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Notebook

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers. -- Voltaire

Trust Voltaire to come up with another perfect quote to ease my embarrassment. Me, I don't have much in the way of answers. Questions, however. Now, that's another thing.

The Notebook is where I've put some of the answers I've found while researching stories. It's kinda like the notes I make on various scraps of paper (that I strew about the house) and in documents on my hard drive. Research is often my favourite bit of the process. There are some seriously weird ideas on the 'net, in case you've never noticed.

The Notebook holds some pieces of my dialog with the rest of the human consciousness. Maybe you'll find something interesting here to spark your own ideas.

Jump in ....

Floating in space
(for The Singular Life of Eddy Dovewater)
In sending Eddy Dovewater into space, I discoverd a Q&A session with real astronauts. What's it like when you float in space? Is it blissful, like lying in a salty ocean? Well, "all muscles are relaxed, the body assumes a slightly hunched over posture with legs slightly rising forward and arms floating in front, much like being under water. There is no perceived 'up' or 'down' ...The amazing thing is, you can tell your brain which way is "up", and it immediately switches to that illusion". ( More at: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/osf/qanda.html#3)

That image of 'mind over matter', of reason ordering chaos, appealed to me. So I gave a touch of that to Eddy. Read an extract.

Good time to be a razor salesman in Mazar
(for The Razor Salesman)
I wasn't looking for a story, but there I was reading the news of the continuing 'crisis in the middle east', and I found this phrase on the flight of the Taliban from Afganistan:

The razor salesman in my story is kinda different, and you'll find no reference to the Taliban. The most oppressive regime I touch on is that of the suburban supermarket. Nevertheless, I remain fascinated by the idea of the razor salesman, and the idea of the desperation behind snipping off beards with nail scissors to escape fate. Imagine, I thought, the calm of the razor salesman, always ready to make his sale. Because, when you get down to it, what's he *really* selling? Freedom? Redemption? Compromise? An escape from destiny? Or just another way to get through, get by, get on with living? How often do we _choose_ to live, and how often is it just habit?

You won't, by the way, find the answers to any of that in my story, but hey, why not read the extract anyhow.

The Labori
(for King of All & the Metal Sentinel)
It's pretty well known that Isaac Asimov created the term 'robotics' -- but before him, someone had to come up with the word 'robot', right? Turns out 'robot' first appeared in Prague in 1921, in a play called R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Czech playwright Karel Capek. Curiously, it's been suggested, though, that it was Karel's brother who initially coined the phrase. The story goes that Karel was complaining to his brother that he had an idea for a mechanical man, but his title for the mechanism sounded "too bookish". That title was 'labori'. Labori. I loved it. And since I knew 'lavoro' was Italian for work, 'labori' seemed to have a pretty nice resonance to my ear.

Hence, in my story, I have populated the world of these two little mechanisms with their fallen colleagues, and named them all with the Capek brothers' apparently more bookish term. (More at the Field Robotics Centre.) Read an extract.

Rorschach's Ink Blots
(for All the Monochrome Butterflies)
Hermann Rorschach, Psychiatrist, was the son of a frustrated artist. How perfect, then, that it would be him who would come up with the now famous visual indicator called the Rorschach Ink Blots. Rorschach died at the age of just 37, apparently from a burst appendix. He was considered a brilliant and compassionate man, who spent many years working with the insane. As to the famous ink blot cards, they are apparently still printed on old fashioned machines "carefully maintained exclusively for this purpose, so as to maintain a virtually identical reproduction of the originals".
(More at: http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/1232.html)
(see below for another Monochrome find.)

The cards life's dealt you
(for All the Monochrome Butterflies)
As it happens, the original quote belongs to Voltaire again:

The version I first saw of this oddly motivating philosophy was on a greeting card. A guy with a thick bushy beard and matching thick bushy hair and eyebrows is sitting at a market stall. Around him are carefully placed little brooms made of -- you've probably guessed -- his own thick, bushy hair. Carl, says the card, was 'one of those people who looked at the hand he was dealt and started playing the cards'.

That kind of simple courage -- what Goldman would call a kind of 'dumb honour' -- is something that's always impressed me. No doubt because of my own complete lack of it. ;) But the will to go on, to insist on being exactly what you are and making the most of what you have fitted nicely with the hero of my story. Read an extract.

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