• Echoes of the Great Farewell
• Bunnocalypse and Other Strange Dreams
• Still Untitled
• Assorted Juvenilia

Amazingly enough, in 2006 at age 39, after decades of farting around with fiction-writing in my spare time, I finally finished a novel! 

OK, arguably it's more of a prose poem than a typical novel per se ... but it's novel-length and with a novel-like complexity of plot and characterization, even though the style as often as not veers into surrealism and stream-of-collective-unconscious and such....

Anyway: this book is definitely not for everyone.  You've got to like avant-garde, experimental literature.  But if you do like experimental writing, and have a taste for sex,  AI, mushrooms, superintelligent elfin aliens and the (real and imagined) End of the World, then Echoes may well amuse you.

You can download Echoes of the Great Farewell right here, in PDF form.

If you want a nicely bound paper copy you can buy one via Lulu.com. It may soon be available via amazon.com and other online retailers as well, but such is not yet the case.

After writing Echoes, I decided to strike out in a somewhat different fictional direction.

What I'm working on these days, in those rare spare-time moments I feel like allocating to fiction-writing, is a series of short-stories dealing with futurist, transhumanist and related philosophical themes.

The stories are all quite different from each other in style, form and content. But some of them interconnect in various ways, including some common characters, universes and themes.

I'll erratically post rough drafts of some of the stories here as they emerge. Then when the whole thing is done (hopefully before the end of 2008) I'll wrap it all up as a single book and make it available in print form, as I've done with Echoes. While the stories certainly do make sense on their own, they're intended to be best read as a whole collection.

Bunnocalypse

The longest and most complex story planned for the collection, Bunnocalpyse is currently a work in progress, started in late March 2007, but alas not worked on very much since.

The setting is post-apocalyptic: the human race has annihilated itself via engineered nanobiopathogens, but fortunately, just before the end, some scientists used nanotech to create a family of highly intelligent rabbits ... who turn out to be immune to the nanopathogens, and move surprisingly quickly toward their own Bunny Singularity.

If I am moved to do so, I may post installments of Bunnocalypse here as the writing progresses. Hasn't happened yet though!

The Big Questions

Coauthored with Stephan Vladimir Bugaj, The Big Questions is perhaps the closest thing to conventional SF I've ever written.

However, it's still rather odd, with multiple sections told from different perspectives, and a lengthy intellectual dialogue with a superintelligent AI....

This story is being published in three sections in the Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy, spread across three issues to be published during 2008; see sciphijournal.com where you can buy copies. At the end of 2008 the story will be posted here.

The intro paragraph at the start of the story, setting the stage for the action of the story itself, is as follows:

Life on Earth had been generally positive since the Transition: war, famine, aging and disease were things of the long past. A complex system of technological restrictions imposed by a sentient global computer network, created at the time of the Transition, prevented the various risks earlier futurologists had foreseen as potentially accompanying the advent of advanced nano-bio-info-cogno capabilities. Rogue wireheading was avoided via restrictions on mind-altering technologies, those that were available being carefully controlled by The Guardian. Most humans happily occupied themselves via social and sensory pleasures, but a significant subset also enjoyed more intellectual pursuits: mathematics, science, literature, art. A small minority, on the other hand, chafed at the restrictions placed on them and, for various reasons, wished that the advanced technologies that had enabled the Transition had been used for purposes more ambitious than the creation of a carefully-controlled human utopia. Post-Transition society tolerated this level of malcontentment due to the general value it placed on freedom of thought; and also because the overall socio-technological system in place was so powerful and robust as to render the odds of this malcontentment having any practical impact almost vanishingly small....

The story tells the tale of one of these malcontents and how he nearly brings down the whole system via cleverly exploiting a natural catastrophe, with a goal that is not destructive in orientation but rather aimed at resolving various philosophical questions.

Enlightenment 2.0

Not a conventional story, but an interview between two journalists and a superhuman AI, followed by some stream-of-consciousness angst lifted from one of the journalist's minds.

As well as highlighting the familiar issue of the dangers of superhuman AI -- even when said AI is well-intentioned according to its own ideas -- this story manifests my ambivalent, complex feelings toward spiritual "wisdom traditions" in general and Zen Buddhism in particular. The AI in the story is an AI Zen Master, but using his superior architecture and processing power to intensify the glory of his Enlightenment, he arrives at conclusions different from human Zen masters, and not terribly palatable to his human creators....

Read the current draft right here.

Beware it may get revised before final publication (if I become more Enlightened, for example...)

My Spurious Self

After reviewing a lot of papers for the AGI-08 conference (many of which were in fact extremely excellent, both in content and in style), I was feeling incredibly fed up with academic prose, especially in its more bloviatorial incarnations.

So I decided to write a story in an incredibly convoluted and annoying prose style.

If you can bear to get through it, it actually makes some interesting points about the future, and comes to a fairly humorous punchline by the end.

Philosophically, the essential question posed by this story is whether, if we do choose to arrest the development of advanced technologies due to fear of existential risks, we'll be dooming ourselves to eons of soul-killing boredom.

Taking a cue from some of Stanislaw Lem's later works, the story is written in the form of a review of a fictitious book, by a fictitious reviewer. However, as it progresses it diverges a fair bit from the Lem inspiration into regions that might be considered more Dostoevskyan -- or even Goertzellian....

As well as highlighting the familiar issue of the dangers of superhuman AI -- even when said AI is well-intentioned according to its own ideas -- this story manifests my ambivalent, complex feelings toward spiritual "wisdom traditions" in general and Zen Buddhism in particular. The AI in the story is an AI Zen Master, but using his superior architecture and processing power to intensify the glory of his Enlightenment, he arrives at conclusions different from human Zen masters, and not terribly palatable to his human creators....

Read the current draft right here.

Beware it may get revised before final publication.

The Guardian's Lament

The glorious, whigmaleerious and excessively mathematical and experimental capstone to the Bunnocalypse-universe story-thread focusing on the Guardian (a superhuman AI charged with protecting humanity, above all from itself)'s experiences of contact with superintelligent aliens from the mushroom dimension.

Yah baby!!!

Two Actual Dreams

These two constructs aren't technically fiction, as they are accurate recountings of dreams I had.

After writing so much dreamlike fiction, I found it interesting to spend a little effort writing down actual dreams, rather than just semi-dreamlike imaginations. For sure, actual dreams are different, in the nature of the symbolism that emerges, and the nature of the rhythm and (in)consistency...

The two dreams I wrote down are:

• Colors, a dream of life in an abstract colored world, with obvious parallels to transhumanism. This one is actually a recurrent dream I've had for years.
• Copy Girl and the Pigeons of Paraguay, a whackier dream that rambles from one theme to another, but with the ultimate thesis that the Singularity is already here. This was an unusual dream in that it included a mushroom trip, and the trip in the dream was pretty faithful to the actual experience. I personally found this dream rather amusing, though I may be the only one (echoing Auden's famous comment that everyone loves the smell of their own fart....)

Assorted Juvenilia

I classify pretty much every piece of fiction or poetry I wrote before Echoes of the Great Farewell as "juvenilia."  Not that it all totally sucks -- there are some great bits and pieces -- but the style overall was never really what I wanted. 

The thousands of pages of whacky fiction and poetry I wrote in the late 80's and early 90's, I now view as "practice at the art of writing."  I didn't try to publish the stuff (except via posting it my website) because I generally wasn't very happy with it.  

True, in my mid-30's I was a pretty old juvenile, but I suppose the fact that I matured as a scientist earlier than as a writer can be attributed to the fact that the former was my profession and the latter "just a hobby."  I always loved surrealist fiction and poetry writing but never spent as much time on it as on science.  So it's not surprising my fiction/poetry took longer to get honed.

Some of my writings from that period can be found here, in rather disorganized form.  Muck around if you wish!  There are a few jewels amongst the silliness, awkwardness and chaos.  For instance, this quasi-random excerpt from my old unfinished rough-draft novel Wargasm, though badly formatted and organized, contains some pretty nifty psychotropic quasi-poems from my early and late twenties.  I would love to find the time one day to filter through this stuff, and extract and clean up the good parts and make a real work of art out if it....  But that seems unlikely to happen, as writing new stuff is much more fun.

Also, in 2000 or so I wrote a quasi-theological prose-poem called The Journey of the Void , which isn't quite either fiction or nonfiction....   

In 2002 I wrote a short piece -- a futurist/surrealist dream-sequence called McBuddha Awakens -- which many have found amusing.  It got incorporated into Echoes eventually.  This sort of stuff passes through my head all day, in those not-that-common moments when I'm not working, thinking about some hard problem or talking to somebody.

FYI, my favorite poem ever is The Petrifying Petrified, by Octavio Paz.  The last & best verse of it is here.

And there were also some experiments with Web poetry -- such as The Truth --

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