Category: photog’s Corner

Here you will find the stuff that shouldn’t be mixed in the other categories but interest me. caveat emptor.

Relevant Science Fiction – Part 1

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In the 1960’s and ‘70’s the science fiction that seemed to be the most interesting was as much about inner space as outer space.  And even space stories like “Dune” were as much about human social interaction as they were about technology.  Altered consciousness and new social norms in stories like “Stranger in a Strange Land” were what was in the air.  As a kid and young man, I was more interested in science (meaning star ships and time travel!) but now that I’m old and disillusioned by how messed up our government has become, I think the kind of speculative fiction I’m interested in now is social science.

I’ve always made fun of Plato’s Republic because listening to him construct straw men and then knock them over with arguments that don’t hold water seemed beyond ludicrous.  But I think we’re somewhat back to where the Greeks were sometime around the time of the Peloponnesian War.  We’ve managed to lose social cohesion and the institutions and methods we use for choosing leaders and making laws have completely failed us.  It’s not hard to see that we’re not far away from a crack-up that could do horrendous damage to our economy and the lives of everyday people.

I think it’s probably time for speculative fiction writers to start taking a few swipes at either predicting the future or at least providing cautionary tales about it.  And that’s what I’m thinking of concentrating on in some of the stories I’m outlining right now.  I’m interested in imagining what kinds of new arrangements people can organize to make their lives better.  For instance, when local, state or federal governments start failing to secure the basic requirements of safety from theft and bodily injury for the citizens they supposedly serve, private entities could step in to secure these services.  And once these non-governmental corporations start branching out the current arrangements we’re used to could cease to exist in ad hoc areas of the country without any formal acknowledgement of the change.  This is not that different from what happened in the later Roman Empire.  When Gaul started slipping away to the Franks the authority of the “Caesar” over the “Legions” who were mostly Franks became almost farcical.

So, I need to think a little bit about what kinds of new social and economic arrangements might be interesting and novel in the “world” I’m imagining.  I’ve poked some holes in the American Empire and now I want to see what kinds of new things might grow up inside these holes.  So, I have a locus of power (Connors’ network of enterprises and human assets) and someone running it who thinks on a larger basis than just building up tech monopolies to monetize what’s left of the American people’s legacy capital.  What I want to see is if I can come up with some believable innovations that would lead people to rearrange their allegiances and social and commercial actions in ways that build something new and better than what we’ve been stuck with for the last fifty years.

What I’m trying to decide is whether Connors will try to control several states under his umbrella without outwardly absorbing these political jurisdictions.  After all, voting for the interests of the company you work for is nothing new.  Remember “What’s good for GM is good for America.”  So that’s what I’m working on.  The problem is I’m making it up as I go along.

I, Robot Author

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I was just reading about the second serious scandal concerning AI generated fiction being published by experts in the world of publishing.  In the last scandal Hatchette bought a self-published book because the author managed to attract a very large number of readers on her own.  After they republished the book, it was discovered that there was a lot of very obvious AI generated content in it.

In the present scandal a prestigious contest that accepts fiction from amateurs living in the countries of the British Commonwealth had three of the five winners flagged by readers as being AI generated by a capable software used for this function.

Here’s a sample of the text:

“Wilfred’s rum-shop leaned into the road like a rotten tooth. Inside, boards blackened by smoke and sweat, the air sweet with cane and forgetting. Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology. One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.”

Okay, what the hell does “white rum hot as apology” mean?  It doesn’t mean anything.  It’s AI slop that it thinks sounds “poetic.”

Now five “Experts” picked this gibberish and declared it worthy of a prestigious award.  Why?  Well, the only thing I notice that both scandals include are woke publishing “experts” selecting the work of minority writers without bothering to see if it’s any good or even written by human beings.

The most hilarious aspect of the latest scandal is that the contest judges refuse to admit that they’ve been made to look like fools and the stories are still up on their site as the winners.

I watched a YouTube video by a young woman who considers herself a seasoned editor and although she agrees that the text is extremely unlikely not to be AI slop she does add the obligatory warning that we should remember that minority writers must not be singled out as more highly suspect just because they always seem to be the ones whose work slips through the editors who are afraid of being called racists if they look too closely at their work and find it’s not very good.

I guess it’s not enough that the publishing world gives precedence to any writer who isn’t a straight white man.  Now they add robots as long as they’re not straight white male robots or at least not working under one of their names.  Well, be that as it may, today I officially began work on the sequel to my book.  I began the outline by writing out a bunch of plot lines to choose between.

Plot Threads

  • Update on Bogey and his life
  • Update on Grace and her boys
  • President Chastain’s crises
    1. Constitutional Convention
    2. Seceding States
    3. Potential Military Insurrection
    4. Personal Problems (health)
    5. Relations with Connors’ Group
  • Connors’ crises
    1. Disaffected Groups with His Organization
    2. Relations with federal and state officials
    3. Connors’ indecision and doubts
    4. Disagreements with Cutter and others
    5. Personal Problems (Grace, Bogey)
  • America’s Crisis of Instability
  • World’s Crisis of Instability
  • Technical Instability

So that’s a lot of stuff.  I’m not sure all of these will be included but it’s always best to start with the kitchen sink and pare it back.  Well, take that Chat GPT.

Catching Up with Becky

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So, now I have to start writing my next book.  And as I decided after finishing the last one, this time I must outline the story ahead of time.  Sure, it’s less fun than just starting to type and see where it ends up.  But it’s also so much less dangerous.  I remember in the last third of “The Sniper” I painted myself into a corner and I had to delete five thousand words and start off in another direction.  And I got seriously confused and had to do a bunch of outlining anyway, so I might as well do some big picture plot planning at the beginning and leave the fine tuning to my unconscious while it’s flowing through my fingertips.

But it’s funny.  It’s not plot events that have been running through my head lately.  It’s characters.  I feel like I want more people and different people showing up in the story this time around.  I want some humorous characters showing up.  I might even want a joke or two being told.  And I think I want an academic type and maybe even an actor.  I was listening to some Shakespeare recently.  It was John Gielgud reciting “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” from Macbeth.  And it struck me that a little poetry and a little philosophy might be a lot of fun to write into even a story like mine.  Now, mind you, I said a little poetry.  And it doesn’t have to look like poetry.  It just has to signify to me that maybe the character on the page has an immortal soul after all.

And as for philosophy, well, it can be practical philosophy.  It can be political philosophy.  And what could be more timely than political philosophy in this time of collapsing republics and demagogues.  Who knows, maybe Connors and Cutter may discuss the application of artificial intelligence to the problem of optimizing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in North America after the end of Boghadair’s War.  Perhaps a completely impartial intelligence could be conjured up to play Solomon to modern day Americans who no longer seem able to live and let live.  Maybe it can cut the baby in half in some modern sense and return us to a functioning society again.  And when I mention Solomon, I think it’s partially because I think there’s a religious (or at least spiritual) dimension to our problems and for which a spiritual solution is necessary.  And Christian revivals are a recurring theme in American history.  And I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking we all need a spiritual boost just about now.

So, yeah, I haven’t got a working plot outline yet but I think it’s time to start.  As I’ve said, I think Bogey will not be dragged into the main action any time soon but personally he’s tied intimately to several important characters and I’m sure he’ll interact with them.  Plus, I have to find out what happened with him and Becky.  That sounded interesting.

Fame and Fortune

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So yesterday I finally got my book onto Kindle Unlimited.  Huzzah!!!

An then I waited.  And I waited.  And I waited.  A day later the page counter for KENP stood at zero.  This seemed unpromising.  So, I closed down the laptop and did something else.

I took a juvenile milk snake that I found hiding under the famous copper sheet and shot a photo shoot of his best profile.  And then we had lunch and worked on some other projects.  I put an air conditioning unit in one of the windows and I started weeding the raspberry patch and I helped clean some kind of ooze that had accumulated on the new fish pond.

And when I checked the KENP after all that, the counter was at one!  Now that’s not one book that’s one page.  So, if a book pays me forty cents what does a page earn me?  Well, you can do the math.  If the book is about two hundred and fifty-two pages long then that page is worth 0.15873 cents in cold hard cash.  If Jeff Bezos took a penny and a pair of tin snips (zinc snips?) and did some rudimentary trigonometric calculations he could probably nip off an arc from the edge of the coin that would somewhat represent this hefty sum.  So, I shut down the laptop again and began to recalibrate my plans to purchase that summer home on Martha’s Vineyard.

I began reading some more of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.”  You know this PKD is a very talented writer but I don’t think he spent a lot of his life smiling.  In fact, I think WWIII was probably one of the lighter topics he thought about.  He’s got the extinction of most animal species, widespread human chromosomal damage, widespread human brain damage and bizarre religious tendencies as the window dressing of his highly depressed main characters.  After a little of this I decided to take a break.  Apparently, this wasn’t going to be Harrison Ford and Daryl Hannah.  It’s going to be a lot less chirpy.  So, I got in touch with the First Selectman and arranged a special meeting to discuss my succession plan as his special assistant in charge of burying the bodies.  Unfortunately, the committee was unable to locate anyone stupid enough to agree to the position.  I came home a few hours later and checked my KENP counter.  It was seventeen pages.  That’s 2.6984 cents.  Well!  Now we’re getting somewhere.  At this rate I’ll be able to afford my favorite Dunkin Donuts donut (an old fashioned) by Fall.

And I think my addition to the Kindle Unlimited rolls has netted me my first troll.  He was pretending to be a fairly successful non-fiction author but was unaware that he wasn’t supposed to be a fiction author so his answers didn’t track with that.  I brought this to his attention and he started making incoherent sentences.  Well, what can you do?  Now that I’m on the road to fame and fortune everyone wants a piece of me.  J K Rowlings eat your heart out.

What’s KENP?

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So, there are a lot of things going on.  I reached 500 reads on Royal Road but out of those 500 reads not a single comment or review was left.  And since I wanted to sign up for Kindle Unlimited, I had to shut down any sites that had e-books other than Amazon.  So, I deleted “The Sniper” from Royal Road and BookFunnel so that I could test out Kindle Unlimited for at least ninety days.  And of course, I’ve been checking Amazon to see how many KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages) of the “The Sniper” have been read.  And, of course, a watched pot never boils.  But I also wonder if Kindle Unlimited will lower the number of e-books I’ll sell on KDP.  And now I’ll also have to figure out how to set up incentives and other come-ons that Amazon has thought up for the poor confused authors out there.

I started reading “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” today.  So right from the git-go PKD’s dystopia certainly has a lot of drugs to control the emotional state of its citizens.  Also, Rick Deckard apparently has a wife that doesn’t seem to like him at all.  He also seems to have artificial sheep.  So, this isn’t exactly Blade Runner so far.  But I’m a patient man and I’ll plow my way in hoping that Roy Baty shows up and offs the founder of the Tyrell Corporation and talks about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  I just hope it’s that cool.

I had my weekly coffee walk zoom with the boys.  One of them was inspired by my book and is now writing several short stories.  Kudos to him.  And we were talking about how the old firm has DEI’d itself into a disaster.  They chased out all the old white guys and now the DEI hires have had to hire them back as contractors because they don’t know how the systems work.  They waited so long to upgrade some systems that the hardware is now unavailable from the manufacturers and competency will be needed to replace it with currently available equipment.  But unfortunately, these DEI hires are completely incompetent so … “contractors!”  I told the boys to drive a very hard bargain and make sure the hourly rate is ridiculously expensive.  When the project shows up as a blinking red light on the C-Suite’s monthly checklist of “problems” it will be embarrassing and hilarious when they have to admit they don’t know how their own systems are supposed to work.  And that’s not going to be easy to explain to the FDA.  Being audited by the feds isn’t fun under the best of circumstances.  When you have to admit that product was thrown away due to out of spec conditions that’s a nightmare.  Well anyway.  We laughed and laughed.  The guy who got booted used to be a good guy.  Then he became a true believer in DEI.  After that he became intolerable and we all agreed that he got what he deserved.

Well, that’s enough for now.

Space Fiction in the Modern Age

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With all the excitement about “Project Hail Mary” making a gazillion dollars at the box office I was thinking about how we get past the reality of the limitations on humans surviving space travel.  I mean what do we think about our interplanetary (not to mention interstellar) travelers bombarded with cosmic radiation and metabolically wasted away by microgravity?    Yikes!

First off, think of all the great old books and movies that have been rendered null and void by these realities.  Other than maybe the Moon, the old ideas of colonies are falsified by what we’ve learned.  No colonies on Mars and the Jovian moons.  No asteroid miners in the Belt.  All just flights of fantasy.  What’s an American boy from the baby boom to do?

Well, I guess the thing to remember is that one age’s wild guess is eventually replaced by a later age’s measured recalculation.  Jules Verne had men travel around the Moon by being shot out of a cannon.  Of course, when someone from the twentieth century crunched the numbers, they probably figured out that a cannon that could send a projectile around the Moon would reduce the occupants to a puddle of goo by virtue of the acceleration needed to reach escape velocity in just the few seconds that the “bullet” was inside the barrel of the “gun.”  And yet these twentieth century engineers didn’t just throw their hands in the air and say “Impossible.”  They invented chemical rockets.

And maybe that’s what will happen with space flight.  Even in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Frank and Dave have a rotating ring with pseudo-gravity.  Maybe a practical way to protect humans from radiation will also be perfected.

Or maybe the science fiction of the future will involve robot missions to the planets and stars but with some kind of instantaneous communication to allow humans to experience the sights and sounds of the robotic mission as if in the first person.  Or maybe they’ll fall back on good old “psionics” to allow humans to explore space-time without leaving the confines of Mother Earth.

Or maybe we go back to the suspended animation idea.  And we add to that a nice heavy duty radiation shield around the cryo-unit.  We can have a robotic autopilot and only thaw the humans at the destination.

Or how about intelligent robots whose memories can then be downloaded for humans to view or even “experience” as transferrable memories.  Or maybe we can build a wormhole in high orbit around Earth and pop out close to other planets or even exo-planets.

And none of these things have to be proven science.  They just have to be figments of our imagination that give us the framework for a story or a future that entertain us.  In a decade or a century what we know to be impossible will change again.  And so will what we find to be possible.  We are very clever monkeys and what is impossible today becomes possible in a different way tomorrow.  There’s no reason to give up our stories or our dreams.

Recreational Time Travel

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So, as you get older you find that nostalgia is your favorite guilty (or guiltless) pleasure.  Movies and songs that showcase things from your younger days are among the happiest moments you spend.  Now don’t get me wrong, things happening in the present day can be fun and exciting and interesting for sure.  But more and more, you become a stranger in the strange land that is the present day.  You look around and you see that everything has changed; the culture, the people, the places, the language, the entertainment and especially the technology.  Even the things that are supposed to be things from your time have been changed until you’re not even qualified to use them.  As an example, look at the telephone.  If you had handed a smart phone to a person in 1970, they would have no idea what it was but they would definitely deny it was a telephone.

So, we are experiencing the slow eradication of the world we knew.  And if you came from a place that has been remade over the last half century it’s even more disconcerting.  Your past has been basically erased and what’s left sometimes has nothing at all left that resembles the place you grew up in.

So, this is all true.  And getting angry or depressed about it won’t change anything except make you feel worse.  But recently I realized that nostalgia is a form of time travel.  You get to use your memories and some touchstones (like people, movies, photos and music) and travel back to a magic place where you were a kid or a newlywed or a happy parent but definitely in the older world where everything was familiar and you were at the center of the universe.

So, you might be watching an old movie and suddenly a bus is moving down a street and it triggers memories when you were living there and were on an identical bus and you think of a day when you took a bus ride that was involved in an important event in your life.  Or you hear a song that you remember hearing when you were on the beach with your best girl.  Or you go to a classic car show and see a car that you owned or was owned by a friend.  And the memories come flooding back and you’re walking around in 1969 or 1987.  And your older relatives are still alive and none of your friends have moved far away and everybody you care about is a short ride away.

Sure, it’s a bit of an escape.  And it doesn’t solve any of the problems you have in the here and now.  The country is still overrun with illegal aliens and gasoline is almost $5 a gallon and your bones are really creaky but for a few minutes or an hour you’re living in the happiest place on Earth; your youth.  Now, you can’t over do it.  If you spend all day every day in the past, you’ll lose the ability to cope with the present.  And you won’t be any use to people who think of now as the center of the universe.  So, I plan to use it sparingly and save it for special occasions where I can share it with the other survivors from the golden age.  Just something I thought of.

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall from Here – Practice, Practice.

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Dystopias seem to be the dominant science fiction type in the last decade or two.  And the dopiness of the ones ending up on the large and small screens doesn’t encourage much hope in the genera.  We have the ever popular “Handmaid’s Tale” that bangs away at the female victim of the evil patriarchy trope.  And then there’s the “Hunger Games” which I suppose reflects the idea that somehow resources on Earth are about to collapse and a zero-sum game will emerge where we all will be fighting for our lives to get a loaf of bread.  Wow!  Who knew science fiction could be so much fun?

I’ve recently heard that horror is becoming a big genre with young men (apparently written stories and video and also video games).  But that doesn’t alarm me.  I think this is wrapped up with the popularity of video games and I think that is more a matter of the desire to work through puzzles and shoot monsters with guns (which is always a good thing!).

I have a theory that the current science fiction publishing model will not endure much longer.  I don’t think they can make enough money from selling romantasy porn and feminist dystopia much longer.  Of course, it’s possible that AI writing will completely destabilize all fiction writing.  In that case the whole thing becomes academic.  That would leave us just downloading AI slop at virtually no cost.  But either way the world will be changing to resemble nothing like what we old-timers remember from the before time when books were an industry and grammatical sentences actually existed.

Of course, this is a hell of a time for me to become an author.  But in a sense, it may be the best time for me to write.  The barrier to getting published doesn’t exist.  The only barrier is figuring out a way to let the reading public know my book exists and what it’s about.  But that’s far from a trivial problem.  Key words and algorithmic search engines and Amazon ad management are complicated and confusing topics and I’ll confess that I know next to nothing about any of that.  But I’m slowly picking up some practical and painful experience.

For instance, so far today my Amazon ads have 23,417 impressions.  I believe that means, that number of people had the chance to see my ad on the search pages they viewed on Amazon.  Out of those thousands, only 16 people clicked on my ad.  Out of those 16 people only two bought my book (e-book version).  And that was with the e-book discounted to $0.99.  So, there was $1.98 worth of sales.  Of which I only get 30% (~$0.59).  Now currently the cost per click is $1.71.  Which means so far today I’ve been charged 16 X $1.71 = $27.36!

Obviously, this isn’t the way to become rich through writing.  But it is a very educational exercise to understand how the current self-publishing model leaves quite a bit to be desired.  But I still have few more ideas to try before giving up on my dream of becoming the next great science fiction author.  Excelsior!

The Pursuit of Happiness – Part 1

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Over the course of human history, what civilization or society produced the greatest amount of happiness?  Now this is a hard thing to define.  What do I mean by “greatest amount of happiness?”  Do I mean that the highest number or proportion of inhabitants were happy?  Or would it qualify if some subset was incredibly happy while the rest of them were miserable?  And even if all of a people were happy but they achieved their happiness by immiserating some external human population such as marauding Vikings or rampaging Vandals did, would it qualify?  Could slave owning societies be happy if they treated their human chattel humanely.  And can we attribute the happiness of a people to their form of government or do we think it has more to do with the innate traits of a particular people?

So, let’s start with forms of government.  If we follow Aristotle, there are three main forms of government; monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.  Of course, every variation on these three classes have occurred over time but I think it’s fair to say that there has never been a form of government that over the very long term produced a stable happy society.  Instead, it seems that each type can have a “golden age” that eventually degenerates into a miserable failed version of itself.  So, a good king or emperor is followed by a monstrous tyrant (possibly his son).  Aristocracies can decay into greedy oligarchies that suck the wealth out of a society and turn their fellow citizens into serfs.  And of course, when democracy becomes mob rule, we have plenty of examples of mass murder from ancient Corcyra to the Terror of the French Revolution.  So, it does not seem that we have discovered a form of government that inevitably leads to happiness.

But maybe there is a condition in society that does contribute to greater happiness in a people.  Now I say this with great trepidation because this principle can be twisted into a weapon that has also caused untold human misery throughout history.  I hesitate to give it an old name.  It can be called religion, morality, law or even philosophy.  What it amounts to is a way to direct the way humans interact with each other and the universe around them.  It might even be called science or knowledge nowadays.  Because sociology tries to turn human relations into science.  It is interesting that the American Founding Fathers thought that in order for their republic to flourish the citizens would have to be religious and therefore virtuous.  And by the same token if they weren’t, then no constitution would be able to keep them well governed.

So, maybe the only way to ensure the happiness of a people is for them to believe in the same god or philosophy or code of behavior.  In some sense they would have to be one family (or tribe).  But does that mean that any empire or mega-state like the United States cannot expect a happy polity?  Well, I think this is actually the truth.  Over the course of the last hundred years the people of the United States have more and more divided along ideological lines until at this point it is more or less at the point of a cold civil war.  And soon it may be hotting up.  So maybe we are seeing an unavoidable consequence of trying to force people who believe in different things to live together.

It seems to me we will have to figure out a way to give each other space.  What occurs to me is some changes to the constitution to give the states more power and the federal government less.  This would allow the different states to diverge toward the practices they favor without the constant battle to control the behavior of the “other side.”

But how do we get there?

Rebooting Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

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I was watching a video where it discussed sci-fi movies that were going to have a sequel or reboot made soon.  And one of those movies was Starship Troopers.  Now the video spun the fact that the original 1997 motion picture lost money as a case of mistaken identity.  If you saw that movie you know that the director wasn’t faithful to the spirit of Heinlein’s book.  In fact, he used the movie to satirize the Heinlein plot as a story of fascism gone wild.  Paul Verhoeven used all the avenues available to him to paint the government in Heinlein’s novel as basically a nazi-like regime.  He even dressed the military officers in what looked like nazi uniforms.

And according to the narrator of the video the movie failed because audiences mistook the satire Verhoeven produced for actual approval of fascism.  Now I tend to believe that the movie failed because fans of Heinlein’s book read reviews that told them that the movie was a criticism of Heinlein’s story and not an honest presentation of the themes of the novel and stayed home.  This would seem to be a more reasonable explanation for such a popular book failing to attract its audience to the movie.

Now, the video debated whether the director who is supposedly making the new movie would copy Verhoeven’s lead and make the new movie a satire or would instead follow the book’s interpretation of the story.  I guess the guy making this video is hoping for a satire that clearly explains ahead of time that it is mocking Heinlein’s story.  This seems a wildly absurd idea.  If the original satire lost many millions of dollars, who would think it was a safe bet to try the same strategy again and expect a different result?

Now I can’t claim to know whether thirty years later there still exists a large enough audience of Heinlein fans to make a faithful screen adaptation of Starship Troopers a big success.  His original fans have aged pretty radically.  And the later generations are hardly the kind of people who would espouse a world view that requires military service as a perquisite for the right to vote.  So, I wouldn’t see any reboot of Starship Troopers as a guaranteed box office success.

But by the same token if it was made with state-of-the-art special effects and gave us an exciting glimpse of what interstellar warfare might look like, I wouldn’t be shocked if it was extremely popular.  There have been several very popular science fiction war movies in the last ten years and the special effects were very good in some of them and made the movies spectacular to watch.  If you take that technical capability and add a sympathetic hero and his journey through the military experience, I could see young and old viewers enjoying it.

Honestly, I’m not even sure this reboot is going to be made.  Hollywood has lost a lot of money in the last five years and I’m sure they’re getting nervous about big budget science fiction movies.  But I guess I’m secretly hoping someone will do Starship Troopers right, the way Heinlein wrote it.  Fingers crossed.