Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Interesting point, Jamais.

You know, one of the reasons I *didn't* spend a lot of time on this in the
book is that it was really well covered in Varley's stories about uploading,
especially "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank."
  

    
Yeah, but is Varley here on the Well for me to pester incessantly?
  

    
Not yet, but we could invite him!
  

    
You ought to invite Varley. Seriously. One of the most important
writers in the SF field during his day -- I just wish he wrote more :)

Although I have a gut feeling that there is more to be said about
backup copies than he said in "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" and his
other early stories, maybe we're being unfar to Cory in all dogpiling
on this one issue. It does seem to raise  the temperature, though!

Cory: new art forms. Have you invented (or run across) any recently?
 
  

    
Well, you and I both share an interest in Machinima, which is narrative
animation video produced by scripting first-person-shooter gaming engines,
like the Quake engine. I'm particularily interested in this as an art-form
that scales with Moore's Law: since the animation is rendered from a set of
Platonic stage-directions, you can always re-render it with next year's
higher-rez gaming engine. Also, you can presumably re-skin the avatars and
do lots of other neat things to the narrative.

Sterling turned me on to this site full of open-source interactive Flash-art
thinggi. They're fun in and of themselves, but I really like the open-
sourcitude, which creates a kind of meta-interactivity: you can either
monkey with the machines to make art, or you can tinker with the machines'
design.

http://www.levitated.net/daily/index.html

I'm keeping one eye on the gradual mainstream of Finnish location-aware,
mobile-device-enabled massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, which
are a kind of LARP-meets-lovegetty that seems to have a lot of potential.
But it's Finnish, which means that it may just be too weird for the rest of
the world to actually latch on to (the Finns are way weirder than Japanese
schoolgirls in my books).
  

    

Cory, if Disney tries to buy the movie rights for this, contact me before
you sign anything.  I'd love to see the movie, and Disney's lawyers, while
the first thing they're going to suggest is they sue you and Tor, have a
"backup" of their own -- buy the film rights outright to ensure that no
movie's ever made.  I couldn't live with that.  I'd rather see you get a big
fat check *and* retain the invisible but real right to sell it again.

It can be done.  And Contracts is what paid the rent when I was doing mostly
assigned-counsel work in the criminal courts (a boy could starve on what
they pay court-appointed counsel for poor people).
  

    

In short, we essentially turn the signed copy into an *options* contract.
Big law firms don't have to read those 100-page contracts they wrote
themselves years ago.  Which  is too bad, because under the law of
contracts, there's what we call the "duty to read."  Good for you; bad for
the bad guys.
  

    
I think I mixed up Vinge and Varley in an earlier post...
  

    
Thanks, Jack.
  

    

I'll do it for free.  You deserve a trip around the world, which a check
from Disney would pay for, and I said way up above that I've got to see this
movie.

You *can* have your cake and eat it too.

I'll scribble all this digression later.
  

    
If you scribble you force later readers to deadhead right on through
the digressions, you know.  
  

    

Attorney-client privilege, babe.
  

    
For all we know, the Mouse could have the unscribble command.  
  

    
Hi Cory!  I've just started reading your book, and I'm enjoying it
very much.

I've also read through this thread and find it interesting that the
participants here are seemingly taking the desire to live forever as a
given.  When I was a little girl, I remember sitting in church singing
"When we've been there ten thousand years / bright shining as the sun /
We've no less days / to sing God's praise" and being absolutely
horrified.  How boring - it still gives me the willies.  Doing the same
thing for thousands and thousands of years.  Bleck.

That's how I imagine these consciousness-trasferring schemes.  Fun for
a couple hundred years and then what have you got?  Same shit,
different century.  I think people may actually want to die after a
while.

But anyway, congrats on the book and keep up the good work.
  

    

        How does it feel
        How does it feel
        To be on your own
        With no direction home
        Like a complete unknown
        Like a rolling stone?
  

    
Mitten, I've no doubt that there will be people who are opposed to life-
extension, especially infinite life-extension. But as I said upstream, those
people will die, or be marginalized, and their kids will, by and large,
break with their belief-system. How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm?

Glad you're enjoying the book!
  

    
Just a little historical note. I was in a hotel room in Montreal (I think!)
when I started work on D&OITMK, and that day, I posted this message:

genx.old.460.7: Type A: The only type that counts! (doctorow)  Wed 27 Jan 99
13:
08

 What's the current best-guess on the date of the heat-death of the
Universe?
  

    
I'm guessing Tuesday, but my definition's probably narrow.
  

    
Cory, I read the D&OitMK (in book form) yesterday and really enjoyed
it.

Someone mentioned similarities to Nick Hornby's books on the
dustjacket, and this really rang true for me.  Given the success that
Hornby's books have had as movies, I think there's reason to think that
a movie of this book might be a hit.  It wasn't as anti-Disney as I
expected; I could imagine them participating (maybe that would pose an
interesting moral dilemma for you.)
  

    
>It wasn't as anti-Disney as I
 expected

Far be it for me to speak for Cory, but I don't think it's anti-Disney at
all. Anti-current-management-Disney, sure; I don't like the direction
they're heading with their theme parks either. I worry about the degradation
of the art at the theme parks; they seem to be heading away from good solid
detailed theming and into stuff without much substance. Contrast the Tower
of Terror with Test Track: Tower is heavily themed, well-thought out, and
is, like the best old Disney attractions, very repeatable. Test Track, which
opened just three years later, is barely themed and has only the thinnest
excuse for a story. At Tower, the use of video is well-placed and engaging;
at Test Track, it's boring. Both are thrill rides, but Tower is a genuine
Disney experience, while Test Track is nothing special.
  

    
Finished it over the weekend.  Lots to like about this book, and there are
a few folks I know I'll tell about it.  I hope to have to time to be back
with some questions, too.  But for now, thank you, Cory.  V. cool.
  

    

I've had it down here too.  I want to go into space for a while.
  

    

IJWTS how much I loved the author bio in the dustjacket.
  

    
Jim, I'm not anti-Disney per se -- I love the sin and hate the sinner, so to
speak. They've made some really killer art and technology, and they've had
some really progressive organizational and HR policies, and they've
accomplished amazing htings. That they've also done terrible things doesn't
change all the good stuff.

Gorey really nails it in the distinction between Test Track and the Tower of
Terror -- you could say the same about most of the attractions at California
Adventure, which is why you can fire a cannon down the main drag without
hitting a tourist.

It's funny how many people want to talk about film adaptation. I saw William
Gibson read on Friday night at the Booksmith in San Francisco and he was
relentlessly nagged during the Q&A about film adaptations of Neuromancer and
his other works -- this despite the Johnny Mnemonic tragedy. Gibson kept
trying to tell people, essentially, that books adapted as films basically
suck, almost without exception, and that while he's primarily a book-writin'
guy, if he was gonna do a movie, it would be a *movie*, not an adaptation of
a book. You could tell, though, that he was more interested in sticking to
books.

That's pretty much how I feel about it. I mean, coked up Hollyweird fatcats
showering me with bathtubsful of money in exchange for the film rights would
be really cool in a financial-independence kinda way, but I'm so totally not
interested in the final product, should it ever come to pass. I suspect it's
moot, anyway, given the number of really bitter enemies I've made of various
studio heads by disrupting their DRM-based world-domination-plans -- I'm
told that a certain senior (*senior*) exec at a certain MPAA member company
personally hates my personal guts and sputters and goes purple when my name
is mentioned in his presence. I'm proud that I established that kind of
rapport without ever having once to have been the difficult creative of any
description.

OTOH, High Fidelity was really good, so maybe it wouldn't suck. But I
wouldn't be surprised if it did.

Gail, glad you liked it!

Madman -- thanks! Apparently, the googlians were very happy about the
dustjacket bio, too! They've even offered to send me a second pair of Google
"I'm Feeling Lucky" magic lucky sex boxer-shorts.
  

    

>personally hates my personal guts and sputters and goes purple when my name
>is mentioned in his presence.

I think that's the coolest thing I've read today.

Unless this is:
>Apparently, the googlians were very happy about the dustjacket bio, too! 
> They've even offered to send me a second pair of Google "I'm Feeling 
>Lucky" magic lucky sex boxer-shorts.