Mostly I avoid politics but something has caught my attention. This video by CPG Grey offers a vision of a fearful future where the robots take over. Nah, I don’t mean take over like Skynet or Colossus, but more like the humanoids in Jack Williamson;’ stories “With folded hands” or The Humanoid Touch. The robots aren’t even sentient, just tireless and efficient. More and more industries use automation and more jobs go away, done better and faster by automation.
It’s not just factory workers either. He mentions things like truck driving (automated vehicles being test now), doctors (actual day job of IBM’s Watson), and even creative pursuits such as music and writing.Nobody is safe from their job disappearing. What happens if there really are no jobs for people? Unless you're a superstar enginee or software programmer you have no chance at getting a job. What kind of society do we have? At one end of the political spectrum would be the folks who say “People who don’t work are just lazy and should starve. Hurry up reducing the surplus population.” At the other side are folks nattering on about “The post-scarcity economy where we wont have money and everybody will have food, clothing and send their days in voluntary useful vocations.” The latter idea is unworkable and the former brutal, cold and too close to what might happen. Would we have some sort of Universal Basic Income? Probably. Back in the depression unemployment hit 25% and the country elected FDR. Who would they elect if unemployment was at 40% and rising? The country might pass it just as a way of getting cash into consumer hands to get us out of the depression. On the other hand, most places with high unemployment have high crime and drug use. Is there a way out of that trap? I don’t know. Would people on UBI turn to sex as cheap entertainment? It seems possible. The result would be more children raised in poverty. Another possibility is a requirement of sterilization to accept UBI. I loathe this idea, as then some government bureaucrat would decide who gets to have children. Will people turn to artistic pursuits? Maybe. If everybody is trying to write a great novel or become the next Rembrandt, the market will be flooded with art, some good, a few great, most terrible. Only a few people will have money to pay for this art, so there’ll be a lot of art in a market with fewer buyers. Many writer’s will self-publish and some give their work away as a marketing promotion. If you have a bunch of writer’s giving away novels, the average reader will have a lot to read without spending any money on art. And again, humans would be competing against writing software that can crank out a novel in a week or less. Or all these artists would use the writing software and flood the market with even more novels that no one can pay for, or even notice. Could an artist set the price as $1 for the unemployed or $100 for those with a job? Not sure how you would set up the marketplace for that. Hordes of peddlers would besiege the employed, all trying to sell their geegaw at an inflated price that would be a week’s sales for them. Another idea is that people get shares in the local robot factory and they live off the dividends. Some people would invest themselves in the local factory, hoping that any small thing they did would help increase their dividend payout. The factories might take the emotional place of sports teams. Local groups of volunteers would form, offering improvements or new designs. The company would have to employ people (or people bossing software) to evaluate stuff. Maybe the volunteers would get a few extra dollars, or have a chance at a coveted employment slot, similar to how some game companies hire developers from the player ranks. This idea has merit, in that it gives people a goal to work towards, and some incentive to actually work. The downside is the creation of a tournament economy, which the boss rich people always love. Another idea is that without jobs to offer, businesses have no leverage over the local communities. The robot factories would have to pay enormous property taxes, because no city would grant them a permit. The days of companies demanding tax breaks and other benefits because they bring jobs to the community would disappear. You can see I have more questions than answers about the post-humanoid future. It may never come to pass. Fusion power was supposed to be commonplace by now, but we’re still perpetually thirty years out from commercial fusion plants. Perhaps the best thing to do is show the video to ninth graders and ask them, “What will you do for a living when you grow up?”
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Many people think that the 20th century was the time period of most technological change in the world. “Look, from Orvilles at Kitty Hawk to Armstrong on the Moon in less than a long lifetime,” they’ll cry. They do have something of a point, but they are mistaken. The one hundred years between about 1818 and 1918 (roughly the 19th century) was the period of most technological change in the world. (I first saw this idea on Michael Flynn’s blog and have come to support it.)
How can that be? Let’s do a thought experiment. Suppose you took a person from the England or the US, familiar with the newer technologies of their day. They read widely and took in various scientific shows or expositions. Bring that person forward from 1918 to 2018. Almost every bit of technology you can explain with the words ‘faster, better, cheaper’. Phones? They had phones in 1918. Cell phones? Better wireless. Cars? Better. Airplanes? Better. Agriculatural harvesters? Just better tractors. Computers are combination of typewriter and adding machine and of course much better. Even the moon landing is better rockets with a protective suit, like a diving suit but better. MRI and ultrasound would be new, but could still be described as better imaging, as radiography was invented in 1894 and used widely during World War 1. Even the short description of how MRI and ultrsound worked would be understandable to our World War 1 era technophile. And of course, every thing is cheaper, so more people can have them. Off hand, I can only think of antibiotics and other kinds of chemotherapy as new, though some MDs may have dreamed of them. Do the same with somebody from 1818 brought forward to 1918. Steam ships were toys back then, just coming into commercial use. Trains had come out of the coal mine but steam locomotives were still experimental, used only in a few areas to haul cargo. No automobiles existed at all. No airplanes, or the science of how they would work. Rockets were imprecise bombardment tools. In the field of medicine they still worked with humors and bloodletting. They could see cells, but modern cell theory of disease was decades away. They knew about vaccines, but not germ theory. No wireless, or even the concept of it. Same thing for x-rays and radiography. Agriculture showed improvements, with the use of guano fertilizers from South America, and introduction of mechanized (although still horse drawn) equipment. Trying to explain all these changes to the 19th Century person would be long hours of discussion and teaching, probably intermixed with periods where the person simply refused to believe what you told them. The nineteenth century brought unprecedented technological change to the world and it’s time to recognize that. This isn’t a review but more of a wandering essay about the new Blade Runner movie. I’m going to include spoilers, so stop reading if you hate spoilers.
They wanted to elicit sympathy for the replicants by showing the rampant discrimination and hatred against them. The movie certainly accomplishes this. It does not show much the alternate side of why replicants are so disliked. Do replicant hookers tear marriages apart, as humans can’t compete against them? Do replicant slaves take people’s jobs, forcing them onto the dole? Nothing is said about the other side of the argument, and the movie is rather one dimensional. Throughout, I had the opinion humanity would be far better off to not create anything like replicants. Our penchant for slavery is too deep, something we constantly fight against. Creating an entire slave race is a bad idea. (Yes, I saw the TNG episode “The Measure of a Man.”) The relationship between K and his holographic girlfriend Joi occupies a major part of the storyline. Indeed, I enjoyed the movie more when I focused my attention on the relationship and stopped waiting for Harrison Ford to show up. Ana de Armas is luminous in the role and brings necessary charm and enchantment. The movie lures us into believing this is a great part of K’s life. Joi offers frienship and understanding. She gives K the name Joe. I grieved when Joi was destroyed. But the whole relationship is false. K can’t touch Joi. She employs a prostitute to provide the necessary physical sensations for K to make love to her. At the end of the encounter, the prostitute says, “I’ve been inside you, and you’re empty.” After K returns from Las Vegas, he encounters a huge billboard advertising the Joi holographic girlfriend. The generic software talks to him, calling him a good Joe, the same name his Joi gave him. He realizes the whole relationship was a trick to keep him subdued and disconnected from his fellow replicants. It was this final encounter that causes him to go rescue Deckard, and provide Deckard with a real relationship with his daughter. As a final thought, how does the industrialist Niander Wallace actually command people’s loyalties when he’s so frickin creepy? You’d think he’d get pushed out into a research position after the first board meeting. Why would people keep working for this guy? By all accounts, Steven Jobs was a dick to work for, but didn’t he have some force of personality at least? And was Wallace human with implants or did a replicant replace him at some point? I couldn’t be sure. He came across as a stereotypical creepy villain, rather like Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman. The music was very loud. The pacing is slow. Seeing it a theater forced me to watch the movie all in one sitting, and I stayed awake (the loud music helped with that). Home viewing would have led to splitting up the movie over two or more sessions, with rewinds due to napping. If only to see what it’s about and form your own opinion, I recommend the movie. It’s preferable to see it on the big screen for the whole visual and audio experience. Since it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, a matinee or bargain theater viewing is recommended. Today I’m going to talk about pulling together a Createspace version of your book. For those of you that don’t know, Createspace is a print-on-demand service. It is now owned by Amazon.
Scrivener does have the facility to output a pdf file, but currently Scrivener for Windows is a bit of a PITA to use. The lack of certain features necessitates the use of a convoluted procedure. The steps are as follows:
You separate your document into three parts to control the page numbers on them. Otherwise your copyright page will get numbered page 2, which just looks wrong. The separation is more in your head than actually doing anything in Scrivener. You should have a FrontMatter folder already in your document. Within it are subfolders labeled ‘Amazon, Kobo, Nook’, ‘Smashwords’, and ‘Createspace’. If you’ve been using other services you may have other subfolders present. Grab the Createspace folder and drag it into the Manuscript folder. You do this so you can compile it separately. It should have at least two documents, title page and copyright page. You may also have half title page, blurb pages, acknowledgements, dedication pages, and maybe other pages. Any page in the front of the book that you don’t want to count as a numbered text page, place them in the Createspace folder. Go into Compile and select Content. Make sure to only select the items in your Createspace folder. You want to check ‘Page Break Before’ if you want that item on a new page. In this example I wanted the copyright page to start on a new page, so ‘Page Break Before’ is checked. You want it to output to your word processor type, in this case OpenDocument for LibreOffice. Next go to Page Settings. Under Paper Size you pick custom. You can chose your paper size here, usually 6”x9”. Make sure you have no header or footer text. You can also change your margins, though I’m not sure how much it matters. Hit compile. Next, open your word processor. LibreOffice never respected the page size I set, so I had to go through and change it again. Check your margins on all your pages. Then export as a pdf file. No, I’m not showing screenshots of that. Figure it out. The next step is the manuscript itself. Again, go to Compile. Under Contents, Alt-Left Click twice to unselect and then select all components. Then uncheck everything in your Createspace folder and Backmatter folders. Again go to Page settings and set the page size and remove any headers or footers. Compile as word processor document. Once inside the word processor, you again change the page size and check the margins. For a printed page, it’s nice to use a space of 1.15 or something similar. The extra space between lines seems easier to read. Choose select all, and set the line spacing. Or you can use styles if you know how. You could try to set this in Scrivener, but LibreOffice seemed to ignore whatever I set. In the footer, insert a page number. I did it the easy way and put them in the center of the page. It’s nice if you can start on page 1, but I wouldn’t worry about it. Most books the manuscript does start on page 1- the page number may or may not be there- but several books I checked started on some other page number. You have enough to worry about to spend time stressing about the first page number. The header is more complicated. Most current books have the author’s name in italics on the verso page, and the book title on the recto page. What are verso and recto? If you open a book, the page of your left hand side is the verso page, and the page on the right is the recto page. Use your word processor to set the Left and Right headers accordingly. Depending on how many pages in your front matter, your manuscript may start on either the verso or recto page. Note that if you want to get fancy you could mess around with left justifying the page number on the verso page and right justifying it on the recto page. You man need some trial and error to get your verso and recto pages set properly. One older book I checked had the title on both verso and recto pages. I suppose you could do that, but it feels like cheating. When the margins, footer and header are set the way you like, export as another pdf file. Finally, go back to Scrivener and only select your backmatter. This section is a folder that contains pages such as ‘About the Author’, ‘Books in this series’, ‘More from this author’’, and similar pages. Some folks put the acknowledgements in the back, or a short afterword. Compiling these pages are similar to front matter. They don’t have headers or footers, so it’s fairly simple to export them into the word processor and then export a backmatter pdf file. Now you have three pdf files. Go get the utility PDFSam. The basic version is free. First you have to look at your manuscript PDF. Did you have to add a dummy page to get the verso and recto headers to work out? If so, use the split function to remove that page. Next, select merge. You add the three pdf files in order at the top. Then at the bottom of the window you specify an output pdf file. Click Run. The program calculates a bit and then asks if you want a preview. Click yes, and check everything. Common errors are that you forgot to change page size on one of the pdf files, the margins don’t look nice, the line spacing seems cramped, and your headers are switched on the verso and recto pages. If this happens, just repeat the steps. You can usually narrow it down to one of the pdf files and just redo it, leaving the others alone. Once done, go to Createspace and upload your pdf file. Let the automated checker look it over and then check it again yourself. The next step is to create a book cover. The Createspace cover creator seemed limiting and didn’t work for me. I’m going to bale here and refer you to these guides, which worked well for me. I assume you have an e-book cover already. Bookow has free templates available for GIMP. You input your book size, ISBN number, price, and page count and it e-mails the template to you. You can also get a separate ISBN and price barcode template. If you know how to use GIMP, you can just create your cover following the template. If you don’t, here is a guide, found on the webpage of Walter Mendelson, book designer. Google has found other guides, and you may need to reference some tutorials on GIMP just to understand what’s going on. At Bubonicon, they had a panel about time travel. Folks brought up issues like would you change the past? Most authors on the panel said, ‘No’, as they worried of unforeseen consequences. But what if you had a prediction capability to tell you what those consequences would be? That’s in my novel. What about diseases jumping in time to a naive population? They could wreak havok. In my novel. S. M. Stirling brought up fundamental changes in the way people thought. I had something similar, with Gale talking about the myriad of details that make up a culture. Get Target Seventeen Must Die, because it’s loaded with awesome.
What are these things, front matter and back matter? They are, respectively, pages that go in the front of your book, and in the back of your book. They are not generally part of the manuscript.
Back matter is easier and I'll go over it first. Back matter goes in the back of the book and includes 'Afterword', 'About the Author', 'Books in this series', 'More from this author' and any other material at the back of the book. Afterword is a short essay. It can be about the writing of the book, or how the themes of the book apply to the present day. Bernard Cornwell places information about the real life battles that inspired the battles in his Richard Sharpe series. 'Books in this series' is a listing of other books in the series, probably in preferred reading order. 'More from this author' includes all the books and an invitation to the author's webpage, facebook page, and blog site. Back matter would also include a glossary, and index, but I don't have familiarity with those. Consult other guides for details. The front matter may include the following:
You may not have all of these pages, especially for your first book. Blurb pages contain the snippets of praise from reviewers and (usually) more famous authors. They may be one page or several pages. The blurbs are trying to convince a person in the book store to buy your book. You might think they aren’t necessary for e-books, but Amazon may put the first several pages of your e-book online, so they may be helpful for convincing a reluctant reader. Title page contains title, author name, publisher name and locations, and sometimes a publisher logo. I found an image with this information looked a lot nicer than text. You can use GIMP or other software to create the image and insert it into your document. It’s also easier if you include a logo or other illustration on the title page. Copyright page includes your copyright statement. The simplest is Copyright © 2017 by Marlon Clark. All rights reserved. The copyrights page also includes a disclaimer that the book is a work of fiction, eg This is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people, or real events are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. ISBN number, a link to your website, edition number, and credit for your cover artist, also go on your copyrights page. Here is link to a guide about the Copyrights page, with more elaborate reservation of rights. Half title page is just a page with only the book title on it. Newer typographical guides say it is the first page inside the front cover. Older typographical guides say that is a bastard title page, and a proper half title page is the last page just before the manuscript begins. You may include it or not. I think it was created as an optional extra page so later pages line up properly on the right or left side of the book. Table of Contents of course shows each chapter or section and the page it begins on. It may also include separate pages for lists of maps, figures or charts. For a simple fiction novel without chapter titles, it can be omitted. For an e-book, you want to get your software to create it, as the variable font size and screen size make page numbers irrelevant. You’ll want it as a list of links to each feature. Details on creating a complicated table of contents would require a separate guide. Acknowledgements is where you thank your critique group, other beta readers, people who checked science or facts, other authors that inspired you, and the support of your family. Dedication page is for that one or two people to whom you dedicate the book. Epigram is a short bit of poetry or quotation that begins the book. For Scrivener, you create a folder in front of your manuscript folder. Label it FrontMatter. Inside, you create subfolders, eg ‘Amazon, Nook, Kobo’, “Smashwords’, ‘Draft to digital’, and so on. Then you add copies of each page to each subfolder. You can then tweak each page as needed. For example, a first author may not have an ISBN for their Amazon book, so you leave it off your copyright page. Smashwords will assign you an ISBN, so you go into that subfolder and add the ISBN number. (Bookow has a free ISBN hyphenator so you can properly hyphenate your ISBN.) Smashwords also wants something about it being the Smashwords edition so add that in. When you compile you simply select the appropriate folder as the front matter. As to compiling, I’ll go over creating your e-pub or mobi file in the next installment! I decided to make a few entries here on the pathway to self-publishing. The second step is get a critique group, some people who will read your stuff and make constructive comments.
The first step is to write. This can never be said enough. Robert Heinlein (Rule 1), Stephen King (2000 words a day), Jim Butcher, and others tell you the obvious. To be a writer you have to write. If you don't write, you got nothing. So, write! Once you have pages written, then somebody else has to read them, and make constructive remarks. Who should be in your critique group? Somebody who can give constructive remarks. I'll elaborate on those later, but your critiquers must be willing to take you to task. They cannot just say, "Oh, it's nice," or similar vague remarks. They have say what's wrong. Plot, pacing, conflict, characters, setting, background, grammar, details, everything has to go under scrutiny. If you aren't annoyed at your group occasionally, they aren't being direct enough. Don't lose your temper or quit though. They are trying to help you. As a writer, you'll have to be thick-skinned. Another quality they must have is familiarity with your genre. If you're writing hip, grim, cutting edge modern day fiction, and you find a bunch of older women who like cozy genre romances, they won't be able to help you much- aside from telling you they don't like the main character. Your critiquers will have know what tropes you are working with, where you are heading with your novel and sort of what to expect. What are constructive remarks? They are helpful, exact and directed at the writing. They examine the plot - is it believable, are there holes? Pacing - is it too slow, or need to slow down a bit? Characters - likable, unlikable, too perfect, too whiny, consistent. Setting - is it believable, consistent. If set in a hospital, does it feel like a hospital? Do the background characters act like nurses, residents, and clinicians? Same for other settings such as military or the criminal justice system. You should get comments about grammar, repeated words, and inconsistent details eg "hero's car is a blue Ford at beginning of chapter, and red Dodge at the end." As best they can they do not go after politics. They may say things like "this isn't how a homeless person acts," but not "how dare you make fun of the downtrodden, you scummy rich asshole!" Again, that last comment would break the rule to address the writing, not the person. Finally, what does it mean to have people read your work? One method is to gather together and read ten pages out loud, with your group annotating copies as you read. You won't like it, and it'll be embarassing, but you'll learn so much. Repeated words jump out of the page, as do extra dialog tags. Vague phrasing will get caught, and you'll get suggestions on how to improve it. Eventually, you'll need to branch out, to having the group read an entire novel and meet to discuss it. You can't get through a novel very fast at ten pages per meeting, and you'll stop making those mistakes. You'll want the input over the whole work, and you'll want it quickly. Read your work, make constructive remarks. That's what your looking for in a critique group. I'm not a fan of the ancient Romans. They were violent and superstitious, a colonial empire. They conquered the nearby 'Federation' analog, the Hellenist culture of Greece. Some argue they used science and engineering, but not really. They had enough engineering, mostly military and civil to create their empire, but never expanded on it. They actually didn't much like science, or more properly natural philosophy. Most of the Greek treatises were never translated to Latin, indicating a lack of interest on the part of the Romans.
Violence was a way of life in the Roman empire, from gladiatorial games to numerous conflicts, both civil wars and border wars to expand their empire. Crime was endemic in Roman cities; most people only walked around at night with armed guards. Romans were extremely superstitious with numerous rituals and incantations to be performed to propitiate the Gods and spirits around them. Some of you were no doubt taught Romans were logical and rational. A few members of the upper class aspired to that, but it was a thin veneer. We think of the Romans like that because the monks of the early middle ages were logical and rational. They valued such qualities and those were the manuscripts they chose to preserve. Another reason we think of the Romans positively is because of the serious man-crush the scholars of the enlightenment had on the tribe from the Tiber. Everything good about antiquity came from the Romans and scholars over emphasized their virtues and under reported their flaws. Of course, every analogy has it's limits. I'm brainstorming here and am willing to be accept some modifications to my proposition. Still, the idea of the Romans as the Klingons helps people see them in a different light, perhaps shaking loose some of the adoration moderns have for them. I was thinking of the old movie Independence Day, the one with Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum. At end of the movie, humanity celebrated the destruction of the alien mothership and all the strike ships. Happiness and good will pervaded all.
The scene glosses over the reality of the situation. The aliens destroyed the cities of New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Washington DC with their opening salvo. The humans nuked the strikeship in Houston with no effect to the strikeship, but plenty of effect to the surrounding countryside. After the initial attack, the strikeships started moving through out the country, destroying major cities. The rest of the world fared no better, with all the major capitals destroyed, followed by subsequent destruction of major cities. The power grid was probably destroyed, so most US cities have no power. The refineries near Houston were destroyed also, so gasoline would soon be in short supply. Food could not get from the farms to the survivors easily. The catastrophe grows greater the more you think of it. And the aliens could have done so much more. Fortunately for us they were a telepathic race with no concept of internet security. Any sort of smart alien invasion we would have little chance against. Most stories of alien invasion deliberately gimp the aliens so humans can take that slender shot, and against all the odds, triumph. I'm all for humans winning, but we may not be so fortunate as our fictional counterparts if we ever contact intelligent alien life. Luckily for us, it appears we have a long time (possibly forever) to prepare. Edit: Post borrowed from another earlier blog. Note that I haven't seen the sequel to ID4; I'm told it was terrible. |
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