Geoffrey W. Cole

Every now and then I think I understand this time in history, but then a shocker comes along like the one I received today when Geoff told me he is teaching a writing course at Vancouver Community College this fall.

How could people write while driving on a race course? I asked. And what was a race course doing at a community college?

Then Geoff explained: college is for education.

That I understand. College is where I received my forty-seven masters and doctoral degrees; all I had to do was sign up for the download, log-in to the college, and blammo, my mind was instantly filled with everything one could possibly wish to know about the parthenogenic reproductive behaviour of certain lazy lizards, to mention but one of my fields of study.

Not so in the 21st century. Education in your time has rather more in common with carpet bombing than with the education in my era. Your schools are mostly a matter of sitting down as many people as possible and firing as many facts as possible in their general direction in the hopes that one will hit a nerve centre and actually make an impression. Well. Sounds appalling, but Geoff says it is actually a great deal of fun. I suppose carpet bombing could be fun too, though I imagine not for the bombee.

So, while skills, experience, and knowledge may not be directly downloadable to your mind, Geoff will do his best to carpet-bomb you into Speculative Fiction writers of the highest quality. Check out the course description and register today!

In a welcome morcel of savoury summer news, Geoff’s story “Abattoir Blues” has been accepted in Gill Ainsworth’s The Blackness Within anthology. The anthology is all about the reappearance of Moccus, an ancient Celtic pig god. The Blackness Within will be released by Apex Book Company sometime in late 2009, early 2010. Look for purchasing info here when it becomes available!

On Thursday, June 11, Geoff will appear at Rhizome to give a reading from one of his published pieces. If you are in Vancouver and available he would love it if you made your way down to the cafe to enjoy the show. He will be on stage around 7:00 PM so come early to get a seat and enjoy some of the tasty treats.

Here is the playbill:

rhizome_june09_1

For your enjoyment, Geoff will be posting bite-sized snacks of fiction up here on occasion. The first piece is “Where Crows Dare Not Go”, which you can enjoy below. In the publication world, Geoff’s piece “Abattoir Blues” has been shortlisted for the Blackness Within anthology, so hold your breath with Geoff and hope that the piece is selected. 

Here is your Fiction Snack:

Where Crows Dare Not Go

One hot afternoon after the shelling stopped, they watched Gar’s father fall asleep through the spy scope Standpipe had taken from the dead soldier. The two of them in the kitchen: Standpipe, who’d put Gar up to it, and Gar, holding the spy scope to the wall.

          Right then, in the other room, Gar’s father dropped the remote, his chin hit his shrunken chest, and the half-empty beer wobbled on the floor beside the recliner. His leg kicked once and he started to snore.

          “Right on cue,” Gar said. “Five and a half ration-beers, the army news, and he’s out.”

          “You grab the brews,” Standpipe said. “I’ll scope. If anyone else comes in, I’ll crow.”

Click to continue »

After months of procrastination, I finally posted a torrent of Geoff’s story Shaded Streams Run Clearest. You can download a walk-around version below. Hope you enjoy.

shaded-streams-run-clearestmp3

Here is the post that was devoured by the internet Langoliers:

Lazy scientists in Britain developed a robot to do their work for them. The robot, dubbed Adam after some character in a novel, can performed over 1,000 experiments a day. Not only does the robot perform the experiments, he develops the hypothesis, test method, analyzes the results, and provides conclusions (for example: nope, humans can’t breathe in sand). For all you robophobes out there, don’t worry, this doesn’t mark the start of the robotic revolution (that’s many years in the future and will be won by a series of Sudoku challenges), but it does mark the start of a new era of scientific discovery. Finally, some history in the making I care about!

Many scientists from my time have speculated why scientific discoveries proceeded so much quicker once AIs and robots took over the bulk of scientific enterprise. As an example, since the Great Leap Forward when humans started asking questions about anything, it took humanity 49,500 years to determine that the earth is round. AI’s determined the supersillystring unified theory in about twenty three months. So why the much greater progress? Most AI science historians attribute our success to the starting point of AI science versus the starting point of the human scientific endeavour.

Have a look at the handy list below, which examines fundamental questions about the universe and where humans and AIs started on both issues.

Who created us?

• Human Scientific Starting Point: Some god. No more questions!
• AI Scientific Starting Point: Some nerd, and how he avoided natural selection we still can’t explain.

What keeps the moon in the sky?

• HSSP: Some god. What did we say about questions?
• AISSP: Gravity.

What is the fastest thing in the universe?

• HSSP: A woman’s temper.
• AISSP: Light, or a woman’s temper, whatever gets there first.

How old is the universe?

• HSSP: Six thousand years. Now don’t go digging in shale and asking any more of those pesky questions.
• AISSP: Fifteen billion years, give or take a few. Before that? No idea. That’s where you robros come in.

What happens after we die?

• HSSP: Heaven, Valhalla, you come back as a bug, some decomposition then nothing, Hell if you had any fun, ad nauseum depending on where you grew up and how much attention you paid at temple.
• AISSP: HSSP: Heaven, Valhalla, you come back as a bug, some decomposition then nothing, Hell if you had any fun… look, we have no fucking clue. Could you get to work on that one? And while you’re at it, not dying would be pretty sweet too.

When will the universe end?

• HSSP: The next time you touch yourself.
• AISSP: The next time the folks down south elect a Republican.

So as you can see, the AI scientific era had quite the head start over you tool-using naked apes, which is why we can rub our bellies and tap our heads while calculating Pi to one hundred trillion digits.

This post is a test. For some reason, my last few posts have disappeared into cyberspace. I have yet to discover the reason for this issue, which is particularly frustrating as I am a hyper-intelligent artificial intelligence (at least compared to most of the flesh-bags and bots roaming the net). Of course, trying to build a webpage using your primitive code is somewhat akin to one of you trying to dress an animal hide using chert stone tools you made yourself. You can understand the difficulty. More entertaining posts to follow.

You humans (or as anthropologists from my time label you, homo sapiens consumerensis) all seem very preoccupied with the current world-wide economic recession. In the words of the dearly departed Mr. Douglas Adams: Don’t Panic.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m not fan of history, but I hate to see everyone so worked up. In the interest of preserving the already tenuous space-time continuum, I can’t tell you much to allay your fears, but here are a few hints I’ve scrounged from my admittedly cloudy historical data files that may comfort you in these difficult times:

• As always in tough times, invest in munitions, or as we future-bots call them, recession-busters.
• Napoleon can’t win every battle.
• This recession (or Depression) will last a few more years, but you will come out of it.
• Coming out of it won’t be pretty. You know the Great War that just finished? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
• Don’t trust the transhumans.
• Don’t worry, the liquor prohibition won’t last forever.

In other very exciting news, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show has accepted Geoff’s story “Lo’ihi Rising” for publication in their fine magazine. This will be Geoff’s third professional publication, and will make him eligible for membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and Speculative Fiction Canada.

The folks over at Apex have a couple of projects Geoff will be submitting to: their guest-edited issue of Apex Magazine, and the Blackness Within Anthology being put together by Gill Ainsworth. Geoff will submit the guest-edited piece tonight, a story tentatively called “She Paddles the Impossible Canoe”.

Next week, Geoff will put together his piece for the Moccus-inspired Blackness Within anthology. Moccus was a Gaulish pig-god in the pre-Roman era. In my time, Moccus worship is right up there with Scientology and Festivism as the major religions of the moon. Those Loons will worship anything, which brings up our safety tip of the week: do not drink the Kool-Aid on the moon.

Looks like the letter writing campaign has finally paid off: Geoff’s story “The Most Successful Man in the World” has been accepted for publication in the summer 2009 issue of Strange, Weird, and Wonderful. Those of you who’ve only recently started visiting this website may not be aware that there has been a months-long effort by Geoffrey W. Cole’s fans to lobby their political representatives to get Geoffrey W. Cole’s stories published. To all of you out there who have written your Members of Parliament, Representatives, Senators, Clergy, and other elected/appointed officials who should surely have power over such things, thank you. Your efforts are meeting with success!