Informal acknowledgements to go with the story. The twenty-two words beginning “Mercifully, the whole thing” are from William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” and the forty-nine words beginning “You know how to take a book” are from Max Black’s “The Identity of Indiscernibles” (see Note). Other background reading which was really helpful included Vinyals, Toshev, Bengio, Erhan, “Show and Tell: a Neural Image Caption Generator”; Anh Nguyen, Jason Yosinski, Jeff Clune, “Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images”; Margalynne Armstrong, “Reparations Litigation: What About Unjust Enrichment?”; Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., “Repairing the Past: New Efforts in the Reparations Debate in America”; Brett Scott, The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money; Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English culture, 1830–1980; and Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors. And thanks to Tim Maughan for selfie drones (see my pre-emptive response to his Superflux Drone Fictions).
And really special thanks to Nathan Crock and Bradford Tuckfield for invaluable assistance in thinking through the PrivilegeCheck thing -- in way more detail than actually made it into the story -- and to Samantha Walton, Lucy Kemnitzer, Rob Kiely, Mark Bolsover, William Ellwood, & Sarah Hayden for all your help with writing & editing. And to my ma for receiving suspicious packages for me.
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DeepDish SausageFest
Elsewhere: I think I finished this one before Google's DeepDream went viral and showed the internet what we had long suspected, that our monads are puppyslugs. But for what it's worth, this story definitely goes into DeepDream-type territory, so here's an interesting Medium piece by Kyle McDonald on more recent imagery generated through deep convolutional neural networks.
Earlier: I read TT 2014, by the way, and it has some great work in it (two of which are mentioned in my economic speculative fiction listicle. Speculonomics. Fictisticle.).
Later: There is more to story to tell about that world (because it's this world) so hopefully there will be some kind of sequel / prequel / interquel before too long.
Note: I figure NeurodiversiME partly works by scraping and sculpting content, so a few micro-plagiarisms are appropriate. Max Black ICE or whevs, come at me, orbs.
Everything in your list of acknowledgments is unfamiliar to me except the William Gibson piece, but I read your story in MIT TR 12Ts over the weekend and really liked it. Pathos, whimsy, spritely language, dancing ideas. I kept wondering whether the narrator's stated age was a little too young; she seems to have learned an awful lot, such as the history of people being called "depressed," before that "neurasthenics," and before that "melancholics." No matter. So far (I haven't finished reading yet), your story is the best thing in the collection. Congratulations, and thank you!
ReplyDeleteTHANK YOU FOR YOUR KIND WORDS.
ReplyDeleteEledy is actually even younger, she bumped herself up from 4 years to make herself a bit more plausible
I am hoping my contributor copy will be waiting for me when I get home so I can read those other stories ^_^