A Late Summer Pause From The Future
A Summer Of Recent Work, Essays And Fiction
Welcome to an update “From The Future”: a recap of recent essays and fiction.
For this remaining year, I plan to share chapters for my novels ala writing in public.
Future + Fiction, Story + History, is my formula for everything From The Future, whether it’s an essay, story or chapter.
These pieces are best read online, via the Substack’s App, when you have fifteen minutes.
“I believe that art thrives on restrictions... you’re forced to be ingenious, things get better than if you can throw oodles of money at the problem.” — Nicholas Meyer
I must tell you something, this has been an interesting week when it came to writing.
A few days ago, I saw the words “Art and Science” and a light went on. Last weekend was busy with cooking for a brother’s birthday, then I was tired but wired. I had to write it, it held me prisoner until I was finished (and then re-finished).
It didn’t let go for three days after I hit send, and after changing it, it finally let me go. I’ve never seen reader counts go up and down quite like that before, a mere history essay. I may have struck a nerve, it’s a sign I’m on to something. Good.
Well, the “never seen” isn’t quite right, it happened in another recent piece, a fiction chapter where I let fly and riffed. A chapter flew out of my mind and onto the page, almost like that. Some loved it and others retreated.
I was reminded of three things:
You can’t please everyone, and you never should.
And there is one more, beautiful, thing: the person who reacts to you with, “You had me at ‘Welcome’, count me in for a long road trip”. And they call, “shotgun”.
I write for myself and for everyone who calls ‘shotgun’. For someone to find you, you focus on making your art, to discover who you are, and then sharing it.
For your art to mean anything, you restrict your art to being just you, and not anyone else.
“Differentiation is Survival and the Universe Wants You to be Typical”: I want to survive, I have to do my thing, my terms, like Roy Batty in Bladerunner, I hunger for more life, my way.
I’m redirecting energy: I’m going to finish prepping “Book #2", “Harvest”, written last year, whose final drafted chapters were finished and shared here, for a brilliant friend’s eyes, and then work with him on prepping “Book #1”, “Box of Stars”. All this is happening, even as I write new chapters of “Book #3”, “Retrieve” at the same time.
Below are the pieces I’ve written over the last few weeks, first essays, then fiction:
ESSAYS
Our Imagination Is A Camera Of The Mind
We learn about Edwin H. Land, the Impressionists and the invention of textile dyes, Leonardo da Vinci and the camera obscura, and the birth of photography on a copper plate, where “seeds for the future of art were planted, for more spontaneous reality”.
I close with an impassioned riff, where I wear my science fiction hat, and imagine what this all means for you and me.
Breach The Sky To Brave The Stars
If freed through a special window, dreams can become the next, taken-for-granted, reality. This is where the future begins.
“Compare the world today with the world fifty, a hundred, years ago, to see if become it”, where, William Wordsworth wrote, “Nature doth embrace Her lawful offspring in Man’s art”.
We open the Overton Window, with screenwriter Christopher Vogler’s embrace of Joseph Campbell’s mythic storytelling - Wordsworth’s “Man’s art”, technology, to the future.
What good is storytelling? Here are some examples where stories made the future:
The famed “Crystal Palace” of the 1851 Exhibition, is an ancestor to skyscrapers commonplace by the 1950s. In the 1950s, the birth of an idea about computing and education, realized by the 1970s in the University of Illinois, is a precursor to what you and I are doing here. A recent poll about Spaceflight may be more than just a poll.
We reach the stars, the future, our “next thing” in life, with stories.
Each new story of the future is a call to adventure for the world.
We Remember The Future Before We Create It
I use my future and fiction filters to distill thoughts into words.
Impatience is corrosive.
The Future, as a promise, where yesterday is transformed into tomorrow, is protected by memory. To protect a promise, we must remember it.
An impossible illogical idea to consider: Remember The Future.
Wordsworth inspired with,
“And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine”
There are references to caves from the ancient Aegean and further back to help me.
I add to a WISH LIST for a new “Bicycle” to go off-roading on the next “Internet”.
In this wish list are “Socratic Engines”, Instrumentalities, and Interest Grids.
The Future is coming, all it needs is attention and patience, it needs to be remembered.
If your attention hasn’t wavered, thank you, this is the one that counts.
This is a riff on an Age of Interaction, during which we began to surrender our attention in an Age of Distraction, where networks consume every waking moment.
A Great Interruption of the hijacking our time and attention is just over the horizon.
It’s our chance for escaping another monster of the Information Age, The Great Distraction. We can return and reclaim our attention.
Why should we care? Ever notice how often “whatever held attention was at the expense of whatever was going to turn out to be important AFTER the fact”?
Then I finish, where “the fiction writer in me working through a potential future for Attention”, and
my “Wish List” for the future focuses on what I call Interest Grids, A hand-stitching of swatches into one tapestry of the outside world, self-woven in sincere ways, powered by what we’re curious or care about.
FICTION
The theme is “SUPERSTITION”.
It is also the next installment for a book, “RETRIEVE”.
Excerpt:
“As far as the skipper of ST12 knew, the contractor was a woman named Thalia, a specialist embedded by a nameless department of a nonexistent section of the Company, “company” being either the one in Langley, or any of the Five Eye cousins, or Outland Ventures’ SLN operations in Heavyville, Texas.”
Excerpt:
“The message is hidden in the books?,” he asked as he leaned in and squinted at the books.
“The message is ‘the books’,” she said, and pulled him back a few steps from the shelf. “Look,” she said, as she took off her designer Persol shades, limited collab with Apple, an “E.H. Land” polarized edition, lenses sandwiched with a homebrew of nanos.”
The Bittersweetness Of Deep Times
The theme is “ISOLATION”.
It is also a new chapter for a book, “RETRIEVE”
Excerpt:
“Let’s not fool ourselves. We did not, as the carbons say, hack it, we did not decrypt human nature. Instead, we’ve been encrypted and made a puzzle too.”
PLUS A MUSIC PLAYLIST for “Book #3”, a tradition in my writing.