{"id":5950,"date":"2015-05-27T13:59:27","date_gmt":"2015-05-27T21:59:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5950"},"modified":"2015-05-28T05:26:42","modified_gmt":"2015-05-28T13:26:42","slug":"by-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5950","title":{"rendered":"By & About"},"content":{"rendered":"

Me, that is. In reference to a couple of essays that have gone live over the past 24 hours.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"AEscifi\"<\/a>I haven’t had a lot contact with the good folks over at The Canadian Science Fiction Review<\/a>\u2014 I don’t even know why they call themselves “\u00c6”, now that I think of it\u2014 but over the years I’ve got the sense that they like my stuff (well, a lot of it, at least\u2014 not even the strength of \u00c6’s fannishness was enough to get them to like \u03b2ehemoth<\/em>).<\/em> Now they’ve posted “God and the Machines<\/a>” by Aurora nominee<\/a> Jonathan Crowe: a short essay on my short fiction, which among other things deals with the question of why everybody thinks I’m so damn grimdark when I’m actually quite cuddly. (Thank you, Jonathan. I was getting tired being the only one to point that out.) (Also, great title.)<\/p>\n

Crowe posits something I hadn’t considered: that I don’t write the darkest stuff out there by any means, but it seems<\/em> darker because I use Hard-SF as the delivery platform. I serve up crunchy science souffle, but I serve it with a messy “visceral” prose that “bleeds all over the page”. It’s a contrast effect, he seems to be saying; the darkness looks deeper in comparison to the chrome and circuitry that frames it. (Also, while those at the softer end of the spectrum tend to lay their nihilistic gothiness at the feet of Old Ones and Tentacle Breathers, I tend to lay it on the neurocircuitry of the\u00a0 human brain. My <\/em>darkness is harder to escape, because\u2014 as the protagonist of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” once reminisced\u2014 “You can’t run away from your own feet”.)\u00a0 Something to think about, anyway.<\/p>\n

It’s a good read. You should check it out.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The other essay<\/a> is not about me but by<\/em> me, and it just went up today over at Aeon. It’s basically a distillation of ideas and thought experiments from various talks and short stories and blog posts I’ve made over the years, mixed in with some late-breaking developments in Brain-Machine Interface technology. It explores some of the ramifications of shared consciousness and multibrain networks. (Those who’ve read my recent exercise in tentacle porn<\/a> won’t be surprised that those ramifications are a bit dark around the edges).<\/p>\n

\"hiveaeon\"<\/a>

Illustration by Richard Wilkinson.<\/p><\/div>\n

In contrast with my experience of “God and the Machines”, I wasn’t expecting to learn anything new from “The Bandwidth of a Soul”, because (obviously) I wrote the damn thing. Surprisingly, though, I did learn things. I learned that it’s not called “The Bandwidth of a Soul” any more. I’m not quite sure what it is<\/em> called: the visible heading reads “Hive Consciousness” but the page itself (and all the twitter links feeding back to it) are titled “Do We Really Want To Fuse Our Minds Together?” (I guess this is just something that magazines do. A couple of years back I wrote an autobiographical bit about flesh-eating disease for The Daily; its title morphed from “The Least Unlucky Bastard” into “I Survived Flesh-Eating Bacteria: One Man\u2019s Near-Death Experience With The Disease Of Your Nightmares”.)<\/p>\n

I also learned that the staff of Aeon might feel the need to tip-toe around references to public figures\u2014 at the expense of what was, IMHO, one of the better lines in the piece. You will find it at the end of the following paragraph:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure how seriously to take [the Cambridge Declaration]. Not that I find the claim implausible \u2013 I\u2019ve always believed that we humans tend to underestimate the cognitive complexity of other creatures \u2013 but it\u2019s not as though the declaration announced the results of some ground-breaking new experiment to settle the issue once and for all. Rather, its signatories basically sat down over beers and took a show of hands on whether to publicly admit bonobos to the Sapients Club. (Something else that seems a bit iffy is all the fuss raised over the signing of the declaration \u2018in the presence of Stephen Hawking\u2019, even though he is neither a neuroscientist nor a signatory. You almost get the sense of a card table hastily erected next to Hawking\u2019s wheelchair, in the hopes that some of his credibility might rub off before he has a chance to roll away.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You will not find it over at Aeon, though; that last sentence disappeared from the final draft. Obviously the Card Table Lobby has no sense of humor.<\/p>\n

I’d also like to give a shout-out here to neuroscientist Erik Hoel<\/a>, out of Giulio Tononi’s lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was his back-of-the envelope calculations that generated the bandwidth comparison between smart phones and corpus callosums. I credited the man in-text but that line also seems to have been cut.<\/p>\n

Other than that, though\u2014 and allowing for the Aeon’s editorial preferences (they like commas; they don’t like hypertext links)\u2014 it’s pretty much all there. They even left my Morse-code-orgasm joke intact.<\/p>\n

So check that out, too. You’ll get all the neuroscientific speculation I ever put in any of my stories, without having to wade through all that noodly fiction stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Me, that is. In reference to a couple of essays that have gone live over the past 24 hours. * I haven’t had a lot contact with the good folks over at The Canadian Science Fiction Review\u2014 I don’t even know why they call themselves “\u00c6”, now that I think of it\u2014 but over the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,13,10,26,6,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beyond-the-rift","category-ink-on-art","category-neuro","category-relevant-tech","category-science","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5950","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=5950"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5961,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5950\/revisions\/5961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}