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fictional creations...
"The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of
literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in
fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating
himself." -- Jim Rohn
Novels
Short Stories
Poetry
Assorted Juvenilia
Novels
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.
It's here, in PDF form.
Edge of the Bleeding
Abyss, is a sort of meta-novel, structurally inspired by the Arabian Nights. It's a series
of short-stories
dealing with radical-futurist themes: advanced AI's going bonkers
and/or doing naughty things, Singularitarian transcension events, the
impending irrelevance of humanity, superhuman intelligences from other
dimensions and so forth. But there is also a meta-story,
involving some folks telling these short stories to a potentially
destructive AI.
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 wrote this stuff during 2007-2008, and finally finished it off during
January 2009.
Brief descriptions of the main parts of the book follow:
Meta-story
The mad scientist's daughter Shahrizad is railroaded by a
quasi-sane, superhuman AI her father and husband have created, into
telling it a series of stories in order to potentially avert it from
destroying humanity.
Edge
of the Bleeding Abyss (the story)
The last 1/3 of the book comprises
the title story, which unlike the preceding stories is told in Echoes of the Great Farewell style
hallucinogenic prose, rather than literary-SF style prose. This
story is properly conceived of as a sequel to Echoes, conceptually and
artistically (though it's more precisely structured than Echoes, due to its diaristic
format). It plays a key role in the meta-story.
Capsule summary: mad scientist gets trapped on an Arctic island all
winter without his meds, hides in a hole in the ground wrapped in
sealskin going insane in the dark winter, and comes into contact with
superintelligences from another dimension, some of whom adopt the form
of midget Elvis Presleys, and who communicate to him copious
information regarding the true nature of the universe.
Bunnocalypse
The second longest and most complex story in the collection, Bunnocalpyse is
based on a bedtime story I told my daughter Scheherazade some
time ago.
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, aka "The
Bunnularity."
However, half the tale is occupied with the other ramblings of Goran
Badunovich, the mad scientist who hallucinates the Bunnularity on his
deathbed -- including a fake preface to a book, which includes a fake
book review of another book (devices I borrowed shamelessly from
Stanislaw Lem).
Badunovich develops the amusing mental issue of perceiving all humans
as apes, with rare exceptions.
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 also being published in three sections in the Journal
of
Science Fiction and Philosophy, spread across three issues.
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....
My Spurious Self
This is contained within Bunnocalypse, but I'll describe it here
separately anyway -- what the hey.
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....
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....)
In Edge, I embedded the
former dream inside the latter, just to go with the Arabian Nights theme -- and because
the latter dream did contain hints of the former throughout.
Mindplex
I've already got my next long
fiction work planned out in a moderate amount of detail -- and it's
gonna be awesome. We're talking a world-class, totally unique, work of
literature here, addressing both the future of the human race and the
inner workings of the human psyche in a manner that's never been done
before. Oh yah. But I'm not going to say anything detailed about it
here, I wouldn't want to kill the suspense. Suffice to say: you're
gonna love it ;-)
Short Stories
In gloriously
seductive pdf, aqui
I was driving late at night listening to a Morphine CD in the car, then
got home, lay in bed and fell asleep with the song "Cure for Pain" in
my head. I had a number of dreams on the theme (what if pain were
really eliminated, in some interesting sense? what would life be like?
what if it were rediscovered?) and woke up plagued by this story. At
first I thought it would take a single page to write down, but it wound
up 15 pages, and the punchline doesn't start to unfold till page 7 or
8. This is the first story I've written in a long time that doesn't
involve AI in any serious way. Rather, it uses future tech like
uploading-to-superhuman-form and cranial jacks to enlarge upon certain
aspects of human relationships, especially romantic ones. It's probably
the closest thing to a maudlin love story I'll ever write (well, I hope
so). Also, I think Suzy is my best female character so far -- in my
novels so far the female characters are largely props for the male ones
(with the exception of the narrator Shahrizad in edge, but as
the narrator Shahrizad doesn't get to do too much). But Suzy is
definitely nobody's prop! (Mindplex on the other hand will let the
women run amok -- but I haven't seriously gotten started on that one
yet!)
Warning for tots and tykes: there's not really any X-rated stuff here
(unlike what may be found nested deep in my novels ;-p), but the theme
is relentlessly "adult" ... most of the story occurs in bed ... (ahh,
the things that can transpire between a man, a woman, and an illicit
cranial jack modification device...!).
Poetry
In gloriously
seductive pdf, aqui
I used to write a lot of poetry but I gave it up a decade ago, deciding
prose-poetry matches my skill-set better. There are some pretty poetic
portions of my novels, but still, hallucino-poetic prose is different
than poetry.
I suppose this made me (for a while, anyway) one of the five people in
the world who read
poetry but don't write it!
However, one day when reading Kate Braverman's poem Ladies Night #2,
I kept reading words different than the ones on the page. I was
rewriting the poem in my mind, much as, when I listen to music, I often
hear my own mental improvisations
rather than what's being played in the outside world. So I wrote down
my Goertzel-ized Braverman, and was also unable to resist
mixing in some of Bukowski's poem back to
the machine gun
and the lyrics to the Hendrix song Third
Stone from the
Sun.
But, the whole thing is not plagiarisms and mutations -- there is
plenty of original unadulterated Goertzelitude in there as well...
Though there are some bright spots, overall I was clearly in a dark
mood when I wrote this,
frustrated by aspects of my relations with the "fairer" sex. When I'm
in a perky mood I don't think about poetry, I play music. (Actually,
music is great regardless of my mood ;-)
I classify pretty much every piece of
fiction or poetry I wrote before Echoes
of the Great Farewell (which I started in 2006, I think) 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 on my website and not advertising it at all) 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. (Of course, by "honed" I mean according to my own
standards! My writing may still not be to anyone else's taste,
but starting with Echoes, at
least it's to my
own taste!!)
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....
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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