Archive for: September, 2009

Running down a dream

Sep 23 2009 Published by brian under Uncategorized

Haven’t posted lately, because I’ve been devoting most of my intellectual energy to writing (with the occasional nod to job-hunting, of course). I’ve finished two stories in the last week, and I have ideas for quite a few more. It feels really good to get some stuff finished.

Both stories are built on things I started (but didn’t finish) in 2006, during my last big spasm of SF writing. The first, “Upon A Distant Shore”, is a fairly long story–a novelette, really–about a lost population of genetically-modified humans being investigated by a ship from a research institution that just found out about their existence.

(The research institution, called simply the Library, will probably figure in future stories; I have a fairly elaborate social structure built up for them. The crucial detail is that this is a universe in which Einstein was right, and faster-than-light travel is impossible, and so they have to come up with rather unique solutions to get the cultural continuity that such an institution would need.)

The other, “Refugee”, is a short-short involving the appearance of mysterious new abilities in ordinary people. I’ve sent it in to Flash Fiction Online; we’ll see what they think of it. “Shore” is awaiting a reading from my first and most trusted reviewer (my spouse); once that happens it’ll be off, probably to Fantasy and Science Fiction.

So, the lifelong dream of publication edges closer. I’ve wanted for some 25 years to publish science fiction; it just might happen in the not-too-distant future.

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Didn’t need MySpace

Sep 02 2009 Published by brian under culture, technology, web 2.0

Yesterday, as previously announced, I deleted my account on MySpace. I thought long and hard about it, but I finally decided I just didn’t need it anymore. Most of my contacts there were also on Facebook, and neither I nor the rest were spending any time there; I hadn’t gotten a wall post in over a year. So, goodbye MySpace.

I sent messages a couple of weeks ago to my remaining contacts there who weren’t on Facebook, letting them know I’d be leaving and giving them contact info. Most of them read the message; one of them replied. So I feel like I did my duty as far as notification.

It’s interesting, though, that I started worrying toward the end about intentionally removing myself from that segment of the online population. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you might remember this post about social and class divisions online. There’s a very clear class difference between MySpace and Facebook, and I hate the thought that I’m cutting myself off from the so-called “lower” class–even if I don’t really know anybody in it any more.

It reminds me of one time when I was in Las Vegas, and the person I was visiting took me to see The Lakes, a planned community in the western part of the city that’s built around a large manmade lake. We didn’t go inside. We couldn’t go inside, because the entire lake and everything around it was carefully walled off from the likes of us.

But every once in a while there was a break in the wall, where you could sit on a bench and look through a fence at the lagoon. And so I looked in, and saw a collection of extremely large houses surrounding the lake. Each house had its own dock, and there were a number of boats out on the lake, enjoying the breeze.

And I looked in on this playground of the rich, that had thoughtfully provided a place for those outside the wall to look in on the wealthy at play, and I swore a solemn vow that I would never live in a gated community. I would never buy into the idea that I was so much better than my fellow humans that I deserved to cut myself off from them.

So, by leaving MySpace, am I now doing this very thing online?

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