could be manipulated.
Of course, that is the reality of St. Cybi’s Well, not our own. In our reality, there’s been no fire-flu (at least yet), Stephen Hawking is still alive, and the laws of physics are still the same.
Black holes are in crisis. Well, not them, but the people who think about them, theoretical physicists who try to understand the relationship between the two pillars of modern physics, general relativity and quantum physics. Judging from the current discussions, one of the two must go, at least in their present formulation. On January 22nd, Stephen Hawking posted a paper where he bluntly stated that black holes, in the sense of being objects that can trap light and everything else indefinitely, are no more. And that’s a big deal.
Sometimes I wonder what reality I am actually plugged into, since it seems that I keep getting leaks from the other one.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Connections, Feedback, Science Fiction, Wales, Writing stuff, YouTube | Tags: Amazon, blogging, Communion of Dreams, jim downey, Pistyll Rhaeadr, reviews, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, video, Wales, writing, www youtube
From near the beginning of Chapter 12 of Communion of Dreams:
“I found the reference that you asked me about regarding Mr. Sidwell and Wales.”
“Oh, really? That’s faster than I expected.”
“Well, as it turns out, there are quite a few scenic waterfalls in Wales, but only one that had an inn where someone lived during that time period. I’ve uploaded some images. Would you like to see them?”
“Sure.”
The first image that filled his sight was of a great waterfall, cascading over the top of a cliff in the middle of a shallow ‘V’ between two higher hills. The stream was narrow, white with spray around the edges. Oaks and pines grew on the sides of the hills near the falls, and there was some kind of archway of rock about two thirds of the way down. Near the foot was an old iron pedestrian bridge crossing the stream.
Seth’s voice narrated. “It’s called Pistyll Rheadr, one of the ‘seven wonders of Wales’. The drop you see there is about 75 meters.”
The next image was closer to the falls, taken, Jon guessed, from the bridge. Now he could clearly see the wonderful natural stone archway, and realized that the initial drop of the falls ended in a pool just behind that, then the water spilled out under the arch for another significant drop into the main pool below. From this vantage, the spray and splash of the water glimmered in the sunlight, coating nearby rocks, feeding the ancient moss that grew there. A path was clearly visible to the right-hand side of the falls, leading up the side of the mountain.
“This next image is taken from the top of the falls. The red structure you see below the falls on the left-hand side is the inn. I have more images, if you wish to see them.”
As Seth spoke, Jon saw the wide, ‘U’ shaped valley open out before him, the falls tumbling down and away in the right foreground. The hills on either side of the valley were lightly wooded here and there, but mostly given over to pasture. On the left-hand side of the image, a narrow blacktop road wound down the valley, echoing the stream’s flow. And there, as Seth said, was the inn.
“No, thanks, Seth, I think that’s enough. Pretty place.”
“So I understand.”
“I don’t see anything particularly noteworthy about it. But it sure seemed to make an impression on Darnell.”
Guess what chapter I’ve just started writing in St. Cybi’s Well. 😉
All water is graceful, be it a tear or a torrent.
Jim Downey
PS: new review up.
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Brave New World, Connections, Google, Humor, Science Fiction, StreetView, tech, Travel, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: augmented reality, blogging, Easter egg, Google, Google Earth, Google Streetview, humor, jim downey, Llangybi, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, travel, Wales, writing, You Are There
An excerpt:
A very short distance down the road was another simple black and white sign which said “Llangybi”. There was a stone house not far past it, but no sign of a real town. Darnell kept going. He passed a few more homes and farms. Then he came to a split in the road and stopped, pulling off to the side in front of yet another stone house. There were some workmen on scaffolding at the near end of the house, doing something to the chimney.
Workmen? What workmen?
Why, these workmen. (It’s a Google Streetview location. You have to let it load, then activate it.)
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been doing a lot of double-checking of locations and descriptions using a variety of map tools. Google has made this very easy, between their satellite, Earth, and Streetview map apps. One thing I haven’t mentioned is that to amuse myself I have been including things actually caught in the Streetview images now and again, so that if anyone actually looks up a particular location I cite on Streetview, they will see what is described in the text. This has mostly applied to storefronts and the like, but also includes the occasional bit like the passage above — where a little later I have Darnell (the main character) actually stop and chat with these workmen, asking them for directions.
It’s a little thing which almost no one will ever discover, just my version of an Easter egg. And whenever Google updates the images used on these locations, they’ll no longer apply. But what the hell.
Jim Downey
*For those who don’t know of/remember the series.
Communion Of Dreams 