Fortune-telling and ChatGPT

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There’s a whole genre that’s emerged recently that is basically “Look what ChatGPT” said. Rather than fight it, here’s my contribution. I asked ChatGPT: “Do you know the novelist Erik Hanberg?” And it did! So that’s either great or terrifying, depending on how you view language models/AI chatbots these days. It wrote, among other things: He has written several books, including both fiction and non-fiction works… Hanberg is also the founder of a publishing company called Swan Tower, which helps independent authors publish and market their work. It starts well, but then… Swan Tower? Huh? What the heck is that? Read more…

100 seconds to midnight?

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It’s no accident that my cover for 1999 has a nuclear explosion on it. The plot is about a year that repeats over and over. I started with the central idea of so many time loop movies, but I asked, “What if the time loop was for a whole year instead of just a day?” I also wondered, “What if everyone knew they were in a time loop? And not just the one or two main characters?” The more I played out the scenarios in my head, the uglier it got. Hence, the bomb right there on the cover. Our collective experience of COVID featured heavily Read more…

1999… on YouTube!

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I’m trying something new with my newest book, 1999. I worked with the great Doug Mackey, who narrated The Lattice Trilogy, to create an audiobook of 1999. And, for the first time, I’m experimenting with having the audiobook on YouTube. You can buy your own copy on all the main audiobook sites. But as more and more people are using YouTube, I thought I’d try this out. It’s also a good way to check out the book risk-free! If you like it, keep listening or go buy it and finish it on your Kindle or in paperback!

Are we really going to space?

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There was news last month of a company working on plans for a space hotel. They want to open in 2027. It all sounds very exciting until you read that they have hit their initial fundraising goal of $1 million. One million dollars is a lot in Earth Money but in terms of Space Money, you may as well have $1,000. It’s just not going to get you that far. (Although space isn’t as far away as you think. I’ve joked that I’m closer to space than any other border. From where I live Washington state, I’m about 320 miles away from Read more…

The power of play

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I’m fascinated by the ways that recreation and play react to technology changes–but sometimes can drive technological change too. How to make a whistle One of the examples of “play” following technology is the tin whistle. I knew the rough idea of how the tin whistle came to be when I identified it as the title for the last book of The Lattice Trilogy. But in order to make sure I was using it appropriately I did a lot of research, including purchasing my own (pictured above). This one has the name of the original inventor on it. Clarke was the first Read more…

GPS and the fictional history of The Lattice

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The origins of our Global Position System are actually pretty interesting. And it tracks very closely with the fictional history of the Lattice in The Lattice Trilogy (which is available as a box set if you haven’t read it). Let’s start with the history of The Lattice in the books. In the future, the US develops the Lattice as a secret defense project to spy on the rest of the world. It works! They can see all of history and they can see thoughts of anyone they want to. They have total knowledge. That is, until Japan figures out how to hack into the signal Read more…

✅ “I’m not a robot”

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I’m not an artist exactly either, but for a little while now I’ve been thinking about this idea of putting haunting images of the protests into captchas. I finally put the images together last night. Like many white people right now, I have the privilege of just scrolling past pain and horror when it’s not happening to me directly, or I can miss the bigger picture of what needs to be done. By putting these images in captchas, it makes it all too clear how easy it is to miss the larger picture and just… click through.       Read more…

An American Blogs About Brexit

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Tomorrow, January 31, the United Kingdom leaves the European Union. I’ve been fascinating by Brexit since the vote. There was a streak of things in a row that weren’t “supposed” to be happen. The UK votes to leave the EU in June 2016. The Cubs win the World Series. Trump beats Clinton. The envelope snafu at the Oscars a few months later. And Brexit was what kicked it off. My interest in Brexit picked up after the 2017 election, when Theresa May’s conservative majority fell enough that she needed to rely on Irish unionists to keep her majority. It set Read more…

10 Years of Self-Publishing

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I happened to notice that this July marks 10 years of self-publishing. I started out with just paperback books of The Little Book of Gold in 2009 and now I have more than ten books in ebook, paperback, and audiobook (plus even a few books in foreign languages). Checking the numbers… holy cow! I’ve sold more than 52,000 books! And on top of that, 2019 has been my best year so far (and I still have five months to go!). For as much as I’ve enjoyed the process, it’s a continual learning process. Here are some of the lessons I’ve Read more…