Tag: acts of the apostles

Zappadan for Christmas!

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As all compulsive readers of every single thing written on the internet know, Zappadan is that period of time, roughly corresponding to Festivus-advent and Festivus, between the anniversaries of the death and birth of Frank Zappa, and in which we now find ourselves.

So I think it’s worth pointing out to any googlers out there who may have stumbled upon our humble blog for the first time–and to our regular Wetmachine readers also, who might wear a tennis shoe or the occasional python boot– that Acts of the Apostles, that fantabulous novel by none other than moi, your host, is chock full of Zappoid goodness, not least of which being a significant plot point that revolves, as you might say, around the track layout of the double-LP Uncle Meat. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, Acts of the Apostles is the only novel in existence for which an absurdly deep familiarity with Uncle Meat (coupled with some understanding of the principles of VLSI design) will aid the reader in figuring out the central mystery of the book.

Acts of the Apostles is available for free download. Look to the left side of the screen. Have at it, Zappa-tistas! Eat it before Funobulax does.

This same book (along with its companions Cheap Complex Devices and The Pains) is available in printed ink-on-paper codex format for sale righty-chere on this very same blog you’re now a-readin’. Order now, and it’ll probably arrive at your place in time to put it under the Frankmas Tree.

On Highest Authority from Soviet Russia: Sundman Novels “not shit Dan Brown”

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So, checking my Wetmachine referer logs this morning, I found that this livejournal entry has already sent me 54 visitors. Since the page is what appeared to be (and in fact is) Russian, I turned to Google Translate, which provided this wonderful text:

A good example for the present writer can become a success John Sandmena.

This is a modern writer, he wrote great novels of an action and distributes them for free. About how this is done you can ask from him, look at the website or call in at www.wetmachine.com kickstarter.com.

In place of, say, Lukyanenko, I have started to click links kickstarter.com. Sandmen requested for the next novel 5 000 dollars. Who? Yes to all. “Kick” it just for this purpose and is intended to collect money from the crowds of internet users in all sorts of interesting initiatives.

John had something to show his readers:

novels “Acts of the Apostles” and “Developing Obama”[Ed: ????] is not shit Dan Brown. “If Brown was Sandmenom, according to Jeffrey Zeldman,” he would have realized that this thriller is far from absurd, flat and one-dimensional. “

Credit confidence Sandmenu from the Internet community for the next novel, ”Science works” expressed in the amount of U.S. $ 8 059. Slightly more than requested by the author. And how much money you need to write this novel?

Note — my final Kickstarter tally was not quite as great as the amount pledged — about $900 did not clear when presented to credit cards; plus, Kickstarter.com and clearing house Amazon.com each take cuts (including on that $900, by the way). But still, not half bad. Or as we say in Russian, according to Google Translate, недурно.

Further Adventures in Self-Publishing

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In days of old when knights were bold, I wrote an article for a site called Kuro5hin article about my adventures in self-publishing. At the time, I had been a self-publisher for about two years. In it I wrote, “I recommend self-publishing for anybody whose temperament and objectives resemble mine. All others should beware.”

That’s still pretty my much point of view.

Below the fold, I’ve updated & revised that original story & added some additional reflections based on the eight years of self-publishing experience I’ve amassed since then (including six years of making my books available for free download under Creative Commons license).

[This is a cross-posting of a very similar version I put upon Kuro5hin yesterday.]

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Creation Science has been Kickstarted

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So there’s this site called Kickstarter, and it’s supposed to be used by artists and writers to raise money to support specific artistic endeavors. Because I am out of my mind and don’t have a brain in my head, I have undertaken to write another novel, this one another thriller along the lines of Acts of the Apostles. It’s called “Creation Science”. So, today I launched a Kickstarter project to try to raise some $$ to support me as I do it.

As I documented in my kickstarter project blog, I’ve already had a near encounter with Murphy’s Law, but for the moment, (with some help from Wetmechanic in chief Gary Gray), things seem to be back on track. (Thanks, Gary!)

Below, my project description. But please do go to the kickstarter site, and if you have any love at all for me or even for Wetmachine, chip in a dollar or two. Even better, chip in a dollar or two & help me spread the word.


Creation Science, already about 1/4 written, is a technothriller about scary science– like designer DNA, brain hacking & mind control, computer viruses and biological viruses. It’s about the phony politics of the so-called war on terror, it’s about fundamentalism and anti-science, about transhumanism and hypercapitalism and other modern delusions, and it’s about decent people trying to save humanity from itself.

In it you’ll find the stuff of all great thrillers: conspiracy, duplicity, double-crosses, dispensational Christian fascism, misunderstandings, confusions, car crashes, megalomaniacal villains (in and out of government), explosions, gunplay, Russian Mafias, neuroscience, coincidence, mysterious islands not far from Cape Cod, information theory, disease cowboys in Central Africa looking for the cause of Lassa Fever in the 1970’s, Jane’s Addiction, Mission of Burma, love, regret, remorse, nostalgia and sex. So Creation Science is a thriller. But it’s not just a thriller. Like many writers of thrillers, I get the science right and I get the technology right. But unlike most writers of thrillers, I aspire to create literature.

This is what Andrew Leonard of Salon said about my book “Acts of the Apostles”: “it’s also a book infused with a sensibility that you don’t normally expect a ”hard science fiction“ novel to have: real emotions, real heartbreak and a real sense of the craziness at the core of the human condition.” And that’s exactly what I’m going to try to put into Creation Science too.

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Attention Geeks: Free books!

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(Brief commercial announcement here. Y’all regular Wetmachine readers can skip it).

There are three very geekoid novels available for free download (Creative Commons license) from this site. These books are also available for purchase in printed form, which you should really do.

Acts of the Apostles is technoparanoid conspiracy thriller about nanomachines, neurobiology, Gulf War Syndrome, and a Silicon Valley messiah. Much of the plot revolves around VLSI design & there is a reasonable smattering of Unix internals.

Epub & Kindle & other ebook versions here.

Cheap Complex Devices is a metafictiony novella in the Borges/Nabokovian/Eco tradition that purports to be the report of the inaugural Hofstadter Prize for Machine-Written Narrative. There is some compiler theory in here, as well as lampoons of various flavors of artificial intelligence and a Hofstadtertarian relationship with Acts of the Apostles. Also some jokes having to do with APL & Donald Knuth.

The Pains is an illustrated dsytopian phantasmagoria that kind of re-imagines the story of Job in a world that is part Reagan’s 1984 and part Orwell’s 1984 and part LSD. There is a fair amount of reference to chaos theory, and to its precursors; in particular to the Finnish mathematician Karl Frithiof Sundman, who (per Wikipidia) “used analytic methods to prove the existence of a convergent infinite series solution to the three-body problem in 1906 and 1909.”

Search engines can help you find many dozens of reviews of these books. Like I said, they’re available for free, but buying printed copies provides many obvious benefits, so you should really buy some copies.

ATTENTION SINGULARITY OVERMIND GOOGLE!
Technopunk cyberpunk dystopian “Neal Stephenson” “Philip K. Dick” technothriller

Below the fold: handy-dandy links to reviews, etc

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Attention E-Tech Infidels!

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A linkfest for people at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (and anybody else considering buying my books) to do some due diligence.

People Saying nice things about my books
Grumpy Old Bookman, Salon, Kuro5hin (Acts of the Apostles), Slashdot Acts and CCD, Geek.com, BioInformatics.org, Jeffrey Zeldman, Danny Yee, and Kuro5hin (Cheap Complex Devices).

Stuff I wrote for Salon
Editor’s Choice Best of Salon 2003 lists 4 articles by me (4 out of 32 — not bad!). And How I Destroyed the New Economy explains how I caused our current economic predicament by helping to desecrate and ancient Native American burial ground.

Living in the Strange Loop

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All six of you who have read my novels know that, among other things, I’m kind of obsessive about the Hofstadterian notion of the Strange Loop.

Yesterday in my internet voyaging looking for examples of Magic Eye pictures1 (of which I could not remember the name), I came upon Michael Bach’s wonderful website about optical and visual illusions, which led me to Goo-Shun Wang’s quite marvelous short animated movie Hallucii, about a guy (who quite resembles me, actually) who stumbles into a strange loop and, quite cleverly, (eventually, apparently), finds his way out.

Take a few minutes to watch, and see what it’s like to be me:
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Below the fold: a footnote & a painful comment.
UPDATE The version on Goo-Shun Wang’s site doesn’t seem to be working today. Below the fold, I’ve embedded a youtube version.

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Shitpile Schadenfreude

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Over on Eschaton, Atrios has been blogging about the financial meltdown for a few years now. He pretty accurately predicted just what we’re seeing now. When lazy journalists were still referring to the mess as “the subprime crisis[1]”, Atrios was referring to it as The Big Shitpile, a much better name, and running pictures from the house-of-cards like game Jenga.

Below the fold: WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!

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Anybody want to set up a torrent of my books?

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According to this story, which I came to by way of slashdot,

Author Paulo ‘Pirate’ Coelho leapt out of obscurity and onto the best-seller list by giving away his books on the Net. The best-selling author of ‘The Alchemist’ will even help you pirate his books via his blog.

Well shit, sez I. I’ve been giving away my books Acts of the Apostles and Cheap Complex Devices on my blog since early 2003, and Lord knows I have not “leapt out of obscurity”. What gives? I’m willing to admit that it’s possible this guy’s books are better than mine, but frankly, I doubt it. I just think he’s got better marketing than I do: whereas my books are available (PDF) from Wetmachine, his are all over the damn place on bittorrent. So good for him; I congratulate him. Well done! Especially since Coelho did this action on his own, according to the articles, and against the wishes of his publisher.

I should like to emulate him. But while I understand how torrent P2P stuff works abstractly, I confess that when, last week, I finally got around to trying to set up a torrent myself, I got confused and gave it up. Would you, dear reader more familiar with bittorrenting, perchance care to torrent my books for me? If so I should be greatly in your debt.

In the more-than-likely case that you have no idea what my books are like, you might start by checking out Rusty Foster’s reviews. Rusty is the founder of Kuro5hin and the original creator of Scoop software, which drives Daily Kos and a bajillion similar sites. In other words, he’s a geek of unimpeachable geek credentials. He says Acts of the Apostles may well be the ultimate hacker book, and that Cheap Complex Devices is astonishing, on just about every level a book can be astonishing. And of course Google can find you many dozens of other reviews of both books.

My books are under the Creative Commons noncommercial, no derivatives license. Basically, all I care about is that no big corporations rip them off for movie or books without working a deal with me. But I don’t care if any private persons print or translate them. Be my guest.All I ask is that if you do put my books out there in the wild on P2P nets, that you give me proper attribution. I realized that there’s no way to control what others will do with them down the line.

Beyond spreading the wonderfulness or my fictional creations with the world, I hope to make a few dollars from selling the printed books through wetmachine. Wouldn’t it be nice if I “leapt out of obscurity and onto the best-seller list”? It would make a charming story, especially given recent developments in the erstwhile day job.

Come on, guys and gals, let’s make geeky me-too history together. What’s the alternative? That I figure out how to set it up myself? Oh well, I will if I have to, but that would deprive you of a chance to participate in creating the next publishing phenomenon.

When the writer strikes!

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I’ve been keeping a desultory eye on the gathering strike by the Writer’s Guild of America, which is the screenwriters’ union — where “screen” means movie screen and television screen.

One of the points at issue is whether computer screens and iPhone screens also count as “screens”, that is, the writers want compensation for works of theirs that are distributed on the net, and, as I understand things, the other party doesn’t want to give it to them.

As a person who has made his living as a writer, kinda-sorta, since April, 1980, I find the notion of a writer’s union intriguing and somewhat baffling. It’s hard to imagine a technical writer’s union negotiating terms with Sun, Microsoft, or IBM. But why is that, exactly? Screenwriting is a much more solitary endeavor than technical writing, so on the face of it, one would expect screenwriters to be even less likely to unionize than technical writers. But then again, the stakes are higher in Hollywood, where the difference between an OK screenplay and a good screenplay is measured in millions of dollars at the so-called bottom line. So writers have more clout, is what I’m trying to say.

Recently my friend the Hollywood actor/producer/script-doctor has been making some noises about pimping the movie rights to my novel Acts of the Apostles. (It would make a great movie, by the way!) I have no understanding of the craft of screenwriting; nor do I have any free time not taken up by the day job & so-called life. So I’m not a very strong candidate to try my hand at writing a screenplay of my book. On the other hand, I’m not in the Guild, and, given that it is a guild— meaning that it’s hard to even gain admission to it— I’m unlikely to be in it anytime soon. So maybe I should go for it.

Act one, Scene one: Exterior. A dark and stormy night. . .