{"id":4195,"date":"2013-06-20T12:49:58","date_gmt":"2013-06-20T20:49:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=4195"},"modified":"2013-06-20T12:49:58","modified_gmt":"2013-06-20T20:49:58","slug":"guest-post-pimping-the-prognosticators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=4195","title":{"rendered":"Guest Post: Pimping the Prognosticators."},"content":{"rendered":"

Not by me this time.\u00a0 Not even about<\/em> me,\u00a0 a couple of gratuitous paragraphs notwithstanding. I’m currently hunched over a pint of Keith’s waiting for the BUG to show up, and subjecting Echopraxia<\/em> to its final polish before I send it off next week.\u00a0 If I was going to show you anything, it would be the cool slides I’m working up for next month’s talk at FinnCon\u2014 but that would be more sizzle than steak.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Steve Saus here is more that willing to pick up the slack with his pitch for a new kickstarter antho; and given the fact that I’m eyeing crowd-sourcing as an increasingly attractive option when it comes to my own work, I’m happy to cede the floor.<\/p>\n

Fellow mammals, Steven Saus:<\/p>\n

I’m not exaggerating when I say that Blindsight<\/em> fascinatingly disturbed me in a way few others have.<\/p>\n

And a huge chunk of the reason for that emotion can be summarized – with a touch of whimsy – in the portion called “The Book of Oogenesis”. Or less whimsically as “It’s biological determinism, stupid.”<\/p>\n

I had been reading the works of George Herbert Mead at the time – particularly Mind, Self, and Society<\/em><\/a>. At first, I thought it was a good counterpoint to biological determinism. One of Mead’s central arguments is that our idea of “self” is not an innate experience, but only arises through interaction. More importantly, a mediated interaction. Sensations, speech, gestures, even written words all serve as the medium in which self arises. Self, in Mead’s viewpoint, is not some ineffable element. Self is not simply a biological machine clicking (or squishing) away, but a dialectic of action and response.<\/p>\n

And then you start thinking about emergent complexity. You think about how simple biological organisms can interact<\/em> in fascinating, complex ways. You look around at the cell phones and speeding automobiles and fancy clothes, and determinism rears its head again, whispering and giggling.<\/p>\n

Take that far enough, and we get back to an older idea that if we just had sophisticated enough equations, we would know the future.<\/p>\n

…and then we’d have to start two foundations, hide one from the other and, well, it gets complicated from there.<\/p>\n

All this went through my head when Nayad Monroe pitched the idea for What Fates Impose<\/em> last year. She’s put together an anthology of tales about divination and fortune telling. It’s a great lineup of award-winning authors, including Maurice Broaddus, Cat Rambo, Tim Waggoner, Beth Wodzinski, Ferrett Steinmetz, and Lucy Snyder. I think fellow readers of the ‘crawl will especially enjoy Ferrett Steinmetz’s story “Black Swan Oracle” (an excerpt is here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

We’re currently running a Kickstarter to fund the anthology. And this guest post is – aside from a platform for me to introduce you to George Herbert Mead – supposed to help that Kickstarter.<\/p>\n

I know, I know, another Kickstarter, another book to read. Heck, I’m a reader myself, with a to-read bookshelf that is threatening to collapse. But when I started reading the stories Nayad had collected for this book, I didn’t want to stop. I made<\/em> time to read them. Because I found that even though there were other books I could<\/em> read, there were no other books I wanted<\/strong> to read.<\/p>\n

I’d like to ask two small things of you. Take a moment to check it out at bit.ly\/kickfate<\/a>. The video features Alasdair Stuart (of Pseudopod) reading a portion of his introductory essay “Singing From the Book of Holy Jagger”. I love hearing Alasdair talk about stories and culture and life; I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.<\/p>\n

Second, I’d like to ask you to help spread the word. We have a special page to make it a matter of three clicks at bit.ly\/sharefate<\/a>. If you can’t back the Kickstarter financially, this is a quick and easy way to still help us out.<\/p>\n

Now that you’ve read my words, now that my self<\/em> has existed in the space between my writing and your reading, will you click? Will you click those links, or will you pass them by?<\/p>\n

Thanks in advance.<\/p>\n

Steven Saus<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not by me this time.\u00a0 Not even about me,\u00a0 a couple of gratuitous paragraphs notwithstanding. I’m currently hunched over a pint of Keith’s waiting for the BUG to show up, and subjecting Echopraxia to its final polish before I send it off next week.\u00a0 If I was going to show you anything, it would be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4195"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4203,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4195\/revisions\/4203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}