Clues to the future

 

Okay, so we’ve got Leary using his blog to yarn about the decades to come, and he, whoever he really is, wants us to believe he really knows what's going to happen. But I can tell you a few things about the future just from website domain names I’ve tried to buy only to find them already them spoken for. (My friend Jack the Hack mentioned some of this stuff some days ago on his blog. But I don’t believe he has tumbled to what it all really means.)

 

While writing my recent sci-fi novels, I coined a number of expressions. At least I thought I’d coined them. When I started checking some out as possible domain names -- “pyschedeli,” “cognitech,” and “Worlds Unlimited” among others -- I found that www.psychedeli.com was already bought up (it’s a My Space site), as were www.cognitech.com, www.inneradventures.com, and www.worlds-unlimited.com (a Second-Lifer blog). Also gone were worlding, worlders, worldsgate, biologic, and magic-circle.

 

And I saw certain patterns emerging. It’s amazing how hard you can try to think of domain spiffy names only to find someone has already laid claim. It’s a lexical version of the Great Gold Rush. What we’re looking at, at least in part, is a bunch of companies planning to apply nanotech, qubital computer tecnology, artificial intelligence, and next-generation bioengineering to launch, among other things, cutting-edge virtual-reality games, educational tools, and military simulations. In general, the production and distribution of consumer goods of all kinds is soon going to prove a very different matter, and words will be needed to describe and market all the new articles and processes involved.

 

That’s on the one hand. On the other, we’ve simply got a gang of far-sighted buggers who see the advantage in holding these names till slower-moving companies come up with the technological advances, and need nicely marketable product and brand names. Then it’s clean-up time. When I look at the new words and what I’d thought were new uses of old words that appear in MOM and The Proteant Enigmass, I see that my imaginary world isn’t all that far ahead of developments in what we’re calling the real world.

 

If only I’d had the early vision to see the marketability of those expressions independently of the stories that generated them. My Sara sometimes tells me I “think too much,” and don’t get off my lazy butt enough to connect with the world of financial opportunities and suchlike. And it could be she’s right.

Tree intelligence vs human.

I didn’t realize it was this easy to trick a tree. From my balcony here in Bangkok, I can see a flame tree, a golden shower tree, and a purple jacaranda all in full bloom. Normally this happens only in the hot season; maybe the extended hot spell in the middle of our rainy season has convinced the trees this is the hot season. (It’s also true flowers start to close up as though for night during full solar eclipses, while some animals also begin to display nocturnal behavior.)

Now I’m looking out beyond the flowering trees to the expressway which, given the traffic, looks more like a parking lot. Never mind we’re suffering a hugely uncertain economic climate, people seem nevertheless convinced this is a a good time to buy new cars and drive them around and around. Global warming may be responsible for the current arboreal confusion. Human confusion, on the other hand, prevails no matter what the weather.

Pubscrawls (n. plural).

Scrawls composed in a series of pubs? No. The title was actually suggested by the need to find an agent or publisher who can get MOM, my most recent novel, out there on the shelves. And the sooner the better. From what I read about Second Life (see “Second Earth”) what was meant to be a futuristic novel—I’m not sure I should call MOM “science fiction”—is instead going to read like history.

I tried Second Life a month or two ago. Within seconds, on this maiden visit, I was groped by a bare-naked lassie who abruptly descended from above for the sole purpose, it seems, of greeting me in this very friendly way. Whatever. I discovered that my RAM, or CPU or something, was inadequate to the occasion, and all I could get my avatar to do was shuffle in place till my computer crashed. Yesterday I returned, laptop newly gigged up to the max, and it worked. The virtual world, I mean. I wasn’t sexually assaulted this time, so I don’t know how I would’ve measured up to the occasion. But it didn’t take long to realize that Second Life could get addictive even without this kind of thing. As though e-mail, blogs, browsing the Web, and virtual games weren’t already enough to derail a writer.

Add bits of technology that lie just around the corner, as we see in MOM, and we’ll have virtual worlds so addictive they make crack cocaine seem like broccoli by comparison. At that point we’re going to have to start plugging intravenous feeds into Second Lifers and their ilk, because they aren’t going to want to reemerge into the “real” world just for something to eat, or to get some sleep, or any of those boring old things.

Stagefright

I’m a professional writer, so it’s funny I freeze up at the idea of composing a blog. But I suppose I have to say something, if only because my website (www.collinpiprell.com) has been infested with bloggers and their blogs right from day one.

To start with, my friend Jack set up a squat on my site, and immediately began to run a blog, I guess convinced that the whole world will be fascinated with his career as a hack writer (his own characterization). Soon after, it began to get stranger than that. Now I find some sort of channel, maybe a digital wormhole, between my site and a guy who started off as a mere character in one of my books but who now, he claims, inhabits a generated reality 50 years in the future. What’s next? I almost hate to look.

Anyway, I expect my own blog will be only sporadic. And pretty terse. I sell words for a living, and I can’t afford to go around squandering them for no good reason. Unlike certain website squatters that I won’t mention again, at least not in this installment.

Okay, so I’ll mention him once more. I see Jack has a list of “Books enjoyed” on his blog. Funny thing. At least half those books are books I bought and can’t seem to find now, no matter how hard I shake down my apartment. I haven’t even had a chance to read Remainder yet. But yo, Jack: I’m really happy to hear you enjoyed it.
While I’m on the topic: does anyone want to buy a book? I have plenty of words, artfully arranged, that need a good publisher. Top of the list is MOM, a science-fiction novel (not really genre sci-fi), and a real departure from my usual adventure thrillers and humor.