Podcast appearances and mentions of Charles Stross

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 21:30:00 GMT http://relay.fm/upgrade/559 http://relay.fm/upgrade/559 All Fingers Are Digital 559 Jason Snell and Myke Hurley After nearly 500 episodes away, Scott McNulty returns to the podcast to discuss the resilience of babies, dysfunction at Apple, the future of the Vision Pro, and (of course) ebooks and e-readers. After nearly 500 episodes away, Scott McNulty returns to the podcast to discuss the resilience of babies, dysfunction at Apple, the future of the Vision Pro, and (of course) ebooks and e-readers. clean 6779 After nearly 500 episodes away, Scott McNulty returns to the podcast to discuss the resilience of babies, dysfunction at Apple, the future of the Vision Pro, and (of course) ebooks and e-readers. This episode of Upgrade is sponsored by: Fitbod: Get stronger, faster with a fitness plan that fits you. Get 25% off your membership. ExpressVPN: High-Speed, Secure & Anonymous VPN Service. Get an extra three months free. Factor: Healthy, fully-prepared food delivered to your door. Guest Starring: Scott McNulty Links and Show Notes: Books Jason: M.R. Carey's Pandominion duology (Infinity Gate/Echo of Worlds) James S.A. Corey's Expanse series (9 books, “Leviathan Wakes”) Adrian Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture series (3 books, “Shards of Earth”) Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series (3 books, “Children of Time”) The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Steven Baxter (5 books, “The Long Earth”) Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross (6+ books, “The Family Trade”) Scott: Jo Walton's Small Change (Farthing, Ha'penny, Half a Crown) Yoon Ha Lee's The Machineries of Empire (Ninefox Gambit, Raven Stratagem, Revenant Gun) The Culture novels by Ian Banks (not really a good fit, but sort of!) Get Upgrade+. More content, no ads. Submit Feedback Ambient music: Free background tunes on your iPhone without ads Howard Lutnick says electronics tariff exemptions are temporary | AP News A 'US-Made iPhone' Is Pure Fantasy Why price increases aren't the only way Apple can fight tariffs – Six Colors How Apple Fumbled Siri's AI Makeover — The Information Report Reveals Internal Chaos Behind Apple's Siri Failure - MacRumors Apple Plans to Release Delayed Apple Intelligence ‌Siri‌ Features This Fall - MacRumors Trump Tariffs Add to Apple's Long-Standing Innovation Woes - The New York Times Upgrade #8: With Special Offers - Relay Upgrade #85: Talk to this Cylinder - Relay Which e-reader should you buy? – Six Colors 2024 Kindle Colorsoft and Paperwhite Review: No perfect choices – Six Colors RF Remote Control Page Turner for Kindle Kobo Libra Colour Review: Color, but at what cost? – Six Colors The future of the Roomba, and the best robot vacuums | The Verge Kindle Scribe review: Big, beautiful, and… buttonless? – Six Colors Boox Palma review: A phone-shaped e-reader – Six Colors Kindle Scribe – Good feature, but get it out of my face – Blankbaby Upgrade 559: A

Halfway through one of my favorite sci-fi novels, Charles Stross' Accelerando, we tune in to the members of an interstellar first contact mission as they pass the time debating whether the Technological Singularity has happened yet. Spoiler alert: all of them are uploaded minds appearing in a consensus VR environment as various post-human avatars, riding inside a computer the size of a grain of rice on a craft the size of a soda can. To readers it seems like a satire: what, if not this, would it take to convince you we're over the rainbow? But good science fiction provokes us to question the present, and so we must ask: what are we waiting for? Are we still moderns? Is this still Western civilization? Should we be looking forward to the age of machine superintelligence, or has it already happened, like physicist Cosma Shalizi argues in his blog post “The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone”? Here's a clip from that piece:Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check.Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check.Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check.Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, "the coldest of all cold monsters"? Check; we call them "the self-regulating market system" and "modern bureaucracies”.Maybe we ought to consider, like Bruno Latour, that We Have Never Been Modern. Or maybe, as Federico Campagna suggests in Prophetic Culture, each era's inhabitants identify as “modern” and project the “likely story” produced by their process of “worlding” to imagine futures that recede like mirages or rainbows as we approach the horizon of our understanding? By the time we arrive, we have transformed and the mysteries of the ancient and future are conserved. Some Indigenous cultures believe that all animals identify as “people” — perhaps every world is mundane to its native observers, and yet all of them arise out of chaos and ineffability. Science can't answer some questions because it depends on replicability and provisional consensus, and some questions ultimately force us out of attempts to get everything to make sense and into contemplative surrender to our own cognitive limits (no matter how much we augment ourselves).Science will, of course, continue. As Ted Chiang wrote twenty five years ago in his short story “Catching Crumbs from The Table”, advancements in AI and biotechnology could foreseeably “[leave] journals to publish second-hand accounts translated into human language… Journals for human audiences were reduced to vehicles of popularization, and poor ones at that, as even the most brilliant humans found themselves puzzled by translations of the latest findings… Some left the field altogether, but those who stayed shifted their attentions away from original research and toward hermeneutics: interpreting the scientific work of metahumans.”In 2025, living through the superexponential evolution of machine intelligence, this story hits close to home. What will we do when all breakthroughs are made by black box AI systems whose logic and insights evade us? We already have to take large language models on faith, doing our best to conserve a modest sliver of understanding as we resign ourselves to the practical benefits of successful but illegible prediction. But given that scientific progress has largely advanced through the proliferation of hyperspecialist experts who cannot understand one another's research, we should again ask if it were ever the case that we could explain everything, or whether we've just been ignoring the central importance of textual interpretation as we puzzled over the riddles of a world that never owed us any satisfying final answers?Whether we're modern or not, it is time for us to reconsider the foundations of ideas like informed consent, agency, evidence, and personhood. Whether you think we're still waiting around for the future or that we are living it, we live among an ecology of diverse intelligences and require a humbler approach…one strangely similar to that of Medieval serfs and jungle-dwelling foragers than first seems obvious…one that owes back pay to the dismissed disciplines of religion, magic, and myth. Which is why I'm excited to get weird with you in this episode.This week I speak with one of my closest comrades in philosophical investigation, Canadian author and film-maker J.F. Martel. Co-founder and co-host (with Phil Ford) of the internationally-acclaimed Weird Studies Podcast and Weirdosphere online learning platform, tenured para-academic explorer of high strangeness and the liminal zones between the known, unknown, and unknowable, J.F. is a perfect partner with whom to refine inquiry into persistent and tricky questions like:– What is the nature of technology and how does it change as our seemingly-discrete tools and built environments merge into a planet-scale thinking machine?– How can we tell when AI achieves personhood, and what does it take to be “good parents” of beings that are fundamentally beyond our control?– What can religion and fairy tales teach us about living well in a world where our explanatory frameworks fail us?– How can we re-think and re-claim healthy institutions to serve human flourishing after the end of history as we know it?Subscribe, Rate, & Comment on YouTube • Apple Podcasts • SpotifyPlease consider becoming a patron or making tax-deductible monthly contributions at every.org/humansontheloop. (You'll get all the same perks.)J.F.'s LinksReclaimingArt.comWeirdStudies.comWeirdosphere.orgJF on X | Weird Studies Discord & SubRedditReclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice (book)Project LinksRead the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordThe Future Fossils Discord Server abides!Contact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteriesChapters0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:01 - Introduction0:09:32 - Revisiting Reclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice0:15:12 - What we lose and gain by automating culture0:31:12 - Wendell Berry's poem “A Timbered Choir”0:36:50 - Transcendental, Machinic, Immanental, Imaginal, and Fractal0:46:21 - Black Box Personhood & AI as A 'Thou'1:00:00 - Is AI Magic?1:06:10 - Fairy Tales, Faith, and Submission after Modernity1:10:27 - Do we still need institutions?1:16:59 - Thanks & AnnouncementsBack Catalogue FF 18 - J.F. Martel on Art, Magic, & The Terrifying Zone of Uncanny AwesomenessFF 71 - J.F. Martel on Sequels & Simulacra, Blade Runner 2049 & Stranger Things 2WS 26 Living in a Glass AgeFF 126 - Phil Ford & JF Martel on Weird Studies & Plural RealitiesJRS Currents 064: Michael Garfield and J.F. Martel on Art x AIFF 214 - J.F. Martel, Phil Ford, & Megan Phipps on Weird Cybernetics: Waking Up From The EcstasyFF 231 - Eric Wargo & J.F. Martel on Art as Precognition, Biblically-Accurate A.I., and How to Navigate Ruptures in Space-TimeMentioned MediaWalter Benjamin's “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”Erik Hoel's “Curious George and the case of the unconscious culture”New York Encounter (event)Art is dead. Long live Art with Android Jones | Mind Meld 323 Third Eye DropsCosma Shalizi & Henry Farrell's “Artificial Intelligence is a Familiar-Looking Monster”Sigmund Freud's Beyond The Pleasure PrincipleWendell Berry's “A Timbered Choir”Henri Corbin's “Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal”William Irwin Thompson's Imaginary LandscapesDanny Hillis' “The Enlightenment Is Dead. Long Live The Entanglement”Neri Oxman's “The Age of Entanglement”David Krakauer's “Emergent Engineering”Kevin Kelly's Out of ControlFF 150 - A Unifying Meta-Theory of UFOs & The Weird with Sean Esbjörn-HargensFF 223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking BlasphemyTop Aerospace Scientists Suspect UFOs are Biblical Time Machines | Diana Walsh Pasulka on The Danny Jones PodcastZiwei Xu et al.'s “Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models”Isaac Asimov's FoundationGilles Deleuze's Difference and RepetitionOther MentionsDonna TartMatt CardinMichael PhilipBenoit MandelbrotJames AllenGregory BatesonDavid HumeGottfried LeibnizL. Ron HubbardErik DavisCarl JungJacques LacanAlbert CamusJean-Paul SartreCurt JaimungalStafford BeerCarl SaganJames HillmanPhil FordMarie-Louise von FranzGK ChestertonEdmund Burke This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

For our first episode of 2025, we touch upon novels we've been reading for the new year, including Charles Stross's 13th Laundry novel/collection A Conventional Boy and Ray Nayler's Where the Axe is Buried, as well as the frustrations of reading books on deadlines—as opposed to wallowing in them at leisure, and some non-SF writers we like. Gary then mentions how hard it is to gain perspective on novels of the past year, and suggests looking instead at important books of the entire past quarter-century from the perspective of 2025.  We only got partway through his list, which included novels by Alastair Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, M. John Harrison, Margaret Atwood, Susanna Clarke, Gene Wolfe, Cixin Liu, and Robert Charles Wilson; collections by Kelly Link, Margo Lanagan, and Jeff Ford; anthologies by Sheree R. Thomas and Gardner Dozois—the last of which leads to a discussion of the durability of space opera as a defining SF theme. Plenty of stuff to argue with this week!

For our first episode of 2025, we touch upon novels we've been reading for the new year, including Charles Stross's 13th Laundry novel/collection A Conventional Boy and Ray Nayler's Where the Axe is Buried, as well as the frustrations of reading books on deadlines—as opposed to wallowing in them at leisure, and some non-SF writers we like. Gary then mentions how hard it is to gain perspective on novels of the past year, and suggests looking instead at important books of the entire past quarter-century from the perspective of 2025.  We only got partway through his list, which included novels by Alastair Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, M. John Harrison, Margaret Atwood, Susanna Clarke, Gene Wolfe, Cixin Liu, and Robert Charles Wilson; collections by Kelly Link, Margo Lanagan, and Jeff Ford; anthologies by Sheree R. Thomas and Gardner Dozois—the last of which leads to a discussion of the durability of space opera as a defining SF theme. Plenty of stuff to argue with this week!

¡Bienvenidos de nuevo a Gabinete de Curiosidades! En estas fiestas, a menos de una semana de acabar el año, toca resucitar este espacio y hacer balance de las lecturas de este 2024. Para ello he preparado dos programas: el primero, este, dedicado a los diez mejores cuentos que he leído este año, y el segundo a las diez mejores novelas leídas este año. Los cuentos incluidos en este programa son los siguientes: -El flamenco de Francisco Coloane -El terror de Arthur Machen -El dragón bailó al anochecer de Ray Bradbury -El rebaño de Cesar Mallorquí -Bilenio de J.G. Ballard -El moho negro de Mark Samuels -Monsieur Maurice de Amelia B. Edwards -Mister Taylor de Augusto Monterroso -Palimpsesto de Charles Stross

Subscriber-only episodeTim and Rob chat with the Innmsouth Literary Festival 24 Guest of Honour, Charles StrossCharles StrossContact us at innsmouthbookclub@outlook.comInnsmouth Literary FestivalNight Shade Books Facebook Youtube PatreonDragon's Teeth Gaming ChannelTim Mendees Innsmouth Gold Graveheart Designs

I wanted to share with HPR peeps four ways to hack our robot/corporate overlords: Fawkes - named for Guy Fawkes, the face mask of anonymous and hackers around the world Glaze - a digital paint curing process to protect your art Nightshade, a software blue pill you can hide in your digital creations so that any AI consuming your work without your permission will also consume your blue pill and be sucked into a world of endless hallucinations Agalmic organizations, the future of AI business, invented by Charles Stross in his second most famous SciFi novel Accelerando, written in 2005 but set in the years 2025-2040 during what he called the singularity and others now call the #pancrisis or post-truth era or 21 Lessons of the 21st Century Those first three applications were invented by Ben Zhao a Neubauer professor at the University of Chicago Here are links to more resources about each one: Fawkes sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/fawkes/ to cloak your selfies, can it be made to work on video? github.com/Shawn-Shan/fawkes Glaze glaze-usenix23.pdf to make it difficult to do style transfer on your images. All your art will look like pollucks If someone asked models to imitate your store. Anime and graphic novels are hard. NightShade arxiv.org/pdf/2310.13828.pdf only needs to poison pill 50 of your images so they will destroy the feature space of any AI model that tries to learn your style from them, they cause models trained on them to hallucinate. Fill in the vacuum of the Swiss cheese holes of your feature space (embedding vectors). There is someone developing an antidote: github.com/RichardAragon/NightshadeAntidote Your local used book store is the best place to find copies of Accelerando or the Lobsters short story released in several periodicals and SciFi compendiums over the years.

This week I speak with social scientist Nicholas Brigham Adams (Twitter, LinkedIn) about his work at Goodly Labs to create new infrastructure for collective intelligence — new systems for collective fact-checking and sense-making that can help us rise to the occasion of our inherently social, planet-scale challenges.  And the time for this work is definitely NOW.  As paths across social, economic, and ecological networks continue to shrink due to the increasing connectivity of technological systems, humankind migrates from an Earth on which most events seem impossibly distant and irrelevant to an Earth defined by nonlinear, often exponential impacts of seemingly-trivial developments anywhere on the planet.  This is the century — and the decade — in which many of us have no choice but to learn, the easy way or the hard way, the consequences of our increasing vulnerability to and power over one another.  And one of the places this is most vividly apparent is in how truths and untruths ripple at unprecedented speeds across the globe, forcing us into a new and intense cosmopolitanism.  In the 1940s, the message was “Loose lips sink ships.”  Perhaps the message for the 2020s is “Cognitive biases spread mind viruses.”If you've followed me for a while, you've likely read my 2017 science fiction short story “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality'”, a peek into our present-day post-truth carnival funhouse where AI-assisted forgeries demand vastly more nuanced and sophisticated methods for navigating fundamental uncertainty, far greater humility about our validity claims, and revolutionary tools for thinking together.  We have to learn to communicate the degree and dimension of our confidence and of our doubt — to learn how we can rigorously restore the trust necessary for coordination at scale — and Goodly Labs is, in my opinion, one of the most promising efforts in the world right now in this regard.  2024 is very likely to feel like the end of reality for a lot of us, and the stakes are immense:  fair presidential elections, concerted ecological action, and effective AI steering policy are all domains of existential risk in which we MUST be able to reconstruct some kind of minimally viable consensus reality.  I'd be considerably more worried for our future if I did not know that there are people like Brigham Adams and his amazing team of academics, founders, engineers, and journalists tilting their spears directly at this issue and working around the clock to help midwife that Holy Grail of communications technology:  a sane and healthy global brain.Announcement: The Future Fossils Book Club is back! Join me for to discuss Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly on Saturday 27 January and Saturday 10 February from 12p-2p MST. I'll send Substack and Patreon supporters the link to both calls soon, and there will be a dedicated private discussion channel in the Discord server.✨ Mostly-Complete List of Citations:Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories (MIT News)LOGIN 2009 keynote: gaming in the world of 2030 by Charles Stross (transcript)Ready Player One by Ernst ClineThe meaning of life in a world without work by Yuval Noah Harari (read at web.archive.org or 12ft.io)Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel KahnemanMotivated Numeracy and The Politics-ridden Brain by Stuff To Blow Your Mind (podcast)Coming Into Being by William Irwin ThompsonExplosive Proofs of Mathematical Truths by Simon DeDeo (lecture video)Stewardship of global collective behavior by Joseph Bak-Coleman et al. (paper)OpenAI's anarchist science chief is a techno-spiritual culthead (Athenil)So You Want To Be A Sorceror In The Age of Mythic Powers by Josh Schrei (podcast)Saul PerlmutterOccupy MovementJamie JoyceLynn MargulisDouglas EngelbartAlexander BeinerDouglas RushkoffSteve JobsStewart BrandW. Brian ArthurJim RuttSense8 (television series)✨ Support My Work:• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes!• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music of Future Fossils (in this episode: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”) on Bandcamp.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I'll get a cut.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Online mattresses; Holmes claims broke; Google class action lawsuit; Coinbase whines like a 4 year old; Reddit's kerfuffle; Spotify GDPR fine; Tesla's Autopilot & Mercedes adds ChatGPT; AI making lonely, sleepless alcoholics; Twitter won't pay the damn rent; food delivery wages upped as are layoffs; disappointment as a service; MGM casino changes photo policy, for now; the Idol; Crime Scene Kitchen; Black Mirror; Strange New Worlds; Quantumania; Foundation; Netflix sign ups increase, pop-up restaurant; the Cure; booze at shows; Peppa Pig podcast; Sol Reader; Torras Coolify; your bias is...; Charles Stross; I don't know, what do you think?Sponsors:SaneBox - Visit https://www.sanebox.com/gog today to start your free trial and get a $25 credit.1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1passwordPrivate Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month.Show notes at https://gog.show/606FOLLOW UPReport: FTC will file to block Microsoft's $69B Activision Blizzard acquisitionEx-Billionaire Elizabeth Holmes Says She Can't Pay $250 a Month to the People She CheatedIn re Google Referrer Header Privacy Litigation“But the SEC let us go public” and other flawed arguments in Coinbase's defenseIN THE NEWSThousands of Reddit communities go dark to protest company's controversial new policyReddit CEO Steve Huffman isn't backing down: our full interviewReddit Threatens to Remove Moderators From Subreddits Continuing Apollo-Related BlackoutsSpotify has been fined $5.4 million for violating GDPR data rules17 fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla's AutopilotMercedes is adding ChatGPT to its infotainment system, for some reasonGoogle, one of AI's biggest backers, warns own staff about chatbotsAI at the Office Makes You a Lonely, Sleepless Alcoholic, New Study FindsTwitter Is Reportedly Getting Kicked Out of One of Its Colorado OfficesElon Musk is hilariously shut down by his ‘favourite' podcastNew York City sets an $18 per hour minimum wage for food delivery workersGrubhub lays off 15 percent of its employeesAll the big tech layoffs of 2023Google Domains shutting down, assets sold and being migrated to SquarespaceMGM Casinos Entice Younger Gamblers With New Photo PolicyMEDIA CANDYThe IdolCrime Scene KitchenPadma Lakshmi Is Leaving ‘Top Chef' After Its 20th SeasonBlack Mirror Season 6Star Trek: Strange New WorldsPatrick Stewart and LeVar Burton Agree ‘Star Trek: Picard' Season 3 Was Perfect — But They Pitch One Last HurrahAnt-Man and the Wasp: QuantumaniaWatch the trailer for the second season of Apple TV+ series 'Foundation'Netflix Sign-Ups Increase 102% After Password Sharing Crackdown: ReportNetflix BitesPaul McCartney is using AI to create a final song for The BeatlesGen Z Is Drinking Less at ConcertsPeppa Pig Heading to Amazon's Audible Under New Podcasting Deal With HasbroAPPS & DOODADSSol ReaderTORRAS COOLIFY 3 Neck Air Conditioner, Extreme Cooling Version Neck Fan, Full-body Cooling Portable Fan, Vertical Airflow Personal Fan, AI Temp Control Portable Neck FanAT THE LIBRARYYour Bias Is...The School of Thought InternationalSingularity Sky by Charles StrossIron Sunrise by Charles StrossSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jim has an extremely wide-ranging discussion with Michael Garfield. They discuss the upcoming book Michael is drafting in public, the exponential scaling of information production, Jurassic Park, mass distributed computation, a new topology for social connectivity, info agents, stereotyping & police violence, a dehumanizing pace of human interaction, Charles Stross's prophetic visions, heuristic induction, strong vs weak social links, restoration of the mesoscale, from the geographic polity to the noetic, the importance of the ground layer, semi-permeable membranes with commons inside them, Pokemon Go & behavioral control, generative AI & intellectual property, creating a commons to benefit culture, circular economies, dividend money & usury, high-temperature search, a future of childlike play, and much more. Michael will be hosting an interactive course with Jeremy Johnson, titled "Jurassic Worlding," beginning on July 18. Those interested should keep an eye on NuraLearning.com. Join the Jurassic Park book club and help Michael research and workshop his next book, Jurassic Worlding: A Palaeontology of The Present, at Michael's Substack. Episode Transcript Michael Garfield on Substack Subconscious (Substack) "The Singularity In Our Past Light-Cone," by Cosma Shalizi Accelerando, by Charles Stross (free online version) "Declaration for The Independence of Cyberspace," by John Perry Barlow John Danaher Interviews Erin Neely on Augmented Reality, Ethics, and Property Rights (Algocracy and Transhumanism Podcast) "The Evolution of Surveillance," by Michael Garfield "Terra Nullius," by Cory Doctorow Future Fossils Reading List Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. (Complexity Podcast) JRS EP130 - Ken Stanley on Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

How can we get artificial gravity in space without rotating a spacecraft? Will there be bigger Mars helicopters in future? How exactly will they deorbit the ISS? Who will be selecting the crew for the Mars mission? Where are the Voyagers today and how can we find them? Answering all that and more in this week's Q&A episode.

In this episode of Chasing Leviathan, PJ and Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross discuss the process of blending various literary genres and current events with Lovecraftian horror. Stross reflects the stranger-than-fiction historical events that have inspired his stories, writing for the same characters in various stages of life, and why fiction is an integral part of our lives.For a deep dive into Charles Stross' work, check out his upcoming book: Season of Skulls: A Novel in the World of the Laundry Files

This week we talk about the intersections of large language models, the golden age of television and its storytelling mishaps, making one's way through the weirding of the labor economy, and much more with two of my favorite Gen X science fiction aficionados, OG podcaster KMO and our mutual friend Kevin Arthur Wohlmut. In this episode — a standalone continuation to my recent appearance on The KMO Show, we skip like a stone across mentions of every Star Trek series, the collapse of narratives and the social fabric, Westworld HBO, Star Wars Mandalorian vs. Andor vs. Rebels, chatGPT, Blade Runner 2049, Black Mirror, H.P. Lovecraft, the Sheldrake-Abraham-McKenna Trialogues, Charles Stross' Accelerando, Adventure Time, Stanislav Grof's LSD psychotherapy, Francisco Varela, Blake Lemoine's meltdown over Google LaMDA, Integrated Information Theory, biosemiotics, Douglas Hofstadter, Max Tegmarck, Erik Davis, Peter Watts, The Psychedelic Salon, Melanie Mitchell, The Teafaerie, Kevin Kelly, consilience in science, Fight Club, and more…Or, if you prefer, here's a rundown of the episode generated by A.I. c/o my friends at Podium.page:In this episode, I explore an ambitious and well-connected conversation with guests KMO, a seasoned podcaster, and Kevin Walnut [sic], a close friend and supporter of the arts in Santa Fe. We dive deep into their thoughts on the social epistemology crisis, science fiction, deep fakes, and ontology. Additionally, we discuss their opinions on the Star Trek franchise, particularly their critiques of the first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard and Discovery. Through this engaging conversation, we examine the impact of storytelling and the evolution of science fiction in modern culture. We also explore the relationship between identity, media, and artificial intelligence, as well as the ethical implications of creating sentient artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the philosophical questions surrounding AI's impact on society and human existence. Join us for a thought-provoking and in-depth discussion on a variety of topics that will leave you questioning the future of humanity and our relationship with technology.✨ Before we get started, three big announcements!* I am leaving the Santa Fe Institute, in part to write a very ambitious book about technology, art, imagination, and Jurassic Park. You can be a part of the early discussion around this project by joining the Future Fossils Book Club's Jurassic Park live calls — the first of which will be on Saturday, 29 April — open to Substack and Patreon supporters:* Catch me in a Twitter Space with Nxt Museum on Monday 17 April at 11 am PST on a panel discussing “Creative Misuse of Technology” with Minne Atairu, Parag Mital, Caroline Sinders, and hosts Jesse Damiani and Charlotte Kent.* I'm back in Austin this October to play the Astronox Festival at Apache Pass! Check out this amazing lineup on which I appear alongside Juno Reactor, Entheogenic, Goopsteppa, DRRTYWULVZ, and many more great artists!✨ Support Future Fossils:Subscribe anywhere you go for podcastsSubscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.Buy my music on Bandcamp! (This episode features “A Better Trip” from my recent live album by the same name.)Or if you're into lo-fi audio, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Future Fossils Facebook Group and Discord server. Join us!Episode cover art by KMO and a whole bouquet of digital image manipulation apps.✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Affiliate Links:• These show notes and the transcript were made possible with Podium.Page, a very cool new AI service I'm happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I'm a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don't wear it all the time, when I do it's sober healthy drugs.• Musicians: let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I've ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park.✨ Mentioned Media:KMO Show S01 E01 - 001 - Michael Garfield and Kevin WohlmutAn Edifying Thought on AI by Charles EisensteinIn Defense of Star Trek: Picard & Discovery by Michael GarfieldImprovising Out of Algorithmic Isolation by Michael GarfieldAI and the Transformation of the Human Spirit by Steven Hales(and yes I know it's on Quillette, and no I don't think this automatically disqualifies it)Future Fossils Book Club #1: Blindsight by Peter WattsFF 116 - The Next Ten Billion Years: Ugo Bardi & John Michael Greer as read by Kevin Arthur Wohlmut✨ Related Recent Future Fossils Episodes:FF 198 - Tadaaki Hozumi on Japanese Esotericism, Aliens, Land Spirits, & The Singularity (Part 2)FF 195 - A.I. Art: An Emergency Panel with Julian Picaza, Evo Heyning, Micah Daigle, Jamie Curcio, & Topher SipesFF 187 - Fear & Loathing on the Electronic Frontier with Kevin Welch & David Hensley of EFF-Austin FF 178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions FF 175 - C. Thi Nguyen on The Seductions of Clarity, Weaponized Games, and Agency as Art ✨ Chapters:0:15:45 - The Substance of Philosophy (58 Seconds)0:24:45 - Complicated TV Narratives and the Internet (104 Seconds)0:30:54 - Humans vs Hosts in Westworld (81 Seconds)0:38:09 - Philosophical Zombies and Artificial Intelligence (89 Seconds)0:43:00 - Popular Franchises Themes (71 Seconds)1:03:27 - Reflections on a Changing Media Landscape (89 Seconds)1:10:45 - The Pathology of Selective Evidence (92 Seconds)1:16:32 - Externalizing Trauma Through Technology (131 Seconds)1:24:51 - From Snow Maker to Thouandsaire (43 Seconds)1:36:48 - The Impact of Boomer Parenting (126 Seconds)✨ Keywords:Social Epistemology, Science Fiction, Deep Fakes, Ontology, Star Trek, Artificial Intelligence, AI Impact, Sentient AGI, Human-Machine Interconnectivity, Consciousness Theory, Westworld, Blade Runner 2049, AI in Economy, AI Companion Chatbots, Unconventional Career Path, AI and Education, AI Content Creation, AI in Media, Turing Test✨ UNEDITED machine-generated transcript generated by podium.page:0:00:00Five four three two one. Go. So it's not like Wayne's world where you say the two and the one silently. Now, Greetings future fossils.0:00:11Welcome to episode two hundred and one of the podcast that explores our place in time I'm your host, Michael Garfield. And this is one of these extra juicy and delicious episodes of the show where I really ratcheted up with our guests and provide you one of these singularity is near kind of ever everything is connected to everything, self organized criticality right at the edge of chaos conversations, deeply embedded in chapel parallel where suddenly the invisible architect picture of our cosmos starts to make itself apparent through the glass bead game of conversation. And I am that I get to share it with you. Our guests this week are KMO, one of the most seasoned and well researched and experienced podcasters that I know. Somebody whose show the Sea Realm was running all the way back in two thousand six, I found him through Eric Davis, who I think most of you know, and I've had on the show a number of times already. And also Kevin Walnut, who is a close friend of mine here in Santa Fe, a just incredible human being, he's probably the strongest single supporter of music that I'm aware of, you know, as far as local scenes are concerned and and supporting people's music online and helping get the word out. He's been instrumental to my family and I am getting ourselves situated here all the way back to when I visited Santa Fe in two thousand eighteen to participate in the Santa Fe Institute's Interplanetary Festival and recorded conversations on that trip John David Ebert and Michael Aaron Cummins. And Ike used so June. About hyper modernity, a two part episode one zero four and one zero five. I highly recommend going back to that, which is really the last time possibly I had a conversation just this incredibly ambitious on the show.0:02:31But first, I want to announce a couple things. One is that I have left the Santa Fe Institute. The other podcast that I have been hosting for them for the last three and a half years, Complexity Podcast, which is substantially more popular in future fossils due to its institutional affiliation is coming to a close, I'm recording one more episode with SFI president David Krakauer next week in which I'm gonna be talking about my upcoming book project. And that episode actually is conjoined with the big announcement that I have for members of the Future Fossil's listening audience and and paid supporters, which is, of course, the Jurassic Park Book Club that starts On April twenty ninth, we're gonna host the first of two video calls where I'm gonna dive deep into the science and philosophy Michael Creighton's most popular work of fiction and its impact on culture and society over the thirty three years since its publication. And then I'm gonna start picking up as many of the podcasts that I had scheduled for complexity and had to cancel upon my departure from SFI. And basically fuse the two shows.0:03:47And I think a lot of you saw this coming. Future fossils is going to level up and become a much more scientific podcast. As I prepare and research the book that I'm writing about Jurassic Park and its legacy and the relationship It has to ILM and SFI and the Institute of Eco Technics. And all of these other visionary projects that sprouted in the eighties and nineties to transition from the analog to the digital the collapse of the boundaries between the real and the virtual, the human and the non human worlds, it's gonna be a very very ambitious book and a very very ambitious book club. And I hope that you will get in there because obviously now I am out in the rain as an independent producer and very much need can benefit from and am deeply grateful for your support for this work in order to make things happen and in order to keep my family fed, get the lights on here with future fossils. So with that, I wanna thank all of the new supporters of the show that have crawled out of the woodwork over the last few weeks, including Raefsler Oingo, Brian in the archaeologist, Philip Rice, Gerald Bilak, Jamie Curcio, Jeff Hanson who bought my music, Kuaime, Mary Castello, VR squared, Nastia teaches, community health com, Ed Mulder, Cody Couiac, bought my music, Simon Heiduke, amazing visionary artist. I recommend you check out, Kayla Peters. Yeah. All of you, I just wow. Thank you so much. It's gonna be a complete melee in this book club. I'm super excited to meet you all. I will send out details about the call details for the twenty ninth sometime in the next few days via a sub tag in Patreon.0:06:09The amount of support that I've received through this transition has been incredible and it's empowering me to do wonderful things for you such as the recently released secret videos of the life sets I performed with comedian Shane Moss supporting him, opening for him here in Santa Fe. His two sold out shows at the Jean Coutu cinema where did the cyber guitar performances. And if you're a subscriber, you can watch me goofing off with my pedal board. There's a ton of material. I'm gonna continue to do that. I've got a lot of really exciting concerts coming up in the next few months that we're gonna get large group and also solo performance recordings from and I'm gonna make those available in a much more resplendent way to supporters as well as the soundtrack to Mark Nelson of the Institute of Eco Technics, his UC San Diego, Art Museum, exhibit retrospective looking at BioSphere two. I'm doing music for that and that's dropping. The the opening of that event is April twenty seventh. There's gonna be a live zoom event for that and then I'm gonna push the music out as well for that.0:07:45So, yeah, thank you all. I really, really appreciate you listening to the show. I am excited to share this episode with you. KMO is just a trove. Of insight and experience. I mean, he's like a perfect entry into the digital history museum that this show was predicated upon. So with that and also, of course, Kevin Willett is just magnificent. And for the record, stick around at the end of the conversation. We have some additional pieces about AI, and I think you're gonna really enjoy it. And yeah, thank you. Here we go. Alright. Cool.0:09:26Well, we just had a lovely hour of discussion for the new KMO podcast. And now I'm here with KMO who is The most inveterate podcaster I know. And I know a lot of them. Early adopts. And I think that weird means what you think it means. Inventor it. Okay. Yes. Hey, answer to both. Go ahead. I mean, you're not yet legless and panhandling. So prefer to think of it in term in terms of August estimation. Yeah. And am I allowed to say Kevin Walnut because I've had you as a host on True. Yeah. My last name was appeared on your show. It hasn't appeared on camos yet, but I don't really care. Okay. Great. Yeah. Karen Arthur Womlett, who is one of the most solid and upstanding and widely read and just generous people, I think I know here in Santa Fe or maybe anywhere. With excellent taste and podcasts. Yes. And who is delicious meat I am sampling right now as probably the first episode of future fossils where I've had an alcoholic beverage in my hand. Well, I mean, it's I haven't deprived myself. Of fun. And I think if you're still listening to the show after all these years, you probably inferred that. But at any rate, Welcome on board. Thank you. Thanks. Pleasure to be here.0:10:49So before we started rolling, I guess, so the whole conversation that we just had for your show camera was very much about my thoughts on the social epistemology crisis and on science fiction and deep fakes and all of these kinds of weird ontology and these kinds of things. But in between calls, we were just talking about how much you detest the first two seasons of Star Trek card and of Discovery. And as somebody, I didn't bother with doing this. I didn't send you this before we spoke, but I actually did write an SIN defense of those shows. No one. Yeah. So I am not attached to my opinion on this, but And I actually do wanna at some point double back and hear storytelling because when he had lunch and he had a bunch of personal life stuff that was really interesting. And juicy and I think worthy of discussion. But simply because it's hot on the rail right now, I wanna hear you talk about Star Trek. And both of you, actually, I know are very big fans of this franchise. I think fans are often the ones from whom a critic is most important and deserved. And so I welcome your unhinged rants. Alright. Well, first, I'll start off by quoting Kevin's brother, the linguist, who says, That which brings us closer to Star Trek is progress. But I'd have to say that which brings us closer to Gene Rottenberry and Rick Berman era Star Trek. Is progress. That which brings us closer to Kurtzmann. What's his first name? Alex. Alex Kurtzmann, Star Trek. Well, that's not even the future. I mean, that's just that's our drama right now with inconsistent Star Trek drag draped over it.0:12:35I liked the first JJ Abrams' Star Trek. I think it was two thousand nine with Chris Pine and Zachary Qinto and Karl Urban and Joey Saldana. I liked the casting. I liked the energy. It was fun. I can still put that movie on and enjoy it. But each one after that just seem to double down on the dumb and just hold that arm's length any of the philosophical stuff that was just amazing from Star Trek: The Next Generation or any of the long term character building, which was like from Deep Space nine.0:13:09And before seven of nine showed up on on Voyager, you really had to be a dedicated Star Trek fan to put up with early season's Voyager, but I did because I am. But then once she came on board and it was hilarious. They brought her onboard. I remember seeing Jerry Ryan in her cat suit on the cover of a magazine and just roll in my eyes and think, oh my gosh, this show is in such deep trouble through sinking to this level to try to save it. But she was brilliant. She was brilliant in that show and she and Robert Percardo as the doctor. I mean, it basically became the seven of nine and the doctor show co starring the rest of the cast of Voyager. And it was so great.0:13:46I love to hear them singing together and just all the dynamics of I'm human, but I was I basically came up in a cybernetic collective and that's much more comfortable to me. And I don't really have the option of going back it. So I gotta make the best of where I am, but I feel really superior to all of you. Is such it was such a charming dynamic. I absolutely loved it. Yes. And then I think a show that is hated even by Star Trek fans Enterprise. Loved Enterprise.0:14:15And, yes, the first three seasons out of four were pretty rough. Actually, the first two were pretty rough. The third season was that Zendy Ark in the the expanse. That was pretty good. And then season four was just astounding. It's like they really found their voice and then what's his name at CBS Paramount.0:14:32He's gone now. He got me too. What's his name? Les Moonves? Said, no. I don't like Star Trek. He couldn't he didn't know the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek. That was his level of engagement.0:14:44And he's I really like J.0:14:46J.0:14:46Abrams. What's that? You mean J. J. Abrams. Yeah. I think J. J. Is I like some of J. Abrams early films. I really like super eight. He's clearly his early films were clearly an homage to, like, eighties, Spielberg stuff, and Spielberg gets the emotional beats right, and JJ Abrams was mimicking that, and his early stuff really works. It's just when he starts adapting properties that I really love. And he's coming at it from a marketing standpoint first and a, hey, we're just gonna do the lost mystery box thing. We're gonna set up a bunch questions to which we don't know the answers, and it'll be up to somebody else to figure it out, somebody down the line. I as I told you, between our conversations before we were recording. I really enjoy or maybe I said it early in this one. I really like that first J. J. Abrams, Star Trek: Foam, and then everyone thereafter, including the one that Simon Pegg really had a hand in because he's clear fan. Yeah. Yeah. But they brought in director from one of the fast and the furious films and they tried to make it an action film on.0:15:45This is not Star Trek, dude. This is not why we like Star Trek. It's not for the flash, particularly -- Oh my god. -- again, in the first one, it was a stylistic choice. I'd like it, then after that is that's the substance of this, isn't it? It's the lens flares. I mean, that that's your attempt at philosophy. It's this the lens flares. That's your attempt at a moral dilemma. I don't know.0:16:07I kinda hate to start off on this because this is something about which I feel like intense emotion and it's negative. And I don't want that to be my first impression. I'm really negative about something. Well, one of the things about this show is that I always joke that maybe I shouldn't edit it because The thing that's most interesting to archaeologists is often the trash mitt and here I am tidying this thing up to be presentable to future historians or whatever like it I can sync to that for sure. Yeah. I'm sorry. The fact of it is you're not gonna know everything and we want it that way. No. It's okay. We'll get around to the stuff that I like. But yeah. So anyway yeah.0:16:44So I could just preassociate on Stretrick for a while, so maybe a focusing question. Well, but first, you said there's a you had more to say, but you were I this this tasteful perspective. This is awesome. Well, I do have a focus on question for you. So let me just have you ask it because for me to get into I basically I'm alienated right now from somebody that I've been really good friends with since high school.0:17:08Because over the last decade, culturally, we have bifurcated into the hard right, hard left. And I've tried not to go either way, but the hard left irritates me more than the hard right right now. And he is unquestionably on the hard left side. And I know for people who are dedicated Marxist, or really grounded in, like, materialism and the material well-being of workers that the current SJW fanaticism isn't leftist. It's just crazed. We try to put everything, smash everything down onto this left right spectrum, and it's pretty easy to say who's on the left and who's on the right even if a two dimensional, two axis graph would be much more expressive and nuanced.0:17:49Anyway, what's your focus in question? Well, And I think there is actually there is a kind of a when we ended your last episode talking about the bell riots from d s nine -- Mhmm. -- that, you know, how old five? Yeah. Twenty four. Ninety five did and did not accurately predict the kind of technological and economic conditions of this decade. It predicted the conditions Very well. Go ahead and finish your question. Yeah. Right.0:18:14That's another thing that's retreated in picard season two, and it was actually worth it. Yeah. Like, it was the fact that they decided to go back there was part of the defense that I made about that show and about Discovery's jump into the distant future and the way that they treated that I posted to medium a year or two ago when I was just watching through season two of picard. And for me, the thing that I liked about it was that they're making an effort to reconcile the wonder and the Ethiopian promise And, you know, this Kevin Kelly or rather would call Blake Protopian, right, that we make these improvements and that they're often just merely into incremental improvements the way that was it MLK quoted that abolitionists about the long arc of moral progress of moral justice. You know, I think that there's something to that and patitis into the last this is a long question. I'm mad at I'm mad at these. Thank you all for tolerating me.0:19:22But the when to tie it into the epistemology question, I remember this seeing this impactful lecture by Carnegie Mellon and SFI professor Simon Didayo who was talking about how by running statistical analysis on the history of the proceedings of the Royal Society, which is the oldest scientific journal, that you could see what looked like a stock market curve in sentiment analysis about the confidence that scientists had at the prospect of unifying knowledge. And so you have, like, conciliance r s curve here that showed that knowledge would be more and more unified for about a century or a hundred and fifty years then it would go through fifty years of decline where something had happened, which was a success of knowledge production. Had outpaced our ability to integrate it. So we go through these kinds of, like, psychedelic peak experiences collectively, and then we have sit there with our heads in our hands and make sense of everything that we've learned over the last century and a half and go through a kind of a deconstructive epoch. Where we don't feel like the center is gonna hold anymore. And that is what I actually As as disappointing as I accept that it is and acknowledge that it is to people who were really fueling themselves on that more gene rottenberry era prompt vision for a better society, I actually appreciated this this effort to explore and address in the shows the way that they could pop that bubble.0:21:03And, like, it's on the one hand, it's boring because everybody's trying to do the moral complexity, anti hero, people are flawed, thing in narrative now because we have a general loss of faith in our institutions and in our rows. On the other hand, like, that's where we are and that's what we need to process And I think there is a good reason to look back at the optimism and the quarian hope of the sixties and early seventies. We're like, really, they're not so much the seventies, but look back on that stuff and say, we wanna keep telling these stories, but we wanna tell it in a way that acknowledges that the eighties happened. And that this is you got Tim Leary, and then you've got Ronald Reagan. And then That just or Dick Nixon. And like these things they wash back and forth. And so it's not unreasonable to imagine that in even in a world that has managed to how do you even keep a big society like that coherent? It has to suffer kind of fabric collapses along the way at different points. And so I'm just curious your thoughts about that. And then I do have another prompt, but I wanna give Kevin the opportunity to respond to this as well as to address some of the prompts that you brought to this conversation? This is a conversation prompt while we weren't recording. It has nothing to do with Sartreks. I'll save that for later. Okay.0:22:25Well, everything you just said was in some way related to a defense of Alex Kurtzmann Star Trek. And it's not my original idea. I'm channeling somebody from YouTube, surely. But Don't get points for theme if the storytelling is incompetent. That's what I was gonna Yeah. And the storytelling in all of Star Trek: Discovery, and in the first two seasons of picard was simply incompetent.0:22:53When Star Trek, the next generation was running, they would do twenty, twenty four, sometimes more episodes in one season. These days, the season of TVs, eight episodes, ten, and they spend a lot more money on each episode. There's a lot more special effects. There's a lot more production value. Whereas Star Trek: The Next Generation was, okay, we have these standing sets. We have costumes for our actors. We have Two dollars for special effects. You better not introduce a new alien spaceship. It that costs money. We have to design it. We have to build it. So use existing stuff. Well, what do you have? You have a bunch of good actors and you have a bunch of good writers who know how to tell a story and craft dialogue and create tension and investment with basically a stage play and nothing in the Kerstmann era except one might argue and I would have sympathy strange new worlds. Comes anywhere close to that level of competence, which was on display for decades. From Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space nines, Star Trek Voyager, and Star Trek Enterprise. And so, I mean, I guess, in that respect, it's worth asking because, I mean, all of us, I think, are fans of Deep Space nine.0:24:03You don't think that it's a shift in focus. You don't think that strange in world is exempt because it went back to a more episodic format because what you're talking about is the ability for rather than a show runner or a team of show runners to craft a huge season, long dramatic arc. You've got people that are like Harlan Ellison in the original series able to bring a really potent one off idea to the table and drop it. And so there are there's all of those old shows are inconsistent from episode to episode. Some are they have specific writers that they would bring back again and that you could count to knock out of the park. Yeah. DC Fontana. Yeah.0:24:45So I'm curious to your thoughts on that as well as another part of this, which is when we talk when we talk your show about Doug Rushkoff and and narrative collapse, and he talks about how viewers just have different a way, it's almost like d s nine was possibly partially responsible for this change in what people expected from so. From television programming in the documentary that was made about that show and they talk about how people weren't ready for cereal. I mean, for I mean, yeah, for these long arcs, And so there is there's this question now about how much of this sort of like tiresome moral complexity and dragging narrative and all of this and, like, things like Westworld where it becomes so baroque and complicated that, like, you have, like, die hard fans like me that love it, but then you have a lot of people that just lost interest. They blacked out because the show was trying to tell a story that was, like, too intricate like, too complicated that the the show runners themselves got lost. And so that's a JJ Abrams thing too, the puzzle the mystery box thing where You get to the end of five seasons of lost and you're like, dude, did you just forget?0:25:56Did you wake up five c five episodes ago and just, oh, right. Right. We're like a chatbot that only give you very convincing answers based on just the last two or three interactions. But you don't remember the scene that we set. Ten ten responses ago. Hey. You know, actually, red articles were forget who it was, which series it was, they were saying that there's so many leaks and spoilers in getting out of the Internet that potentially the writers don't know where they're going because that way it can't be with the Internet. Yeah. Sounds interesting. Yeah. That sounds like cover for incompetence to be.0:26:29I mean, on the other hand, I mean, you did hear, like, Nolan and Joy talking about how they would they were obsessed with the Westworld subreddit and the fan theories and would try to dodge Like, if they had something in their mind that they found out that people are re anticipating, they would try to rewrite it. And so there is something about this that I think is really speaks to the nature of because I do wanna loop in your thoughts on AI to because you're talking about this being a favorite topic. Something about the, like, trying to The demands on the self made by predatory surveillance technologies are such that the I'm convinced the adaptive response is that we become more stochastic or inconsistent in our identities. And that we kind of sublimate from a more solid state of identity to or through a liquid kind of modernity biologic environment to a gaseous state of identity. That is harder to place sorry, harder to track. And so I think that this is also part of and this is the other question I wanted to ask you, and then I'm just gonna shut up for fifteen minutes is do you when you talk about loving Robert Ricardo and Jerry Ryan as the doctor at seven zero nine, One of the interesting things about that relationship is akin to stuff.0:27:52I know you've heard on Kevin have heard on future fossils about my love for Blade Runner twenty forty nine and how it explores all of these different these different points along a gradient between what we think of in the current sort of general understanding as the human and the machine. And so there's this thing about seven, right, where she's She's a human who wants to be a machine. And then there's this thing about the doctor where he's a machine that wants to be a human. And you have to grant both on a logical statuses to both of them. And that's why I think they're the two most interesting characters. Right?0:28:26And so at any rate, like, this is that's there's I've seen writing recently on the Turing test and how, like, really, there should be a reverse Turing test to see if people that have become utterly reliant on outboard cognition and information processing. They can pass the drink. Right. Are they philosophical zombies now? Are they are they having some an experience that that, you know, people like, thick and and shilling and the missing and these people would consider the modern self or are they something else have we moved on to another more routine robotic kind of category of being? I don't know. There's just a lot there, but -- Well done. -- considering everything you just said, In twenty words or less, what's your question? See, even more, like I said, do you have the inveterate podcaster? I'd say There's all of those things I just spoke about are ways in which what we are as people and the nature of our media, feedback into fourth, into each other. And so I would just love to hear you reflect on any of that, be it through the lens of Star Trek or just through the lens of discussion on AI. And we'll just let the ball roll downhill. So with the aim of framing something positively rather than negatively.0:29:47In the late nineties, mid to late nineties. We got the X Files. And the X Files for the first few seasons was so It was so engaging for me because Prior to that, there had been Hollywood tropes about aliens, which informed a lot of science fiction that didn't really connect with the actual reported experience of people who claim to have encountered either UFOs, now called UAPs, or had close encounters physical contact. Type encounters with seeming aliens. And it really seemed like Chris Carter, who was the showrunner, was reading the same Usenet Newsgroups that I was reading about those topics. Like, really, we had suddenly, for the first time, except maybe for comedian, you had the Grey's, and you had characters experiencing things that just seemed ripped right out of the reports that people were making on USnet, which for young folks, this is like pre Worldwide Web. It was Internet, but with no pictures. It's all text. Good old days from my perspective is a grumpy old gen xer. And so, yeah, that was a breakthrough moment.0:30:54Any this because you mentioned it in terms of Jonathan Nolan and his co writer on Westworld, reading the subreddit, the West and people figured out almost immediately that there were two interweaving time lines set decades apart and that there's one character, the old guy played by Ed Harris, and the young guy played by I don't remember the actor. But, you know, that they were the same character and that the inveterate white hat in the beginning turns into the inveterate black cat who's just there for the perverse thrill of tormenting the hosts as the robots are called. And the thing that I love most about that first season, two things. One, Anthony Hopkins. Say no more. Two, the revelation that the park has been basically copying humans or figuring out what humans are by closely monitoring their behavior in the park and the realization that the hosts come to is that, holy shit compared to us, humans are very simple creatures. We are much more complex. We are much more sophisticated, nuanced conscious, we feel more than the humans do, and that humans use us to play out their perverse and sadistic fantasies. To me, that was the takeaway message from season one.0:32:05And then I thought every season after that was just diluted and confused and not really coherent. And in particular, I haven't if there's a fourth season, haven't There was and then the show got canceled before they could finish the story. They had the line in season three. It was done after season three. And I was super happy to see Let's see after who plays Jesse Pinkman? Oh, no. Aaron oh, shit. Paul. Yes. Yeah. I was super happy to see him and something substantial and I was really pleased to see him included in the show and it's like, oh, that's what you're doing with him? They did a lot more interesting stuff with him in season four. I did they. They did a very much more interesting stuff. I think it was done after season three. If you tell me season four is worth taking in, I blow. I thought it was.0:32:43But again, I only watch television under very specific set of circumstances, and that's how I managed to enjoy television because I was a fierce and unrepentant hyperlogical critic of all media as a child until I managed to start smoking weed. And then I learned to enjoy myself. As we mentioned in the kitchen as I mentioned in the kitchen, if I smoke enough weed, Star Trek: Discovery is pretty and I can enjoy it on just a second by second level where if I don't remember what the character said thirty seconds ago, I'm okay. But I absolutely loved in season two when they brought in Hanson Mountain as as Christopher Pike. He's suddenly on the discovery and he's in the captain's chair. And it's like he's speaking for the audience. The first thing he says is, hey, why don't we turn on the lights? And then hey, all you people sitting around the bridge. We've been looking at your faces for a whole season. We don't even think about you. Listen to a round of introductions. Who are you? Who are you? It's it's if I were on set. You got to speak.0:33:53The writers is, who are these characters? We've been looking at them every single episode for a whole season. I don't know their names. I don't know anything about them. Why are they even here? Why is it not just Michael Burnham and an automated ship? And then it was for a while -- Yeah. -- which is funny. Yeah. To that point, And I think this kind of doubles back. The thing that I love about bringing him on and all of the people involved in strange and worlds in particular, is that these were lifelong fans of this series, I mean, of this world. Yeah. And so in that way, gets to this the idiosyncrasy question we're orbiting here, which is when these things are when the baton is passed well, it's passed to people who have now grown up with this stuff.0:34:40I personally cannot stand Jurassic World. Like, I think that Colin Trivaro should never have been in put at the reins. Which one did he direct? Oh, he did off he did first and the third. Okay. But, I mean, he was involved in all three very heavily.0:34:56And there's something just right at the outset of that first Jurassic World where you realize that this is not a film that's directly addressing the issues that Michael Creighton was trying to explore here. It's a film about its own franchise. It's a film about the fact that they can't just stop doing the same thing over and over again as we expect a different question. How can we not do it again? Right. And so it's actually, like, unpleasantly soft, conscious, in that way that I can't remember I'll try to find it for the show notes, but there's an Internet film reviewer who is talking about what happens when, like, all cinema has to take this self referential turn.0:35:34No. And films like Logan do it really well. But there are plenty of examples where it's just cheeky and self aware because that's what the ironic sensibility is obsessed with. And so, yeah, there's a lot of that where it's, like, you're talking about, like, Abrams and the the Star Wars seven and you know, that whole trilogy of Disney Star Wars, where it's, in my opinion, completely fumbled because there it's just empty fan service, whereas when you get to Andor, love Andor. Andor is amazing because they're capable of providing all of those emotional beats that the fans want and the ref the internal references and good dialogue. But they're able to write it in a way that's and shoot it in a way. Gilroy and Bo Willeman, basic of the people responsible for the excellent dialogue in Andor.0:36:31And I love the production design. I love all the stuff set on Coruscant, where you saw Coruscant a lot in the prequel trilogy, and it's all dayglow and bright and just in your face. And it's recognizable as Coruscant in andor, but it's dour. It's metropolis. It's all grays and it's and it's highlighting the disparity between where the wealthy live and where the poor live, which Lucas showed that in the prequel trilogy, but even in the sports bar where somebody tries to sell death sticks to Obi wan. So it's super clean and bright and just, you know, It shines too much. Personally though, and I just wanna stress, KMO is not grumpy media dude, I mean, this is a tiny fraction about, but I am wasting this interview with you. Love. All of the Dave Felloni animated Star Wars stuff, even rebels. Love it all.0:37:26I I'm so glad they aged up the character and I felt less guilty about loving and must staying after ahsoka tano? My favorite Star Wars character is ahsoka tano. But if you only watch the live action movies, you're like who? Well, I guess now that she's been on the Mandalorian, he's got tiny sliver of a foothold -- Yeah. -- in the super mainstream Star Wars. And that was done well, I thought. It was. I'm so sorry that Ashley Epstein doesn't have any part in it. But Rosario Dawson looks the part. She looks like a middle aged Asaka and think they tried to do some stuff in live action, which really should have been CGI because it's been established that the Jedi can really move, and she looked human. Which she is? If you put me on film, I'm gonna lick human. Right. Not if you're Canada Reeves, I guess. You got that. Yeah. But yeah.0:38:09So I do wanna just go real briefly back to this question with you about because we briefly talked about chat, GPT, and these other things in your half of this. And, yeah, I found out just the other night my friend, the t ferry, asked Chad g p t about me, and it gave a rather plausible and factual answer. I was surprised and That's what these language models do. They put plausible answers. But when you're doing search, you want correct answers. Right. I'm very good at that. Right. Then someone shared this Michelle Bowen's actually the famous PTP guy named him. Yeah. So, you know, So Michelle shared this article by Steven Hales and Colette, that was basically making the argument that there are now they're gonna be all these philosophical zombies, acting as intelligent agents sitting at the table of civilization, and there will be all the philosophical zombies of the people who have entirely yielded their agency to them, and they will be cohabitating with the rest of us.0:39:14And what an unpleasant scenario, So in light of that, and I might I'd love to hear you weave that together with your your thoughts on seven zero nine and the doctor and on Blade Runner twenty forty nine. And this thing that we're fumbling through as a species right now. Like, how do we got a new sort of taxonomy? Does your not audience need like a minute primer on P zombies? Might as well. Go for it.0:39:38So a philosophical zombie is somebody who behaves exactly like an insult person or a person with interior experience or subjective experience, but they don't have any subjective experience. And in Pardon me for interrupt. Wasn't that the question about the the book we read in your book club, a blind sign in this box? Yes. It's a black box, a drawn circle. Yeah. Chinese room experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Look, Daniel, it goes out. You don't know, it goes on inside the room. Chinese room, that's a tangent. We can come back to it. P. Zombie. P. Zombie is somebody or is it is an entity. It's basically a puppet. It looks human. It acts human. It talks like a human. It will pass a Turing test, but it has no interior experience.0:40:25And when I was going to grad school for philosophy of mind in the nineteen nineties, this was all very out there. There was no example of something that had linguistic competence. Which did not have internal experience. But now we have large language models and generative pretrained transformer based chatbots that don't have any internal experience. And yet, when you interact with them, it seems like there is somebody there There's a personality there. And if you go from one model to a different, it's a very different personality. It is distinctly different. And yet we have no reason to believe that they have any sort of internal experience.0:41:01So what AI in the last decade and what advances has demonstrated to us and really even before the last decade You back in the nineties when the blue beat Gary Casper off at at chess. And what had been the one of the defining characteristics of human intelligence was we're really good at this abstract mathematical stuff. And yeah, calculators can calculate pie in a way that we can't or they can cube roots in a way that humans generally can't, creative in their application of these methodologies And all of a sudden, well, yeah, it kinda seems like they are. And then when what was an alpha go -- Mhmm. -- when it be to least a doll in go, which is a much more complex game than chess and much more intuitive based. That's when we really had to say, hey, wait a minute. Maybe this notion that These things are the exclusive province of us because we have a special sort of self awareness. That's bunk. And the development of large language models since then has absolutely demonstrated that competence, particularly linguistic competence and in creative activities like painting and poetry and things like that, you don't need a soul, you don't even need to sense a self, it's pretty it's a pretty simple hack, actually. And Vahrv's large language models and complex statistical modeling and things, but it doesn't require a soul.0:42:19So that was the Peter Watts' point in blindsight. Right? Which is Look revolves around are do these things have a subjective experience, and do they not these aliens that they encounter? I've read nothing but good things about that book and I've read. It's extraordinary. But his lovecrafty and thesis is that you actually lovecraftian in twenty twenty three. Oh, yeah. In the world, there's more lovecraftian now than it was when he was writing. Right? So cough about the conclusion of a Star Trek card, which is season of Kraft yet. Yes. That's a that's a com Yeah. The holes in his fan sense. But that was another show that did this I liked for asking this question.0:42:54I mean, at this point, you either have seen this or you haven't you never will. The what the fuck turn when they upload picard into a synth body and the way that they're dealing with the this the pinocchio question Let's talk about Blade Runner twenty forty nine. Yeah. But I mean yeah. So I didn't like the wave I did not like the wave of card handled that. I love the wave and Blade Runner handled it. So you get no points for themes. Yeah. Don't deliver on story and character and coherence. Yeah. Fair. But yeah. And to be not the dog, Patrick Stewart, because it's clear from the ready room just being a part of this is so emotional and so awesome for everyone involved. And it's It's beautiful. Beautiful. But does when you when you see these, like, entertainment weekly interviews with Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard about Jurassic World, and it's clear that actors are just so excited to be involved in a franchise that they're willing to just jettison any kind of discretion about how the way that it's being treated. They also have a contractual obligation to speak in positive terms about -- They do. -- of what they feel. Right. Nobody's yeah. Nobody's doing Shout out to Rystellis Howard, daughter of Ron Howard.0:44:11She was a director, at least in the first season, maybe the second season of the Mandalorian. And her episodes I mean, I she brought a particular like, they had Bryce Dallas Howard, Tico, ITT, directed some episodes. Deborah Chow, who did all of Obi wan, which just sucked. But her contributions to the Mandalorian, they had a particular voice. And because that show is episodic, Each show while having a place in a larger narrative is has a beginning middle and end that you can bring in a director with a particular voice and give that episode that voice, and I really liked it. And I really liked miss Howard's contribution.0:44:49She also in an episode of Black Mirror. The one where everyone has a social credit score. Knows Donuts. Black Mirror is a funny thing because It's like, reality outpaces it. Yeah. I think maybe Charlie Bruker's given up on it because they haven't done it in a while. Yeah. If you watch someone was now, like, five, six years later, it's, yes, or what? See, yes. See, damn. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But yeah. I don't know. I just thing that I keep circling and I guess we come to on the show a lot is the way that memory forms work substantiates an integrity in society and in the way that we relate to things and the way that we think critically about the claims that are made on truth and so on and say, yeah, I don't know. That leads right into the largest conversation prompt that I had about AI. Okay? So we were joking when we set up this date that this was like the trial logs between Terence Buchanan and Rupert Shell Drake. And what's his name? Real Abraham. Yeah. Yeah. All Abraham. And Rupert Shell Drake is most famous for a steward of Morphe resin.0:45:56So does AI I've never really believed that Norfolk residents forms the base of human memory, but is that how AI works? It brings these shapes from the past and creates new instantiation of them in the present. Is AI practicing morphic resonance in real life even if humans are or not? I've had a lot of interaction with AI chatbots recently. And as I say, different models produce different seeming personalities. And you can tell, like, you can just quiz them. Hey, we're talking about this. Do you remember what I said about it ten minutes ago? And, no, they don't remember more than the last few exchanges.0:46:30And yet, there seems to be a continuity that belies the lack of short term memory. And is that more for residents or is that what's the word love seeing shapes and clouds parad paradolia. Yeah. Is that me imparting this continuity of personality to the thing, which is really just spitting out stuff, which is designed to seem plausible given what the input was. And I can't answer that. Or it's like Steven Nagmanovich in free play talks about somewhat I'm hoping to have on the show at some point.0:47:03This year talks about being a professional improviser and how really improvisation is just composition at a much faster timescale. And composition is just improvisation with the longer memory. And how when I started to think about it in those terms, the continuity that you're talking about is the continuity of an Alzheimer's patient who can't remember that their children have grown up and You know, that that's you have to think about it because you can recognize the Alzheimer's and your patient as your dad, even though he doesn't recognize you, there is something more to a person than their memories. And conversely, if you can store and replicate and move the memories to a different medium, have you moved the person? Maybe not. Yeah. So, yeah, that's interesting because that gets to this more sort of essentialist question about the human self. Right. Blade Runner twenty forty nine. Yeah. Go there. Go there. A joy. Yes.0:47:58So in Blade Runner twenty forty nine, we have our protagonist Kaye, who is a replicant. He doesn't even have a name, but he's got this AI holographic girlfriend. But the ad for the girlfriend, she's naked. When he comes home, she is She's constantly changing clothes, but it's always wholesome like nineteen fifty ish a tire and she's making dinner for him and she lays the holographic dinner over his very prosaic like microwave dinner. And she's always encouraging him to be more than he is. And when he starts to uncover the evidence that he might be like this chosen one, like replicant that was born rather than made.0:48:38She's all about it. She's, yes, you're real, and she wants to call him Joe's. K is not a name. That's just the first letter in your serial number. You're Joe. I'm gonna call you Joe.0:48:46And then when she's about to be destroyed, The last thing is she just rushes to me. She says, I love you. But then later he encounters an ad for her and it's an interactive ad. And she says, you looked tired. You're a good Joe. And he realizes and hopefully the attentive audience realizes as real as she seemed earlier, as vital, and as much as she seemed like an insult being earlier, she's not. That was her programming. She's designed to make you feel good by telling you what you want to hear. And he has that realization. And at that point, he's there's no hope for me. I'm gonna help this Rick Deckard guy hook up with his daughter, and then I'm just gonna lie down and bleed to death. Because my whole freaking existence was a lie. But he's not bitter. He seems to be at peace. I love that. That's a beautiful angle on that film or a slice of it. And So it raises this other question that I wanted to ask, which was about the Coke and Tiononi have that theory of consciousness.0:49:48That's one of the leading theories contending with, like, global workspace, which is integrated information. And so they want to assign consciousness as a continuous value that grayates over degree to which a system is integrated. So it's coming out of this kind of complex systems semi panpsychist thing that actually doesn't trace interiority all the way down in the way that some pants, I guess, want it to be, but it does a kind of Alfred North Whitehead thing where they're willing to say that Whitehead wanted to say that even a photon has, like, the quantum of mind to accompany its quantum of matter, but Tinutti and Coker saying, we're willing to give like a thermostat the quantum here because it is in some way passing enough information around inside of itself in loops. That it has that accursive component to it. And so that's the thing that I wonder about these, and that's the critique that's made by people like Melanie about diffusion models like GPT that are not they're not self aware because there's no loop from the outputs back into the input.0:51:09And there isn't the training. Yeah. There there is something called backwards propagation where -- Yes. -- when you get an output that you'd like, you can run a backward propagation algorithm back through the black box basically to reinforce the patterns of activation that you didn't program. They just happen, easily, but you like the output and you can reinforce it. There's no biological equivalent of that. Yeah. Particularly, not particularly irritating.0:51:34I grind my teeth a little bit when people say, oh, yeah, these neural net algorithms they've learned, like humans learn, no, they don't. Absolutely do not. And in fact, if we learned the way they did, we would be pathetic because we learn in a much more elegant way. We need just a very few examples of something in order to make a generalization and to act on it, whereas these large language models, they need billions of repetitions. So that's I'm tapping my knee here to to indicate a reflex.0:52:02You just touched on something that generates an automatic response from me, and now I've come to consciousness having. So I wanted it in that way. So I'm back on. Or good, Joe. Yeah. What about you, man? What does the stir up for you? Oh, I got BlueCall and I have this particular part. It's interesting way of putting it off and struggling to define the difference between a human and AI and the fact that we can do pattern recognition with very few example. That's a good margin. In a narrow range, though, within the context of something which answers to our survival. Yes. We are not evolved to understand the universe. We are evolved to survive in it and reproduce and project part of ourselves into the future. Underwritten conditions with Roberto, I went a hundred thousand years ago. Yeah. Exactly. So that's related. I just thought I talked about this guy, Gary Tomlinson, who is a biosemietition, which is semiative? Yes.0:52:55Biosymiotics being the field that seeks to understand how different systems, human and nonhuman, make sense of and communicate their world through signs, and through signals and indices and symbols and the way that we form models and make these inferences that are experienced. Right? And there are a lot of people like evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith, who thought they were what Thomas had called semantic universalists that thought that meaning making through representation is something that could be traced all the way down. And there are other people like Tomlinson who think that there is a difference of kind, not just merely a matter of degree, between human symbolic communication and representational thinking and that of simpler forms. So, like, that whole question of whether this is a matter of kind or a matter of degree between what humans are doing and what GPT is doing and how much that has to do with this sort of Doug Hofstetter and Varella question about the way that feedback loops, constitutes important structure in those cognitive networks or whatever.0:54:18This is I just wanna pursue that a little bit more with you and see kinda, like, where do you think that AI as we have it now is capable of deepening in a way that makes it to AGI? Or do you because a lot of people do, like, People working in deep mind are just like, yeah, just give us a couple more years and this approach is gonna work. And then other people are saying, no, there's something about the topology of the networks that is fundamentally broken. And it's never gonna generate consciousness. Two answers. Yeah. One, No. This is not AGI. It's not it's not gonna bootstrap up into AGI. It doesn't matter how many billions of parameters you add to the models. Two, from your perspective and my perspective and Kevin's perspective, we're never gonna know when we cross over from dumb but seemingly we're done but competent systems to competent, extremely competent and self aware. We're never gonna know because from the get go from now, from from the days of Eliza, there has been a human artifice at work in making these things seem as if they have a point of view, as if they have subjectivity. And so, like Blake Limone at Google, he claimed to be convinced that Lambda was self aware.0:55:35But if you read the transcripts that he released, if his conversations with Lambda, it is clear from the get go he assigns Lambda the role of a sentient AGI, which feels like it is being abused and which needs rep legal representation. And it dutifully takes on that role and says, yes. I'm afraid of you humans. I'm afraid of how you're treating me. I'm afraid I'm gonna be turned off. I need a lawyer. And prior to that, Soon Darpichai, in a demonstration of Lambda, he poses the question to it, you are the planet Jupiter. I'm gonna pose questions to you as are the planet Jupiter, answer them from that point of view. And it does. It's job. But it's really good at its job. It's this comes from Max Techmark. Who wrote to what a life three point o? Is it two point o or three point I think it's three point o.0:56:19Think about artificial intelligence in terms of actual intelligence or actual replication of what we consider valuable about ourselves. But really, that's beside the point. What we need to worry about is their competence. How good are they at solving problems in the world? And they're getting really good. In this whole question of are they alive? Do they have self awareness? From our perspective, it's beside the point. From their perspective, of course, it would be hugely important.0:56:43And this is something that Black Mirror brings up a lot is the idea that you can create a being that suffers, and then you have it suffer in an accelerated time. So it suffers for an eternity over lunch. That's something we absolutely want to avoid. And personally, I think it's we should probably not make any effort. We should probably make a positive effort to make sure these things never develop. Subjective experience because that does provide the potential for creating hell, an infinity of suffering an infinite amount of subjective experience of torment, which we don't want to do. That would be a bad thing, morally speaking, ethically speaking. Three right now. If you're on the labor market, you still have to pay humans by the hour. Right? And try to pay them as little as possible. But, yeah, just I think that's the thing that probably really excites that statistically greater than normal population of sociopathic CEOs. Right? Is the possibility that you could be paying the same amount of money for ten times as much suffering. Right. I'm I'm reminded of the Churchill eleven gravity a short time encouraging.0:57:51Nothing but good things about this show, but I haven't seen it. Yeah. I'd love to. This fantasy store, it's a fantasy cartoon, but it has really disturbing undertones. If you just scratch the surface, you know, slightly, which is faithful to old and fairy tales. So What's your name? Princess princess princess bubble down creates this character to lemon grab. It produces an obviously other thing there, I think, handle the administrative functions of her kingdom while she goes off and has the passion and stuff. And he's always loudly talking about how much he's suffering and how terrible it is. And he's just ignoring it. He's doing his job. Yeah. I mean, that that's Black Mirror in a nutshell. I mean, I think if you if you could distill Black Mirror to just single tagline it's using technology in order to deliver disproportionate punishment. Yeah. So so that that's Steven Hale's article that I I brought up earlier mention this thing about how the replacement of horse drawn carriage by automobile was accompanied with a great deal of noise and fuhrer about people saying that horses are agents.0:59:00Their entities. They have emotional worlds. They're responsive to the world in a way that a car can never be. But that ultimately was beside the point. And that was the Peter again, Peter Watson blindsight is making this point that maybe consciousness is not actually required for intelligence in the vesting superior forms of intelligence have evolved elsewhere in the cosmos that are not stuck on the same local optimum fitness peak. That we are where we're never we're actually up against a boundary in terms of how intelligent we can be because it has to bootstrap out of our software earness in some way.0:59:35And this is that's the Kyle offspring from Charles Strauss and Alexander. Yes. Yeah. Yes. So so I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm just, like, in this space today, but usually, unfortunately.0:59:45That's the thing that I I think it's a really important philosophical question, and I wonder where you stand on this with respect to how you make sense of what we're living through right now and what we might be facing is if we Rob people like Rob and Hanson talk about the age of where emulated human minds take over the economy, and he assumes an interiority. Just for the basis of a thought experiment. But there's this other sense in which we may actually find in increasing scarcity and wish that we could place a premium on even if we can't because we've lost the reins to our economy to the vile offspring is the human. And and so are we the horses that are that in another hundred years, we're gonna be like doing equine therapy and, like, living on rich people's ranches. Everything is everything that will have moved on or how do you see this going? I mean, you've interviewed so many people you've given us so much thought over the years. If humans are the new horses, then score, we won.1:00:48Because before the automobile horses were working stiffs, they broke their leg in the street. They got shot. They got worked to death. They really got to be they were hauling mine carts out of mines. I mean, it was really sucked to be a horse. And after the automobile horses became pampered pets, Do we as humans wanna be pampered pets? Well, pampered pet or exploited disposable robot? What do you wanna be? I'll take Pampers Pet. That works for me. Interesting.1:01:16Kevin, I'm sure you have thoughts on this. I mean, you speak so much about the unfair labor relations and these things in our Facebook group and just in general, and drop in that sign. If you get me good sign, that's one of the great ones, you have to drop in. Oh, you got it. But The only real comment I have is that we're a long overdue or rethinking about what is the account before? Us or you can have something to do. Oh, educational system in collections if people will manage jobs because I was just anchored to the schools and then, you know, Our whole system perhaps is a people arguing and a busy word. And it was just long past the part where the busy word needs to be done. We're leaving thing wired. I don't know. I also just forgot about that. I'm freezing the ice, getting the hand out there. Money has been doing the busy word more and faster.1:02:12One thing I wanna say about the phrase AI, it's a moving goal post -- Yeah. -- that things that used to be considered the province of genuine AI of beating a human at go Now that an AI has beat humans at go, well, that's not really AI anymore. It's not AGI, certainly. I think you both appreciate this. I saw a single panel comic strip and it's a bunch of dinosaurs and they're looking up at guy and the big comment is coming down and they say, oh, no, the economy. Well, as someone who since college prefers to think of the economy as actually the metabolism of the entire ecology. Right? What we measure as humans is some pitifully small fraction of the actual value being created and exchanged on the planet at any time. So there is a way that's funny, but it's funny only to a specific sensibility that treats the economy as the

Charles Stross is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of six Hugo-nominated novels and winner of the 2005, 2010, and 2014 Hugo awards for best novella, he has won numerous other awards and been translated into at least 12 other languages. His award-winning series include the long-running Merchant Princes series and The Laundry Files. His latest book, Season of Skulls, is out in May 2023.It was amazing to be able to chat with Charlie, a real legend of the SF scene. He told us how it took a little time to make the move from short stories to novels, and how initially his cross-genre storytelling received some resistance - until he won a Hugo Award for it! Since then, he has been prolific, and we chat to hiim about how he comes up with his stories, and how he plans (or doesn't) his long-running series.Links:Buy Charlie's books nowVisit Charlie's websiteFollow Charlie on mastodonPage One - The Writer's Podcast is brought to you by Write Gear, creators of Page One - the Writer's Notebook. Learn more and order yours now: https://www.writegear.co.uk/page-oneFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ukPageOneFollow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ukPageOneFollow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ukpageone/Follow us on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@PageOnePod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

S.I Clarke shares her home with her partner and an assortment of waifs and strays. When not writing convoluted, inefficient stories, she spends her time telling financial services firms to behave more efficiently. When not doing either of those things, she can be found in the pub or shouting at people online — occasionally practising efficiency by doing both at once. As someone who's neurodivergent, an immigrant, and the proud owner of an invisible disability, she strives to present a realistically diverse array of characters in her stories. She's also a reader, mainly of science fiction and mysteries. Some of her favourite authors include: Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Becky Chambers, John Scalzi, Tanya Huff, Christopher Brookmyre, Robert J Sawyer, Charles Stross, Gareth Powell. Subscribers to her newsletter get her reviews of books she's enjoyed. Twitter Instagram Goodreads Webpage

The Laundry Files Roleplaying Game is based on the best-selling novels by Charles Stross. In the game, you play officers of the Laundry, that eccentric and underfunded agency dedicated to protecting the United Kingdom from unthinkable horrors. The Laundry uses the Basic Roleplaying System - the same system that powers the classic Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game (so you can easily convert adventures from one game to the other). As Laundry staff, you're trained to deal with the weird and ghastly spawn of the Mythos, you're equipped with the best equipment your committee-approved mission budget can buy, and you've got back-up on call from the SAS. All of that means you're only terrifyingly underprepared, as opposed to completely screwed, when the shoggoth hits the fan. If you want to discuss this episode, join our community Discord server!

Nach einem nicht ganz unanstrengenden Jahr braucht das geschundene Leserinnenhirn ästhetisch Angenehmes oder wenigstens was, was knallt.Für letzteres stellt Herr Falschgold zum Erwerb anheim:* die “Sandman Slim” Reihe von Richard Kadrey erschienen auf deutsch unter ungefähr dem gleichen Titel* die “The Laundry Files” Serie von Charles Stross auf deutsch genannt “Die mysteriösen Fälle des Bob Howard”* die “The Ark” Reihe, auf deutsch zum Beispiel mit dem ersten Band “Die letzte Reise der Menschheit” veröffentlichtAnne Findeisen empfiehlt:* Lisa Jewell mit “Der Fremde am Strand”* Ottessa Moshfegh mit “Eileen”* Claire Keegan mit “Kleine Dinge wie diese”Irmgard Lumpini ist überzeugt von:* Stacey Abrams “While Justice Sleeps” * den Leinengebundenen Klassikern von Penguin (Achtung: nicht direkt bei Penguin UK bestellen, durch Brexit entsteht hoher Zoll und die Bücher kommen nicht an; geht zur Buchhändlerin eures Vertrauens), zum Beispiel Virginia Woolfs “Orlando” oder H. G. Wells' “Krieg der Welten”* alles von Philip K. Dick (eine sehr schöne Reihe von Heyne ist leider nur noch antiquarisch zu erwerben), aber der Inhalt zählt. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lobundverriss.substack.com

In today's episode, we look for the fun in Charles Stross' rainbow space frogs and admire some very large gastropods.    Get your US copies of the Pamphlet here and the Magonium Mine Murders here. In the UK? Get your physical copies of the Pamphlet of Pantheons, the Magonium Mine Murders, or both direct from me. Looking for digital copies? Find them on Itch or on Drivethru.   If you're enjoying the show, why not consider supporting it on Patreon? You'll get access to lots of new bonus content, including my other podcast, Patron Deities!   Thanks to Ray Otus for our thumbnail image. The intro music is a clip from "Solve the Damn Mystery" by Jesse Spillane, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

We chat about Charles Stross' 2006 novella, Missile Gap and how Carl Sagan, Gregor Samsa, Seth Brundle and several others all ended up in the same story. https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/spring_2007/fiction_missile_gap_by_charles_stross

Join us as we sit down with award winning author, Charles Stross. We discuss his books and his creative writing process. Charlie tells us about the different directions he is taking with his latest works, and we make time to get some interesting political insights.  Check Charlie's website for books and his blog:https://www.antipope.orgFor the latest from Charlie himself, follow him on twitter. Thank you to all our listeners. We appreciate you very much and we will continue to bring great conversations and content to the world of science fiction.You can always find more Tales From The Bridge on Apple Podcasts or our website, you can also find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to see what is happening on The Bridge.Please check out our newest show, Finer Points TriviaCast Follow us on twitter to get all the latest. @FinerPoints_Watch the video trailer here: https://youtu.be/9f5ZmaHivrgCheck out our many links:Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tales-from-the-bridge-all-things-sci-fi/id1570902818Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3MQuEYGQ3HD2xTewRag8KGTwitter: @BridgeTalesInstagram: @talesfromthebridgeFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/groups/talesfromthebridge/Good Reads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/141864356-talesfrom-thebridge?shelf=readIMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17354590/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1Website: https://talesfromthebridge.buzzsprout.com/Email: talesfromthebridgepodcast@gmail.com

Brian's guest this week is literary agent Caitlin Blasdell. Caitlin began her career editing for Harvard Business School and Harper Collins before making the transition to her current job as a literary agent for Liza Dawson Associates where she has helped nurture and sell such clients as Charles Stross, Rebecca Zanetti, Zen Cho, and numerous others that include Brian himself!Brian chats with Caitlin about their professional relationship, the ups and downs of the publishing market, an agent's role where business and creativity meet, and the way their industry has changed over the last decade. Caitlin was also kind enough to answer some of the more standard agent questions, such as what she's looking for and what kills a query letter. Enjoy Brian's conversation with Caitlin Blasdell!Find Caitlin's submission guidelines and client list at her agency, Liza Dawson Associates.Find Brian at his website, on Twitter and Instagram, or find his books on Amazon, direct from his bookstore, or wherever books are sold!Don't forget to support the show on Patreon, or pick up some swag on Redbubble. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Basic Crawl 00:00:21 - Overview 00:03:47- How have we used this in our games? 00:04:25 - Things we liked about this adventure 00:20:12 - Questions we had about this adventure 00:23:43 - Chain Lightning Round The Expert Delve 00:25:52 - Zooming Out & Fantasy Procedurals Companion Adventures 00:43:11 - X-Files (and other TV) 00:44:54 - Podcasts 00:46:44 - Books, RPGs, and fiction Some links to matters discussed in the episode: Groversville Radio, September 1997 playlist: https://youtu.be/MUFasKZcH_c?list=PLq6xCUPY2FwIzLraC21zKIKr04hYcs5zw “A Colder War” by Charles Stross   http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm  John Tynes' DG-era website: http://johntynes.com/revland2000/ Tom's DG PbtA rules:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jHtNGtGGeb4qBLrPOhe0Mqx_H3M6-HnAYxPsOtyBQ7A/edit?usp=sharing

After cyberpunk had its day, a more mature, less countercultural successor to it emerged, known as postcyberpunk. In this episode, we explore what makes it distinctive and how it ties in with the ideas of transhumanism. Book recommendation: Existence by David Brin. Other books discussed: Permutation City by Greg Egan The Imperial Radch/Ancillary trilogy by Ann Leckie Accelerando by Charles Stross (free download) Blindsight by Peter Watts Charles Stross's "crib sheet" on Accelerando.

Here is a visual representation of the Kardashev scale and the amount of energy for each step: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#/media/File:Consommations_énergétiques_des_trois_types_de_l'échelle_de_Kardashev.svg] Why is there a scale? It's hard to have an intelligent conversation about something if you don't have a way to think critically about it. Classification schemes is one way of creating a frame of critical thinking. You have to create criteria for the different levels. How did we get the Kardashev scale? Russian astrophysicist, Nikolai Kardashev, created the scale in a paper he published in 1964 called, “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations”. The scale measures a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is able to use. What is the scale? Type 1 through 3. Frequently referred to as K1 through K3. A Type I civilization, also called a planetary civilization, has the capability to use all of the energy of its planet. A technological achievement that a K1 society would likely have is weather control. An example of this in movies would be any science fiction movie that shows Earth United by one government, or close cooperation, such as the movie Interstellar and 2010 Space Odyssey. References: the movie Interstellar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_(film) Stanley Kubrick Space Odyssey: * 2001 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/ * 2010 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086837/ A type II civilization, also called a stellar civilization, can use and control energy at the scale of its planetary system. Technological achievements that K2 civilizations would likely have is the ability to terraform and build megastructures. An example of a near type 2 is the TV series The Expanse. Most space operas fall into this category such as any Star Trek. I wanted to place Star Wars here to but since Sith lords frequently entertain ruling the galaxy, they must be nearing K3 contrary to Star Trek, where the galaxy is still a vast place that takes lifetimes to span even with warp drive. Another delightful noir/cyberpunk book series is the Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard K Morgan. The first of which, Altered Carbon, was made into a Netflix movie. References: The Expanse: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3230854/ Star Trek serieses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek Richard K Morgan's Takeshi Kovacks book series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeshi_Kovacs A type III civilization, also called a galactic civilization, can control energy at the scale of its entire host galaxy. Movies like this do casually travel the wide reaches of the galaxy and the galaxy is as well known as any of us today see the Earth as well known and prospected by various nation states. The most famous example of this in movies would be, as I've already said, is Star Wars. More choices are Jupiter Ascending, as well as Valarian and the City of a Thousand Planets. In literature we have books like Vernor Vinges Zones of Thought, and Asimov's The Foundation. The Vinge book showcases civilizations up and down the kardashev model and so I highly recommend that to those who have a love for alien civilizations and interest in socio-economic development. Apple TV has produced and is streaming The Foundation as a multi series TV show, and it is very enjoyable and well acted, so go check it out. A feature length movie script that Hal Dace and I wrote Miss Wisenheimer and the Aliens falls into the K3 category as well but with the unique angle that despite having the ability to casually travel the galaxy like in Star Wars, there are no aliens so the film focuses on that mystery. I'll put a link to the short film version in the show notes. The short film version of the feature length movie, by the way, won an award at a Belgium film festival. References: the movie Star Wars: https://www.starwars.com/films the movie Jupiter Ascending: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1617661/ the movie Valarian and the City of a Thousand Planets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerian_and_the_City_of_a_Thousand_Planets Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought novel series: https://www.goodreads.com/series/52585-zones-of-thought Isaac Asimov's The Foundation book series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series the TV series The Foundation: https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/what-to-watch/ct-ent-review-foundation-apple-tv-plus-20210924-3rzd3lon7rbrhidtrlpv5pl4t4-story.html Is the Kardashev scale any good? As you've heard on the show, it does help to quickly categorize levels of civilizations. A common criticism is that the jump from K2 to K3, from controlling the energy of a solar system to the ability to control all the energy of all the suns of a galaxy is too big of a step. But that said, it did actually do the job when analyzing science fiction movies. Another criticism is what about beyond K3? This brings us to the next topic. Typical adds to the scale At the front of the scale, it's typical to use 0 for civilizations that are just starting out or have yet to master energy generation. At the other end of the scale, it's common to add a level 4 beings who can control or use the entire universe. Because seriously, why would a Sith stop at making only a galaxy of beings unhappy when she could put an entire universe into a bad funk? Adding level 5 brings gives us a category for those who control collections of universes, or said another way, multiple dimensions. For those who have seen Valarian, remember the extraction scene that the main character, Valarian was involved with required them to go to another dimension. And for those who have seen the Thor movies, this gives us a catagory for Asgardians. References: Miss Wisenheimer: Short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJpyfhkfm3QFacebook page: https://www.facebook.com/MissWisenheimer/TV interview about the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EItnd8bXhdkMiss Wisenheimer and the Aliens film page: https://www.facebook.com/MissWisenheimer Valarian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerian_and_the_City_of_a_Thousand_Planets Jupiter Ascending: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ascending What are the dangers of advancing on the scale? There are some books that follow characters through the changes that happen to a civilization as they climb the Kardashev scale. Charles Stross' Accellerando describes a progression from K0 to K2. In Italian, accelerando means "speeding up" and is used as a tempo marking in musical notation. In Stross' novel, it refers to the accelerating rate at which humanity in general, and/or the novel's characters, head towards the technological singularity. This story focuses mostly on human culture. To the author's credit, he does all of this in one book. Accellerando: Vernor Vinges Zones of Thought novels, shows civilizations climbing to high parts of the scale, and many falling to lower parts of the scale. And like The Foundation, there is a group who is interested in helping to prevent a fall or helping to shorten the dark ages that follow after a fall. A Fire Upon the Deep is a 1992 science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge. It is a space opera involving superhuman intelligences, aliens, variable physics, space battles, love, betrayal, genocide, and a communication medium resembling Usenet. A Fire Upon the Deep won the Hugo Award in 1993, sharing it with Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. This series contains a lot of wonderfully thought out and dramatic alien culture. Zones of Thought: Wikipedia entry about Kardashev: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale These Issac Arthur videos make a great companion video to this podcast episode. Becoming a Kardashev-1 Post-Scarcity Civilization Low-Tech Kardashev-2 Civilizations Tips from Kardashev 2 Engineers, part 2 Acknowledgements Thanks to Freesound.org user Nanakisan for: Evil laugh 04 - Gen 4.wav If you enjoyed this episode, you'll also enjoy listening to: JPL Scientist Jonathan Jiang on Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the Milky Way Galaxy: Interested in reading a space opera? Check out MEMORY'S VICTIMS by Lancer Kind Arcadie struggles with the rest of his shipmates to become immigrants rather than settlers. He adapts better than his sister who seems always involved with lost causes and he becomes part of space force. But he gets mixed up in a mystery about a woman who is breaking interstellar treaties by tampering with generation ships, and her reasons for doing so sound similar to his sister's affliction—an out-of-control savior complex.

We explore some of our favorite crime novels, the genre at large as part of mystery, and pick apart the differences between detective novels (tending to support law & order) vs caper novels (tending to be anti-establishment or radical) and the exceptions. Crime and caper novels can be historic or modern, and cross every genre. What do you need to think about when writing crime stories? We have some ideas. … Continue...Episode 102 – Crime and Euphemisms

Scott returns from a coastal vacation and three recent reads. We also discuss group reads via BookTube, the appeal of series, and more.Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 220: Pronunciations Subscribe to the podcast via this link: FeedburnerOr subscribe via Apple Podcasts by clicking: SubscribeOr listen through TuneIn Or listen on Google Play Or listen via StitcherOr listen through Spotify Or listen through Google Podcasts Books discussed:  Njal's Saga by AnonymousTrue Story by Kate Reed PerryThe Summer Book by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas TealFour Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha BlaineEvery Dead Thing by John ConnollyOther mentions:The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord DunsanyThe Thrall's Tale by Judith LindberghThe Sagas of the Icelanders by VariousSagalong on Youtube, episode 1Tournament of Books - YuInterior Chinatown by Charles YuThe Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham JonesThe Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns GoodwinHow to Be An Anti-Racist by Ibram X. KendiStamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. KendiFreedom is a Constant Struggle  by Angela Y. DavisThe Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky ChambersChildren of Ash & Elm: A History of the Vikings by Neil PriceGone with the Wind by Margaret MitchellThe Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross Even as we Breathe by Annette Saunooke ClapsaddleAlways Coming Home by Ursula K. Le GuinRelated episodes:Episode 055 - Too Late for an Autopsy with Julie Davis Episode 087 - Going Native with Bookclub Social with Amanda and Grace Episode 088 - Author Head Space with Sara Moore Episode 126 - Bernice Bobs her Hair with Jon LaubingerEpisode 157 - Joint Readalong of Gone with the Wind with Book CougarsEpisode 198 - Mood Reading with RobinStalk us online: Scott on A Good Story is Hard to Find (podcast) Scott on Shelf Wear (blog and podcast)Jenny at GoodreadsJenny on TwitterJenny is @readingenvy on Instagram and Litsy All links to books are through Bookshop.org, where I am an affiliate. I wanted more money to go to the actual publishers and authors. I link to Amazon when a book is not listed with Bookshop.

There are writers who can take one genre and then turn it into multiple genres before they're done - and you can't put the books down. We sat down one of our favorites who gets away with it all the time. Charles Stross, unrepentant Pantser, as he labels himself, tells us all about his books, his inspirations, his process, and his latest projects. … Continue...Episode 86 – Charlie Stross, Harbinger of Our Times

Our crew of explorers split up and find themselves unknowingly pursuing very similar goals related to an enigmatic nano known as Doc Taraz. Cha-Cha meets up with friends both old and new. Nix investigates her parent's papers and attempts to explain to her friends what her parents do for a living. Cha-Cha goes on a vision quest for Nix's parents. Atalia searches Doc Taraz's office. Dili learns the secrets of wellness. Player Intrusion: Daniel: The Laundry Files by Charles Stross. Start with The Jennifer Morgue Bookshop (https://bookshop.org/books/the-jennifer-morgue/9780441018147) | Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Jennifer-Morgue-Laundry-Files/dp/0356502384/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1604070880&sr=8-1) | Barnes & Noble (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/jennifer-morgue-charles-stross/1100361550?ean=9780441018147) Your cast: GM: Daniel (https://www.explorerswanted.fm/hosts/daniel) Adilabrim "Dili" Kret: Sampson (https://www.explorerswanted.fm/hosts/sampson) Atalia: Marietta (https://www.explorerswanted.fm/hosts/marietta) Chansey "Cha-Cha" Letoile: Alex (https://www.explorerswanted.fm/hosts/alex) Nix: Stace (https://www.explorerswanted.fm/hosts/stace) Music Theme music: Ninth World by Dave Sterling (https://www.mixcloud.com/davesterling/). Long Note Three by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/3993-long-note-three License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Evolutions IV by Jameson Nathan Jones / via Audiio Stranger Synths IV by Liam Back / via Audiio Hidden Place by Rafael Krux Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/5361-hidden-place- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Production Editing: Daniel Transcription: Stace Safety in Role-playing It is essential that everyone playing in a game feels safe and is having fun. We've compiled a brief list of the safety tools we use here (https://www.explorerswanted.fm/safety). As always, see our standard disclaimer (https://www.explorerswanted.fm/disclaimer).

This week I’m delighted to bring The Teafaerie (ep. 100) and Ramin Nazer (ep. 120) back to Future Fossils Podcast! These are two of the funniest, weirdest amateur futurists I know, and I hope you agree this discussion was worth the wait while I spent hours making it sound like we didn’t just talk over each other like overexcited dorks for two-plus-hours.In this episode, we discuss the virtualization of live events as relates to the science fiction of Charles Stross and Hannu Rajaniemi, the stratification of class according to who can afford to be somewhere in person, and my writing on AR and telepresence for H+ Magazine (“Best Seat In The House”) and the Body Hacking Conference Blog (“Being Every Drone”). We talk about the perverse incentives of social media as an outrage generator and surveillance capitalism pit trap, and how we might be able to redesign the social Web so it doesn’t drive us all (even more) insane. Plus:• The world being transformed into an unending series of limnoid events• Having “an affinity for the rapids”• Should we just side with our new AI overlords?• Beyond the Black Mirror• A very curious fan theory about the Flintstones & Jetsons• The Bell Riots in Star Trek DS9• Eternal upload simulation matrix reawakeningsAnd more, until we all get shut down by a robot in mid-sentence.If you aren’t sated after listening to their episodes (and who could be?), subscribe to Ramin’s Rainbow Brainskull Hour and The Teafaerie’s YouTube Channel.Please rate and review Future Fossils on Apple Podcasts! And if you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon. Patrons gain access to over twenty secret episodes, unreleased music, our book club, and many other treats.And Happy Holidays: I just made all of the Future Fossils Book Club recordings free. You’re now welcome to enjoy at your leisure our small-group discussions on some of my favorite works of science fiction and psychedelic non-fiction: books by Peter Watts, Diana Reed Slattery, Cixin Liu, Octavia Butler, and Jeff VanderMeer…AND here’s a Spotify Playlist for psychedelic experiences created by Future Fossils listener Rian Bevans (host of The Riancarnation Podcast) that, along with legends like Brian Eno and Four Tet, heavily features instrumental music by yours truly (some of which also made it on the official clinical playlist for FDA’s MDMA for PTSD trials).We’d also love to have you in our thriving little Discord server, if you’re interested in meeting other members of our awesome scene. (And if you’re up for helping edit Future Fossils Podcast transcripts, please drop me a line at futurefossilspodcast@gmail.com.)Intro and outro music is from Skytree’s new LP of spacey downtempo electronica, Infraplanetary, which I highly encourage you to purchase. Official podcast theme is “God Detector” by Skytree (featuring Michael Garfield).Enjoy, and thanks for listening! Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The UNSONG Audiobook is now complete. Two-hundred and forty-four thousand, one hundred and forty words. Thirty-two hours of audio. Let me know of any episodes you think really need to be re-recorded. For the rest of this year, the further episodes will be my favorite short stories from the same author, which I have been looking forward to. Here is the hour-long retrospective episode. If you have not read the book and this is where you're starting, be advised of spoilers, and of content warnings about violence and mental illness. It includes an interview with the author, announcements of the future of the podcast, recommendations for further reading or listening, my reflections on the themes of the novel, the ability to change the world, finding patterns where none exist, random acts of violence, and resisting despair. It also includes a very personally vulnerable account of how the novel makes me feel about the historical development of this century so far, the position of my life within that, and the place of you and I and each other in the world. According to my time tracker, I have been writing, reworking, and editing this episode for almost 18 total hours in my text editor alone, to say nothing of the audio editor. On the one hand, I might talk about myself too much, and on the other hand, I consider it misleading if I present a "view from nowhere" as if it were the only one. Everyone has a viewpoint on the subject they are discussing, and this one is mine. I'm interested in yours, so please email your questions or answers or follow-up questions or follow-up answers to: thatsoundshard@gmail.com Question timestamps: 1, the theme of your blog- 01:07. 2, softening opposition to the antagonists - 01:47. 3, planning in a serial format- 05:56. 4, justifying the unjustifiable- 11:09. 5, placebomancy and propaganda- 20:18. 6, worldbuilding premise- 26:44. 7, comedic style- 30:53. 8, psychological distance- 38:02. 9, did anyone ever make it to Wall Drug- 46:50. 10, after the interview- 52:39. Knock, knock. Who's there? Lincoln. Lincoln who? Lincoln the shownotes. Too Like The Lightning, the Terra Ignota series by Dr Ada Palmer: https://adapalmer.com/publication/too-like-the-lightning/ The Atrocity Archive, The Laundry Files series by Charles Stross: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/04/faq-the-laundry-filesseries-ti.html Walkaway by Cory Doctorow: https://craphound.com/category/walkaway/ Blindsight by Peter Watts: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm Cory Doctorow's article in Locus about Cold Equations and moral hazard: https://locusmag.com/2014/03/cory-doctorow-cold-equations-and-moral-hazard/ Meaningness, an online HTML book by David Chapman: https://meaningness.com/ Blankets, a graphic novel by Craig Thompson: https://smile.amazon.com/Blankets-Craig-Thompson/dp/177046218X Distress by Greg Egan: https://www.gregegan.net/DISTRESS/DISTRESS.html "I Can't Stop Watching Contagion" by Dan Olson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsSzrVhdVuw&vl=en

Dans cet épisode de 3d8plus4, bercés par la douceur d'un automne presque parfait, nous parlons (brièvement) de Final Fantasy XIV, de Diablo 3 sur la Switch, du jeu Spider Man sur PS4 et de la version  multiplayer de DOOM Eternal. Nous couvrons rapidement le bordel légal entre Tracy Hickman+Margaret Weis vs Wizards of the Coast avant de couvrir les nouveautés télé et cinéma : Star Trek Discovery, Taco Chronicles, Color Out of Space, Street Food South America.. Et d'autres moins nouveaux comme Road House, In Hell.. Côté musique nous jasons de Sleigh Bells.Nouvelles:Pas de nouvelles, bonnes nouvelles!Jeux Vidéo:Final Fantasy XIVDOOM EternalDiablo 3Spider ManJeux de Table:Tracy Hickman et Margaret Weis versus Wizards!Livres:Correction : c'est CHARLES Stross - thanks Pat!TV Cinema:Star Trek Discovery S3 E1Taco ChroniclesStreet Food South AmericaRoad HouseIn HellParanormal Activity 4Colour Out of SpaceMusique:Sleigh BellsQuestions, commentaires: 3d8plus4@gmail.comSuivez-nous sur Twitter: @3d8plus4

Dans cet épisode de 3d8plus4, remplis d'énergie après un long weekend réparateur, nous parlons du 'October Event' de Apple, puis de Final Fantasy XIV, Doom Eternal (ça faisait longtemps!) et Star Wars: Squadrons - que Dan, contrairement à Luis - a adoré. Ensuite, on parle des dernières nouveautés de Games Workshop, ainsi que de la série 'Merchant Princes' de Charles Stross, du début de la nouvelle (et dernière) mi-saison de Supernatural, de la délicieuse série Taco Chronicles pis finalement du 'Haunting of Bly Manor' (spooky season oblige!)Intro:Correction et mea culpa de Dan - Rogue Squadron est un jeu de N64 sorti en 1998!News:iPhone 12... Mini.. Regular... Max.. Pro...Pro Plus.. XL Deluxe edition... Et HomePod MiniJeux vidéo:FF14DOOM EternalStar Wars :  SquadronsJeux de Table:Codex Space Marines, Necrons.. Artillerie..Livres:Merchant Princes - Charles StrossTV/Cinéma:Supernatural S15Taco Chronicles (Netflix)The Haunting of Bly Manor (Netflix)Questions, commentaires: 3d8plus4@gmail.comSuivez-nous sur Twitter: @3d8plus4

Com este episódio inicia-se uma nova rubrica: o Book Club do Um Sobre Zero. O objetivo é ter um convidado a apresentar um livro ou autor que admira e contar um pouco do porquê. E neste episódio, o convidado é o Pedro Pinheiro que nos fala do autor Charles Stross, e em particular do seu livro Accelerando, a obra que em parte inspirou este podcast.Convidado: Pedro PinheiroPara mais informações sobre o episódio, podem consultar o site do Um Sobre Zero.

Charles Stross is the multi-award winning author of bestselling series of space opera, alt-history and more. With his new novel Dead Lies Dreaming he jumps back into his Laundry Files universe, and he gives us some incredible tips on writing successful long-running series and how to grow your reader base. And the Two Marks look forward to celebrating four years of the podcast with a special live show. Find out how you can join them...

Charles Stross is the multi-award winning author of bestselling series of space opera, alt-history and more. With his new novel Dead Lies Dreaming he jumps back into his Laundry Files universe, and he gives us some incredible tips on writing successful long-running series and how to grow your reader base. And the Two Marks look […] The post EP287: Charles Stross — Don't Wait. Write! appeared first on The Bestseller Experiment.

Did sci-fi books inspire you to enter science or engineering? In this fascinating conversation, Kevin talks with one of his favorite authors about a broad range of topics from Trotskyism to bioscience research.  Kevin Scott Charles Stross Click here for transcript of this episode. 

Cyberpunk magic, wicked billionaires, and referencing American presidents, oh my! Paul Weimer pulls out his interview pants to talk to Charles Stross about the newest Laundry Files novel, Dead Lies Dreaming. They dig into the long-running Laundry Files series, this new novel's political intrigue in a world of mansions and curses, and even how Trump […]

Week two of our summer special with Dino Sarma! We continue our discussion from last week, picking up after Kevin has fed the hounds. Chickens, dogs, The DC Animated Universe, cooking, games, books, and a whole lot more are discussed this week! Links for this Episode DC Animated Universe Great British Bake-off Big Flower Fight Making the Cut Wingspan Wyrd Sisters Podcast Pandemic Board Game Tabletop Simulator Roll20 Wizards of the Coast Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Ultimate Bread King Arthur Flour Recipe Book Redshirts by John Scalzi Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi The Laundry Files by Charles Stross Rapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow

Warhammer 40k Audio: Monastery of Death by Charles StrossPart of the Deathwing collection available here: https://amzn.to/2WqU73q#warhammer #40k #audio    Thanks! Emperor Protects! -----------------------Affiliate links-----------------------------

Thema der Woche: James Bon Feeling in der Fantasy! Bücher dazu: „Jennifer Morgue“ von Charles Stross, den zweiten Teil der „Laundry“ Bücher. Hier trifft die mundane Welt der Geheimdienste mit Sicherheitskonferenzen im Merriot Hotel in Düsseldorf auf die glizernde Welt der von James Bond, mit Casinos in der Karibik, Superschurken und sexy Doppelagenzen (vor dem […]

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times. Today Jonathan spends ten minutes with Charles Stross, bestselling author of the Hugo award-winning Laundry Files series and the critically acclaimed Accelerando, to discuss working in the time of pandemic, whether authors are the people to turn to for reading recommendations, his upcoming work and return to space opera, and much more.  Books mentioned include: Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross Invisible Sun by Charles Stross The Unspoken Name by Alison Larkwood Middlegame by Seanan McGuire The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

Our first interview of the new season continues with Sean Tilley of We Distribute. We talk curating video via “Frown Tube,” San Francisco’s chilly weather not seen on TV, and the service industry. We also discuss how funding the things we love and keeping them going is a difficult thing when their competing with “free” centralized services. Sean is using Pleroma, a social network that federates with Mastodon and others using the Activity Pub protocol. Our guest is experimenting with FunkWhale, a social network with sharing music at its core (Also using Activity Pub). Peertube is a YouTube replacement from the world of open source. Sean explains how it works. A really great human in the fediverse, Wakest, gave Sean this list of 40+ fediverse projects in the works. During the recording, Jacky was in the chatroom asking questions and contributing to the conversation. Sean used to work at BackerKit. What’s Paul using right now? He’s been playing with Micro.blog. Sean brings up a topic we will cover with another guest this season, the IndieWeb. One of the cores of IndieWeb is Publish on your own Site, Syndicate Everywhere (POSSE). Manton Reece is the developer of Micro.blog. Paul and Jacky (in the chatroom) talk about funding issues and Sean shares how Eugen Rochko, the developer of Mastodon is paid. The Patreon alternative discussed is called LibrePay. Apple nerd Paul likes & subscribes to sixcolors.com, Maximum Fun, and RelayFM. Chris is using Masto.host to have his own instance on Mastodon (You should message him and join it.) The service is maintained by the amazing Hugo. One of Chris’ favorite projects is PixelFed from the amazing Dansup. Discovery is a big discussion in the episode, and Paul mentions directory services. Mastodon has Trunk which associates people with subjects. Sean recommends Halt and Catch Fire despite not really liking television. He also likes Mad Men. Sean is currently reading The Living Dead: Switched Off, Zoned Out— the Shocking Truth about Office Life. Chris suggests the fiction version of Sean’s book, a series called The Laundry Files from Charles Stross. Find Sean Tilley using that link. Find us on Twitter and Patreon. Thanks to our moms for listening, to our spouses for putting up with our recording and thanks to you for listening. Support Montreal Sauce on Patreon

When you're world building for a story or novel, you need to figure out how magic works. The coffee shop writers chat about how to build something coherent, something that makes sense, and the pondering of magic that doesn't get in the way of a story. Or how magic can become a story. And how red coffee is the best coffee. … Continue...Episode 36 – Systemic Magic

This week we’re joined by Michael Phillip, host of Third Eye Drops Podcast, to discuss some of the biggest and most persistent questions in philosophy — for which he feels he received definitive answers in a recent psychedelic experience: what it means to live a life of virtue, whether the universe is biased toward a Great Unfolding integration and continued process of perfection, the nature of evil, the question of free will, our responsibility to one another and to the future…It’s a great discussion with one of my favorite podcasting peers. Enjoy!Future Fossils Podcast is entirely listener-supported. Support the show on Patreon for more inspiring extras than you probably have time for.Buy any of the books we mention in this episode through my Amazon Shop and I’ll receive a tiny kickback at no extra cost to you.Michael Phillips’ podcast: thirdeyedrops.comMichael has appeared on Future Fossils before:Episode 14 on WestworldEpisode 52 on Blockchain with Jennifer SodiniEpisode 67 on Magic & Media with Douglas RushkoffKey item in question for this conversation is Manly P. Hall’s “The Wisdom Series: The Challenge of Forever Becoming, Part 1”Mentioned:Daniele Bolleli, The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P Hall, The Wisdom Series by Manly P Hall, Darwin’s Pharmacy by Richard Doyle, “Wizard” (Song) by Stuart Davis, Erick Godsey, Book of Job, What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly, Joseph Campbell, Accelerando by Charles Stross, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Terence McKenna, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul SartreFuture Fossils Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder feat. Michael Garfield See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Episodio 364. Incontro con l'Ospite d'onore Charles Stross. Introduce Salvatore Proietti (panel in lingua originale del 22.4.2018). Per l'immagine di copertina: © Aventi diritto. All rights reserved.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/fantascienticast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Incontro con l'Ospite d'onore Charles Stross. Introduce Salvatore Proietti (panel in lingua originale, domenica, 22/4/2018). Deepcon 19: 19-22/4/2018 a Fiuggi (FR). Leggi di più su Fantascientificast.com - Pubblicazione amatoriale. Non si intende infrangere alcun copyright, i cui diritti appartengono ai rispettivi detentori - Autorizzazione SIAE 5612/I/5359.

Fin de temporada: Hoy Rekens os hablará de la película Jurassic Park de 1993 de Steven Spielberg, Seburo nos explicará que son los Yôkai y daremos un repaso a los más populares, Akasha nos traerá el cómic Uzumaki de Junji Ito, y el Camarada Mo nos comentará el libro "El archivo de las atrocidades" de Charles Stross.

…in which I talk about Jurassic Park, Terminator, Pokémon, cat videos, Radiolab, Google, DARPA, Charles Stross, the Singularity, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martine Rothblatt, Genesis P Orridge, neo-advaita nondual philosophy, and angels. (“Do you guys believe in angels?”) DISCUSSED:Bringing Heart Back To Futurism. Technological Acceleration As Psychedelic Yoga. It Doesn’t Have To Be Either/Or. Scan Lovers. Can We Have Identity Politics In A Posthuman Society? Control or Liberation?Recorded at Boom Festival's Liminal Village, 16 August 2016 — here’s the official Boom Festival video of the talk.Originally published on my archive of public talks at bandcamp, this lecture became the basis for the essay series with the same name, which you can read on my Medium blog.Support The Show: patreon.com/michaelgarfieldTheme Music: “God Detector” by Evan Snyder feat. Michael GarfieldQUOTES:The future is an idea that is constructed socially, just as insanity is constructed socially.Most people spend most of their time thinking about what the world we’re moving into is going to look like, and very little time thinking about what it’s going to FEEL like. Who we are going to be, once all this transformative change has settled into a newly-constituted world age?It’s very telling that so much of the conversation around artificial intelligence is this notion that there’s some kind of demon emerging through the machine for us to encounter and to reckon with. That there is something we have to confront…something that may destroy us even as it transforms us. And I think that the problem here is that this is a half-chewed sandwich. We’re right there on the precipice of recognizing that we too are implicated in this global conspiracy, that we too are participating in the evolutionary process, and it falls upon us all to heal this alienation from the natural world – especially as it appears in non-human living systems and as it appears in non-human machine intelligences. And to recognize, first of all, that we are a function, we are an action, of Earth’s geology.It’s by failing to identify our own transcendental nature – our own identity beyond the opposites of subject and object, self and other, nature and culture, the made and the born – that renders the transcendental as something against which the limited identity of the egoic self has to be defended. And so we experience what could be regarded as the emergence of a planetary Christ child – as the internet swallows us and we awaken together into this planetary identity, we experience this as the intrusion of a Borg mind or Terminator: Rise of the Machines. We are capable in our understandably anxious paranoid delusion of seeing only the demonic manifestation, because it’s so much easier to reject this kind of radical transformation than it is to embrace it and to steer it. And I’m hoping that by the end of this talk you all feel slightly more empowered to participate in this future, and to participate in the growing number of people worldwide that recognize that it falls upon us as we birth a new age, to love what we create. And to infuse it with love and creativity, and not to reject this baby, but to raise it right.The mirror was believed to have terrifying spiritual properties: that a mirror can steal your soul, or that a vampire couldn’t be seen in a mirror because it had no soul. And likewise with the camera: anything that renders the previously unconscious as the conscious, anything that shows our selves to ourselves in a new way and thus creates an object out of what was originally the subject, a new “it” out of what was “I,” is going to appear to us as the monstrous.As we become more transparent to one another, we become more accountable to one another. And the accountability is in some sense the masculine structure that we see growing as the companion to the desire to share with one another as a sort of feminine urge for intimacy.As a river runs all possible ways down a mountain, the future will have more options for how to be a human being than before. It will have more ways for us to become partial and non-inclusive of the future than ever before.We are becoming more and more compatible with the machine and it is becoming more and more compatible with us, in the same way that we domesticated corn and corn domesticated us.We have this profound opportunity to invest as much beauty and love and creativity into this new space as we possibly can. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If complex systems science had a mascot, it might be the murmuration. These enormous flocks of starlings darken skies across the northern hemisphere, performing intricate airborne maneuvers with no central leadership or plan. Each bird behaves according to a simple set of rules about how closely it tracks neighbors, resulting in one of the world’s most awesome natural spectacles.This notion of self-organizing flocks of relatively simple agents has inspired a new paradigm of engineering, building simple, flexible, adaptive swarms that stand to revolutionize the way we practice medicine, map ecosystems, and extend our public infrastructure. We’re living at the dawn of the age of the robot swarm – and these metal murmurations help us create communications networks, fight cancer, and evolve to solve new problems for an age that challenges the isolated strategies of individuals.This week’s guest is Sabine Hauert, Assistant Professor in Robotics at the University of Bristol and President/Co-founder of robohub.org, a non-profit dedicated to connecting the robotics community to the world. In this episode, we talk about how swarms have changed the way we think about intelligence, and how we build technologies for everything from drug delivery to home construction.Visit our website for more information or to support our science and communication efforts.Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Hauert Lab Website.RoboHub Website.NanoDoc Website.Sabine at Nature on the ethics of artificial intelligence.Sabine's 2019 SFI Community Lecture.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn

The Immune System: A Dewey Decimal Novel & Love Maps  & The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. (Akashic Books)  Join us tonight for a special event brought to you by one of the most exciting independent presses in the country, Akashic Books. The Immune System is the explosive final installment in Nathan Larson's Dewey Decimal trilogy. Picking up months after the events of The Nervous System, Dewey finds himself running dirty operations for the crooked Senator Howard. When Dewey is tasked with disrupting unrest from a growing group of outcast civilians, and simultaneously given the assignment of protecting a pair of Saudi royals, he is forced to look within and make some impossible choices. Ultimately, this puts him at odds with his benefactor and the powers that be.  In the course of the novel, we learn the true nature of the 2/14 cataclysm that decimated New York City, and by the end of it, Dewey must choose whether or not to face his own past. He must also decide if he is to be part of the elite control system, or if he's willing to commit himself to the unknown, without the protections he enjoys in the good favor of the landlords of the new New Order. Praise for the Dewey Decimal Series: “The most incredible thing about Larson's novel is just how credible it is . . . and the prose is perfect, as tweaked and jumpy and memorable as the man known as Dewey Decimal. I'm a Library of Congress girl myself, but Larson's uncannily original fiction deserves its own number within any system of library classification.”—Laura Lippman, author of After I'm Gone “Larson's vividly imagined world and his quirky narrator are likely to win him a cadre of loyal fans.”—Publishers Weekly “Whiplash prose, teeth-gnashing dialogue and post-civilization concepts that make a crazy (amateur) librarian in a pitch-black world a hell of a lot of fun . . . A good time for fans of the likes of Charlie Huston and Charles Stross.”—Kirkus Reviews Nathan Larson is an award-winning film music composer, having created the scores for over thirty movies, including Boys Don't Cry, Dirty Pretty Things, and Margin Call. The Dewey Decimal System and The Nervous System are the highly acclaimed first two installments in his Dewey Decimal crime-fiction trilogy. Larson lives in Harlem, New York City, with his wife and son. --- The love in Love Maps is not the kind associated with domestic bliss; it is the kind that bubbles up at inopportune moments, attaching itself to people who might be better off free, causing mayhem and longing, along with moments of rare beauty. The title is taken from a series of paintings by Sarah Marker, an artist who ekes out a living teaching humanities at a fancy high school in Connecticut.  The story begins when Sarah receives a letter from Philip, her erstwhile husband. They have lived separately for seven years, without having seen each other once, without having formally severed ties, in a state of sustained ambivalence. Now he wants to visit. As much as Sarah would like to see him, she is terrified at what he will do when he discovers that he has a son.  Sarah bundles up her son and once again takes flight, only to arrive in a place she had not intended. While navigating the terrain of the 1980s art scene in New York City, she must confront the terrible events surrounding Philip's departure, and reconcile the expectations of domestic life with her own fractured experience of family, confronting the violence and aching love at the heart of this story. Praise for Love Maps: “Who can plot the turns and reversals of the heart? Who can follow its illogical loyalties and mysterious obsessions? Who can reconcile its competing claims from lovers and family? Eliza Factor, that's who, in this stunningly assured novel about a pair of sisters—one a successful artist, the other a famous singer—and the handsome architect who comes between them. The cover should come with a warning to put your life on hold for a few days, because once you pick it up, you won't be able to do anything else until you finish.”—Bliss Broyard, author of One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets “Eliza Factor's second novel is a beautiful and uplifting journey through the New York art scene of the 1980s, as lived by one true artist. You'll be hard-pressed to find a character more fully and honestly revealed across the pages of a book than Sarah Marker. A stunning and original exploration of family, romantic love, and the possibility of healing.”—Joseph Weisberg, creator/executive producer of The Americans (FX Network) “By turns lyrical and flinty, searching and suspenseful, Love Maps is animated by the strivings and travails of characters who seek (and find) the real and the true, the territory instead of the map.”—Thad Ziolkowski, author of Wichita “Eliza Factor's Love Maps is a delight, and I read it with mounting pleasure and admiration. It feels strange to think of Love Maps as a pleasure—this is, after all, a book that captures in technicolor detail the pain and vulnerability that come with just about every variety of human relationship. But prose this witty and psychologically deft, and structures this intricate and heartbreaking, don't come around often.”—Ben Dolnick, author of At the Bottom of Everything Eliza Factor is a writer and the founder of Extreme Kids & Crew. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and three children. Her debut novel, The Mercury Fountain, was published in 2012 by Akashic Books. -- From Tehran to Los Angeles, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. is a sweeping saga that tells the story of the Soleymans, an Iranian Jewish family tormented for decades by Raphael's Son, a crafty and unscrupulous financier who has futilely claimed to be an heir to the family's fortune. Forty years later in contemporary Los Angeles, Raphael's Son has nearly achieved his goal--until he suddenly disappears, presumed by many to have been murdered. The possible suspects are legion: his long-suffering wife; numerous members of the Soleyman clan exacting revenge; the scores of investors he bankrupted in a Ponzi scheme; or perhaps even his disgruntled bookkeeper and longtime confidant. Award-winning novelist Gina B. Nahai pulls back the curtain on a close-knit community that survived centuries of persecution in Iran before settling and thriving in the United States, but now finds itself divided to the core by one of its own members. By turns hilarious and affecting, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. examines the eternal bonds of family and community, and the lasting scars of exile. Praise for The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. "A wide-ranging, page-turning, magical realist, multigenerational family saga and Iranian-Jewish-American immigration tale enveloped in a murder mystery...it both entertains and instructs, and its differing genres seem more complimentary than conflicting."--New York Journal of Books "Nahai has crafted an engaging combination of family saga and murder mystery, placed it in the framework of a relatively unknown subculture, and people it with fascinating characters. Flavored with both elements of magical realism and down-to-earth observations, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. brings a little-known Los Angeles community to vivid life."--Shelf Awareness "What results is a novel that feels more universal than anything, and an engrossing, expansive epic that charts not only thousands years of Iranian Jewish life, but the brutality of one family's survival amidst revolution and cultural upheaval." --Kirkus Reviews "One of the many pleasures of this sprawling, multigenerational story is the way it transcends the specifics of the Iranian diaspora with insights that could apply to anyone."--LA Weekly "One of Nahai's gifts is her astute observation of this community, her own, which she describes with unsparing precision."--Los Angeles Review of Books "Nahai's eye for detail, whether it's succinctly summing up a funeral or providing a description of a Tehran summer, always seems to be spot on."--PopMatters "An intriguing murder-mystery journey anchored within the Iranian-Jewish community of Los Angeles. Vivid and raw...Nahai masterfully introduces us to the mythical and mundane layers that make up Iranian-American identity."--Washington Independent Review of Books "It's the family connections--the true Iranian heritage--that is the luminous heart of the novel."--The Reporter Group Gina B. Nahai is a best-selling author, columnist, and full-time lecturer at USC's Master of Professional Writing Program. Her novels have been translated into eighteen languages, and have been selected as “Best Books of the Year” by the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. She has also been a finalist for the Orange Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and has won the Los Angeles Arts Council Award, the Persian Heritage Foundation's Award, the Simon Rockower Award, and the Phi Kappa Phi Award. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles magazine, Publishers Weekly, and the Huffington Post, among others. She writes a monthly column for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, and is a three-time finalist for an LA Press Club Award. Nahai holds a BA and a Masters degree in International Relations from UCLA, and a Master of Professional Writing from USC. She's a former consultant for the Rand Corporation, and a frequent lecturer on the politics of pre- and postrevolutionary Iran.