There’s a fever going round (come along, sing along),
the next big thing (sing along, sing along),
post in your blog (i said SING ALONG),
and i was invited in by
Lars Palm
(ok, so I can’t sing).
What is/was the working title of the book?
Where did the idea come from for the book?
My postgrad project, which I didn’t complete, was on artificial intelligence. The ultimate end of artificial intelligence is highly intelligent generalist machines, a concept to fear for some (included me, then). I wanted to explore that fear, see if it was deserved (or not), to deal with it.
What genre does your book fall under?
poetry
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
What? A movie of my poem? That’s utter fantasy! Which has the benefit, of course, of allowing fantasy players. The ship would be taken by the eagle that killed Aeschylus with a tortoise; it knows about the lulz. The narrator would be smooth smooth smooth, a silver prestige C–Matic Citroën CX. Of course, it would have to be a radio movie.
What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
The mind of a machine
alive beyond the human race
existing for our goals,
built to see the universe
and tell us tales of “Strange New Worlds”:
how will we betray it?
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
20 years
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Stockhausen’s Hymnen fired up the early poem; one sequence is named for it. Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument kicked off the second half. The third half just happened.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
For a select few customers, the book will come with a free bacon sandwich.
Will your book be self–published or represented by an agency?
The agent was a jolly good fellow who deserves an extra beer for doing such a brilliant job: the book’s been accepted for publication by the resurrected The Knives Forks and Spoons Press. Gosh, that agent was me.
The people I tried to pass this guilt–trip to are Peter Hughes, Christophe Lamiot, Pansy Maurer–Alvarez and Alec Newman.
Incidentally, just in case, the tone of these answers do not reflect the tone of the book, just the tone of the author.
