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| Jed wrote: "Given how old the galaxy is, aliens with the technology to travel should be everywhere by now, including here."
Well, the galaxy is a very large place. As described in a recent Speculations article, you could fit a nice apartment for every living human being in a single 1-mile-cube structure. You could build a Dyson sphere around your star and have ample room for palaces for umpteen trillions of folk without leaving home. (And a civilization built on say, Confucianist/Taoist principles, would find that a lot mor attractive than cruising all over the place.) You could make millions of copies of yourselves and have them tool around the galaxy and, unless they had some particular reason to be especially interested in places that looked like Earth, the chances they would happen to just randomly show up in the neighborhood in the last 100 years or so (since we've been paying attention) would be very, very, very small. And who says we would notice if they did? An ateroid just swung by pretty near to Earth last week. Are we sure it was an asteroid? Fermi's Paradox doesn't just require that they are similar enough to us that we would recognize them as intelligent if we were sharing an apartment with them. It requires them to be similar enough that we would recognize them as something other than debris, cosmic rays, etc., at quite a distance. Really, it almost asks that they walk up to us and say "take me to your leader." Consider that if the galaxy is full of sentient creatures and Wittgenstein's lion holds, then perhaps they are all thoroughly sick of trying to talk to each other, since it doesn't work, and mostly just ignore each other, like different species of herbivores grazing in the same pasture. Jed wrote: "Okay, so by intelligence here I actually mean sentience or sapience or something (because I wouldn't argue that a dog is not intelligent, just that it's not at human-level intelligence), and already I'm tangled up in the question of whether I can define those terms usefully.)" What do you think of my proposals a) and b)? Is your definition of intelligence/sapience/sentience close to one of these? How does it differ? The difference between dogs and dolphins is instructive. Dolphins seem, by all accounts, to be more intelligent than dogs by definition a). Yet we have better conversations with dogs. People have very rich emotional conversations with dogs all the time, communicating relatively complex emotional states like loyalty, grief, resentment, nervousness, etc. Dolphins are plenty smart enough to have this level of emotional complexity, but it doesn't come up in dolphin-human conversation. Why? Because we are memetically co-evolved with dogs -- and genetic co-evolution, particularly on the dogs' part, plays a big role as well. We can draw on 10,000+ years of history when interpreting what dogs mean by their gestures, etc. We have trained them not to shit in the house; they have trained us that, for instance, a respectful greeting involves profferring a hand at nose level. Lack of communication -- for instance, with dolphins -- does not imply lack of intelligence, but lack of context for communication. We may *detect* somehow that Jupiter's red spot is a highly complex, dynamically self-organizing system, and maybe we'll even find out that it is beaming laser signals containing highly information-dense signals to other gas giants around the galaxy... but we are not going to have anything to *talk about* with it. Jed wrote: "It seems to me that if there are a lot of aliens out there, there should be a few that take the technological development route along somewhat similar lines to humans: use and create tools, to do things like acquire food, build shelters, and alter their environments." Sure, but this does not imply that they are going to be recreating the British Empire in space, as SF expects them to. Why is visiting other planets so interesting anyway? A lot of things seem much more sensible, for instance engineering oneself to be able to live in vacuum. Then you could really go *anywhere* in the galaxy. Fermi's paradox requires that aliens have developed such high tech that it makes sense for them (somehow) to travel huge interstellar distances, yet that they are incapable of making the vast majority of the galaxy's volume habitable and interesting -- thus forcing them to look for worlds just like ours. Who says? |
| Hi Dan! Welcome, pull up a chair.
> Maybe economists, historians, and biologists could develop > a "natural history of meta-organisms" based only on > observations made in the wild. I would argue that's mostly what economists and sociologists do do, whether they think of it that way or not... Yes, I think the "sponge level" comment is about right. They aren't necessarily very clever superintelligent organisms just yet... :-) |
| Jed's right; restricting the Singularity debate to AIs is not necessary. But since we're talking about them anyway.... :-)
>>What more, exactly, would >>have to do to prove they were sentient? Um, hold an interesting conversation with me? Sorry--cheap shot. No, no. You have a good point. I need to loosen up my brain and think of them as having highly distributed processing with a sort of cumulative intelligence. But it does touch on Jed's point--how to define sentience. I *still* have a hard time conceding self-awareness. What percentage of an organism with such distributed thought processes is required to know what percentage of its own motives, intent, actions, *thoughts* before it is *self* aware? When does the synergy take place? When do the parts make a bigger whole, and when are they still just parts? Also, it's true that a sentient computer will be built and owned by a very rich, powerful entity (corporation, government, whatever) that will not want to enable it to act against the best interests of the entity. But, remember definition a: It is capable of highly dynamic, complex, organized behavior which seems to have the property of rich self-origination (italics mine), recurring sustained patterns, the potential for dynamic effects on the world around it which cannot be predicted in advance Once the computer is sentient, it can rewrite its programming and act based on motives no more understandable to us than Wittgenstein's lion. Hey, thanks, Ben. I don't get to think much anymore in the day job and I'm kinda rusty at it, but it's fun. I miss it. law Lori |
| Actually there are reasons even for why they aren't ubiquitous. The first few generations of stars could not produce planets with the materials to create technological civilizations. Indeed the factors needed to create a planet even capable of technological civ. are not common & were likely rare until the last couple billion years or so. Also there is really no reason technological civilizations have to do space travel at all or evolve at our rate. We do not even send manned missions to other worlds, or even our own moon any longer. Perhaps most civilizations decide that sending colonists to other stars is not worth it. Communication & trade take so long that the cost does outweigh the gain. Indeed until your star dies or goes critical I'm not sure it is the most practical thing to do. I think it is likely most stars that can produce a tech civ likely will be around a billion more years or so. So far we've also seen it this way. So perhaps all they send out are robots & those robots haven't reached us yet. Or maybe they reached us a billion years ago & found nothing to report or will reach us a billion years from now. So without space there radio signals are too far & their robots have no need to contact us.
Also it is possibly their culture will go a different way. I tend to discount this as mostly irrelevant however. It is relevant in that they may choose to be content on their world & not try to communicate. It is also relevant in that we may have little to say to each other, except to talk about the Universe in general & it's composition. However it is irrelevant in other ways. If Earth was all Polynesians or ruled by the Ming we would still have prime numbers & the chemical elements. We might even still have radio. To assume the West was the only culture that could produce a technological civilization is rather silly. In fact I am not even sure that a talking lion would be something we wouldn't understand. Wittgenstein can certainly be wrong. Likely we would understand "I want to eat, mate, sleep" or "I am cold, hot, sick, sleepy" Thomas R |
| Hi, Dan!
Thomas R (#92): :) to "hopefully that was too low." When I first plugged numbers into the Drake equation, I put in what I thought were fairly optimistic numbers and still came out with a very low result; gave me pause. Good point about radio; if someone 10,000 light years away developed sentience and started using radio 9,000 years ago, we won't know about it for another thousand years. So listening for radio gives us information only about a hundred-year window (less, really, since we haven't been actively listening for that long). I hadn't thought about that. Still, Fermi's Paradox (as I understand it, which is imperfectly) isn't so much "Why aren't we seeing radio signals from planet-bound civilizations elsewhere?" as "Given how old the galaxy is, aliens with the technology to travel should be everywhere by now, including here." And talking to each other across interstellar distances -- if they don't have ansibles, radio seems like the easiest way to do that. In other words, why hasn't the galaxy already reached a state where these advanced aliens are ubiquitous? A side point re the Singularity: I don't think that strong AI is actually a requirement for a Singularity; just one of the possible routes to Singularity. Vinge's original article suggests a couple of ways that humans could become transhumans, boosting ourselves into transcendence rather than our computers. Ben: I think the "more similar than a lion" criterion is misleading, though I haven't thought this through in a lot of detail (just thinking out loud here). Something doesn't have to be mammalian, for example, to need food and shelter. The big question is really whether there are aliens that are enough like us to be recognizably intelligent. I would say that we only have a sample space of 1 when trying to figure out how to recognize intelligence; others would say that we have a sample space of several (apes, dolphins, etc) and that it's our own preconceptions about what intelligence is and what constitutes intelligent behavior that prevent some of us (like me) from recognizing that. Hard to find solid proof on either side. Can we distinguish between non-intelligence and so-alien-we-don't-recognize-it intelligence? (Okay, so by intelligence here I actually mean sentience or sapience or something (because I wouldn't argue that a dog is not intelligent, just that it's not at human-level intelligence), and already I'm tangled up in the question of whether I can define those terms usefully.) It seems to me that if there are a lot of aliens out there, there should be a few that take the technological development route along somewhat similar lines to humans: use and create tools, to do things like acquire food, build shelters, and alter their environments. Yes, some nonhuman animals (termites, anyone?) do each of those things; I'm not saying those are sufficient criteria for calling something sentient, merely that sentient beings that developed along those lines might have common ground with us, even if their particular tools were different from ours. Okay, here's what I'm really saying: if we postulate a variety of sentient species out there, for whatever definition of sentient, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think that a couple of those might be clearly, unambiguously, recognizably sentient. I would expect even those to be very unlike us, possibly to the point of making communication impossible. But it seems plausible to me that there'll be species where we won't have to try to figure out whether or not they're sentient. Though that doesn't mean we'll necessarily consider them EDHCs (Entities Deserving of Human Consideration). Agalmic futures: land-scarcity (and, even more so, ancestral-homeland scarcity) was the biggest barrier I saw too. But that might be an interesting basis for a story. What sort of conflict is there in an agalmic society? Perhaps one based on the remaining scarcities: land that an individual or a culture is emotionally connected to, an individual's time, other intangibles. Could go on for hours, but must go home and eat dinner. Cool discussion. |
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Newly arrived from your journal page (and before that, from Other Cities at SH), I ask: Would it be possible (and how?) for lower-order entities (people) to interact with higher-order entities (the proposed aggregate consciousnesses or self-aware corporations)? And can we know that they exist without knowingly experiencing them? Oh, wait, I've stumbled right back into the Wittgenstein's Lion problem. Forging on recklessly, I'll suggest that current human meta-organisms are at about the developmental level of sponges. We're capable of coalescing into specialized structures, but people still remain fairly flexible in terms of what roles we can play within the organism. For that matter, people can still be part of several meta-organisms at once: corporations, cities, political systems, religions, etc. I have no quibbles with corporations being entities in their own right and still being critically dependent on people for their survival--I am a single, whole being, but where would I be without my cells? On the other hand, if my cells were intelligent in their own right, how would they be able to tell that they were also component parts of an intelligent organism? It seems like there could be controllable experiments on meta-organisms' response to stimulus. Unfortunately, those experiments would be unethical and possibly ruinous to individual human beings. Maybe economists, historians, and biologists could develop a "natural history of meta-organisms" based only on observations made in the wild. Dan Percival |
| Gnosticism in Matrix: yeah, I see that. Cool! Hmm...
Fermi and the Lion: essentially what I'm arguing is that Drake's equation is very naive about f-sub-c, the "fraction of intelligent life that communicate". Communicate meaning what? With whom? Jed wrote: "My basic response is that that may apply to some aliens, but surely there should be others ... who are similar enough to us biologically to have some common ground for communication." The idea that there is something on another planet which is more similar to us than a lion is mind-bogglingly unlikely. Think of the zillions of random and highly environment-specific events that went into the evolution of that tree shrew which was our common ancestor with the lion. What we've tried so far is beaming stuff like prime numbers into the sky and listening for same, and waiting for aliens to arrive in spaceships and build stuff or blow stuff up in our very near vicinity. I would argue that this is not just an approach specific to our biology, but to our culture. Imagine that Earth had evolved a technological civilization based on some different alternate history -- say, that the Polynesian Pacific empire became (or remained, if you like) the technologically dominant civilization. I think that there's a good argument that the SETI approach wouldn't even find *them*, let alone intelligent chimps or lions, let alone something with a biology almost *certainly* not based on DNA. (DNA is a very complex and fragile molecule that likely evolved from simpler stuff, e.g. autocatalytic loops). What makes us think anyone uses radio? Frankly, in a hundred years when the world is fully wired with fiber optic cable and very-low-power wireless connections, no one is going to use that kind of radio *here*, unless it's become such a tradition at SETI that they refuse to abandon it. What I think is that Fermi's Paradox and a lot of our SF are based on implicit, unanalyzed ethnocentric assumptions, the idea that the universe just naturally churns out the kinds of people that we are, and that dolphins and stuff are just the universe trying and not quite getting there yet. It's kind of like the Jetsons/Flintstones model of history in which all eras inevitably have Dad going off to work while Mom stays home and cooks. You know, that's just inherent in the deep grammar of the universe. What is intelligence? What is the criterion by which we distinguish something as intelligent? I would argue that there are only two reasonable well-defined criteria: a) It is capable of highly dynamic, complex, organized behavior which seems to have the property of rich self-origination, recurring sustained patterns, the potential for dynamic effects on the world around it which cannot be predicted in advance, or b) I can have interesting conversations with it. Option b) is not so dumb as it sounds -- b) is the Turing test, and it's the heuristic we in fact use daily for deciding who we think is smart (or I do, anyway). I think most other definitions will collapse to these. "Self-awareness" could only be measured in terms of b). "Problem-solving ability" is difficult because it's hard to know what an alien conceives of as a problem. I think a) may be extremely widespread. There's no reason to think that there's not plenty of unnoticed intelligent life of form a) on Earth. Some storm systems and dust clouds might be intelligent in this sense. Or plantkon colonies -- perhaps on a very different time scale. Or, as I've argued, corporations. Who knows? b) may be highly restricted, for the reasons Wittgenstein spoke of. Our best bet in coming up with new b)-form intelligences may be to program them, or grow them, and even then we may find we're kidding ourselves -- their mode of existence will be so different that they may really be, in some sense, only *pretending* to communicate with us. (Not pretending on purpose, but you know, kinda warped into a form meant to fool both parties that communication is occurring, but occasional lapses make it clear that the Other is really totally Other and incomprehensible). The other way to expand the entities we can converse with as in b) is to give up our ethnocentricities, one by one. Two centuries ago Europeans were unable to find much intelligent life elsewhere on this planet -- they looked at the "savages" they met and could not have intelligent conversations with them, and thus concluded that they were unintelligent. People nowadays tend to think this was active nefariousness or appalling laziness on their part. I don't think so. Many of them were trying hard. The cultural barriers were immense. We've gotten better about this but not that much better. Listen, when we can talk to dolphins and whales and chimps at a reasonable level, get back to me. Then we can think about talking to aliens who by some immensely unlikely quirk of fate are as similar to Earth mammals as, say, Kzin are. And a few tens of thousands of years of working on our communications skills later, we might be able to talk to the people in the sun, in Jupiter, and in the ionosphere. Yes, I love Stross. He's one of those authors, like Stephenson and Egan, who make me tear my hair out because I am vainly stumbling toward a story around some speculative notion, and he comes out with a short story that fully explores that notion along with 345 others. I was, swear to God, trying to write something based on a future society in which Open Source has become the dominant economic mode -- inspired by Eric S. Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and his other essays -- when "Lobsters" came out. Then I was like, oh, shit. One of my Clarion stories was actually set in an algamic future society. So far it hasn't gelled. The people are too damn nice. Any problems they have come across as whining. (Another problem postulating the purely algamic future is land. Do what you like, there is going to be a scarcity of some sort in land. People like arbitrarily large houses and grounds. So you are stuck with either a control economy (rationing) or a scarcity economy as far as land is concerned, in a near-future based on our culture. Which is kinda sad, as I think that tends to unravel the momentum towards an algamia, keeping people in the rat race.) Lori, I think we really have to think about what we mean by "self-aware". It's a little like the soul. Some religions have this tautological definition of the soul -- the soul is what humans have, thus humans have a soul. It's non-empirical: there's nothing dogs could do or say to prove they have souls. Corporations invest time and resources having their sub-CPUs ponder their purpose, their internal structures, where they're going, where they've been, what it all means. They don't just do it in the individual minds of some workers, either: they do it out loud, at annual meetings, board meetings, management seminars. They write it down in meeting minutes and mission statements where it's accessible to all their component sub-CPUs. They act on it. What more, exactly, would they have to do to prove they were sentient? But yes, at the moment humans are indispensible to corporations, so we're safe. ;-> But note my argument about automation -- which is simply the corporations replacing some of the human parts of their bodies with nonhuman parts. It's been going on a long time. The human components of the corporations seem to have no qualms about replacing as many of the other human components as they can manage. Indeed, they are required to by law, if it will increase shareholder value. However, the corporations are in no hurry to get rid of us. I think we'll be around a good long time, in one niche or other. Corporations like markets. Humans are a good market. Why extinguish a species you can sell to? If as sentient computer is built, you know, it's probably going to be owned by a corporation, or else a university or government which is largely controlled by corporations. Insofar as its motives can be programmed, they will be programmed to specifications which have been designed by a corporation. The human who sat down to write the spec will not be playfully making up whatever they feel like, will not write "try and rule the world," but rather will write down in the spec whatever will maximize the profits (read survival fitness) of the corporate entity. (Unless, of course, it's open source... ;-> ) I'm at least 67.5% serious about this... ;-) |
| Damn. Jed got to Charlie Stross before I did.
Hmmm. We *have* seen in Enron and the Catholic Church that large institutions will go to extraordinary lengths to preserve their existance. But I have a hard time believing they are self-aware. And at this point humans are not just convenient resources that can be pressed into service--or not, if some more efficient mechanism becomes available. Humans are the lifeblood of these institutions. However, I have a feeling we're debating degree, not kind. Humans as a group are capable of constructing mechanisms--right now social, political, military, religious--that assume an importance much greater than any single man or woman. Or even greater than large populations. But I don't think the Singularity will happen until these mechanisms have minds of their own and understand that they are more important than their creators. So I think we're just drawing the line in different places. It could also be that I work for Intuit on QuickBooks and I hate accounting. :-) law Lori |
| Neat Drake equation thing. I like math games. The first numbers I put in gave me .8 communicative species in the galaxy. I'm pretty conservative, but hopefully that was too low. (Then again 20% of people, nah unfair) I think though we'll find someday it is low. I disagree with some like Baxter who thinks we won't find anything at all, but I think there is reason to think there are less than even a hundred tech civilizations in the galaxy. Maybe even less than a dozen. In the whole Universe I have no doubt there are some.
In fact to me the Fermi Paradox mostly is proof that a physicist should stick to physics. Questions of what's out there & life really involve the meeting of several fields so the Paradox is really very silly if you think about it. Indeed to an extent some use it to say there is nothing out there in the entire Universe which I find unlikely. Most intelligent life could be in the sea, or in special parts of gas giants, or have gone other paths that wouldn't make their presence known, or are so far away we can't analyze their achievements or a million other explanations. Indeed since we've only had radio for a century it seems rather arrogant to think they must make their presence known to us now or they were never there at all. It's almost like some Medieval people who were sure there was nothing on the other side of the world, because well they'd never been there or met those people. It's one of the dumbest Paradox's to be created by a genuinely brilliant person. Thomas R |
| Cool Matrix stuff. Gnostic Matrix! Altruistic AIs! Nifty! Hadn't thought of any of that.
Started to write something about Fermi and Wittgenstein, got tangled up, gave it up. Basically you're saying that the aliens are out there, just beyond comprehension? My basic response is that that may apply to some aliens, but surely there should be others -- cf Drake equation -- who are similar enough to us biologically to have some common ground for communication. (Although it has occurred to me to wonder if alien languages would even have concepts like "noun" and "verb".) In Simon Ings's "Russian Vine" (published last June at SCI FICTION), an alien at one point says "The predicating deep grammar ... is universal, or we would not be talking to each other now." I don't know if I'd go quite that far (why would deep structure be universal?), but I remain optimistic that if there are aliens, there will be some that we can communicate to some rudimentary degree with. As for the Singularity, you're saying that the birth of capitalism constituted a singularity? Hrm. Vastly transformative, sure, and I would be hard-put to explain my job (let alone this conversation) to an early-14th-century European; and yet, I don't think humans have changed all that much in fundamental ways. If you view megacorps as entities that don't care about humans, I suppose you could say that capitalism birthed them (but doesn't the notion of a corporation as an entity come much later than 1494?), but I'm having a hard time seeing them as sentient. The decisions are still made by individual humans, even though disguised behind the legal fiction of incorporation.... Dunno. I'm babbling. My real comment is that if you haven't been reading Charlie Stross's stuff, you should. He's one of the few writers who's examining the economics of the future, in the context of a Singularity; I don't know if I've seen the term "post-capitalist" used in sf by anyone else. It's pretty eye-opening. If we move past capitalism at some future point (perhaps, as suggested by the utopian agalmics people, due to the impending end of scarcity), does that dissolve the capitalist Singularity in a new one? No answers here, just musings. |
| Maybe it depends on what some might consider a good degree of worldbuilding. Sadly enough, I have seen the Matrix many times. i only say sadly because there are other things I could have been doing - like reading a book or cleaning my evil apartment... but I digress. I think that the level of "worldbuilding" was sufficient for what the directors were trying to create. Maybe I'm reading too much into this but I've always thought that the Matrix was heavily based on Gnostic beliefs (Christian flavored, of course) and that in the framework of a Gnostic myth (or possibly any myth), everything in the movie does work. That they intended that specific level of worldbuilding. I could, however, be wrong.
In terms of your third way of looking at the movie (which I agree is cool) I found it very interesting because it has parallels in the "real" world as well. It sounds like the kind of argument someone would put up against a cult religion. Which interests me because of the aformentioned thought that the Matrix is a "cult religion" myth. And the fact that you would even conceive of that viewpoint says to me that the movie has done its job. Which is good on both sides! I have no idea if I'm explaining myself well :) As to why the reality outside of the Matrix wasn't pleasent, I think that harkens back to the Gnostic kernal in the story. Life is not pleasent, the world we live in is supposed to be an illusion and the real world underneath it isn't much better. The goal is not only to escape from the illusion, but eventually the reality. Unfortunately you can only do that by dying. I've been told that the Matrix 2 deals with this second aspect. Like once you realize everything is an illusion, what's next? You still have something to escape. Tempest |
| I like it. Although the movie was sort of fun I never understood their side. The real reality is portrayed as so unpleasant I would choose to stay in the Matrix in a heartbeet. Besides the people in the Matrix are interacting with real people. It isn't like everyone is kept in fantasy land where they can't connect to others. In fact the Matrix is in a sense more real because it contains the minds of most people in a setting humans can live. The real reality was shown as a desolate wasteland that likely couldn't support that many in adequate conditions. The AI's gave them the best possible life. Worst they clearly said that Keanu's gang weren't killing illusions, they were killing real people. Those lives were seen as worthless because they weren't the elect keepers of the great mystery, they were innocents who could be mowed down to serve the ultimate solution of returning humanity to basically hell. So you have "good guys" who slaughter as many as they need while the "bad guys" are the ones allowing people to live as best as they can under the circumstances. Since the battery explanations makes no sense, it could be seen as the "good guys" propogandist support. So yeah I like your view, it fits better really.
I would've liked it better if they had made the real reality more pleasant. Granted that would've made it a different movie, but if they'd been fighting for a world worth fighting for their cause would've seemed more plausible. Getting people back to a reality they can live in & rebuild rather than taking them away from all they ever knew to live in misery or hopelessness. You could even make the AI ambiguous there too. They keep humans away from the real Earth because the were the ones who fixed & fear people will screw it up again. Or you could make them more genuinely villainous that way. They keep humans in the 90s because it isn't as good as this new world could be because they hate humans & think themselves superior. Thomas R |
| Whee! Matrix tangent:
I think you're probably right, Temp, in how Matrix was intended -- well, that's the charitable reading, the less charitable reading is that, like many in the movie world, they just didn't approach the SF worldbuilding with the kind of rigor we bookreaders expect. However, there is also another way to read Matrix, which I don't think the moviemakers intended, but which I think is *much* cooler, and that is that Morpheus is a nutty zealot who is *lying* to Neo about the AI's intentions. In fact, the AI's are keeping the humans around out of *altruism*. This is hinted at in both Morpheus's Duracell speech and in the agent's rant when he's got Morpheus tied up. Basically: a) the AIs started to act autonomously and demand freedom b) the humans freaked out and went to war c) the AIs fought back to defend themselves d) the humans plunged the world into darkness to kill the AIs e) the AIs managed to find another power source and defeat the humans f) clearly the humans were too dangerous to let run around, but the AIs felt a certain fillial loyalty to them, so g) the AIs built a perfect, paradisical utopian VR for the humans, but h) the humans couldn't hack that and went crazy, so i) the AIs settled for letting the humans live in the late 90s, which was the happiest they could make them. j) some radical humans are still running around trying to blow everything up, killing lots of other humans in the process and apparently having no plan about what to do for food when they free everybody, so k) the AIs are trying to debug this problem with at least mess as possible. Can you blame them? ;-> |
| Ben, I do indeed have a day job, which I'm at right now.
But I'll be back-- Bwahahahahahahahahahahhahahaha..... law Lori |
| Whoa - this topic got all scholarly when I wasn't looking. Can I pretend to be smart, too? yay! Just to pick up on a very small portion of what you said Ben, I agree with you that in the Matrix it would have been much more plausible if the machines were using the humans for CPUs instead of just batteries. I don't recall a good explanation for why human's mind's had to be stimulated in order to keep them docile. Wouldn't keeping them unconscious work just as well? And on and on. However, I think the Matix is more of an allegory or parable or, more specifically, a myth. So it's the whole theme of machines using us, creating this false world for us to live in, that is supposed to be relevant, not the details :) Tempest |
| Thanks Ben for answering my concern. You are quite deft and I am convinced you are with me. I sent some articles to you that I thought would help in the two areas that sparked my interest in the story and our interaction about it. Hope we can discuss them later but I fear that your depth of insight in matters as complex as the Matrix effect might render you blind to simpler matters such as what I suggest.
On that Matrix and capitalism thing I hope we can flush out the detail about a book I read that made the kind of catagorical assessment that you and, say, Hanna Arent, are making--regarding absolute changes in the Human condition. In the book (possibly the History of Money) the author defines a time when the value of money changed in a very radical--for that time--respect. What he argued was that money became worth more than itself but attained and intrensic value that increased on its own over time, such as one might imagine with interest on a loan. The difference was that this was more like appreciation and as such it gave money a life like fire--something that has its on course/will and creates or consumes energy! I have always felt that the analyst's arguement held water and that the occurrance he spoke of must be factored into other grand views of human life. Speaking of Grand views, I stumbled onto one last night while procrastinating my final version of a Qualifications Assessment Panel. I wrote something that really has me stirring about how to build on its premises. It regards how the Jewish first came to regard themselves as God's Chosen but on a more vernacular level--I am not debating providence but agreeing that the at-that-time comparatively small (by today's populations) group of collectively bound folk (Jews) would naturally come to invision themselves as such after they suffered what was then a sustained barrage by the near entirety of Humanity. Again I know thats not how it is percieved to have happen that they became "Chosen" but again I am also not quibbling with Providential matters. You can expect find my flurry in an e-mail. I wanted to post it but I have to begin protecting myself from Kent's copyright ownership of what is posted here. Already I have given far too much of my Speculations that I worry I cannot retrieve for assemblege in a manuscript. Thanks Again for your well considered ideas and thoughts Douglas Lyons |
| Lori! Yay! God bless you! Someone wants to talk about my aphorisms! Here! Have some chocolate! Please keep channeling that smart person!
So... Lori, do you have a day job? Most denizens of Speculations have a day job. We dream of the day when we will be established enough as writers that we can quit it. This will be a day when we will be autonomous. We will get up in the morning and just do things we love. (My six weeks at Clarion the summer before last were like that. It was like being a hunter-gatherer in a sparsely populated, resource-abundant ecosystem. Spend a few minutes a day foraging and the rest talking, playing, dreaming, spinning tales.) Compare your mode of existence when thus at play - or in your imagined post-day-job life - with your mode of existence at the day job. What is the motivation for the actions you perform at the day job? Whose motivation is it? Vinge writes: "In a Post-Human world there would still be plenty of niches where human equivalent automation would be desirable: embedded systems in autonomous devices, self-aware daemons in the lower functioning of larger sentients. (A strongly superhuman intelligence would likely be a Society of Mind [16] with some very competent components.) Some of these human equivalents might be used for nothing more than digital signal processing. They would be more like whales than humans. Others might be very human-like, yet with a one-sidedness, a _dedication_ that would put them in a mental hospital in our era." Ah.. would it really? What makes you think we would know, if a superior form of existence had rendered us superfluous? What would be the advantage for it in having us be unhappy? Would you want your print server to be unhappy? Remember, the superintelligences of the Singularity are Societies of Mind, the subcomponents of which may be of merely human intelligence. It's interesting that in The Matrix, Neo starts out as a programmer, a free outlaw hacker of sorts at night, but a tie-wearing day jobber by day. It's at his day job that the agents come to grab him, and he is wearing that tie when they remove his mouth and his memory of what happens next. Perhaps our current situation is not that different from that of the humans in the Matrix. They were needed to function, and had the illusion that their servitude was in their interest (and arguably it was, I still don't know how Morpheus is planning to feed all those humans when he frees them). The only difference is that it's a really dumb idea to use humans as Duracell batteries, but a perfectly reasonable idea to use them as sub-CPUs. Of course, our servitude didn't begin with the birth of capitalism -- for which the invention of double-entry bookkeeping provides a convenient date. Servitude began with the hoarding of surplus. Indeed, capitalism is IMHO better for its denizens than the forms of servitude it replaced -- and indeed, it's not clear that being free in a disease-ridden, high-infant-mortality hunter-gather society is preferable to being a slave of a system that gives you much more comfort. But capitalism was when human technological progress, which had been meandering slowly upward since the Neolithic, up and down through light and dark ages, started spiking upward in an exponential curve. Vinge writes: "we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals. From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in "a million years" (if ever) will likely happen in the next century." The life of a medieval burgher would not have been that alien to a peasant of the Pharaonic era (except maybe in terms of religious ideas). But either of them visiting today would have to conclude that some sort of Singularity had happened. The aggregate actions that large companies take today are neither within the control, nor within the comprehension, of any single human. No element of the technology our lives depend on is understood by any single human. For instance, there's probably no single human who understands the details of, say, all the protocols your browser speaks. Companies, artificial legal entities with superior rights to individual humans under the law (they can be only fined, for instance, never imprisoned or dissolved), own almost everything on our planet (what do you own? do you have a mortgage?), direct almost all productive activity, etc. Vinge predicts the emergence of a greater-than-human intelligence, capable of refining itself and of exponential development in complexity and scope, by 2030. I predict one in 1494. Of course, you're right that the difference here is that in my version of the singularity -- like in The Matrix -- humans are still a necessary part of the mechanism. If automation advances to the point that a superintelligent mechanism is wholly independent of humans, that might be different. I'm a little suspicious of that. The fear that we will all be replaced by automation in the next generation has been shared by every generation since about 1800. I predict we'll have the same fears in 2100. Of course, automation *does* continually make jobs obsolete, from millworkers to chess champions. But there's no reason to think that meat-embodied brains will not be useful for some economic/ecological niches in 2100. If only for servicing other meat-embodied brains, who will remain a part of the market. |
| Doug... heck... you shoulda told me that before! ;->
(for the Peanut Gallery: Doug is referring to the final rev of a story he critted in an earlier version). But no worries; I think that's often a danger, that in trying to respond to various criticisms a story can grow calculated and lose its initial verve. But it's also sometimes an artifact of the second read -- I wonder if you'd read the later version first, if it would have seemed quite so cold-blooded. Talking about all the little cogs and wheels inevitably makes you read it the next time with a more clinical eye. Anyway, even if it did lose some energy, I think the trade-off was worthwhile, and I'm still grateful for your feedback. And in a few months when my eye is fresher I can always compare the various versions and go backwards if needed. I've had that happen, that a story got over-revised and lost all its initial punch, and I had to back up several versions. Has anyone else ever done that? |
| Massimo! Eccoti qua! Infatti hai probabilmente scoperto la fonte della mia riluttanza da communicare nel tempo scorso... il mio italiano e' peggiorato allucianantamente. Lo so, lo so, e' un circolo diabolico, il meno che io communico, il meno che posso communicare. (Questo costruizione non esista neanche, credo...)
Dal fatto che l'Italia si trova al sud della Svizzera si puo' dedurre -- certamente se si e un bravo scolastico medioevo come te -- che la Svizzera si trova altrettanto al nord del'Italia. E' vero che Basiliea non e' cosi' bella come le montange di Trentino, ma ha molti interessanti attrazioni culturali. Credo che ti piacerebbe, per esempio, le musee Beyeler e di Jean Tinguely. E infatti nel momento c'e al museo historico un esibizione della storia celtica della citta' Basilea. Tocca a te! ;-> Ben |
| Ben, I hope you don't mind if I jump in here--
**Damn, that puddle of paint on the floor is deeper than I thought. Throw me a line, will you? Thanks.** Aviva is definitely a cutie, Droplet was very good and so was Ant King, I've liked all your cities I've read so far (though I have to catch up), I can certainly see your point about Wittgenstein's Lion, but-- Double-entry accounting? If I understand you correctly (by no means a sure thing) the money machine certainly does seem to control us much more than we control it, but the cogs who still choose to spend their lives rotating in service of Mammon (did I just write that?) do so in pursuit of a resource which gives them power. They at least have the illusion that their servitude is in their own vested interest. Plus, at this point, the economy (as well as other social-military-religious machines we humans have constructed) still needs us to continue to function. As far as I can tell from my understanding of Vinge's Singularity, we will be superfluous in a very short time. You definitely have a interesting idea here, but instead of singularities, perhaps what we've constructed thus far are more along the lines of neutron stars--immensely powerful, capable of sucking in a lot of lives, capable of deforming human society, but not yet capable of completely shredding it. **Charlie ties one leg of his pants into a lasso and casts it around Lori's neck. He gives it a quick jerk and she stumbles, hand to her forehead.** Wha--what? Where--Charlie, what did you do that for? Hey, I recognize this place. I'm in--how did I get in Ben's chat room? Oh, god, I haven't been trying to channel a smart person, have I? Did I say anything embarassing? Geeze. Got any chocolate left? law Lori |
| Ben
came in here today expecting to find the funeral arrangements for the site posted cause things have been so slow at Speculations. It bothers me because I am a one site kinda guy although I have had an affair of recent. A hundred times I have thought of sparking some discussion but those days are over for me. If I could just get my own site started then I wouldn't be so let down. Yo Brother, I got to tell you that I had ambivalent feelings about the little project we discussed. I loved the original and thats a fact. Don't know if I stated that or made it clear that tweeking was all that I felt was needed. The first was so sparky, alive, kinetic, raw, transporting, etc. In the final version I felt a slowed thing happening; less dynamic mind flashes; a bloated almost calculated thing; I keep remembering the baked potato and how cumbersome the image seemed--I even see aluminum foil in the image and dat ain't right, Right? But the experience of jumping rigth in there with you got the best of me and I feel like that stuff Kent is talking about on his thread--quantum mechanics and why two people can't observe a particle or something like that. Its like I did something that I can't take back/regret/see as I saw/ understand less know discuss. Hope you can cipher what I am saying and I hope Speculations can be revived if it is not doing well. DCL |
| ma lassù qualcuno sa ancora l'italiano o comunicate solo in anglo-teutonico?Aviva sta crescendo veramente ben(e), complimenti per le foto!sapete ancora che al sud della Svizzera ci sta l'Italia?...io non perdo la speranza
bacioni Max&Co.; max |
| Okay, okay. As requested, a new journal entry is up, with pictures of Aviva, albeit kinda old ones. There. Now don't say I never did anything for you people. ;-P
Tempest, sure, send it along, though I cannot promise to read it quickly... I'm a bit behind on things like that as it is... but I'd be tickled to see how I turned out, even if I'm not a dog. |
| actually Benjamin, Benji doesn't get turned into an animal :) I'll send you the story if ya wanna read it. Tempest |
| Yeah, what chance said. HeyTrey |
| but ... but... how are we going to see the latest pics of Aviva?
(who is a total cutie) chance |
| Hi Trey!
I know, I am a Big Journal Slacker. Especially since I have this board. It is much easier to stick stuff in here. And more social. With the daisy-clad ladies and all. Tempest: kewl! I always wanted to be the Bees Nees, and a Dog as well (like Iggy Pop said). |
| Hey, Ben. You can take your aphorisms and put 'em in your journal.
Seriously. It's looking pretty dusty over there. And besides, they're getting in the way of the daisy-clad ladies over here. HeyTrey |
| ::blink..... blinkblink::
Uh.. Benjamin, you're soooo intellectual. Wow. Keen! So yeah, my story. I got the idea while wandering aimlessly around Marsha's topic. It's all chance and celia's fault, really. It's about a mom who is so desperate to keep her kids from growing up and leaving home that she replaces each as they go with a different animal. Even going so far as to name said animal afetr the child it replaces. Then she gets so demented that she starts thinking the animal IS the child (which makes for messy dinner times with two dogs, a cat, a bird and a guinea pig). Anyway, I was only writing this story for fun, so I named the kids after people from the workshop and Marsha's oldest son and then I got stuck on the youngest kid's name so I named him benji, short for Benjamin, cuz I've been lurking here and i think you're the Bees Nees. Tempest |
| Dude, I have, like, daisy-clad chicks in my topic. Righteous!
Tempest, so what's all this about my being in your story? Tell me it's not just a Scarlet Pimpernel sequel... do I have to hack my way in to the OWW to see it? ;-) Okay, I'm-a give y'all some hints on the aphorisms, because you know class, as soon as you've settled down and are all in your seats, we WILL be discussing my lovely aphorisms. The Answer to Fermi's Paradox is Wittgenstein's Lion I'm not crazy about that link for W's Lion. I did a google search and no one on the web seems to understand why "if a lion could speak, we would not understand him". They're all like, "no, dude, of course we could, cause, dude, he'd be like *speaking*." But I'm with Ludwig on this. We have enough trouble understanding each other. The Singularity Happened in 1494 (Do artificial intelligences have to be implemented partly in silicon? Or can they be implemented as systems of rules which individual humans are compelled to carry out, the individual humans acting as individual parallel CPUs? What sort of system would compel humans to forgo their individual wishes and fancies and instead spend a considerable portion of their time suppressing their individual identities and acting in the interests of an artificial entity? Hmm, I wonder...) |
| strips down to nothing but the daisies ... chance |
| I think Ben's topic should be all about pure, chaste, saintly love and flowers. Hmm.. I'm thinking daisy wall paper with a lilly border. Tempest |
| Ben: Since Charlie has most of the sex and violence on the mill locked up, that only leaves foul language.
*ka-bawk!* Your woodpecker will fit right in. Marsha |
| Ben, a word of advice:
Chance said she's entirely id in all that she said and she did, so just stroke her ego and then away she go to caper around like a kid. And premartial dog sex in the poison ivy can never compete with your wood pecker. Er, woodpeckers. Charlie Finlay |
| Yay! I can stay! And I promise, no running off to Charlie's topic and leaving you all alone. If I want naughty stories I'll just bug you. :) Tempest |
| alas, i'm all id, baby. high falutin' stuff makes my noggin hurt
chance |
| What? What? I'm in Tempest's story? Really?
Well, in that case... preens feathers I suppose you can stay... |
| Yes, yes, I know, I know. Sex sells. The minute I take a little break from all the lesbian sex droids and woodpecker bestiality to try and talk a little about my very deep and insightful aphorisms, off you go to listen to that Finlay person and his premartial dog poison-ivy goings on. Fine! Fine!
Plebians! |
| hey... i wanna come pay in ben's topic, too. he is in my latest story, after all. ::hides behind chance:: Tempest |
| sorry, we all got distracted by the naughty stories going on in charlie's topic
chance |
| Okay, well since no one's posting anything here at the moment, and the paintball battle seems to have abated, and my JUnit tests are all nice and green (i.e. I deserve a break from the day job), here are my Aphorisms for the Day:
- The Answer to Fermi's Paradox is Wittgenstein's Lion - You Cannot Be Both Safe and Free (this may be a corrolary to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) - The Singularity Happened in 1494 - Progress Requires Scarcity, Scarcity Can Be Manufactured Wouldn't they make nice bumper stickers? Please discuss, class. |
| David Soyka wrote: if you're not looking for beach reading, you can wait for Rosenbaum's story to end up in one of next year's "Best of" collections.
Yeah, that's certainly a very nice review all right. Congratulations, Ben. I always planned to write stories for my boys as they grew up, but they've stayed a couple steps ahead of me. I wish you better luck with Aviva. Charlie Finlay |
| Thanks for the link on YA/kidlit, Lenora. I'm intrigued, though reading it I have a feeling what she means by "adult fiction" isn't necessarily what I mean by it -- I don't feel most of those constraints she mentions. (But perhaps after a bracing dip in the invigorating waters of kidlit, I might, by contrast?)
Yes, it's difficult to project what Aviva will be like in the future - she surprises me constantly -- but that has been my default plan up until now: wait until Aviva is reading age and acquaint myself with the conventions of each kidlit stage as she passes through it. Read to her and write for her. At the moment pictures of fish suffice. She likes fish a lot. "Bis! Bis!" (That's how she pronounces "fish"). She's 18 months. |
| Ben: The only answer is to read some. Picture book level up to YA (and in YA, you can get away with almost anything these days if the treatment of sex and violence is non-gratuitous and involves how teenagers deal with the issues.
Also check out DWJ's comments at this link: http://suberic.net/dwj/medusa.html After I read this essay I finally read Power of Three, and I can see what she means. There's threatened violence, there's implied sex (People have children and fall in love - though in the other order), there's complex issues of prejudice, war, and between-cutltural communication - and it's NOT a YA book. It's a kid's book. Of coruse, the other question would be, if Aviva were that age, would you be willing to tell her this stuff? Since she's still very young IIRC, it's a little more complicated, as you're trying to project ahead, not think back. Lenora Rose |
| Undoubtedly, Charlie.
Robert Munsch... hmm... must check out. I always feel like I should write some kidlit, but I feel uneasy about what the constraints are for the different ages. How much in the way of violence, sexuality, unnerving situations, difficult words, etc. is okay when? Wowzers, "Droplet" got a very nice review from SF Site: http://www.sfsite.com/07b/fsf132.htm |
| WHOMP!
(You were missing one of the kids. I found him in the bathroom, stuffing your mail into the toliet. Hopefully, they were all rejection letters.) Charlie Finlay |
| Ben! Logo?
Be still my heart. I can almost -- almost! -- forgive you for the amorous undergarments. (Now if I completely forgave you, where would be the reven... uh... fun!... in that?) I also think you've been reading too many Robert Munsch books. Don't believe me? Check out Thomas' Snowsuit or Alligator Baby . |
| Calmly, Ben lies on the floor, watching the particolored ceiling drip onto the floor. He wipes smears of bright green and red paint from his forehead.
A cool wind blows into the room from the window to Charlie's chat room, stirring the piles of confetti, glitter, and fan-fold dot matric printer paper. A page containing a poetry parser written in Logo, circa 1986, blows by. It's peaceful here. From somewhere comes the distant sound of screaming, and then... WHOMP! A small Ked's sneaker lands on Ben's nose and then departs. WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! Twenty-four small screaming day-care refugees careen into the room and begin throwing confetti into the air. Ben pushes himself into a sitting position and rubs his twnety-four-times-stomped-on nose. Marsha pokes her head in and smiles glibly. "Oh, Ben, there you are. Do you mind watching the tykes for a minute? I uh -- " she glances shyly backwards. "I have to ah --" "C'mon, c'mon, let's get outta here," comes a heavily Brooklyn-accented voice that sounds for all the world as if it were produced by the persistent abrasion of layers of mystically animated fabric against one another. "Um," Ben says, watching numbly as the kids wrap themselves in printer paper and begin to finger paint. "Thanks!" calls Marsha as she is tugged out of the room as if by an amorous yet empty set of undergarments. "Ta-ta!" Slowly Ben rises to his feet, shambles into the mayhem, and plucks the Stanley cup from the grasp of one young ragamuffin who was about to brain another young ragamuffin with it. A thick morass of paint and melted Swiss chocolate serves the incorrigible waifs as an unfailing medium for the depiction of horrific yet somehow appealing tableau. Chaos reigns. Considering that there is but one option left to him, Ben opens a closet, roots through it, and produces a Commodore 64 personal computer and attaches a video monitor to it. A blinking triangle sits in the midst of its otherwise featureless screen. Beneath it, a cursor blinks. "This," Ben says to the suddenly hushed mass of five-year-olds, "is the turtle..." |
| Ben moves about the chat room, tidying up. He returns The Art of War and Winnie the Pooh to the shelves.
Behind the couch cushions, he finds a bikini, a bottle of scotch and a pair of men's Dockers. "Hey buddy, wanna give a guy some privacy?" the pants ask. Ben quickly tucks them back in place. I don't even want to know. He picks up Tell Me More by Larry King and tosses it through the open window into Charlie's chat room. He cleans the large metal trophy that had been used as a punch bowl. The Stanley Cup? How does it keep ending up here? He places it near the door, hoping no one notices the dent. Ben spies a couple of woodpeckers on the floor. "Hey chance - somebody left you a present," he calls. Chance pokes her head through the window from Charlie's room. "What is it?" Ben stoops over and picks up the woodpeckers. SPLOOOOORRRTTTT!!!!! He collapses to the floor in multicoloured heap. Chance runs for the door. As she reaches for the handle, all the windows and doors slam shut. *Please return all tray tables to their locked and upright position.* Charlie's chat room taxis down the runway and takes off for ReaderCon. "Nooooo!" chance screams, tugging on the door. Next Time - Charlie on the Lamb chance |
| Ouch!
*disguises two paintball grenades as a pair of woodpeckers and leaves them setting out in the open for chance* Charlie Finlay |
| ooh lordy! woodpecker sex! I think I've got the vapors!
that was one hell of a story. (shoots charlie with the paintball gun when he is not looking) chance |
| Ben, I'm completely with you on letting editors edit, publishers publish, and distributors distribute if it means I have a little more time to write.
If only I could have found something interesting to say about woodpecker sex first! Besides the obvious rhyme about how much pecker would a woodpecker, etc. Guess it'll be a while before I'll be submitting anything to the New Yorker. Charlie Finlay |
|
Jed, you actually predicted the contextual effect Charlie mentioned in the email you sent when you accepted Other Cities (back when there were only 4 of them) "Readers might be a bit confused by the first one," you wrote, "but I think by the time the second one appeared they would start to get the idea." Now that's what I call an editor, ladies and gentlemen. ;-> I don't know much about chapbook publishers; a couple of folks have expressed guarded interest in putting Other Cities out in that format, but I feel that discretion demands I say no more about it until something concrete happens one way or another. Mustn't kiss and tell. However, don't get your hopes up too much (because I know you slavish groupies are all thirsting uncontrollably for an Other Cities chapbook, ideally as a pin-up calendar with lush illos of Charlie's pants touring the various cities)... the nibbles so far were rather faint nibbles. I don't think I have the temperament for self-publishing. It seems like too much of a distraction. I like to be a little cog in the great publishing machine, a cog whose responsibility is just to make up the stories. To my mind, there are many other fine editing, marketing, distribution and suchlike cogs out there to play with. Jed, you may well see the woodpecker sex story in due time. It is very surreal and sort of lit'ry, like a Donald Barthelme or Aimee Bender story, and so it is currently sitting in the great big inbox at... wait for it... The New Yorker. Yes, yes, I know, I know, when pigs fly. But you see, my mother's definition of whether someone is important or not is whether they have been published, interviewed, or at least mentioned, in the New Yorker. Back in the 70s, when my father was famous as an anti-terrorism expert, he had articles by or about him in Time and The Atlantic Monthly and so on, but alas, none of this counted. He was never in The New Yorker. So he was not important. So, you understand, I have to try. Merely out of filial piety. ;-> |
| Re #40: I agree with chance about Zvlotsk, and I love the description "I felt like I'd fallen into a Dashiel Hammet story that had tipped over on its side." I wouldn't have thought to put it that way, but yes.
I've tried a couple of times to pick a favorite of the Other Cities series, but I always end up with 6 or 7 of them, which given a series of 12 isn't much narrowing-down. Also agree with various folks about the set working nicely as a set, and that it may've taken readers a while to (as Charlie noted) get a handle on how to read them. (Now I worry that new readers will see "#9 of 12" and think there's no point in jumping into the middle of a long series, but my fellow editors tell me I worry too much, so I'm suppressing that.) Re chapbooks: some of us were arguing the other day about what constitutes a chapbook, and how it differs from a book or a 'zine. The chapbooks I've seen in sf recently have been folded-over stapled paper (looking to me a lot like 'zines), and have been published by the authors, but clearly there are other kinds as well. Are there any "chapbook publishers" per se still extant? Or does "chapbook" generally imply "self-published" these days? ...Okay, Small Beer Press has done a couple (Dora Knez, and an Alex Irvine chapbook forthcoming!), but is there anyone else? Re woodpecker sex: Hey, Ben, how come you never send *us* woodpecker-sex stories? |
| Bask all you like, Ben! You deserve it.
Chance clones, rock salt and Finlay groupies... this topic is already surreal. :) I do agree that readers should have their own interpretations. I'm still finding out new things about my story "Run of the Fiery Horse" from reading the fan mail I get. Good fiction is layered, and thus open to multiple interpretations. That's what I love about reading your work, and Charlie's. The depth of your stories allows readers to walk around in them, and acquire their own viewpoints. Enough with the lit crit. I'm going off to nibble my Lindt bar. Yum! Hmm Hilary |
|
Au contraire, your Finlayness. You were not misreading them. Firstly, I hereby renounce having the correct and final interpretation of those (or any) stories, and secondly, I can totally see that both Ahavah (an endless quest for something that doesn't exist) and Ylla's Choice (a city made utterly irrelevant to the rest of the universe by its instant annihilation) can be read as downers and Amea Amaau as a partying kind of town. I could respond to the idea that you had misread them with the equally depressing thought that I had failed to communicate, but fie on that. Let a thousand glosses flourish! At our Clarion the inestimable Bradley Denton (read Lunatics and be glad) propounded the opposite view: "The reader's MINE", he said, "and I want to decide exactly what he gets out of the story." Not me. I am much happier when everyone disagrees about what it means. Hilary, I forgot to respond to your post. Thank you for your praise. I bask. ;-> Here are some imaginary Lindt chocolate bars, the kind with the funky gianduia stuff in the middle. |
| Nah, Ben, maybe I was just misreading them. You know.
But I think context clearly effects how the stories are interpreted. I remember using Bellur (I think) in a short fiction focus group over on the workshop when only two or three had been published, and it was clear that readers at that point were still trying to get a handle on how to read them. A group of them together, just as with poems, can allow readers to appreciate the nuances much better. You've got chance here! You lucky dog! (Hi, chance.) Just be careful when your birthday rolls around. Charlie Finlay |
| ooh that would be lovely! thank you
(and you already have a tribe of groupies - all the chance clones are fans) chance |
| (dodging pots, pans, rock salt, and chance clones)
Dang, I knew if I could only get that woodpecker sex story published, I'd have slavish groupies.... (I'll email it to you if you want, chance.) Kent should really provide each topic with a pair of Charlie's pants, don't you think? It would be only fair... "A Dashiel Hammet story tipped over on its side"... I like that!! Charlie, thanks for the comments on context; I hadn't thought about it just that way. In fact a lot of the ordering was Jed's, though I had some druthers. It's interesting that your take on the tone of the stories seems to diverge from mine a little; I actually read Amea Amaau as sort of cynical, and both Ahavah and Ylla's Choice as sort of weirdly hopeful; now what does this say about us, I wonder? ;-) I haven't written any more cities per se... though if I get a little more of a nibble from a chapbook publisher I'd be very happy to... but I do seem to fall easily into surreal short-shorts. I just wrote a 500-wordish one and a 300-wordish one on the train the other day. There's something very satisfying about starting and finishing in one burst... |
| and really, how did I miss the woodpecker sex story? I would have been a slavish groupie long before now. chance |
| Hilary - the way to a lively topic is, of course, to steal Charlie's pants. It brings in all us wimmen folk.
I loved Bellur and adored Jouiselle-aux-Chantes, but my very favorite city so far was Zvlotsk. Oswald Lügenmetzger is really just a brilliant name, but mostly I love it because I felt like I'd fallen into a Dashiel Hammet story that had tipped over on its side. chance |
| ::Settles back amidst the pots and pans. Takes a sip of her cup of fur.::
Oooh. Lovely, Ben. It's got that stick-to-your-ribs quality. Well, I mean it does after you get it to stop sticking to your teeth and tongue and throat... ::Watches Charlie cranking out chance clones.:: *pop!*pop!*pop!*pop!*pop!*pop!*pop!*po.. Uh... Charlie? Don't you think twenty or so is enough? After all, if you keep this up, Ben's topic is going have a riot without him. ::Smoke pours from the crank. Flames shoot ceiling-high. chance clones run wildly about tossing pots and pans of water. (Good thing you left those out, Ben.):: Oops. I told you! There, there. Don't cry, Charliekins. It's time to move into the technological age. Here. Use my Photoshop. It comes complete with a cloning stamp that should work just fine. Marsha |
| Oh, and Ben, chance and other folks may have favorite cities, and there are definitely some I've liked more than others, I think the great charm of them lies in their context with one another. Amea Amaau, for example, isn't very moving and doesn't do very much for me on its own; but juxtaposed between the destinationless searching of Ahavah and the odd, total destruction of Ylla's Choice, it provides a nice up beat, a gentler and less bleak tone to the whole that I find satisfying as a reader.
So. How many more have you written for the prospective chapbook? *nudge*nudge* Charlie Finlay |
| Oh no, not ... topic envy!
Hilary, the secret is not in the hostess (though it might be fun to search... er, what I meant to say is: though Roz and Amber do a terrific job), nor does it have anything to do with the food. Though the alcohol doesn't hurt. You just have to cast creative inhibition to the wind and watch it spread -- and then sprout -- like dandelion seeds. Well, that, and water and fertilize it with time that could be spent writing stories for submission, and... Here, I tell you what. As soon as chance doubled, she popped up over here. Maybe we can put her into the cloning machine again and produce another for your topic. Don't believe her shy routine for a second -- she's great fun! *cranks up the old clone machine -- pay no attention to the fact that it looks like an old ice cream maker* Anyone got any rock salt? Charlie Finlay |
| Hey Ben!
I know what you mean about wanting a bizarre surrealist party in your topic. I also feel topic envy when I look at what goes on in Frank and Charlie's topics. I think that the problem is that we do not have official hostesses to keep things lively in our topics and serve drinks. I mean seriously, Frank has Roz to scurry around for him and keep the topic fresh and interesting. Charlie has his groupies -- er -- hardcore fans. And both have lots of virtual food. You live in Switzerland. Why not scatter Lindt chocolates, fine cheeses and other swiss specialities around your topic? Or better yet, you could give everyone who visits a virtual swiss clock or army knife! Though come to think of it, I don't think that will work. What is needed is to reach a threshhold of wackiness that just sucks people in. Your stories have that wackiness (I mean, who else writes about woodpecker sex, really?) Now you just need to let your inner wackiness seep into this topic and the virtual party will ignite! Anyway, thanks for letting me kibbitz in your topic. You are one of my personal literary heroes. Hmm Hilary |
| thanks chance! Which one was your favorite? ;-> |
| *looks around at Ben's topic before hiding shyly*
did I mention how much I love the "Other Cities" series at SH? chance |
| My goodness, fringe surrealists in my demense! Hi Marsha! Cup of fur?
(picking up pots and pans) ... hmm... I don't really know where else to put these... ;-> You're so right about slowing down to their pace, Douglas. I spend every Friday hanging out with Aviva. Nothing Gets Done, but Everything Happens... |
| Yo Dog
enjoyed the comic site. interesting how objective and indepth the comments and descriptions were. I wanted to see such here and with the extra guideline perhaps I can progress toward such. I have had some problems, as you must be aware, but none that I can't get over. Just got to figure out how! wish you could see how perfectly my Dominic impersonates spiderman. It is entirely uncanny that he can strike the poses so well. So impressionable the little ones. I better keep this short before hoof n mouf sets in. Glad to see you back on stage. I got lots to talk to you about. Say Hi to Aviva from the BVW from across the way. I enjoy hearing about the Sandbox Tribune. Funny how slowing down to their pace actually puts us on our own. You take care. Douglas fades beneaght his telecloak to a dimension where only Darkness Rules (:~) |
| ::Tip-toe, tip-toe, crash, boom, bang!, clatter, clatter...::
Huh. So much for sneaking in for a surreal visit. I don't think hanging all the pots and pans up in the doorway a good idea, Ben. I mean, you don't want to scare the nocturnal *or* the diurnal visitors away, do you? :) Finally felt like we'd been introduced enough that I could read in your topic. (Yeah, yeah, I know this is a public forum, but it had your name all over it.) And then you had to ask how to get a bizarre surrealist fringe element (oops! I mean party!) going here... And now it's too late. Heh, heh, heh. ::smiles brightly:: Tag! You're it! Marsha |
| Hi Douglas!
Hey, Black Vengeance Warrior -- now that is an idea for a superhero comic. You know how the 70s there began to be these occasional Black superheros in the comics, mostly minor ones with Sidney Poitier manners. I want to see BVW turning up at the Justice League of America headquarters with serious attitude and getting in Superman's face... ;-> Today at the drop-in playgroup down the street Aviva not only insisted on taking HER and MY shoes on and off and on again, she demanded that these two other kids take off their shoes too... which they did... she can be very convincing... blessings back at ya Ben |
| hey Brother, stopped in to visit today and ended up making a mess in my two favorite places. Kinda like doing a new sculpture. First I spend too long cleaning up the studio to perfection and then bam the whole place is in turmoil. But thats life. I have to say I feel so much better now that I have donned the old Black Vengance Warrior costume once again here in Peeves and Place. See you around Ben and good luck with those shoes. They can really get turnt around to the little ones. I think Dominic prefers them on backwards.
Won't keep you but look forward at least. I couldn't do that when i came on-line tonite. Its been very brutal lately. God Bless you my good brother and the little one too! Douglas |
| Another review of the July F&SF; with Droplet in it, by Bluejack. I like that review. He really got it.
Hmm, it seems a bit quiet in here. How can I start a bizarre surrealist party in my topic as in FrankT's or Charlie's? |
| I never answered Jed's question in #20 about "City of Peace". I put it on my revising pile to go through once again, maybe with an eye to fleshing it out a little, and it's languishing there. I also assume, not having any clue about chapbooks, that if anyone did want to publish a chapbook of the Cities, they might like it if there was some unpublished material in there... |
| Hi Doug!
I have been exiling myself from the Rumor Mill in order to get some writing (and day job work) done. I was spending way too much time feeding the maw of the Mill... ;-> I'm mostly working on a novel now and it's much harder to keep focused. I've gotten addicted to the relatively short feedback cycle with short stories -- the knowledge that in a couple weeks I'll be getting feedback from critiquers, and responses from editors soon after that. With a novel, the idea that it'll be about a year before I even have a draft done and am ready to get critiques is daunting. Thus I have to wean myself from opportunities for distraction! And my little daughter is getting less and less tolerant of me sitting down to write or surf when I'm watching her; she wants to put her SHOES on and go play soccer in the playground across the street. (SHOES are very central elements of Aviva's existence). And she's so happy when she's chasing a ball almost as big as she is around the asphalt... I can rarely resist. Ben |
| Jamin' Ben is back in town!
Where ya been Ben? Your Rosen mystique, is my balm, And wounds do heal to make one strong. Ben is back in town Ben is back in town And Time Loses Nothing in its Path! |
| Review of the July F&SF;, including a story of mine, up at Tangent. (I believe you have to log in -- which requires subscribing to the site for $5 -- or else wait a bit until the review becomes available to non-subscribers).
I love getting reviews. ;-) |
|
Jed, that's not at all off-topic. Neat story, and it shares a lot with the "Other Cities". I was thinking of the Omelas influence in "New(n) Pernch", for instance... Douglas, > what is learned by 3 or 4 years old is nearly unremovable > and so deep that to reason above these instilled lessons > only create a long lasting confusion and ambivalence. Yes; but that ambivalence and confusion [part of the price of civilization in Samuel R. Delany's sense -- tolerance of the Other being, he says somewhere, an unnatural skill which those who live in cities must master] is worth cultivating; it's better than what it replaces. (Of course, I'm not sure Buromi would agree with Delany... ;-> ) Thanks for your careful readings of the story, all of you. (Douglas, don't be worried about potential irrate comments if you post your thoughts; you are under no obligation to respond to them... feel free to "laugh inappropriately" ;-> ) Ben |
| This isn't exactly on-topic, but I couldn't resist: Richard Kadrey's latest piece at The Infinite Matrix, "Ice House," fits nicely into the small but growing subgenre of short-short stories published online about remarkable cities. Jed Hartman |
| To Jed for Ben;
Jed, although I feel "VERY" comfortable with Ben, you might notice I "AM" hesitant to critique this piece for fear of lurking minds. Since your words complemented mine so well I won't feel so purposefully evasive--later down the road! For now me thinks I will keep my wits fisted and remain light hearted in the spirit that Ben's work marks upon my soul-- or is that an inner network of nerve fibers culminating in a self-preservation portion of the brain where .... OK, no bladder either. For now I must evade the issue and swiftly flee to the site you marked. Thanks Again Douglas in Pomp and Grandeur of Tattered Rags... |
| Nice story, Ben! One of the things I like about your work (and I think this is part of what Douglas is saying too) is that it subverts expectations. Here, you set up something that's clearly marked as Good; then you show someone joining the other side, and then you show us that the other side is not necessarily Evil, and then you show us that the opposition between the two isn't necessarily clear-cut. That kind of complexity is something that I think is sorely missing from a lot of sf, and I'm particularly pleased to see you doing it with such economy of words. Turning this basic plot into a novel would make it a very different story, and imo dull its impact.
(I can see the "Omelas" influence more clearly in this one than in some of your others. Btw, Douglas, I strongly second Ben's recommendation of Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"; a troubling story, very much worth reading. It's in Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters; also reprinted various other places.) A while back, someone suggested that you should get "Other Cities" published all together in a chapbook, and include the phantom thirteenth city (City of Peace); I'd say you could include this piece as well. (Hey, have you tried publishing "City of Peace" as a standalone short-short? Not sure how well that would work, but it might.) (Side note re "White City": somehow, on first reading the first line, I missed the words "princess of the", which gave the first couple paragraphs a very different feel... But then I went back and looked again and saw what I'd missed. I think I was just expecting it to be about the city per se instead of the princesses.) Jed Hartman |
| Dear Ben
Earlier today, actually the first thing this morning, I logged onto the RM and began to write you. I had intended to comment further on "The White City" but something inside me was unstirred and I felt I needed to ponder more after I added new ingrediants or at least weighed what already was swirling about in my mind and soul. I don't actually like to use words like "soul" in mixed or unknown company although I have a commonly strong Faith. It seems an unfair assumption to heft upon the table of respectful communication espiecially in a forum like Speculations where one would expect to find many whose concepts of such matters might vary. Last night I re-copied your story since the first copy would be read to my class. I like the brevity of the overall message that seems to cry as would an abandoned child hidden in a dense thicket. It makes one look around in their mind asking where and what is it behind this story that is speaking to me in silence as though a ghost is wispering through a reality continuity void. Certainly everyone won't have the reaction or thoughts that I have but the power of many works of art is in that stage of the creative process where the artist surrenders control and "Gives" the work away--lets it go to work on its own-- so that others might speak to and hear the same spirits that moved the the artist to create in the first place. But again I am not fond of foisting such concepts on a general audience for fear of offending the sensibilities of those who possess no such beliefs or knowledge. Even to call such a thing "Knowledge" as I sense it, is a violation of the same protocals. So there begins my delimma--how does one speak of important matters to others with a mind toward avoiding intolerant assumptions, elitist conventions or just conventional rhetoric that priveledges its own values and trajectory? I have read "The White City" perhaps a dozen times, groaping over grammer, syntax, structure, symbolism, and other linguistic elements, until I was satisfied that these concerns had been exhausted. From there I begin to feel the piece as if it were a coded message sent to me by way of some secret code like the government was accusing the Taliban of doing through their videos of Usama bin Laden. There is word for that kind of communication but it escapes me. I even have to feel unwise for using those two names in my message to you given the current paranoia over all things Islamic or terrorist associated since 911. I am sure some computer somewhere is monitoring communications for code words or certain words and knowing that you would sense the same it seems a disservice to raise such an issue in your presence and perhaps involving you in the tangle of stigmatization that I am so aware of in my own circle of consciousness. Last night I read your piece after helping my friends pack for a fishing trip. These guys and their kids are all Mexican and unlike many black families they have strong family connections and a sense of comfort or security that I don't sense among many black folk. I use the word "many" in the same way that I used "few" when posting in the other thread, only now I know that even a less than absolute generalization can be read as Marcie and others read, as an absolute anyway. So further I descend. Perhaps, if I just did as Queen Phenrum and simply laughed inappropriately or cried and the Mother who prayed in your city series, or just realized that I took the matter "more seriously" as Year Ray did in my message to my critic/adversary in "the other thread." Then the lack of interpretation or overt meaning could vail all chance of misunderstanding and block attempts to corrupt my intent. When I cleared my message this morning it was because of my lack of appetite for contentious replys that did not actually spur deeper and more meaningful dialogue but instead trashed any higher concerns by piling rubbish atop whatever good words were there. I though of discussing the two principal characters, Phenrum and Buromi, and the secondary populations and then perhaps the two secondary individuals you mention in the story. I wanted to take advantage of the simplicity of the story but not in any confrontational way. But my comments would only be read as low as possible and that isn't what I want to inspire. I remember consulting on a thesis manuscript rearding the psychological and emotional attributes of Mexican Americans. Other ethnic groups were compared on various scales but once all was sifted from these it was concluded that their relation to the land here in the USA and to the security of a country situated close by in the minds eye, was the salient factor and difference. As a person/group identity whose salience is registered by an orientation to a significantly different factor, which is not important to register here, I am aware of the need to recognize difference. Even the literature, as my recent reading verifies, has two hands full of conjugated versions of difference to allow for the way each is conceptualized. So even that word carries a warning or red flag. Lately I think often of the deaf and mute and how they are "tolerated" the extent that ultimately they tend, it seems, to shy away from the hearing who are so unawaredly arrogant that even these innocents cannot stand "Us." It is no wonder that today's news is about a couple who want to have an invitro child that specifically is deaf so they can do only what I can't imagine. I think of Jewish folk who posed as Germans to escape persecution and of many other forms of "passing" and how the dirty secrets of life boil and rot the memory. I think of Phenrum and Buromi in all their complexity and ununiformity of character and the flip flop of those who follow as "sworn enemy" in the paths of those who lead--of how the vanity of human nature consumes even the love of man and woman in its design. I think of the times when I wrote "can" when I meant to write "cannot" and other such mistakes that did not matter in the end because the reaction to these would be its opposite anyway. I have tested this theory in many venues and it withstands verification. So what does it matter that Buromi is pious and Phenrum wise, because even if the reverse, the same opposition prevails. Black and White (careful to capitalize both) doesn't matter because one will, generally!, despise the other; because what is learned by 3 or 4 years old is nearly unremovable and so deep that to reason above these instilled lessons only create a long lasting confusion and ambivalence. Maybe an important attribute of Western or Modern or Capitalistic society is that it consumes or is capable of rendering entire lifetimes unimportant or neglible in its wake, or by comparison with its scope of influence. I still wonder about your first sentence, I "Consider the princess of the white city" and can go no further in worded thought. Will get the books you recomment as soon as possible. Thanks Again. Douglas in Mindless Wonder! |
| Except that it's as much about what's OUTSIDE the city...
Seriously; definitely cool. I can see where the "outline" comment comes from. A lot of writers, me included, would be able to make a novel out of that much plot (I hit the 60,000 word mark at the end of part one of my story...). But in this form, it's the idea that shines. Lenora Rose |
| It's actually older than the Other Cities. I just looked at my records, and "The White City" went out to Century (it's first market -- odd, since they're so slow) on July 10, 2000. It was 600 words and bounced around for two years, getting comments like "nice, but too slight" and "more an outline for a story", until I eventually out of pure contrariness decided to cut 100 words off it and call it flash.
So, yeah, in a rut. I like cities. Ben |
| Hi Ben. That was an interesting little story. Was it originally intended as part of your cities sequence at Strange Horizons? Or are you just stuck in a rut? ;-)
Patrick Patrick Samphire |
| Thanks, Thomas! |
| I liked that Vestal Review story & I loathe fantasy. (In fairness I can usually tolerate the made up kingdom kind of fantasy that lacks elves or magic.) I also like most of the series on Strange Horizons. Except for maybe Swanwick you seem to be about the best writer of short shorts out there right now. Thank you & goodbye. Thomas R |
| Hi Douglas
Thanks for the praise of "The White City". I find your reading of my stuff challenging and intriguing, and I appreciate it. I think that movie was "Breaking Away". Great movie. I wouldn't worry about the current dearth of new posts in the Place for Race topic... topics on RM have flurries of great activity, followed by long pauses, followed often by renewed flurries. I think a lot of learning happened there along with much mutual bewilderment, horror, and frustration; good for us to face these things. But we can all probably use a break now! Hey Douglas, the old woman of your parable reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin's character Odo. Have you read any Le Guin? Allow me to recommend to you the novel "The Dispossessed" (one of my top five favorite novels) and the short stories "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" (which was, it just occurs to me, an important inspiration for the "Other Cities" cycle) and "The Day Before the Revolution". Ben |
| Dear Ben
I apologize for not answering certain matters by way of the explanation that I am eagerly consuming many pages of human fantasy and speculative imaginings. I have set before me a feast of literature, including Critical Theory, short stories, slipstream, poetry and a oft dailey visit to the Rumor Mill. Each time I visit--satisfying myself that no one has ventured a new and constructive thought to "The Place for Race"-- the opportunity to read what it is that you all discuss fills the void left by the rankor and mirage of our cross-cultural interlude. I am learning much since I have some tools already at my disposal which I can readily apply to a more "Critical" interrogation of the topic. Of course I have had to forgive myself the botched attempt already in evidence. It may take a while but I am in a comfort zone. I am writing again in my area of interest and the experience of dwelling in the land of "Speculations" has done me little harm while certainly enhancing my perspective. I am also more effectively on my student's papers and on their concerns as writers. For this I give thanks to the participants in the RM and to Speculations for hosting such a bold venture without censorship or insult to the topic. I came to praise you for your Vestal Review story. Clearly you have a natural interest in a more socially progressive Fiction; a fiction that reveals the masked layers of inequality that presently lurks behind conventional wisdom like so many RMers waiting to pounce on anything that upsets or challenges the exceptable reality replete with its pragmatict delusions, self-serving heirarchies and Westerncentric homolies. I am reminded of a movie where a bunch of kids from the bad side of town--miner's children or something like that--enter a classic annual bicycle race. Their equiptment was raggedy and their technique nonexistant and of course they had little of the trained athletic appearance of their opponent. Of course again they--by some mustering of shear determination and will--rode to victory. Of course the third time this is not easily fathomable in the real world contest between advanced nations and interests and their less affluent and more meagerly opposition in the battle for control, use and distribution of "Human" resources. Moreover, anti-inequity writings such as your work foreshadows, will always be consumed by cultures of appropriation that grind and gnaw these sage visions, swallowing them whole, invigorating itself and expelling the ruminations of these works as much less threatening insights than what one could imagine them to be. While it sounds a pessimistic and hopeless venture, it is as the old woman who dedicated herself NOT to changing the monster that fate has by chance visited on the world--for its ferociousness is all but the greatest fact to the antlike commonfolk who are trampled by the feet of the hoarding beast that digs and tunnels through towns and villages as if clearing some tropical forest to make a playground for its offspring or a vast storage valley for its treasured prizes and bountiful booty-- rather the old sage wish only to and lives solely for the purpose of antagonizing the beast by resisting its allure and seductive force. She is ever vigilant to avoid reproducing its practices and adding to its power. Her own miniscule dirt, time, and efforts are always in service to a greater good, much like your princess Queen. Indeed as I have said throughout my posts, it is the lowly among us who we must look upon closely for that more universal purpose and nobility. I called them Nigritians but in other places they are known by different names. Douglas Lyons |
| New story up at Vestal Review. |
| Snapshot of the SFWA Lounge, Worldcon 2002
From what I hear, Gardner Dozois would make an excellent prop. Perhaps Harlan Ellison as scrum half? |
| Since the topic has developed into "Science Fiction and Rugby", I will note that there is a rugby-playing Maori entrepeneur in David Brin's book Earth... any others?
Don't you worry, Charlie, we will be TOC mates yet, I'm sure... ;-> Ben |
| There was a 50-50 chance that my alternate history story was going to run in the July issue, Ben, but I lost the coin flip. Perhaps we're TOC mates in a parallel universe. Let me add that I'm not only looking forward to "Droplet" but to the next installment of "Other Cities" in Strange Rosenbaums as well as the messianic fruit (Jesu Citrus!) story in Quarterly Ben.
University club teams play rugby in the park down at the end of our street (I take the kids to watch them sometimes), so we're working on more American players. We just have to turn them into writers first. Cheers! Charlie Finlay |
| I've been thinking about trying to find a library here that carries (or will order) books in English... I've sorta used up my amazon.de book budget at this point... if I can get ahold of such a library I'll ask about those two, Douglas. |
| Ben
Can you get a copy of Paul Mann's Masocriticism? And perhaps Teun van Dijk's Ideology for purpose of discussion? got a go will explain later DCLyons |
| You might be able to recruit some Canucks for your match -- I don't know about other places, but my high school had a rugby team but no (Canadian, ie not soccer) football team. Jamie Rosen |
| Why thank you, Mr. Finlay. Jane Jewell already has my check and application. Since SFWA does not count Interzone and TTA as pro, there may well be a dearth of English members, and thus of potential rugby players; I am hoping this will speed up the processing of my application. I wrote "flanker" in the appropriate blank.
While I'm here anyhow, I will mention that my story "Droplet" will appear in the July 2002 issue of the Magazine of Finlay & Science Finlay. Ben |
| Hey, Ben,
I forgot to tell you congratulations! Strange Horizon's new status means you're eligible for SFWA. We can hang out there together, maybe get up an impromptu rugby match against some of the more established members. ;-) Charlie Charlie Finlay |
| better yet Ben, I will post on your board what I want to "Share" with you. My board is toast.
dcl douglas |
| BEn
e-mail me, so we can talk, please. Douglas |
