And to start off the New Year, I’m experimenting with Instagram. Here are a few Sedona images:
[wdi_feed id=”1″]Meanwhile, here are my current projects for 2019:
Quintessence of Rust (QOR): Post-apocalyptic and post-cyberpunk novel series set in a future world devastated by climate change. Begun in 2018, I expect to complete the first book by summer 2019. Here’s a sample:
The jungle is so overwhelmingly alive some days that the air is a vibrating green shroud. The vines strangle up through the canopy trees towards a wan shimmer. The heat becomes toxic where the gray skies break through and the violet and rust of the fungal mounds heap like domes. A low drone warns of bloodsucking swarms of gigantic flies, startling the naked rodents out along paths and down through root mazes into protective huddles in the cooling mud, while the women stoke smudge fires and call the painted children close. And then the sound passes, and the clucks and snorts begin again, at first with hesitancy against the silence of the moist envelop, then more, and then with greater intensity, until the music of the day is restored. The hunters return by lunch to await the afternoon rains that slide and drop in pachinko-ball rivulets through the thousand feet of piled and layered life.
Fifty feet up, where the tree splits its ancient trunk into three equal parts, atop the accumulated detritus of hundreds of years that became yet another pad of spongy jungle, the high apartments begin. Layer upon layer of wooden hovels, connected by ropes woven from vine fibers, wedged by pins and slotted bamboo, build like a rectilinear wasp nest, splitting off and then recoupling higher still, for two hundred feet more. It stops then, with the vegetable gardens on roofs and balconies, at the point where even the hardiest can barely cope with the unceasing sweating heat and the muggy clots of mosquitoes and dark flies.
And then there is Electrum, a political thriller that is developing into an unconventional narrative form. The novel, per se, is old and tired, yet there are few truly experimental ways of conveying long-form stories. Some claim that video games are the newest story form, with examples like the Bioshock series held for its engaging narrative and background story. And, recently, there have been experiments with using social media. But what else is possible?
¡Reconquista! should be appearing (in conventional form) by mid-Spring, though the ultimate publishing venue is still resolving.
Meanwhile, there are many, many research and development interests ranging from Generative Adversarial (Neural) Networks to the possibility of negative mass for dark energy and matter.
I hope you have an engaging and productive 2019!