To-do list:

- I'll be reviewing Charlie Stross' "Scratch Monkey" (Go read; it's free and good!) within the next couple of days.

- work progresses slowly on weepee-Prime (if you haven't been following, weepee = work-in-progress peewee), a yet-unnamed tale of blood, venture archaeology, time travel and Bodhisattva-class martial arts. I hereby dub the genre stylish hard fantasy. You heard it here first.

- Sleep off a sixty-hour week.

Now go away.

There's so many of them, they might as well be of use...

Now, isn't this just nifty.

Up yours, sleeve.

Finished Altered Carbon last month. Finally tracked down Broken Angels today (Barnes & Noble - for once - managed to be good for something) and started in on it.

Some thoughts:

What if a cortical stack were placed in an animal body, say an octopus for instance? How would this affect the human mind? Substrate vs. software. Probably, only an Envoy could handle it without going hopelessly nuts.

How would a Bene Gesserit handle the Altered Carbonverse?

Envoys are Bene Gesserit-lite.

There’s a pretty strong reductionist argument that humanity is all brain; the rest is just life-support. If you apply that POV to Morgan’s setting, we’ve been out-evolved by the stacks. The human body has been recast as vehicular transportation.

Oh, and the books are both brilliant of course. Transhumanist types will love the multifaceted look at uploading.

Have some of this:

Meet Iblis. She lives _in_ space. She can do this because she is a Sailor of the Ebon Sea. As such, she often gets compared to the angels of antiquarian myth.

A quick Net-search reveals our girl not to have wings _per se_ but an iridescent bioplasma sail. The gauzy black ‘wings’ she does have, furled in her grey hump, are far from propulsive; rather, they welcome starlight into her internal ecology, permitting she and her brilliantly space-adapted clade to thrive there. But that is all scientific minutiae, irrelevant to her current dilemma.

Iblis, formerly of Lesser-clan Thuoree, is a renegade. How else to rebel against nomadic society than to settle down? Originally, she’d merely wanted to explore the indoor universe for awhile. But like all teenage rebellion, censure was the water that made it grow. Thus it was that she set off on her galactic debut.

Sailor wanderlust, of course, can only be sublimated so far. She still traveled the galaxy, albeit by ship and wormhole rather than her own steam. Unfortunately, nothing ever lives up to the hype; every polity in the Terragen sphere had its own uniquely unlivable flaws – until Kepleria. Like millions before her and millions hence, she fell in love with the galaxy’s most acclaimed mega-Dyson for the same reasons as everyone else – her own. A few years later, that love lead Iblis to join the fighting spirits and, inescapably, to her present situation.

The angel is about to lose her wings.

-------

Key words: Orion's Arm, transhumanism, far-future, written by me

The Age of Ageless

There's a discussion to be had about neural associations here. What chemoelectrical sequence could have lead from this to the subject heading?

Head-down all the way ...

There are those who ask "Where is my flying car" when told we are living in an age of wonders. There are those who trivialize the impact of laser-guided flies and superpowered babies; they bury their heads and wait to be impressed.

They are not wrong. What they are is behind.

Here's the secret: we will always be blase about the future. How else to react? By definition, the future is faster than us, constantly accelerating away like a De Sitter horizon. It can either be ignored, feared, raged against or accepted; a lot like another inevitable fate really. Wonders are always in the past: apple to the head, e is equal to MC squared, didaliensbuildthepyramids? The future? That's yesterminute's news, man.

This is what we know:

In the future, things will be good

- an autofabricator in every home

- eat burgers on the moon

- all markets will be niche markets.



Here is what else we know:

In the future, things will be bad:

- an autofabricator in every home

- eat burgers on the moon

- all markets will be niche markets.


That is all.

...Roll with yo' hood/Get stomped in the club ...

Denzel Washington called in on one of the local radio stations and went nuts. Why? His kids had apparently been listening to Lil' Scrappy's "No Problem". The hosts were actually trying to calm him down but he was having none of it. He read out the lyrics and everything!

The funny part was, he sounded exactly like his character from Training Day during the "King Kong" speech.

So. Was he acting or simply going the way of everyone over a certain age with the "Protect the children" schtick and such?

... and other stories.

Hmm, let's see. What hasn't been covered under info and interests and movies and books and music? Ah, yes the Monkey Index. Updates can and will be found at the link.

Little ongoing theme; throughout the course of this blog, I will be bestowing what I will term sprinklefiction upon ye. Snippets, fractions, whole chapters: basically whatever I think you can handle.

To begin, I shall begin with beginnings. The next several fiction posts will be the opening paragraphs from assorted works in progress (henceforth referred to as weepees. Funny? Yes).

Here goes:

You know it’s going to be a bad day when you wake up to a bullet in the face. I don’t even get a chance to ID my attackers, blood-blind, spitting teeth. It doesn’t take long for me to die, my bed soaked in –

Thoughts?

PS
In other news: here. Have some Key 23

You know you want it.

Blogger me ...

well, hello everyone.

shall we begin?