Happy 2019!

And to start off the New Year, I’m experimenting with Instagram. Here are a few Sedona images:

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Meanwhile, here are my current projects for 2019:

Quintessence of Rust (QOR): Post-apocalyptic and post-cyberpunk novel series set in a future world devastated by climate change. Begun in 2018, I expect to complete the first book by summer 2019. Here’s a sample:

The jungle is so overwhelmingly alive some days that the air is a vibrating green shroud. The vines strangle up through the canopy trees towards a wan shimmer. The heat becomes toxic where the gray skies break through and the violet and rust of the fungal mounds heap like domes. A low drone warns of bloodsucking swarms of gigantic flies, startling the naked rodents out along paths and down through root mazes into protective huddles in the cooling mud, while the women stoke smudge fires and call the painted children close. And then the sound passes, and the clucks and snorts begin again, at first with hesitancy against the silence of the moist envelop, then more, and then with greater intensity, until the music of the day is restored. The hunters return by lunch to await the afternoon rains that slide and drop in pachinko-ball rivulets through the thousand feet of piled and layered life.

Fifty feet up, where the tree splits its ancient trunk into three equal parts, atop the accumulated detritus of hundreds of years that became yet another pad of spongy jungle, the high apartments begin. Layer upon layer of wooden hovels, connected by ropes woven from vine fibers, wedged by pins and slotted bamboo, build like a rectilinear wasp nest, splitting off and then recoupling higher still, for two hundred feet more.

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Quintessence of Rust

¡Reconquista! is making the rounds looking for representation. This is a first for me. I’ve been strongly attracted to the idea of disintermediating publishing, music, film, transportation, business, and anything else that happens by; my Silicon Valley persona sees disruption as a virtue, for better or worse. But why not learn from the mainstream model for the trajectory of books and ideas?

Meanwhile, nothing sits still. I’m journeying through Steven Pinker’s latest data dump, Enlightenment Now. My bookshelf crawls with his books, including Learnability and Cognition, Language Learnability and Cognitive Development, The Stuff of Thought, Words and Rules, and The Language Instinct, while my Kindle app holds The Better Angels of Our Nature and the new tome. I also have a novel by his wife, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, though I have never read any of her more scholarly materials on Spinoza.

Enlightenment Now (shouldn’t it have an exclamation point?) gives an upbeat shine to these days of social media anger and the jeremiads of fracturing America. Pinker is a polished writer who should be required reading, if only for his clarity and perseverance in structuring support for mature theses. There is some overlap with Better Angels, but it’s easy to skip past the repetition and still find new insights.

And I have a new science fiction/cyberpunk series under development, tentatively titled Quintessence of Rust. Robots, androids, transhumans, AIs, and a future world where reality, virtual existences, and constructed fictions all vie for political and social relevance. Early experimentation with alternative voices and story arc tuning have shown positive results. There is even some concept art executed with an iPad Pro + Pencil combined with Procreate (amused a firm would choose that name!).… Read the rest