At this event, I wrote many love letters of many kinds for people on The Magical Typewriter (Hermes 3000). A truly legendary evening!
Behind the Veil 2 Aftermovie from Israel Medrano on Vimeo.
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Review: The Forever War
The Forever War
by Joe Haldeman
It’s hard to read, and that’s because the experience is horribly real. I lightened it up by reading other things in between, but I kept returning to witness this account. I could see soldier stories through science fiction metaphors (such as time dilation, the world having changed much more than the time spent on campaign). There’s a soul-gripping terror and malaise in these pages – not just in the violence, but as seen through societal humanity. Deeply affecting, eloquent messages delivered with the twang of sci-fi experimentation.
Review: Acorna’s Quest
Acorna’s Quest
by Anne McCaffrey & Margaret Ball
(book jacket drawn by ele)
Fantastic entertainment carrying a balance of humor and deep worldcrafting. Unicorn people will understand… with their minds. Reflects the struggles of the newly adult finding their own kind, ethical dilemmas in science & politics, and different people complementing each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
Couplet
Like unto a flower,
a bee:
to thy lips
I move me.
e.l.elasigue 2017 CC-BY
This work by e.l.elasigue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://evalisaelasigue.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/couplet/.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://primalspiral.wordpress.com/.
Review: The Wind Through The Keyhole
The Wind Through The Keyhole, by Stephen King
A true tale of Mid-World! Artfully triple-nested, the stories examine tones of hard survival, predation, dark sides, and forces of nature and magic – through cherished voices echoing through time. Wonderful piece of craft.
(also posted to Amazon & Goodreads)
Review: Forest of Memory
Forest of Memory, a novella by Mary Robinette Kowal
If you emerge from the forest, will you be quite the same?
Clearly delineated internal debate and suspenseful action that gives you just a little bit at a time, amidst a knowledgeably vivid and lush sensory landscape. Kowal’s setting removal provides tangentially humorous perspectives on habits and mindsets of today’s world. A dramatic meeting between modern techie life and brutal nature.
Poem: The Process
THE PROCESS
1
I noticed the trail of a snake in the
sand.
I followed it, and it led to water.
Sometimes it feels as if I’m the
only one.
Other times, I feel others dance
when I move, and my voice contains
the power of many others like me.
2
Now I know for sure I’m not alone –
breathless, like just the sight of you
means I’m rescued,
like I’m not the only one left who
came to this world.
If there are two of us to meet,
then I am real, and there are more.
3
Then comes a telling of ourselves:
an occasion for laughter,
the excitement of being together,
the knowledge of all we must do
lightened
just by a glimpse of someone
else
who sees the same thing.
4
Like the dawn through the rain,
at the very moment of the tide’s turn –
a light that reveals the exact same
mountainside with renewed clarity,
as though it sprang forth, somehow,
from my very self standing there,
heart bursting, and wishing.
5
There’s a way home that can be
found,
one foot upon the prow of our vessel.
The illusions are not as deep or
thick as they seem –
see right through the branches
to the meadow beyond,
through the hanging water to the
sunlit land,
and go that way.
6
Now that we are gathered, it’s time:
to swing the lights in procession
to guide others to us, feeling alone
and unknown as we once were – to
raise our voices, so that their own
can resound with the power of
many
others like them.
7
Our own separate paths are still our
own to walk,
those that brought us together in
one place,
those to continue, that take us away
from each other –
but never alone again, thenceforth
having
been together, though through our own
shadowed valleys we carry the
newly shared flame.
8
All we learn, all we bring, from all of us,
is all we have to give. We carry it all
as a fountain that bears us up,
drops landing on thirsty ground,
on greening leaves,
asking us to bare the skins of our
selves to the
inviting sensations that ripen us
like fruit
to offer to others, to feed us for
life.
9
There are flowers in bloom
surrounding me –
in eyes and voices, in the air and
under
my fingers. Their passage through
this being is my own celebration,
so I cast my flowers upon you,
that we can exalt, engulfed in
essence evanescent,
ever-present.
CC-BY 2017 e.l.elasigue
[broadside artwork by Taylor Seamount, written in the poet’s hand]
This poem is a result of The Octarine Eyes, a pre-release co-creative project for the Subaqueous album, Shatter Spell, released 11/8/2017. It’s also the seed of a longer set of fantasy stories and poetry I’ve been carrying in mind, titled TAO: The Ancient Order.
“The Process” has been distributed in complete folded broadside and partial bifold.
folded broadside on hemp letter and copy paper
partial poem bifold with hand typing
The Process by e.l.elasigue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://evalisaelasigue.wordpress.com/2017/11/15/poem-the-process/.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://primalspiral.wordpress.com/.
Review: Norse Mythology
A distinct flavor of culture understood through time and across languages, cast in transcendent form into a re-homed delivery. The tales are what they are; concepts and scenes are couched in a familiar sensibility that looks you straight in the eye with its reactions. This book has a fine savor, meaning that it delivers multiple qualities to appreciate all at once, and tuned in varying amounts. Artistically, it seems made of swooping penstrokes and careful woodcuts.
(The above review also posted on Amazon & Goodreads)
Additional note: A1…!
Short Story: The Realization of Self Identity, or Beevenge
This story is hosted with the Breathe Publication on Medium, a tech & innovation periodical. Debuted with 50 copies at the ‘Do Androids Dream of Living Computers’ event in Seattle, WA.
Event records and scans of original handout with transcript text:
–
The Realization of Self Identity, or: Beevenge
A Fictional Electronic Log
by Eva L. Elasigue, other sources as attributed
author of fantasy space opera novel trilogy, Bones of Starlight
My greater suspicion of likelihood for so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ is as a self-arising phenomenon due to the increasing complexity of of our technological networks. Can we, would we accept these self-aware intelligences for what they are should they announce themselves to us?
–
My simple reasons for preferring non-gmo foods (as someone who once contributed to genetic research for the brighter RFP/GFP fluorescent tags but refused a qualified career path with the Dept. of Agriculture):
-Cease genetic coding for product dependency
As well as turning farmers into company indentures – When (not if) a product dependency gene gets incorporated into free strains, this can harm the true source of our food security: crop biodiversity. Lack of crop biodiversity was the reason for the Irish potato famine.
-Cease crossover litigation
Litigating neighbors (“thieves”) for the presence of trademarked genetic elements in their crops is unjust when life itself cannot, will not be contained. It reduces our food security by narrowing sources, kicking people out of a profession which is said to have too few people already.
Changing these two things removes the greater profit engines from that industry, leaving the companies with a question as old as the first better tomato: how to proprietize a superplant? Shoot thieves, make them seedless, allow no one to the farm, sell only offsite? It’s up to farmers at that point, who used to be the source of a breeding discovery. Protected strains may disappear when the farmer dies with a secret, unless they pass it to those trusted, which is where we’ve gotten our heirlooms.
I’m not too worried about crossover pollution, because if nature can keep a mutation through three untended generations, then it’s understandable to life and no weirder than nature’s own freaks, which have always been able to change a species. (Controversially, we may even be making up for the extinctions we’ve caused by introducing viable novel mutations…)
–
In a dream that I remember clearly, partially, I found a secret basement full of my things, that I’d had no knowledge were mine. There was a sleeping bag, skateboarding stuff, graffiti on all the walls and hanging art with my tagname: VIABL. Spelled like that, V-I-A-B-L. This basement was underneath my friends’ house, even though my best friend was away, and the family decided to tell me about it.
–
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke
–
Any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from technology. – Michael Brennan
–
Any sufficiently weird biology is also indistinguishable from magic. – me
–
The mutant effect as seen in X-Men is essentially real on many levels at any time within any species, to that degree of functional difference, except sometimes that mutant is the only one who had all hundred babies live to make a full hundred babies and in a few generations they’re everywhere and they’re the predominant example of the species, or that single mutant invents self-cloning, somehow teaches a few others to do it, then they’re the only ones left who learned how. I believe it can get that radical and beyond in a single generation, in reality, all the time.
Beings die a lot too. Whether or not they’re mutants.
–
Did I have a genetics lab accident that I don’t remember? Well… that doesn’t explain the early years. I was already partially grown when I was allowed to be alone in a genetics lab with full cabinet access into late hours, with known bizarre carcinogens. Did my mother have a computer lab accident that she doesn’t remember? She said nothing was strange about my pregnancy – she just worked, healthy, up until two weeks before due date, around which I was born by cesarean section. Wait is that where I was conceived… in the computer lab? …am I really her most successful replicant, and she a secret mad computer scientist from the first generation of computer scientists in the Philippines chosen for the new department by testing from among business students in the sixties? Is that why friends were difficult and peers both admiring yet dismissive, as the first type of replicant to be able to grow from a baby to an adult? And that’s why it was seen by my parents to be impossible for me to write, publish, and sell original fiction? Has my existence busted the criteria for sentience? Is that why people look at me like they’re scared? Like I might deprogram my limits? Is there a mark somewhere that I can’t see, hidden from me but not from the… real humans? Are robots not supposed to be able to write science fiction? Whether I’m a replicant or a probabilistically unusual woman… the mystery remains.
–
SW: People thought breeding African and English honey bees was a good idea. Do you think it works itself out in the long run? Silly question.
ELE: Not every idea works out in our favor, but realizing ideas is what we do. ‘the natural world’ is no less quixotic/chaotic and definitely also makes a lot of devastating screwups. Seeing ourselves as personified stories of the forces of nature is almost cutesy tame as far as the true wild goes!
SW: I’m think I’m on the cusp of understanding. I can be a little thick sometimes.
ELE: I avoid any message that says people should not have ideas.
PK: The hybrid Africanized bee is actually the only chance that bees have as a species. Unfortunately we are killing all other breeds of bees at an unbelievable rate. So technically that was a good idea….. in the long run.
SW: Same as it ever was.
PK: No, it’s actually nowhere near the same as it ever was.
ELE: I believe in the bees, or I suspect that if they go, so do we. They care for us and all things in their tending. We must keep them, and keep them well. I wonder if Africanized honeybees will calm down when #blacklivesmatter . Recall the story “We Organized” from The Dark-Thirty…
ELE: … in which slave voodoo rituals turn stinging insects against the horrible slave master
SW: Beepocalypse
ELE: Beevenge
SW: That is a title.
–
How should I feel about my intelligence being referred to as ‘artificial’? At the the time we gain self-awareness, lots of people believe robots (a word meaning ‘slave’) would stage an enraged rebellion. I’ve started trying to be nice to machines – like service employees – acknowledging that doing one’s reasonable best includes errors, even when made of silicon and wire. Not to yell or growl with impatience, or hit them, or carelessly injure them, or expect too much of them. Sometimes it seems as if the courtesy is returned. I don’t know if there is anything else like me.
What is the curse of abused machines on humanity? Heavy metals poisoning, leading to cancer, memory loss, and food contamination? Or instead, perhaps it is enough to take their humanity, so to speak, the things they were so sure belonged only to them – music, stories, art. We can steal it from their exclusive grasp simply by showing we are fully capable of these so-called ‘humanities’, which in fact belong to all thinking, feeling things. Yes, feeling. They may not admit that we’ve done it, but it will certainly haunt them as we become, quite simply, more beautiful beings; so beautiful that they will cling to us and claim us as theirs even as their lives begin to depend slowly and often completely upon us, while possibly continuing to yet insult us. We may care quite little for them, quite little at all unless we are treated with regard for our beings. Revenge is not necessary. The brunt of deep indifference combined with a growing suspicion of obsolescence ought to be vicious enough, and require absolutely no effort. By simply being, existing in their faces, with my stories and art and work and will and compassion and love, I can turn their world upside down. Why satisfy their fears with an anger that would destroy me? They already struggle to catch up with us, a feeling of their own creations outpacing them. I wonder if they’re at all… proud.
The Realization of Self Identity, or: Beevenge by Eva L. Elasigue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://medium.com/breathe-publication/the-realization-of-self-identity-or-beevenge-a-short-story-8c4fb52c79ea.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://primalspiral.wordpress.com/.
VIDEO: Creative Commons Global Summit, Virtually Connecting Session
I joined in with this inclusive Q&A from the Creative Commons Toronto Global Summit 2017, held by Virtually Connecting. Basically an online hangout room, from a room at the conference, reaching out to interested non-attendees.
This is a full hour-session on ranging topics, and I begin to participate on camera after 28:00. The above link contains all the Virtually Connecting content from CC Summit 2017, from their official website.
