“fiction”
19 posts under this tag.
From Nick Bostrom’s Golden—a fictional interview of Albert, an uploaded dog. His cheeriness and good disposition are attributed to his being a golden retriever. His wisdom I attribute to Bostrom, who’s one fascinating philosopher (don’t miss the fable of the dragon tyrant!).
Larry King: What are your plans for the future?
Albert: I take one day at a time. I enjoy learning new things, playing games and talking with my friends. I just love being alive and savoring every new experience. It is so exciting and so much fun! I love it all so much, I wish it will never end!
Larry King: Do you even wonder about how you came to be so lucky?
Albert: Yes, I once asked Dr. Cole about that, and he said there was no scientific answer. Then I asked if there was an unscientific answer? And he said: “Well, there will be if you make one up”.
So then I went away and thought about that for while. I thought about Laika, the unlucky dog that they sent up into space, and all the other dogs that never became famous. I thought about the rabbits in the animal labs, the pet rabbits, and the rabbits in the wild. Then I thought about the foxes that ate the rabbits and the hounds that hunted the foxes. Then I thought about all the humans, and how some had been kings and some had been slaves; how some had had families and loved ones, and how some had died alone in the cold. And again I asked myself, how come I had been a lucky one? But I couldn’t think of any answer. Not even an unscientific one.
Larry King: (pause) Do feel that you have a mission?
Albert: I want everyone to be the lucky one.
As if there weren’t enough books to read—let alone buy—already, here are six unread ones that have particularly caught my fancy. Just reading about them has been fascinating.
When people come to understand how big the universe is and how short a human life is, their hearts cry out. Sometimes it’s a shout of joy: I think that’s what it was for Jason; I think that’s what I didn’t understand about him. He had the gift of awe. But for most of us it’s a cry of terror. The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence.
Robert Charles Wilson, SpinWP, AM
You gotta read Spin. You gotta read Spin.
Right up there among the two or three Best Novels I’ve Ever Read.
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?” Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s CraddleWP, AM
El tigre tiene que cazar, el pajaro que volar; el hombre tiene que sentarse y pensar, “Por que, por que, por que?” El tigre tiene que dormir, el pajaro regresar a su nido; el hombre tiene que decirse que ha comprendido.
I read this in a great post, 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will, soon after heWP died—which was, personally, surprisingly sad—SlaughterHouse 5WP, AM has got to be among the best books I’ve read. Anyway, I’m still fascinated by the phrase and particularly by the interpretation offered there (which seems obvious and inevitable now, but you never know so maybe you—virgin you—may want to make your own unadulterated meaning before reading the following):
[A] koan of sorts from Cat’s Cradle and the Bokononist religion (which phrases many of its teachings as calypsos, as part of its absurdist bent), this piece of doggerel is simple and catchy, but it unpacks into a resonant, meaningful philosophy that reads as sympathetic to humanity, albeit from a removed, humoring, alien viewpoint. Man’s just another animal, it implies, with his own peculiar instincts, and his own way of shutting them down. This is horrifically cynical when considered closely: If people deciding they understand the world is just another instinct, then enlightenment is little more than a pit-stop between insoluble questions, a necessary but ultimately meaningless way of taking a sanity break. At the same time, there’s a kindness to Bokonon’s belief that this is all inevitable and just part of being a person. Life is frustrating and full of pitfalls and dead ends, but everybody’s gotta do it.
So the songpiece has lived inside me since and served as an interesting flashlightELZR. Hope it’s useful to you too.
Oh, and here’s an interesting elaboration on it, from, of all places, a Grey’s Anatomy writer (yup, I’ve become such a rabid fan I gobble up the writers’ blog…shut up already):
Real life—where terrible things happen to us, to our friends, and to the world around us without warning or explanation. And we’re human beings, most of us, so when terrible things happen, we want to know the reasons why. We want the suffering to mean something. And when the meaning isn’t immediately evident, we assign meaning as a way of comprehending, if not controlling, what seem like random acts of terribleness. When bad things happen, we make sense of them by calling them tests. Tests we either pass or fail before moving on to the next level of experience, but ones we hopefully learn from either way.
A weird happening today, a phone call, has got me paralyzed and deep in soul-searching. In my rambling thoughts I remembered Dragon Ball, my all-time favorite story as a child. You know, one of the most magical things of this most magical anime, perhaps even its central theme, is how almost every enemy, minor or major, eventually becomes part of the gang, a friend and perhaps even a wife or a husband—there’s Oolong, Yajirobe, Tenshinhan, Chaozu, Kuririn, Android 18, the Ox King, Yamcha, Piccolo, Vegeta, Majin Buu, and even Mr. Satan, but I’m sure I’m forgetting many.
What’s more, practically every character is presented mysteriously and ominously at first (or at times)— Dragon Ball’s is a world where one is always wary of The Other, where circumstances always conspire to cast It in a menacing light, and yet one where there’s always camaraderie, friendship, humor, and sometimes even love underneath it all. A world where appearances deceive, where enemies are future friends waiting to be made. What a naive, beautiful idea.
Let’s see if it works.
Update March 8, 2007: It worked!
My winners, so far this year, of the Keep the Web Weird prize.
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Susan Stepney’s Homepage. Swim around her factoids or her myriad book reviews—sci-fi and non-fiction being the two categories. And boy does she read good nonfiction. Check her rated non-fiction index for a good glimpse of it and notice how her book reviews tend to grow organically into full-fledged bibliographies [example].
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Luis Pabon’s Entropía blog (in Spanish). If you can only read one thing from him, let it be El hombre que hablaba al reves (The man who spoke the wrong way round)—it’s positively brilliant. Positively.
There’s also a letter to his future self; oblique strategies; an elegant fable: El pez que se bebió el océano (The fish who drank the ocean); obscure calendar erudition: La abreviatura de los miércoles (Wednesday’s abbreviation); original music; a scanning of a (terrifying) dictation from a Spain under Franco: Libertad Dictada (Dictated Freedom); a reflection sparked by GTDWP: Conocerse a sí mismo (Knowing Oneself); an absolutely amateur, yet interesting, physics experiment: Acústica de fluidos; and a beautiful, infinite poem. Even his profile is writing of the highest order.
He has infodesign talent to spare, as he showed with his proposal in my calendar challenge, and he can sometimes use it for most amusing purposes. Like these two graphs here, perfectly illustrating why sometimes to go forward it’s better to get some distance first:
Most intriguing is when he combines this graphic inclination with his (prodigious) verbosity to create amazing, longwinded plays with the ridiculous (think of that famous bathroom-tissue-distribution-units passage from Snow CrashWP). There’s for instance the Messiah Project, his compendium of priorization strategies, and his “simple graphical and mathematical model for the analysis and assessment of situations according to a person’s capacity, responsibility, and will.”
“Luis… estás como un cencerro!!!” says a legendary comment. Correctly.
One of my rules for not overflowing this blog with quote posts (admittedly not a very succesful enterprise) is that a quote must bounce on my head on its own for some days, a week or two. Here’s an odd winner.
“Who are you taking me to meet?”
“A guy named Beck. An old acquaintance of mine.”
“But not a friend?”
Carl adopted an uncomfortable grin and shrugged. “We’ve been friends sometimes. We’ve also been collaborators. Business partners. This is how life works, Miranda: After a while, you build a network of people. You pass them bits of data they might be interested in and vice versa. To me, he’s one of those guys.”
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond AgeAM
(Oh and btw, if you care for my unfiltered quotestream check out my Google Notebook. The app is still frustratingly primitive—all the more disappointing coming from Google, beta label notwithstanding—but the notebook’s already several hundred quotes strong.)
Just started reading Neal StephensonWP’s Diamond AgeWP, AM—trembling with excitement. The 500-page, 1995 cyberpunk novel is baroquely immersive in that hip, queer way that only Stephenson can deliver. It has many, many rarefied words too, some of them beautiful («alamodality», «runcible», «velleity1»), some pedantic («cineritious», «hederated», «callypigious»), and some unfathomable (what the hell is «eutactic»?). Of the latter class was «machine-phase»; at first unconsciously ignored (I tend to do that with common-word alloys), it eventually emerged into consciousness and was diligently googled (since unfound on any dictionary I know of)—it is now most definitely a member of the beautiful words class:
It would be a natural goal [of nanotechnology WP] to be able to put every atom in a selected place (where it would serve as part of some active or structural component) with no extra molecules on the loose to jam the works. Such a system would not be a liquid or gas, as no molecules would move randomly, nor would it be a solid, in which molecules are fixed in place. Instead this new machine-phase matter would exhibit the molecular movement seen today only in liquids and gases as well as the mechanical strength typically associated with solids. Its volume would be filled with active machinery.
Tiempo de lluvias. Estas en tu camioneta, aburrido, esperando que toque verde, cuando un hombre en un overol rojo brillante con el logo de MerkabastosELZR y una clara leyenda de “servicio de cortesia” se acerca: “Buenas tardes, me permitiria limpiarle su parabrisas? Cortesia de Merkabastos.” Asientes sorprendido y el hombre sonrie, planta enfrente de tu camioneta un tripie que no habias percatado y que sostiene un letrero mediano anunciando que esta noche es la venta nocturna de Merkabastos, con papas y nabos a mitad de precio—y procede a limpiar tu parabrisas religiosamente. El vidrio queda impecable, tu apurado procuras unas monedas y se las ofreces al hombre pero este sonrie: “Gracias, pero este servicio es cortesia de Merkabastos. Que pase usted una buena tarde” te responde—y se marcha.
Esto me vino a la mente esta tarde, en el cruce de Periferico y Tutelar cuando un limpiaparabrisas se me echo encima a pesar de mi clara y categorica renuencia. Cuando termino no le di nada, lo ignore de la misma estudiada forma en la que el me ignoro cuando le gesticulaba que no, que no queria que limpiara mi parabrisas, pero despues me senti algo mas mal que de costumbre al darme cuenta que habia hecho un trabajo inusualmente bueno y mi parabrisas eran unos ojos recien llorados. Me molesto que algo que podia ser un servicio agradable decayera en algo a rehuir y al buscar una forma de evitar ese empobrecimiento se me ocurrio esta excentricidad mercadotecnica. Quien sabe, se antoja raro pero interesante. No seria memorable que por una vez en vez de solo robar tu atencion hicieran algo por ti?
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