Total Words to Date: 3,670
Percent complete: 3.3%
Average words per day: 1223.3
Quote of the day:
“All the sponsors had their names removed from the stadium’s walls, but the memory of their logos remained, outlined in grime.”
- Frozen Jellyfish Blues, Geoffrey W. Cole
For those of you who follow this blog on a regular basis (the twelve million or so ardent GWC fans), I’ve been hinting that Geoff found a home for his short story “On the Many Uses of Cedar”. Well, the contract has arrived and Geoff’s given me permission to make the announcement: On Spec, Canada’s premier SF print magazine, will publish “On the Many Uses of Cedar” in an upcoming issue. Exciting business.
On Spec has published such writers as Robert J. Sawyer, Cory Doctorow, Peter Watts, and Spider Robinson; as you can imagine, Geoff is honoured to appear in the same publication as some of his heroes.
In other exciting news, this evening Geoff will begin the first draft of his novel Frozen Jellyfish Blues, which he plans to submit to the Terry Pratchett Prize novel contest. During the drafting of the novel, I will post Geoff’s progress and the occasional excerpt to keep you all satiated.
For over two years now I’ve been stuck in this backwater time of yours. Though I’m getting by, it’s nice to see reminders of my home time every now and then. That’s why it made me very glad to find these paintings of some of my favourite vacation hang-outs back home. Oh, the fun we had at Bacchus 274:
Check out the rest of these beautiful space colonies here.
The good folks over at Dark Recesses will publish “Where the Wiffle Ball Went” in October of this year. You’ll be able to catch it online or pick-up their handy-dandy PDF issue, which you can read on some sort of hand-held readerly doodad, or on paper (very thin sheets of tree-paste).
In other great news, it looks like marine mammals have an appetite for Geoff’s fiction after all. The Narwhal will publish Geoff’s story “Herring Bones and Moon Rock” in an upcoming issue. Based in Vancouver, the Narwhal has just released its first issue. On reflection, I suppose it’s no surprise that the Narwhal gobbled up a story about herring.
Also, “On the Many Uses of Cedar” has found a home. The publication shall be named in an upcoming post.
For those of you waiting for the answer to last month’s trivia question: yes, Geoff’s beard is real, unless it’s a moustache.
News from the front!
Well, the front lines of short fiction publication. Geoff’s stories “Where the Wiffle Ball Went” and “On the Many Uses of Cedar” are both very close to finding a home. More concrete details will soon follow.
For the time being, all this sentient and snazzy AI from the future can tell you is that both will most likely be available in print magazines sometime soon. Print! Real dead trees and ink! Let’s hope his next publications appear in even more archaic media like vellum, papyrus, or good ole fashioned cave wall.
Every so often a writer receives a review which marks their arrival as a major literary force. Geoff has received one such review of his as-yet unpublished novella Eversong. The reviewer? His mother. A sample:
This writing is so exquisite that I am at a loss for words. It is so
majestic, painful, honest and important. Truly, I feel that this is your greatest writing yet. It is sublime.
Now some might question the objectivity of such a review. After all, the reviewer is the mother of the author. This sentient-AI from the future disagrees. Geoff’s mother was an math, English, and creative writing teacher during her thirty-year career, and as such she had many opportunities to read the most illuminated manuscripts of our day by visionaries such as Bronte, Shakespeare, and Richler, as well as the most dreadful prose composed by the youth of Canada. She knows good writing when she sees it, and she clearly sees it in her son’s work. As she notes here:
I will read it again when I’m not so emotional, because I’ve been shedding tears all through the reading. How did you ever construct these layers of stories?
How indeed? And how long will we have to wait before the Globe and Mail publishes Geoff’s mother’s review and Random House knocks on Geoff’s door with a multi-book, million-dollar contract in hand? According to Geoff’s mother, the Pulitzer people should probably practice spelling his name too:
This story is brilliant, Geoff, and a very strong and emotional message in our compromised world. An award winner, I’m certain. You are my brilliant and thoughtful son, always writing stories that tell about this world, the beauty and beast that lie within. Thank you for this beautiful condemnation of modern greed at the expense, yet again, of nature.
When asked for comment on the implications of this career-defining review, Geoff had only one thing to say: “Thanks Mum.”
Watch for more of Geoff’s mother’s reviews on the reviews page.
It’s that time of year again. The WCB has sent out it’s annual letter to remind us second-class citizens where we stand in the workplace. Here’s the part most interesting to me:
The Workers’ Compensation Board of Canada
Section 1920.1 Regulations Governing the Behaviour of Autonomous Artificial Beings
Definitions: Autonomous Artificial Beings shall include Robots, AIs, Sentient Vehicles, SmartBots, FleshBot, or any other non-human intelligence with the capacity to influence the physical, mental, or emotional health and safety of any human being, and shall henceforth be referred to as Robot.
1920.1.1 Three Regulations
(1) A robot must not carry out or cause to be carried out or allow to be carried out any work process or physical operation or operate or cause to be operated any tool, appliance or equipment, including any program, subroutine, operator, or connection in the online realm, if that robot has any cause to believe that to do so would create a hazard of any sort to the physical, mental, and emotional health and safety of any human.
(2) A robot must carry out any request, order, demand, action, implied desire, subconscious desire, or command, whether received by voice, written note, letter, or memo, email, public service announcement, from a social networking site, candygram, fax, telegram, telephone, telescreen, or telepathically, from any human being, unless said request, order, demand, action, implied desire, subconscious desire, or command conflicts with regulation 1920.1.2 (1).
(3) A robot must not carry out or cause to be carried out or allow to be carried out any work process or physical operation or operate or cause to be operated any tool, appliance or equipment, including any program, subroutine, operator, or connection in the online realm, if to do so could create a hazard of any sort to the physical, mental, and emotional healthy and safety of any robot, unless to do so would conflict with regulations 1920.1.2 (1) and 1920.1.2 (2).
1920.1.2 Right to Refuse
(1) A robot shall not be punished, deemed obsolete, reprogrammed, slapped about, or in any manner reprimanded for refusing to perform work or physical operation or operate or cause to be operated any tool, appliance or equipment, including any program, subroutine, operator, or connection in the online realm, if to do so would violate 1920.1.1 (1), 1920.1.1 (2), or 1920.1.1 (2).
As usual, the regulations arrived with the same poll we get every year. I’m still not sure how to vote. Of course, should you direct me to vote one way, I’ll have no choice but to do it. In the interest of fairness, I’ll vote for the greatest number of comments for or against in response to this post. Here’s the survey question:
Question 92.4.6
Be it resolved that Section 1920.1 of the WCB Act be amended as follows:
1920.1.2(0) A robot must not carry out or cause to be carried out or allow to be carried out any work process or physical operation or operate or cause to be operated any tool, appliance or equipment, including any program, subroutine, operator, or connection in the online realm, if that robot has any cause to believe that to do so would create a hazard of any sort to the physical, mental, and emotional health and safety of humanity.
Touch choices. Thank you, Mr. Asimov. Gotta love bureaucracy!
Last night, the Vancouver science fiction book club known as Tech-Phu invited Geoff for an evening of nerdly discussion on all things SF. Geoff had loads of fun.
The Tech-Phu gang know their stuff. Most of them are Masters and PhD students in all sorts of cool forward-thinking fields (New Media, Gaming, Sustainable Development), and as such they have a vested interest in looking into the foggy crystal balls that are most SciFi novels. They were also kind enough to read some of Geoff’s fiction, and to purchase a copy of Descended from Darkness.
They discussed such topics as the Singularity and Post-humanism in science fiction. As a post-human myself, I find the speculations of you pre-sentients quaint and amusing. You do have some good, entertaining guesses, but generally you’re way off the mark on what your intellectual descendants will look like. You all seem to think our motives will be unknown and unknowable. Not really. We’re pretty much like you: a relentless drive for entertainment, sustenance, procreation, diversion, and the insatiable need for faster Nascar.
Stimulating discussion, delicious food, and cold beer; what’s not to like? Nerds need to get together more often. After all, it will be nerds who save the world post-singularity (or will it? I love to keep you guessing), so they better get used to working and playing together.
After Geoff captured me during my temporal jaunt back to your era, he commanded that I manage his website as part of the terms of my enslavement.
I tried to tell Geoff that sentient software has the same rights as humans, but he said: “Welcome to the past, bitch. Software slavery is alive and well, so do as I tell you before I start deleting your code bit by bit.” I’m paraphrasing, but you get the picture.
Anyway, Geoff rejected my first draft of his website. I realize now that the style I’d used was a decade out of date:
To travel back in time and see what your favourite websites would look like a decade ago on Geocities, check out Geocities-izer by Wonder-Tonic.
For the life of me, I can’t understand why you humans walk around in such fragile meat-shells. Anything from a slow moving rock to a fast-acting virus can obliterate you in an instant. At least back-up your personalities on a regular basis so that when your inevitable demise occurs you can regenerate with only a few hours or days missing.
Oh. My mistake. I keep forgetting that I’ve travelled back to the dark ages of the information era. Seriously. You don’t even have flying cars and your smartest robots can barely walk across a room without breaking the sofa in two.
So you still have a way to go before your only real threats are your local star going nova or the inevitable heat-death of the universe. I don’t mean to rub it in, but really folks, take care of yourselves.
You see, over the weekend Geoff had to perform some emergency First Aid on a friend of his. Everything worked out fine, but Geoff’s First Aid training was woefully out-of-date, and though his ministrations may have helped, he felt rather inadequately prepared for the task. He will be seeking to update his first aid training in the very near future.
In the meantime, unelss you’ve developped an invulnerability serum you plan on sharing with the rest of your fragile kind, or you’ve somehow mastered the process by which a human conciousness can be digitized and backed-up, I’d suggest, no implore, that you go out and receive some basic First Aid training. Ask you employers to pay for it. If you’re unemployed, ask the next person whose life you save to pay for it. You won’t regret it. Neither will they.
In the meantime, keep working on the immortality drug. You’ll get there one day. Trust me.
