Twelve Tomorrows 2016

MIT's Twelve Tomorrows anthology is now definitely out! "Inspired by the real-life breakthroughs covered in the pages of MIT Technology Review, writers Nick Harkaway, Bruce Sterling, and Paola Antonelli join emerging authors from around the world to envision the future of the Internet, biotechnology, computing, and more."

Earlier: my acknowledgements to go with my story.

See also: I've only read one story so far, Charles Stross's "Life's A Game," which makes an excellent addition to this gamification fiction listicle.

Elsewhere: review in Locus.

Idk why they didn't just call it Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow I would have called it that.

"Two thoosand an' fifteen?! Ye mean we're in the future?" - "Aye! ...A 'hink." pic.twitter.com/JeY3G3AC0u

— Back Tae The Future (@BackTaeTheToon) June 17, 2015

OK but, gentlemen: I think three out of eleven contributors are women. The one before I think was two out of nine. The one before was a bit better. I recognize that sometimes, as an editor or organizer, you make a decision to seek some certain kind of variety or dialogism -- perhaps a kind that doesn't register very visibly in the quasi-canonical set of authorial identity characteristics around which the contemporary new left is organized -- and that variety or dialogism offsets and explains, even if it doesn't excuse, the plethora of white men. And I'm not somebody who thinks gender parity necessarily needs to exist within every year of a multi-year literary project. That said, I have no doubt that such a smart project as Twelve Tomorrows, so invested with the idea of being cutting-edge, already realizes it is veering toward unacceptable, and is going to spend some energies next time round to correct its course. Right guys? Yeah! I guess I should be grateful that Bruce Sterling was so dauntlessly perigrinatory and so devil-may-care supportive of work by relatively unknown or not-known-for-sf writers, which is why my story's in it. But personally, if I'd been editing this year, why not just completely cut the stories by Ned, Nick, John, Pepe, Charlie, Daniel, Virgil and DEFINITELY Bruce, and actually possibly Annalee, Paolo and Ilona tbh. Sometimes less is more, you get me.

The Internet of Oh and One More Things

I'm not sure when it will be out, but I have another strange story coming out, this one in MIT Technology Review's Twelve Tomorrows which is  available for pre-order. (I took everything way too literally and put in loads of reviews of technology). There's some sweet hype from io9 here. io9 you do come from the future!

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.