If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo,please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months(unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
Christmas In Time: Six Stories of Time Travel and Second Chances
Time is not an Ocean. But then again it is.
From award-winning author Sarah A. Hoyt come six tales of time travel, parallel worlds, and the furthest reaches of space—all bound together by Christmas miracles and the choices that define us.
Meet Time Corps agents who risk madness to prevent reality from splintering. Follow a mathematician pulled into a parallel universe where his twin captains starships between worlds. Watch as mysterious children arrive from impossible futures, and discover Victorian lighthouses that serve as anchors in the storm of time itself. Journey from blood-soaked space stations to asteroid colonies at the edge of the known universe.
This collection includes “What Child Is This,” a prequel to Hoyt’s acclaimed novel No Man’s Land, revealing how a child’s accidental time-slip can save a man’s life and create the bonds of family love.
When Jock Robin is murdered in the middle of his clown act, Bobo Buttons is pressed into service as the circus’s private detective, tasked with keeping the authorities out of the show’s business while tracking down the killer.
But in the circus, misdirection is the rule of the day. Nothing is what it seems. When another trouper falls victim, can Bobo unravel a generation of hatred before the circus itself is assassinated?
First answers.FAA attorney Terrence Rogers dreams of space, but he spends his days on informed consent for space tourists. Young foreign service officer Hal Cooper faces real change with the arrival of an alien spaceship, but it means something else for Terrence. A short story.
The quiet routine of the first Mars colony is shattered by ghostly voices and alien footprints. Fourteen-year-old Logan Mitchell and his friends are blamed… and suspicion spreads fast. To clear their names, they must unravel the mystery, track down the real culprit, and face the secrets hidden beneath the red dust. But time is running out, and the ghost isn’t finished yet.
Logan Mitchell and the Ghosts of Mars is a gripping sci-fi mystery about trust, teamwork, and the importance of a good reputation.
Danny couldn’t understand why he was so attracted to Carly, because they didn’t have a lot in common. Danny was quiet; Carly couldn’t stop talking. Danny loved science and math; Carly was terrified of them. Danny read science fiction; Carly read Harlequin romances. Danny’s favorite band was Pink Floyd; Carly had never heard of Pink Floyd.
It was only later that Danny found out that Carly’s father was a Mafia boss. That made things complicated, because Danny’s father was an FBI agent.
The Mobster’s Daughter is a tale set in Youngstown, Ohio, a blue collar city of giant steel mills and back-room bookie joints, close-knit families and unsolved disappearances, church festivals and car bombs.
The story lines in this anthology run the gamut, from planetside, to open space, to Mars and beyond:
An old cowboy and his dog teach the new kid how to handle rustlers. Cowboys defend their ranch and others against predators and thieves. Good guys and gals vs. the bad guys while they learn about horses. ‘Ranching’ creatures come among the asteroids, lousy neighbors, and rustlers. Frontier sheriffs step up and solve a crime before things go badly for everyone in town. ‘Rodeo’ takes on a whole new meaning with LBJ in an alternate history. Learning occurs on a cattle drive, with a surprise ending. With rustlers in space, technology is in play, with the equivalent of Rangers. A cowboy and his girl take on train robbers to save the passengers. An old cowboy comes out of retirement for one more cattle drive on Mars. (from the introduction by J.L. Curtis)
When sex in the city becomes a deadly game, it’s up to the Manhattan Homicide Task Force to deal with the startling serial murders that are panicking the city and pressuring the pols. But Manhattan Roulette, with its pungent insights and razor-sharp, occasionally rollicking, prose, is more than just a riveting detective story; it’s a probing exploration of the state of our unions in the post-romantic world. It’s also a compelling character study. Its hero, Burt Brymmer, is a man who’s both physically and emotionally scarred, and as the head of an expanding team of detectives, he’s uniquely equipped to take the case to a close. His partner, Steve Ross, whose manic sense of humor is a shield against the tragedies he faces at home, is the yin to Brymmer’s yang as they move through Manhattan accumulating stories from the winners and losers in a fatal game of chance. From porn writers to cover girls, bartenders to fashionistas, stockbrokers to millionaires with a taste for the exotic and the desperate “huddled misses” haunting the West Side bars, the novel covers a city where nobody seems to sleep without Lunesta or Atavan or a 3AM hookup. Brymmer gets his own chance to gamble with his luck when a Fox News reporter who’s been following the blood trail with a questionable persistence starts to knock on his heart and to challenge his reserve. Written in a fresh, direct and cinematic style, Manhattan Roulette takes the popular genre of police detection to a new and bracing level.
Join Elak on perilous quests across the ancient world! These four classic sword-and-sorcery tales by the masterful Henry Kuttner take us to realms of wonder and terror.
Across the mystical landscapes of lost Atlantis, Elak faces down ferocious monsters, cunning foes, and alien magical arts. With his unmatched skill with a sword and unyielding will to survive, Elak battles to protect the innocent and vanquish evil in this action-packed collection.
With their unique blend of swashbuckling adventure, fantastical world-building, and Lovecraftian horror, Kuttner’s Elak tales have captivated fans of fantasy and science fiction for generations.
This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving the stories genre and historical context.
A luxury sightseeing cruise among the fourteen major moons of Jupiter was meant to be the trip of a lifetime—genteel, elegant, and perfectly safe. The Celestial Swan, staffed entirely by flawless humanoid robots, promises its passengers refinement, comfort, and uninterrupted travel through the most spectacular vistas of the Jovian system. But when the voyage begins, so does the terror.
Fourteen passengers—some respectable, some hiding secrets—soon discover that someone on board intends to judge them one by one. “Accidents” claim the first victims. A sudden illness takes another. Each death echoes a cryptic line from a chilling poem mysteriously delivered to the passengers before launch… a poem that predicts all fourteen fates.
Only two among them are truly innocent:
– A reserved young engineer searching for a quiet holiday – A disciplined archivist escaping a life of burdens
Drawn together as suspicion spreads, they must navigate fear, mistrust, and the tightening pattern of deaths. With the robots unable to deviate from their programmed itinerary and the ship sealed in unstoppable transit, the passengers have no escape—and the killer has no reason to rush.
Survival will depend on uncovering the truth behind each past sin, deciphering the poem’s final lines, and facing the mastermind who hides behind a mask of civility. A tale of refined suspense, subtle romance, and classic mystery inspired by the magnificent backdrop of Jupiter’s moons.
Hera was hard at work in her counseling office when her clients started cancelling for Thanksgiving travel. She…hadn’t realized that a) that was coming up, or b) what it actually about…until she did a little research and decided to celebrate. In the process, she learns about Christmas coming, and decides that it’s high time somebody threw Christ a birthday party.
Of course, nothing goes as planned, but when does it ever?
These are troubled times. The Flannigan Administration’s hostility to clones has reached a boiling point, resulting in the Expulsions. All of NASA’s astronaut clones have been sent to lunar exile in Shepardsport.
Christmas is approaching, and Brenda Redmond is helping put on a musical adaptation of A Christmas Carol. But the three ghosts who visit Scrooge in the classic Charles Dickens story aren’t the only ghosts haunting the corridors of Shepardsport.
Even as Brenda is trying to get her young players ready, she must also track down the source of the strange visions that are coming unbidden to the settlement’s inhabitants.
Robinette Thornburg, the half-human daughter of ultra-rich Robert Thornburg, thought she was fully human, just weird, for the first twenty-one years of her life. She went to expensive private schools, then Harvard. On her twenty-first birthday, she learned that she was half Mangi, the result of an encounter between her father and a primitive near-human woman from the Wild, an alternate reality North America where primitive humans arrived half a million years ago, but no modern humans ever did.
That was the first she had heard of Mangi or the Wild, closely held secrets of the wealthy families who control Gates to it, but she finds out far more than she wants to about the Wild when mysterious enemies kidnap her and leave her to die in the Wild, naked and weaponless.
Robinette nearly starves before finding her way back to our world through an early, uncontrolled Gate. She vows revenge, but on who? She teams up with Eric Carter, a down on his luck private eye and former bodyguard to her father. The two try to figure out who kidnapped Robinette and why, a quest that takes them through the decadent world of the Gate families, the only law in the Wild. It also takes them back to the Wild and then to a final confrontation with, their lives and the fate of the Wild at stake.
Twenty thousand years ago on Earth, a cosmic entity infected a highly advanced cooperative civilization, with a neurological virus. This mind-virus brought that civilization to an end, but the virus remained, feeding on the survivors. Today, one half of an ancient artifact is rediscovered that if made whole, could end the infection that still grips Earth. But the virus itself opposes any such effort. Rather vigorously. The race is on through the ancient Southwest landscape to recover the artifact that is yet unclaimed. If these two artifacts can be brought together, it will either be used to save human civilization, or destroy the Earth, and everything on it for good.
Agnes Rawlins would never dream of showing a melancholy face to her brother’s guests. She may be a spinster, and treated little better than any common housekeeper, but she is responsible for bringing Christmas cheer into the dark and rambling Blackheath Manor, and she does not shirk her duty, even when she has little reason to celebrate.
William Marlowe, Viscount Claridge, has reluctantly accepted an invitation to spend the Christmas season at Blackheath. It’s not his first choice- how anyone could wish to spend time in the gloomy manor house is beyond him- but when he meets the kind and gentle lady of the house, he finds that Christmas at Blackheath might not be so bad after all.
A collection of short stories by Award-Winning Author Sarah A. Hoyt. From dark worlds ruled by vampires to magical high schools, from future worlds where superhumans face all-too-human struggles—this collection showcases Hoyt’s signature blend of high-concept adventure and deeply human drama. Her characters face impossible odds in worlds both strange and familiar, yet they never surrender. With vivid storytelling that has earned her recognition in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales, Hoyt delivers fiction that is as emotionally resonant as it is imaginative. Angel in Flight is set in Sarah Hoyt’s popular Darkship series.
The collection contains the stories: It Came Upon A Midnight Clear, First Blood, Created He Them, A Grain Of Salt, Shepherds and Wolves, Blood Ransom, The Price Of Gold, Around the Bend, An Answer From The North, Heart’s Fire, Whom The Gods Love, Angel In Flight, Dragons—as well as an introduction by fantasy writer Cedar Sanderson.
Like all Private Detectives, Seamus Lebanon [Leb] Magis has often been told to go to Hell. He just never thought he’d actually have to go. But when an old client asks him to investigate why Death Metal bands are dressing in pink – with butterfly mustache clips – and singing about puppies and kittens in a bad imitation of K-pop bands, Leb knows there’s something foul in the realm of music. When the something grows to include the woman he fell in love with in kindergarten and a missing six-year-old girl, Leb climbs into his battered Suburban and like a knight of old goes forth to do battles with the legions of Hell. This is when things become insane…. Or perhaps in the interest of truth we should say more insane.
Meanwhile, in aiding your efforts to not give money to people who hate you and supporting OUR side.
THESE HOLIDAYS FOR ALL OF YOUR SHARP POINTY NEEDS, OR RETRO MEDIEVAL STUFF, CONSIDER THE SHARP-POINTY-DAUGHTER-IN-LAW’S SHOP:
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
If you have questions, feel free to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: WRIST
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Crusher growled “Take your hand off my wrist if you don’t want to lose it.”
Maggie replied “Sorry about that. You just looked very worried. I’m a bit afraid of what might worry you.”
“Well, I am worried and a bit nervous. There’s something out there that may be more dangerous than me.”
”The fake human bodies the aliens are using can’t bend their wrists,” the stunning tall blonde repeated, looking him steadily in the eyes while her left wrist flexed through a full range of motion to demonstrate. Her right wrist didn’t move, so the 1911 she was pointing at his face didn’t move either. “So. Flex. Your. Wrists.”
Harry flexed both of his wrists. He was careful to continue to hold his hands high and well away from his body. She watched carefully, then nodded and reholstered her pistol in a smooth well practiced motion. “You can lower your hands.”
Indeed it was, a segment entitled “A Day in Beaumont”, which seems to have been full of loving allusions to 1950s SF cinema and literature. Even the sheriff being named Haskin would have gone right over my 11 year old head.
Somebody might have borrowed the concept, after filing off the serial numbers. I doubt I saw the ’85 version of The Twilight Zone. Was TV-less for several years when I was remodeling the house, but I think I got one summer of ’85. OTOH, was trying to finish the house to get the damned thing on the market. That neighborhood sucked rocks.
Wiki has an article on it, with several oddities for the alien bodies. I missed many of them because we didn’t have a color TV. Not until the early ’70s. The good news is that I missed some of the more jarring color schemes in the original Star Trek. :)
I remember the moon base ladies, lovely as they were, wearing oddly colored wigs. And apparently to board their interceptors, the fighter pilots flung themselves down laundry chutes.
I got sucked into UFO Fandom and had fun writing in it with our various self-inserted characters. Somewhere around here is a copy of the UFO/Dr. Who story I wrote (4th Doctor).
It might not actually be “flying”, but it’s objectively “aerial”, and it might not be an “object” so it could just be a trick of the light, thus a “phenomenon”…
Yep, it’s newspeak cope. They just don’t want official War Department reports headed with the name of that British TV show with the hot space control interceptor director girls with the miniskirts and purple hair.
I missed that one; was in college undergoing first-year festivities. I survived, mostly. Life was way too interesting.
Drinking to deal with my Dad’s death was suboptimal. I (unfortunately) remember the fencing lesson done with a massive hangover… Instructor thought I didn’t have it in my blood to do well. Hell, not sure I had enough blood in my alcohol stream. Learned my lesson, eventually. The clue-by-four had barbed wire…
The human wrist is a particularly tricky structure, from a biomechanics perspective. This makes it challenging for reconstructive surgeons and designers of prosthetics — but it also gives humanity our particular skill at highly accurate distance throwing.
What had been rather abstract came home to me a few months after First Contact, during a baseball game. Nothing fancy, just a sandlot game, but some of the Legate’s staff came out to see us play, and decided to try a paw at it.
I’d never realized just how much went in the simple act of throwing a ball to first base until I tried to teach Nyarwan and Kekayu. Stretching their fingers around the ball without having their claws get in the way was the first hurdle we had to get over. Once they had that figured out, they tried to imitate our throwing motions — and simply couldn’t. Not just the power from the shoulder, but the fine control the human wrist puts on a thrown object — and forelimbs shaped by a pouncing attack simply couldn’t do it.
Quite honestly, it’s a wonder they even developed the concept of ranged weapons at all. That they would have done so only well into their Industrial Age, as they were developing ironclads and primitive war-wagons, became a lot more comprehensible to us.
One of the squires was bringing around waterbags. “Sir,” the squire asked, carefully trying to untangle himself from the water bags, “are you thirsty?”
“Yes, give me as many as you can,” Sir Nought sighed, and the squire handed him one waterbag. “How much?”
“All of it, sir,” the squire nodded, and staggered off under his load.
Sir Nought pulled off the bag’s cork with his fingers, wincing as his left wrist tried to move, and drank it wulfen-style, squirting most of the water in his mouth without touching his lips to the rim. The water was mostly warm, cut one in five or so with an indifferent if sharp white wine, and tasted better than any water he ever had.
The remainder of the water, Sir Nought used to wash off the bruises and abrasions he could easily reach. He saved the very last for his left wrist, washing off the dirt and dust to reveal the abrasions and bruises from the ork club. A few careful twists of his wrist confirmed that it wasn’t broken, just badly bruised and scratched from the padding scraping along his skin.
Light gleamed off the titanium implant, briefly distracting SGT Granger from painful memories. The failed orbital boarding mission, although three months ago, was still fresh in his mind. But a mind-controlled prosthesis would soon adorn the implant at the end of his left wrist. He really hated being called ‘Stumpy.’
In most institutes of higher learning, Josiah would be called a “graduate assistant.” In the Wizardry Department at State U., his formal title was “wizard postulant,” or informally, “foolhardy bastard.” The fireball wand lab was especially risky; an improperly flicked wrist could result in singed eyebrows, or a cooked beard!
Off topic, but I feel I need to share something with the folks here who have guns, want guns, or simply oppose gun control legislation as well as any who are in favor of gun control. My friend Holly Math Nerd has a substack essay that takes gun control seriously and what the true implications of implementing it in the US would be. https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/the-reality-of-nationwide-gun-control. A lot of her stuff is paywalled because she’s still paying off her student loans and could use the money, but you should be able to read this one as a “free sample”. Trust me, it will be worth you while. Holly is a data scientist and a very clear thinker and writer. I consider it well worth my subscription. In all the pro-gun and anti-gun debates I’ve read, I’ve never seen anyone “do the math” and the implications of that math so calmly and so thoroughly. No hysterics, no jibes or hot takes, just a clear-eyed view of how such a thing would be attempted.
Sarah, feel free to delete this, if you find it wrong for your blog, but your blog gets so much more traffic than my little one, and I want to introduce others to this. (Well, Sundays are for promotion, right?) :)
Read Holly’s article. Brutal, but doesn’t go far enough.
Successful prevention of making guns further requires confiscation of metal plumbing pipes, nails, wood, drill presses, springs, sheet metal, rivets and other fasteners.
Pakistani gun makers are known to make AK-47s from shovels using hammers and files.
That cat is out of the bag, the trouble is out of Pandora’s box.
And then we get to imports. We get bales of marijuana and kilos of other drugs coming in illegally. When the demand goes up, adding a few surplus Glocks or AKs to such shipment will keep a trickle of them coming in, effectively forever.
Holly can’t believe the gun control activists would want to impose the universal surveillance, searches, confiscation, confrontations and shootings of cops, gun owners and innocent bystanders that total gun control would require. Holly is…innocent.
Because that is exactly what they want. It’s what those Eeevul gun owners deserve, for insisting on exercising their Constitutional rights and standing in the way of Utopia. “In a Perfect World, nobody would need guns, so we must eliminate guns to make the world Perfect!”
She also misses a couple of things. I suspect that a lot more people own guns than the surveys account for, and the number of guns in private hands exceeds 600 million. Then, what happens to the people who don’t comply with the (unconstitutional) new laws? They go to jail, right? Except there aren’t nearly enough jails for all those newly created felons. They’re already stuffed so full that real criminals — murderers, child molesters, rapists, arsonists, looters — are being released to make room for more. We’d have to build 4 new prisons for every existing prison just to lock them all up. And left-wing judges and prosecutors wouldn’t grant them the same leniency they show to murderers, rapists and kidnappers. No, they’d go straight to jail to serve their full sentences.
———————————
How can imperfect people build a Perfect World? How could imperfect people live in a Perfect
World?
“Holly can’t believe the gun control activists would want to impose the universal surveillance, searches, confiscation, confrontations and shootings of cops, gun owners and innocent bystanders that total gun control would require.”
Actually if you read her intro carefully, she does believe it, at least for the big promoters of gun control, although just not the innocent go-alongs. She just wants to put out in the open what those behind the scenes want for those who can’t see the big picture. What really worries her is that, in addition to the go-alongs, the anti-gun control folks aren’t fully aware of what it all will have to entail.
As to her 600 million estimate, like a good data scientist, she’s just trying to take as realistic an estimate as she can get from the accepted data and show how unfeasible the project is with even that estimate.
She stated in her article that she was consistently picking the conservative numbers to make her points about the minimum scale of any actual implementation regime. I’d bet on a real number closer to a billion just based on the fact that a lot of the “statistics” are based on surveys. Enough said.
And her point about 3d printers is one I have not seen a lot of emphasis on – they are not rocket science to put together from scratch just from stuff pulled from other stuff like printers (as the first ones were), so would also be impossible to “control” without house-to-house searches. And while the files to print working, quite sophisticated, firearms are already ubiquitous, designing a simple zip-gun style weapon that could be printed would not be especially challenging.
Heck, there are even people working on 3d-printable ammunition.
And that leaves out the currently high end computer controlled laser and plasma cutters, and the various metal 3d printers. Stuff like that will become cheaper and more ubiquitous.
So given the actual numbers being greater and the actual scale of control necessary to try and prevent new builds using stone knives and bearskins, her point on the resulting overbearing police state required is fully valid.
But your headache is killing you – little problem keeping ‘SICF’ from becoming ‘SCIF’, only noticeable because I read the first book(s?) and have the common usage meaning of SICF in my head.
Her hand touched his wrist. “Perhaps they struck down the wizards by years of learning, to eliminate the danger, and you could only have saved the children.”
Then her thoughts leapt ahead. “Were any of you poisoned? I did not sense it, but — I should have looked. And healed.”
heir ride home was interrupted by a heavy thumping of rap, a screech of tires, and a gaudy red low-rider car that swerved across the center line, racing at them head-on. Hands stuck out of windows on both sides, holding everything from revolvers to an AK-47, all shooting at them. Tovala’s shield had sprung up around them instantly, but most of the bullets missed anyway, striking cars and buildings behind them.
Daniel hit the clutch and brakes hard.
Tovala’s left arm snapped out straight, pointing at the garish thing, and an intricate device made entirely of light assembled itself around her hand and wrist with dizzying speed. The main structure was purple, filled with dozens of complex interlocking parts, sheets and circuits made from different shades of red, blue, orange, white, yellow and green light, some brighter than others, some pulsing or blinking at various rates. It emitted an ominous thrumming sound, and an impression of palpable menace that reached straight into the most primitive parts of any primate brain and screamed, this is a powerful, deadly weapon! Parts within the construct flashed brighter, and a pulse of dazzling blue-green light struck the onrushing vehicle dead-center.
It collapsed as if made out of loose sand. The motorcycle stopped with its front tire nearly touching the pile. Parts of it quickly became soaked with gasoline, oil, antifreeze and blood.
Tovala stared in shock at her arm, as if it belonged to a stranger. The glowing energy weapon thrummed on, clearly seeking more threats. Finding none, it chimed, as if in satisfaction, and most of its internal components grew dimmer.
She found her voice. “D-deactivate!” she commanded. The thrumming stopped, and more parts darkened.
And Thunderbird decided that Sarah’s substack address was junk. Somehow, I had cleared that folder a couple days ago, and my email volume is low, so it was easy to rescue those.
(Somebody’s flogging “security” services [phishing at best] claiming the bill wasn’t paid. A note in the upper left corner says it’s an advertisement, but the “From” field blames a substack account. Not from the rest of the headers…. That goes with the occasional email claiming to be from my ISP, trying to direct me to some orc’s account in Buggerallistan.)
And, after rescuing Our Hostess’s posts from the junk folder (with firm? instructions to knock it off), I read the first chapter of the new Elly book.
I have one question about the book: When can I put in a pre-order? [Borrows begging expression from Kat-the-dog.] I know, patience, patience, but I really like it.
and, yes, took half-forever to get anything this time)
“So, you’re saying you can create a new world, even a whole new universe to go with it, simply by a toss of your head or a flick of your wrist?”
It was a beautiful setting, picnic-like trestle tables and smaller round ones with separate chairs, among trees and smoothed grass like a lawn. It didn’t look ‘maintained’ but it didn’t seem quite fully ‘wild’ either.
Alea looked at him with the least possible visible trace of consternation. “Yes, actually in fact I am; only if you’re thinking only that then you’re really missing my whole main point entirely. What I’m really saying is that surely I can but of course you can too. All of you can.”
And there was something like a snap! in the nature of things, or in his relationship to things; and Melanie looked at her quizzically. “All of us? Who’s ‘us’? You don’t mean you; I’m the only other one here.” Vaguely, off in the back of her head, there was briefly something a bit interesting (somehow) about being (simply and familiarly) Melanie Kripka; but it faded fast as she kept trying to understand what she’d just heard Alea say.
Her powers of understanding were… formidable. You just didn’t get to be a real, true mathematical cryptographer and implementor without those.
“Look, I’m Alea Fortuna, exactly as I introduced myself; and I could give you all the classical references and points of introduction you could ever want or need, you’ve heard enough over the years to let me do it. But my saying that, is like saying you’re from the Pittsburgh area, before going on to give more detail and specficicity. Really, when you get right down to it and from at least one major valid viewpoint, ‘Alea Fortuna’ is very much like ‘Pittsburgh’ in that it identifies one point in space — yes, a rather formal sort of space instead of one mapped more familiarly by latitude and longitude on to an almost-sphere, but of course you’re no stranger to any of that stuff, Melanie. I mean mappings and such.”
And she smiled a quiet, engimatic sort of smile. “Just how you’d still be at, or at the least be mapped to, the same point in a similar space if you had grown up instead as…” And snap! — still the same ‘park’ and still those same trees and occasional quarrelling squirrels, but…
“Michael O’Flynn in Mount Airy to start, then Lynchburg. I’m not talking here about history, or all the whole diary of personal choices and details of eventuality; I’m only talking about the fundamental essence of who-and-what you really are. The you-that-makes-you-you. Ever read much Buddhism? Excuse me, that’s rhetorical, of course I know you have and how much, it comes with the territory. And I mean, of being the so-called ‘goddess’ of ‘random’ chance and therefore underneath it all fate.” She’d made the quote marks in the air as she said it, as in a game of charades.
And shook her brownhaired head, only a little peevishly. “Parenthetically, that last part’s sometimes a bit tiresome to me and anyone like me — it’s simply ‘being’ a point on a map, being and doing, not running some endless strategy or confidence-game to ‘win’ followers or to ‘score’ by some table of point values. I am, we are, simply the… world looking back at you, as you look at the world. Yes, I-and-we are the archetypal ‘divine’, but…”
Alea shook her head again. “And, like the man said in French, back to our sheep. The Buddhism, Michael. You know classical theory denies the ‘true’ existence of anything like a ‘soul’ — like a thread that runs through and connects the beads of your individual incarnations? But, rather, it’s like a pile of dice; as the ‘you’ is the conditionalization of what-you-are, so each life is separate from the next, but still the result of the last, and rests on the last much as one die rests on another beneath. It may be I’m not using your memory and concepts to explain it so very well.”
Michael O’Flynn smiled at her, remembering. “Is the flame of the lamp the same flame that burned in the same lamp an hour earlier, having burned all the time steady and bright? Or is it a different flame, moment to moment, despite being each instant’s flame the direct, causal result of the last? Something like all that. Nagasena and Milinda, maybe?” The squirrels were at it again, into it again and quite passionately.
“Yes,” said Alea. “And the causes, the ongoing and moving set-of-causes of the next-moment’s-you arising out of the you-as-you-are-now — that is the real you, that’s the point on the map, that says…” snap!
“Melanie Pauline Kripka. But even at that same point it could just-as-well be, say, Eleanor Rigby instead of… Melanie Kripka.” And the last two of those words, her name, were sung — right to the tune of the song and in perfect time.
Then, for only the merest instant, Mel imagined being someone named Eleanor Abigail Rigby, from Dorsetshire, first-born daughter of Joseph and Leigh Rigby — and not at all happy about the ‘1984’ turn of things in her version of the UK. With a tantalizingly just-out-of-reach wealth of detail she was utterly sure of… and then, she was familiarly only Melanie again as she’d always been.
“So what you’re saying is that I’m really… some point on a manifold, at least at some level of abstraction? And that I’m not even uniquely that point, but I have to share my being-there-ness with some other person, or people, who in some mad way have exactly that same being-ness as me? Maybe you can clear all that up just a bit for me.” Sounding like a question in seminar.
Alea shook her head the merest trifle. “No abstraction. You are, in your being-ness, that exactly and precisely, even exhaustively. Maybe it might conflict with your natural ego-tism; but your ‘ego’ is nothing more than another ‘content’ of the unconscious, only another ‘complex’ as Freud taught his posse of hangers-on and co-conspirators to say. So even at the level of psychology, you know you ‘are’ a personality; but also how you have sub-personalities, aspects of yourself that come up and do assorted things depending on the need and the context. Or, the trigger.
“Well, there could be other selves, too. Eleanor Rigby…” Once again she sung, those last two words; and Melanie-as-Eleanor was having tea in the back room of her snug-but-lovely little house, looking over her tiny but exquisite garden, ruminating darkly with her friend Richenda on the varied infirmities of the state. Only for an instant, and then…snap!
“Okay, then, but what does all this stuff about shared identity and causal nature — I guess that is what you’re saying, fundamental nature — have to do with a whole new universe being born in the blink of an eye or the twitch of a wrist? Or, maybe,” he said, with a bit of a gleam in his eye and a Loki-esque lilt in his voice, “a twiddle of your nose.” Old TV shows for $400, Alex…
“What it has to do with that, Michael, ‘Bewitched’ reruns and all, is that you-as-you are, multiply, in ‘other’ worlds, already. You might be someone ‘else’ who grew up in Raleigh or Chattanooga instead of Mount Airy and points north. You might specialize in deep math instead of heavy-duty, down-to-the-metal programming. Or you might be married with four children instead of doggedly still looking, and…” Alea Fortuna held up a finger, “…still. be. you.” There was a little bit of a… discontinuity, if rather more of one than any simple snap! had been.
And Michael Paul O’Flynn was still there. Aware, now, just a bit, of being a mathematician named Melanie Kripka — not he-as-he-was, in detail; but somehow, some way, still who-he-really-was, who-she-really-was too. It was almost indescribably and incomprehensibly strange, and familiar as sitting in front of a warm fire in a comfortable chair, somehow both all at once.
His mind drifted, only a little bit, to what she was doing — just messing about, as she called it, with discrete logarithms in quasi-polynomial time from that new-ish paper. Elliptic-curve recursive descent, in some deeply weird way like doing Pohlig-Hellman recursive splitting, only using ghost factors the numbers in question didn’t actually have. The details got lost whenever he tried to look too directly at them, fell apart into dust drifting like glitter on the wind; yet the underlying sense, somehow, remained. Somehow, he knew he’d at least half understand the paper if he looked it up, assuming it even existed in his timeline. snap!
Melanie sat at a picnic table in a park in some different sort of reality than her normal, waking world. Her mind was full of details of execution ports and throughput delays and instruction latencies — even though it, also and undeniably, was not. All of it like some crystalline puzzle built not across inches but across fractions of nanoseconds… awesomely so. It somehow made perfect sense that their middle names were, almost, the same.
Alea was still talking. “See, this is what it’s really all about, this way to see into and behind things. And people have been doing it for millennia but it’s about time for them to do it more and better and more coherently.
“‘AI’ is really neat, Interactive Statistical Models can hold a mirror up to humanity and show it its own cleverness and genius, like the fictional Final Encyclopedia but better and not all stuck in one place; but ISMs’re not the real future. The future is CI, Creative Imagination; and the past versions of it don’t hardly hold a candle to what it’s already becoming.”
snap! “You already know how well intuition, and guidance, and just the sort of thing that comes to you through a writer’s ‘gateway’ even more specifically, can… supply you things, Michael. Would you rather hand off your writing to some ‘AI’ to do for you, like hiring someone to eat your dinner or watch a movie for you? Or would you rather be helped to do it, as people have been helped since the days of mammoths and flint blades made with the same clever insights from a deeper world, to do it yourself so that you become and be more than you were, before the doing?” She laughed.
“Sorry, again, rhetorical question posed to you as a real one. Apologies tendered in advance.” Alea smiled again, fully and broadly and merrily.
“The world, your world and the greater world, is changing. Sounds too-like a cliche; but actually, it’s a huge and wonderful and revolutionary thing.
“I guess nothing is ever totally to the good, but this really does come close; and the world — yours, and them all — will need people, who can find such a change natural and useful, and help others let it be so.
“You’re getting decently good at gateway writing, Michael, though as you know you still need more practice. But you’re still very much of a beginner at the higher and far more useful art of gateway living, by guidance and intuition and” — she waved at the park — “what they used to call, in the old Irish way, ‘the music of what happens.’ Work at it.”
And then, slowly though the continuity was across ways of being conscious and of being — as-such and itself, slowly he started to wake up.
There was, he found, music playing in his head. Sans MP3s or phonographs.
… I wonder if you think about it, Once upon a time, In your wildest dreams.
Michael stretched a little, warmly, under the covers. Slowly he was waking up, slowly he was coming to consciousness.
And when he got up, he knew, he was going to do… something.
According To Hoyt 
Crusher growled “Take your hand off my wrist if you don’t want to lose it.”
Maggie replied “Sorry about that. You just looked very worried. I’m a bit afraid of what might worry you.”
“Well, I am worried and a bit nervous. There’s something out there that may be more dangerous than me.”
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With a name like Crusher, one would think there would be a “Shut up, Wesley” in there somewhere.
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He thought about using the name “Smasher”, but his friend/enemy/favorite-person-to-fight convinced him otherwise.
His response to “Shut Up” would be “Make Me” and only one person (in that world) might be able to “shut him up” but likely wouldn’t bother.
Note, Crusher was created to destroy the Major Superbeing in their world but he prefers “fighting” to “destroying”.
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That, or there is a Baron von Raschke analog waiting in the wings to provide some kayfabe enmity.
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In many ways, “Crusher” is a Baron von Raschke type with massive super-powers. 😉
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OK, “clown detective” is a brilliant conceit, and I’m annoyed I did not think of it first.
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Remember, o Readers, that you can be FORCE MULTIPLIERS! When you read books, you can rate and review them.
Even short reviews are of aid to the writer, because sheer mass helps. (And if you really can’t review, still rate.)
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King Ambrose put down his pen and flexed his wrist. Violetta tried to look away from the desk. She did not want to spy on his letters.
“Lady Violetta. I have spoken with your brother Basil. He sends his greetings.” She murmured something she hoped was appropriate.
“He and Lady Linnet said that you gave them no help beyond the spell that reworked the library.”
“Oh no, I did not, that is quite true,” said Violetta. “Florian might have helped.”
“Yes, I might have.” Florian, grinning, stepped in and bowed. “Your Majesty.”
Jasper stood behind him, and bowed as well.
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”They can’t what?”
”The fake human bodies the aliens are using can’t bend their wrists,” the stunning tall blonde repeated, looking him steadily in the eyes while her left wrist flexed through a full range of motion to demonstrate. Her right wrist didn’t move, so the 1911 she was pointing at his face didn’t move either. “So. Flex. Your. Wrists.”
Harry flexed both of his wrists. He was careful to continue to hold his hands high and well away from his body. She watched carefully, then nodded and reholstered her pistol in a smooth well practiced motion. “You can lower your hands.”
Harry did, very slowly and carefully.
”Okay then,” he said, “Hi, my name is Harry.”
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OK, who else flashed on the 1960s TV show The Invaders? There, as memory serves, the aliens could not flex their little fingers.
It wasn’t great SF-TV, but at least it was SF. Quinn-Martin for the, er, not sure.
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I thought the pinky finger thing was an episode of the 1985 Twilight Zone iteration. And I’m too young to have seen The Invaders.
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Indeed it was, a segment entitled “A Day in Beaumont”, which seems to have been full of loving allusions to 1950s SF cinema and literature. Even the sheriff being named Haskin would have gone right over my 11 year old head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Day_in_Beaumont
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Somebody might have borrowed the concept, after filing off the serial numbers. I doubt I saw the ’85 version of The Twilight Zone. Was TV-less for several years when I was remodeling the house, but I think I got one summer of ’85. OTOH, was trying to finish the house to get the damned thing on the market. That neighborhood sucked rocks.
Wiki has an article on it, with several oddities for the alien bodies. I missed many of them because we didn’t have a color TV. Not until the early ’70s. The good news is that I missed some of the more jarring color schemes in the original Star Trek. :)
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I see that the pinky fingers were one of many Easter Eggs/allusions in that episode. Missed it.
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Thus the correct affirmative answer to “Hey, remember ‘The Invaders’?” is “Get Off My Lawn.”
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Yep.
Lawn? We ain’t got no stinking lawns! Weeds and dispirited grass in the back yard, plus pasture(ish) grass. And weeds.
I don’t care if you get on it or not. :)
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I did manage to see UFO at some point. And am glad I did.
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Oh, good LORD
I just realized you man a movie. Was briefly confused.
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A one-season TV series, actually. But one with lots and lots of excellent scenery.
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“excellent scenery”.
Especially, the ladies on the Moon-Base. [Crazy Grin]
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I remember the moon base ladies, lovely as they were, wearing oddly colored wigs. And apparently to board their interceptors, the fighter pilots flung themselves down laundry chutes.
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The scenery meant WAS the ladies, but apparently no joke can just be left as is, they all have to be jokesplained.
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I got sucked into UFO Fandom and had fun writing in it with our various self-inserted characters. Somewhere around here is a copy of the UFO/Dr. Who story I wrote (4th Doctor).
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There’s much to be said for the mesh shirts in the sub Skydiver.
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Yep, and I was thinking that the mesh shirts were on the Moon-Base. [Embarrassed]
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Yes, but I thought you were CASUALLY announcing that you’d seen a UFO. And it was a good thing.
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“UFO” is such a 1970s term. I believe the Current Hotness is UAP.
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if you can’t pronounce it, it’s not that hot.
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I’m just amused that everyone rolls with the update to the Newspeak dictionary, without questioning it.
Constantly changing the “acceptable term” is never, ever a good sign.
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When I encounter “UAP”, my first impression is “drone”. The second is a name for a third or fourth-world airline.
UFO or bust!
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I second this.
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No love for NTIs?
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It might not actually be “flying”, but it’s objectively “aerial”, and it might not be an “object” so it could just be a trick of the light, thus a “phenomenon”…
Yep, it’s newspeak cope. They just don’t want official War Department reports headed with the name of that British TV show with the hot space control interceptor director girls with the miniskirts and purple hair.
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And if the Bubbleheads detect something submerged, is that a UUP?
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There is a term for that, I forget what it is. But apparently, there have been a lot of sightings of them underwater.
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Uh. And now you’re going to have to find me links, little brother.
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…got it from Rogan interviewing a guy with a new documentary out, and a few related interviews. Give me a bit.
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For those too young, here’s a reference re those ladies working up at the SHADO interceptor base on the moon from the 1970 British TV show UFO:
https://www.vintag.es/2019/01/shado-girls.html
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The original reference was literally to every female on the show, at all.Because it was made in 1969/70, and British ladies in that year were amazing.
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I suspect that “UAP” was created because too many people “assumed” that “UFOs” were alien spacecraft.
Oh, UAP applies to underwater unknowns.
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I missed that one; was in college undergoing first-year festivities. I survived, mostly. Life was way too interesting.
Drinking to deal with my Dad’s death was suboptimal. I (unfortunately) remember the fencing lesson done with a massive hangover… Instructor thought I didn’t have it in my blood to do well. Hell, not sure I had enough blood in my alcohol stream. Learned my lesson, eventually. The clue-by-four had barbed wire…
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Oh dratted algorithm! Did I trigger it with the D&&th word? Exsqueeze me!
Is this going to get moderated? Placing my bet now…
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The human wrist is a particularly tricky structure, from a biomechanics perspective. This makes it challenging for reconstructive surgeons and designers of prosthetics — but it also gives humanity our particular skill at highly accurate distance throwing.
What had been rather abstract came home to me a few months after First Contact, during a baseball game. Nothing fancy, just a sandlot game, but some of the Legate’s staff came out to see us play, and decided to try a paw at it.
I’d never realized just how much went in the simple act of throwing a ball to first base until I tried to teach Nyarwan and Kekayu. Stretching their fingers around the ball without having their claws get in the way was the first hurdle we had to get over. Once they had that figured out, they tried to imitate our throwing motions — and simply couldn’t. Not just the power from the shoulder, but the fine control the human wrist puts on a thrown object — and forelimbs shaped by a pouncing attack simply couldn’t do it.
Quite honestly, it’s a wonder they even developed the concept of ranged weapons at all. That they would have done so only well into their Industrial Age, as they were developing ironclads and primitive war-wagons, became a lot more comprehensible to us.
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One of the squires was bringing around waterbags. “Sir,” the squire asked, carefully trying to untangle himself from the water bags, “are you thirsty?”
“Yes, give me as many as you can,” Sir Nought sighed, and the squire handed him one waterbag. “How much?”
“All of it, sir,” the squire nodded, and staggered off under his load.
Sir Nought pulled off the bag’s cork with his fingers, wincing as his left wrist tried to move, and drank it wulfen-style, squirting most of the water in his mouth without touching his lips to the rim. The water was mostly warm, cut one in five or so with an indifferent if sharp white wine, and tasted better than any water he ever had.
The remainder of the water, Sir Nought used to wash off the bruises and abrasions he could easily reach. He saved the very last for his left wrist, washing off the dirt and dust to reveal the abrasions and bruises from the ork club. A few careful twists of his wrist confirmed that it wasn’t broken, just badly bruised and scratched from the padding scraping along his skin.
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Light gleamed off the titanium implant, briefly distracting SGT Granger from painful memories. The failed orbital boarding mission, although three months ago, was still fresh in his mind. But a mind-controlled prosthesis would soon adorn the implant at the end of his left wrist. He really hated being called ‘Stumpy.’
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“So, these fae…”
“Yes.”
“They exhibit normal human features except for one body part.”
“Yes.”
“And in this case, they get everything right, but their wrists which still look insectoid.”
“Yes.”
“So, what you’re saying is, that in order to catch them, we need a wrist watch.”
“I hate you so much right now.”
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“It’s all in the wrist,” said Josiah. “Watch closely, than you can try.”
Elmer the Aspiring Wizard watched as Josiah flicked the wand, sending a tiny fireball downrange. “See?” said Josiah. “Simple. Now you have a go.”
Elmer took the wand nervously. “I’m really gong to regret this,” thought Josiah.
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In most institutes of higher learning, Josiah would be called a “graduate assistant.” In the Wizardry Department at State U., his formal title was “wizard postulant,” or informally, “foolhardy bastard.” The fireball wand lab was especially risky; an improperly flicked wrist could result in singed eyebrows, or a cooked beard!
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Off topic, but I feel I need to share something with the folks here who have guns, want guns, or simply oppose gun control legislation as well as any who are in favor of gun control. My friend Holly Math Nerd has a substack essay that takes gun control seriously and what the true implications of implementing it in the US would be. https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/the-reality-of-nationwide-gun-control. A lot of her stuff is paywalled because she’s still paying off her student loans and could use the money, but you should be able to read this one as a “free sample”. Trust me, it will be worth you while. Holly is a data scientist and a very clear thinker and writer. I consider it well worth my subscription. In all the pro-gun and anti-gun debates I’ve read, I’ve never seen anyone “do the math” and the implications of that math so calmly and so thoroughly. No hysterics, no jibes or hot takes, just a clear-eyed view of how such a thing would be attempted.
Sarah, feel free to delete this, if you find it wrong for your blog, but your blog gets so much more traffic than my little one, and I want to introduce others to this. (Well, Sundays are for promotion, right?) :)
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Read Holly’s article. Brutal, but doesn’t go far enough.
Successful prevention of making guns further requires confiscation of metal plumbing pipes, nails, wood, drill presses, springs, sheet metal, rivets and other fasteners.
Pakistani gun makers are known to make AK-47s from shovels using hammers and files.
That cat is out of the bag, the trouble is out of Pandora’s box.
And then we get to imports. We get bales of marijuana and kilos of other drugs coming in illegally. When the demand goes up, adding a few surplus Glocks or AKs to such shipment will keep a trickle of them coming in, effectively forever.
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Holly can’t believe the gun control activists would want to impose the universal surveillance, searches, confiscation, confrontations and shootings of cops, gun owners and innocent bystanders that total gun control would require. Holly is…innocent.
Because that is exactly what they want. It’s what those Eeevul gun owners deserve, for insisting on exercising their Constitutional rights and standing in the way of Utopia. “In a Perfect World, nobody would need guns, so we must eliminate guns to make the world Perfect!”
She also misses a couple of things. I suspect that a lot more people own guns than the surveys account for, and the number of guns in private hands exceeds 600 million. Then, what happens to the people who don’t comply with the (unconstitutional) new laws? They go to jail, right? Except there aren’t nearly enough jails for all those newly created felons. They’re already stuffed so full that real criminals — murderers, child molesters, rapists, arsonists, looters — are being released to make room for more. We’d have to build 4 new prisons for every existing prison just to lock them all up. And left-wing judges and prosecutors wouldn’t grant them the same leniency they show to murderers, rapists and kidnappers. No, they’d go straight to jail to serve their full sentences.
———————————
How can imperfect people build a Perfect World? How could imperfect people live in a Perfect
World?
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“Holly can’t believe the gun control activists would want to impose the universal surveillance, searches, confiscation, confrontations and shootings of cops, gun owners and innocent bystanders that total gun control would require.”
Actually if you read her intro carefully, she does believe it, at least for the big promoters of gun control, although just not the innocent go-alongs. She just wants to put out in the open what those behind the scenes want for those who can’t see the big picture. What really worries her is that, in addition to the go-alongs, the anti-gun control folks aren’t fully aware of what it all will have to entail.
As to her 600 million estimate, like a good data scientist, she’s just trying to take as realistic an estimate as she can get from the accepted data and show how unfeasible the project is with even that estimate.
Of course your comment about prisons is spot on.
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Mass graves are faster to build and take no effort to maintain.
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She stated in her article that she was consistently picking the conservative numbers to make her points about the minimum scale of any actual implementation regime. I’d bet on a real number closer to a billion just based on the fact that a lot of the “statistics” are based on surveys. Enough said.
And her point about 3d printers is one I have not seen a lot of emphasis on – they are not rocket science to put together from scratch just from stuff pulled from other stuff like printers (as the first ones were), so would also be impossible to “control” without house-to-house searches. And while the files to print working, quite sophisticated, firearms are already ubiquitous, designing a simple zip-gun style weapon that could be printed would not be especially challenging.
Heck, there are even people working on 3d-printable ammunition.
And that leaves out the currently high end computer controlled laser and plasma cutters, and the various metal 3d printers. Stuff like that will become cheaper and more ubiquitous.
So given the actual numbers being greater and the actual scale of control necessary to try and prevent new builds using stone knives and bearskins, her point on the resulting overbearing police state required is fully valid.
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Promoting a new book …
Just read the new chapter of ‘Ellly’ – very nice.
But your headache is killing you – little problem keeping ‘SICF’ from becoming ‘SCIF’, only noticeable because I read the first book(s?) and have the common usage meaning of SICF in my head.
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Nah. That’s just me being dyslexic as usual.
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Her hand touched his wrist. “Perhaps they struck down the wizards by years of learning, to eliminate the danger, and you could only have saved the children.”
Then her thoughts leapt ahead. “Were any of you poisoned? I did not sense it, but — I should have looked. And healed.”
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heir ride home was interrupted by a heavy thumping of rap, a screech of tires, and a gaudy red low-rider car that swerved across the center line, racing at them head-on. Hands stuck out of windows on both sides, holding everything from revolvers to an AK-47, all shooting at them. Tovala’s shield had sprung up around them instantly, but most of the bullets missed anyway, striking cars and buildings behind them.
Daniel hit the clutch and brakes hard.
Tovala’s left arm snapped out straight, pointing at the garish thing, and an intricate device made entirely of light assembled itself around her hand and wrist with dizzying speed. The main structure was purple, filled with dozens of complex interlocking parts, sheets and circuits made from different shades of red, blue, orange, white, yellow and green light, some brighter than others, some pulsing or blinking at various rates. It emitted an ominous thrumming sound, and an impression of palpable menace that reached straight into the most primitive parts of any primate brain and screamed, this is a powerful, deadly weapon! Parts within the construct flashed brighter, and a pulse of dazzling blue-green light struck the onrushing vehicle dead-center.
It collapsed as if made out of loose sand. The motorcycle stopped with its front tire nearly touching the pile. Parts of it quickly became soaked with gasoline, oil, antifreeze and blood.
Tovala stared in shock at her arm, as if it belonged to a stranger. The glowing energy weapon thrummed on, clearly seeking more threats. Finding none, it chimed, as if in satisfaction, and most of its internal components grew dimmer.
She found her voice. “D-deactivate!” she commanded. The thrumming stopped, and more parts darkened.
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You may have heard a Loud Scream a couple of hours ago.
It was me when I discovered over 900 missing emails in my Junk Folder.
Since I didn’t want to leave them there, I’ve been busy moving them to their proper folders (except for a very few that belonged in the Junk Folder).
Whew! At least, that’s taken care of. [Very Very Big Tired Grin]
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And Thunderbird decided that Sarah’s substack address was junk. Somehow, I had cleared that folder a couple days ago, and my email volume is low, so it was easy to rescue those.
(Somebody’s flogging “security” services [phishing at best] claiming the bill wasn’t paid. A note in the upper left corner says it’s an advertisement, but the “From” field blames a substack account. Not from the rest of the headers…. That goes with the occasional email claiming to be from my ISP, trying to direct me to some orc’s account in Buggerallistan.)
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And, after rescuing Our Hostess’s posts from the junk folder (with firm? instructions to knock it off), I read the first chapter of the new Elly book.
I have one question about the book: When can I put in a pre-order? [Borrows begging expression from Kat-the-dog.] I know, patience, patience, but I really like it.
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Writing will be slow through the Holidays. That said I dreamed a couple of chapters.
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Did you write them down? [Big Crazy Grin]
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So that’s what that noise was…
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Great selection as always, and thanks for boosting the signal on our anthology!
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(Part 1/3
and, yes, took half-forever to get anything this time)
“So, you’re saying you can create a new world, even a whole new universe to go with it, simply by a toss of your head or a flick of your wrist?”
It was a beautiful setting, picnic-like trestle tables and smaller round ones with separate chairs, among trees and smoothed grass like a lawn. It didn’t look ‘maintained’ but it didn’t seem quite fully ‘wild’ either.
Alea looked at him with the least possible visible trace of consternation. “Yes, actually in fact I am; only if you’re thinking only that then you’re really missing my whole main point entirely. What I’m really saying is that surely I can but of course you can too. All of you can.”
And there was something like a snap! in the nature of things, or in his relationship to things; and Melanie looked at her quizzically. “All of us? Who’s ‘us’? You don’t mean you; I’m the only other one here.” Vaguely, off in the back of her head, there was briefly something a bit interesting (somehow) about being (simply and familiarly) Melanie Kripka; but it faded fast as she kept trying to understand what she’d just heard Alea say.
Her powers of understanding were… formidable. You just didn’t get to be a real, true mathematical cryptographer and implementor without those.
“Look, I’m Alea Fortuna, exactly as I introduced myself; and I could give you all the classical references and points of introduction you could ever want or need, you’ve heard enough over the years to let me do it. But my saying that, is like saying you’re from the Pittsburgh area, before going on to give more detail and specficicity. Really, when you get right down to it and from at least one major valid viewpoint, ‘Alea Fortuna’ is very much like ‘Pittsburgh’ in that it identifies one point in space — yes, a rather formal sort of space instead of one mapped more familiarly by latitude and longitude on to an almost-sphere, but of course you’re no stranger to any of that stuff, Melanie. I mean mappings and such.”
And she smiled a quiet, engimatic sort of smile. “Just how you’d still be at, or at the least be mapped to, the same point in a similar space if you had grown up instead as…” And snap! — still the same ‘park’ and still those same trees and occasional quarrelling squirrels, but…
“Michael O’Flynn in Mount Airy to start, then Lynchburg. I’m not talking here about history, or all the whole diary of personal choices and details of eventuality; I’m only talking about the fundamental essence of who-and-what you really are. The you-that-makes-you-you. Ever read much Buddhism? Excuse me, that’s rhetorical, of course I know you have and how much, it comes with the territory. And I mean, of being the so-called ‘goddess’ of ‘random’ chance and therefore underneath it all fate.” She’d made the quote marks in the air as she said it, as in a game of charades.
And shook her brownhaired head, only a little peevishly. “Parenthetically, that last part’s sometimes a bit tiresome to me and anyone like me — it’s simply ‘being’ a point on a map, being and doing, not running some endless strategy or confidence-game to ‘win’ followers or to ‘score’ by some table of point values. I am, we are, simply the… world looking back at you, as you look at the world. Yes, I-and-we are the archetypal ‘divine’, but…”
Alea shook her head again. “And, like the man said in French, back to our sheep. The Buddhism, Michael. You know classical theory denies the ‘true’ existence of anything like a ‘soul’ — like a thread that runs through and connects the beads of your individual incarnations? But, rather, it’s like a pile of dice; as the ‘you’ is the conditionalization of what-you-are, so each life is separate from the next, but still the result of the last, and rests on the last much as one die rests on another beneath. It may be I’m not using your memory and concepts to explain it so very well.”
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(Part 2/3)
Michael O’Flynn smiled at her, remembering. “Is the flame of the lamp the same flame that burned in the same lamp an hour earlier, having burned all the time steady and bright? Or is it a different flame, moment to moment, despite being each instant’s flame the direct, causal result of the last? Something like all that. Nagasena and Milinda, maybe?” The squirrels were at it again, into it again and quite passionately.
“Yes,” said Alea. “And the causes, the ongoing and moving set-of-causes of the next-moment’s-you arising out of the you-as-you-are-now — that is the real you, that’s the point on the map, that says…” snap!
“Melanie Pauline Kripka. But even at that same point it could just-as-well be, say, Eleanor Rigby instead of… Melanie Kripka.” And the last two of those words, her name, were sung — right to the tune of the song and in perfect time.
Then, for only the merest instant, Mel imagined being someone named Eleanor Abigail Rigby, from Dorsetshire, first-born daughter of Joseph and Leigh Rigby — and not at all happy about the ‘1984’ turn of things in her version of the UK. With a tantalizingly just-out-of-reach wealth of detail she was utterly sure of… and then, she was familiarly only Melanie again as she’d always been.
“So what you’re saying is that I’m really… some point on a manifold, at least at some level of abstraction? And that I’m not even uniquely that point, but I have to share my being-there-ness with some other person, or people, who in some mad way have exactly that same being-ness as me? Maybe you can clear all that up just a bit for me.” Sounding like a question in seminar.
Alea shook her head the merest trifle. “No abstraction. You are, in your being-ness, that exactly and precisely, even exhaustively. Maybe it might conflict with your natural ego-tism; but your ‘ego’ is nothing more than another ‘content’ of the unconscious, only another ‘complex’ as Freud taught his posse of hangers-on and co-conspirators to say. So even at the level of psychology, you know you ‘are’ a personality; but also how you have sub-personalities, aspects of yourself that come up and do assorted things depending on the need and the context. Or, the trigger.
“Well, there could be other selves, too. Eleanor Rigby…” Once again she sung, those last two words; and Melanie-as-Eleanor was having tea in the back room of her snug-but-lovely little house, looking over her tiny but exquisite garden, ruminating darkly with her friend Richenda on the varied infirmities of the state. Only for an instant, and then…snap!
“Okay, then, but what does all this stuff about shared identity and causal nature — I guess that is what you’re saying, fundamental nature — have to do with a whole new universe being born in the blink of an eye or the twitch of a wrist? Or, maybe,” he said, with a bit of a gleam in his eye and a Loki-esque lilt in his voice, “a twiddle of your nose.” Old TV shows for $400, Alex…
“What it has to do with that, Michael, ‘Bewitched’ reruns and all, is that you-as-you are, multiply, in ‘other’ worlds, already. You might be someone ‘else’ who grew up in Raleigh or Chattanooga instead of Mount Airy and points north. You might specialize in deep math instead of heavy-duty, down-to-the-metal programming. Or you might be married with four children instead of doggedly still looking, and…” Alea Fortuna held up a finger, “…still. be. you.” There was a little bit of a… discontinuity, if rather more of one than any simple snap! had been.
And Michael Paul O’Flynn was still there. Aware, now, just a bit, of being a mathematician named Melanie Kripka — not he-as-he-was, in detail; but somehow, some way, still who-he-really-was, who-she-really-was too. It was almost indescribably and incomprehensibly strange, and familiar as sitting in front of a warm fire in a comfortable chair, somehow both all at once.
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(Part 3/3)
His mind drifted, only a little bit, to what she was doing — just messing about, as she called it, with discrete logarithms in quasi-polynomial time from that new-ish paper. Elliptic-curve recursive descent, in some deeply weird way like doing Pohlig-Hellman recursive splitting, only using ghost factors the numbers in question didn’t actually have. The details got lost whenever he tried to look too directly at them, fell apart into dust drifting like glitter on the wind; yet the underlying sense, somehow, remained. Somehow, he knew he’d at least half understand the paper if he looked it up, assuming it even existed in his timeline. snap!
Melanie sat at a picnic table in a park in some different sort of reality than her normal, waking world. Her mind was full of details of execution ports and throughput delays and instruction latencies — even though it, also and undeniably, was not. All of it like some crystalline puzzle built not across inches but across fractions of nanoseconds… awesomely so. It somehow made perfect sense that their middle names were, almost, the same.
Alea was still talking. “See, this is what it’s really all about, this way to see into and behind things. And people have been doing it for millennia but it’s about time for them to do it more and better and more coherently.
“‘AI’ is really neat, Interactive Statistical Models can hold a mirror up to humanity and show it its own cleverness and genius, like the fictional Final Encyclopedia but better and not all stuck in one place; but ISMs’re not the real future. The future is CI, Creative Imagination; and the past versions of it don’t hardly hold a candle to what it’s already becoming.”
snap! “You already know how well intuition, and guidance, and just the sort of thing that comes to you through a writer’s ‘gateway’ even more specifically, can… supply you things, Michael. Would you rather hand off your writing to some ‘AI’ to do for you, like hiring someone to eat your dinner or watch a movie for you? Or would you rather be helped to do it, as people have been helped since the days of mammoths and flint blades made with the same clever insights from a deeper world, to do it yourself so that you become and be more than you were, before the doing?” She laughed.
“Sorry, again, rhetorical question posed to you as a real one. Apologies tendered in advance.” Alea smiled again, fully and broadly and merrily.
“The world, your world and the greater world, is changing. Sounds too-like a cliche; but actually, it’s a huge and wonderful and revolutionary thing.
“I guess nothing is ever totally to the good, but this really does come close; and the world — yours, and them all — will need people, who can find such a change natural and useful, and help others let it be so.
“You’re getting decently good at gateway writing, Michael, though as you know you still need more practice. But you’re still very much of a beginner at the higher and far more useful art of gateway living, by guidance and intuition and” — she waved at the park — “what they used to call, in the old Irish way, ‘the music of what happens.’ Work at it.”
And then, slowly though the continuity was across ways of being conscious and of being — as-such and itself, slowly he started to wake up.
There was, he found, music playing in his head. Sans MP3s or phonographs.
… I wonder if you think about it, Once upon a time, In your wildest dreams.
Michael stretched a little, warmly, under the covers. Slowly he was waking up, slowly he was coming to consciousness.
And when he got up, he knew, he was going to do… something.
Something new.
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