A book of beginnings

In the years since I first wrote Sea of Dreams, I have come back to it from time to time with thoughts of revising it, or even rewriting it completely. I have learned a great deal about the business of novel writing, as well as the craft behind it and see how it could benefit from […]

Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 and the logics of violence

I have a long, and enjoyable relationship with the film 2001: A Space Odyssey spanning most of my life; however, I had never read the novel version until I bought the Penguin Galaxy version after Christmas this year. The book is a perfect companion to the film, using the medium of the printed word to […]

Artistic legacy

Earlier this year, I was visiting my parents. While I was there, my dad gave me a collection of digitized images from slides he had taken between the late 50s and mid 70s. Going through them was a very odd experience. Apart from the familial history that I discovered, I had an odd sensation seeing […]

AI alien intelligence and Sea of Dreams

Kevin Kelly recently wrote an article in Wired, “The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World.” One of the themes he explores the the fact that AIs are increasingly “like Amazon Web Services—cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off.” He goes on to […]

Thoughts on ‘Speculative Fiction: Androids and the Prometheus Myth’

Just after writing about Elon Musk and his ‘summoning the demon’ quote about AI, I found this blog by Stephie Dror, Speculative Fiction: Androids and the Prometheus Myth. It’s a different reading of the whole AI/android versus humanity trope in science fiction. I hadn’t thought about it being an analogy for the struggle between parents […]

Summoning the demon

Recently, Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and CEO of Space-X, distilled his concerns about artificial intelligence as an existential threat in this quote, With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control […]

Mark-making in the digital age

Viewing Rothko to Richter: Mark-making in Abstract Painting at the Princeton Museum of Art, I was struck by the concept of mark-making and what the making of mark signifies. The exhibit explored the ways in which certain abstract artists in the postwar period explored the form of painting. More specifically, the exhibit engaged with how […]

Picture This: New York, Paris and creativity

I watched two documentaries the other night or BBC, Blondie’s New York… and the making of Parallel Lines and Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities. The common thread between them was the importance of place and time in creating an environment whereby a critical mass of artist, musicians and writers converge. In […]

Adaptation not annihilation

I have been visiting Jordan for the first time. A relative of mine, who has lived here for a year, said the country is the fourth poorest in terms of water in the world. He was saying how they get a monthly water delivery to the tanks on their roof. If you run out of […]

Global history

In this weekend’s FT, there was a review of Juergen Osterhammel’s ‘The Transformation of the World’. The book describes the global history of the 19th Century with a focus on how it marked a complete reinvention of the social, political and economic relationships on the planet. Implicit in this argument is the idea that this […]