Book Reviews

Twilight lit an empty suburbia in sepia. His parent’s neighborhood was older, more traditional. The sameness scrolled by without triggering Isaac's conscious awareness. Yards circled each house, each house was ringed by bushes, every tree was lined with mulch, and each yard had a pleasantly curved island of flowers. Families in these old neighborhoods got an operating credit for lawn maintenance, but the scale of the operation ruled out creativity. He pulled into his parent’s driveway and pressed the gearshift into park. Then he turned the keys slowly, reluctantly in the ignition, drawing out the moment between on and off…

He fell into another memory, and before his vision cleared, he heard speaking. "You're quitting? Scott." As the darkness cleared he saw Pastor Dan remove his glasses and set them in front of him on a mahogany desk and stare at him in disbelief. Isaac checked out his surroundings. They were in a little office, the walls floor to ceiling with books. It was Pastor Dan! Huh. Isaac wondered again what had happened to him. Propped in front of Dan was an ancient screen on a portable folding stand. Isaac chortled inwardly. That thing must weigh a full two pounds…

The wind rippled through the golden grain, heavy heads bowed. The young man watched and prayed his prayer, a silent, nameless thing, yellow and flecked with black. The Mind nagged at him like an uncompleted game of chess, pulling him back. It was less overwhelming out here, but he knew that the closer he got to the city the stronger it would become. He sighed, looking down. He was already late. He looked back up and then turned toward his old car, rust crescent moons above the wheel wells, the sun already sinking toward the horizon…

Dear Harry, A novel about peeling back the surface of the normal. I write seeking representation for my completed 80,000-word neuroscience dystopia novel, bigMind, a work of literary science fiction whose world development and sociological ideas do not overshadow plot, character, and pacing. Don't be fooled by the genre tropes below: bigMind subverts most of the tropes that it leverages. In a dark near-future, teenage Isaac is a member of the elite operator class, on the cusp of his Choosing and obsessed with finding autonomy from the AI implanted in him since birth…

Picts blew through the classmind like a breeze through the leaves of a tree, the Goople watermark barely visible in the backdrop of thought. The classmind was the collective intelligence of the class, fused together by collaboration. There were all kinds of bigMinds, and each one had its own idiosyncratic archetypes, a kind of semiotic pidgin. But Isaac couldn't pay attention to the picts blowing through his thoughtnode…

Dear Richard, I write seeking representation for my completed 80,000-word neuroscience dystopia novel, bigMind, a work featuring a young-adult protagonist that fuses literary and hard science fiction. In a dark near-future, Isaac is a member of the elite "operator" class, on the cusp of his Choosing and obsessed with finding autonomy from the AI implanted in him since birth. He can choose to submit himself to the neural machinations of the AI and step into his "privilege," or he can choose to discover who he really is without it…

Needs: 1pg synopsis Dear Harry, I write seeking representation for my completed 80,000-word neuroscience dystopia novel, bigMind, a work fusing literary and hard science fiction whose world development and sociological ideas do not overshadow plot, character, and pacing. It is written for adults, but could be marketed as a coming-of-age novel because it features a YA protagonist. It is not only genre-bending; it consciously subverts genre tropes. In a dark near-future, Isaac is a member of the elite operator class, on the cusp of his Choosing and obsessed with finding autonomy from the AI implanted in him since birth…

Bio: Sometime in high school Jeremy accidentally ate the red pill instead of the more harmless blue one, and has been an activist ever since. In 2003, Jeremy spent six months in prison for civil disobedience while working to close the School of the Americas: a US training grounds for Latin American military that fueled the excesses of the anti-communist dirty wars. Coming out of the Occupy movement in Washington DC, Jeremy created an program at the Quixote Center organizing Fresh Stops: farm-to-table initiatives for low-income families built through community organizations…

Leon, I write seeking representation for my completed 80,000-word neuroscience dystopia novel, bigMind, a work fusing literary and hard science fiction whose world development and sociological ideas do not overshadow plot, character, and pacing. It is written for adults (read: without condescension), but features a YA protagonist. It is not only genre-bending; it consciously subverts genre tropes. Synopsis In a dark near-future, Isaac is a member of the elite "operator" class, on the cusp of his Choosing and obsessed with finding autonomy from the AI implanted in him since birth…

Splitting The wind rippled through the golden grain, heavy heads bowed. The young man watched and prayed his prayer, a silent, nameless thing, yellow and flecked with black. The Mind nagged at him like an uncompleted game of chess, pulling him back. It was less overwhelming out here, but he knew that the closer he got to the city the stronger it would become. He sighed, looking down. He was already late. He looked back up and then turned toward his Toyota, rust crescent moons above the wheel wells, the sun already sinking toward the horizon…

Dear Harry, I write seeking representation for my completed 80,000-word neuroscience dystopia novel, bigMind, a work of literary science fiction whose world development and sociological ideas do not overshadow plot, character, and pacing. It is written for adults, but could be marketed as a coming-of-age novel because it features a YA protagonist. In a dark near-future, Isaac is a member of the elite operator class, on the cusp of his Choosing and obsessed with finding autonomy from the AI implanted in him since birth…

Dear Harry, I write seeking representation for my completed 80,000-word neuroscience dystopia novel, bigMind, a work of literary science fiction whose world development and sociological ideas do not overshadow plot, character, and pacing. bigMind has elements of magical realism that are ambiguously attributable to psychological technology, a young adult protagonist, and a commentary on white privilege. Think Lucius Shepard and Octavia Butler rewriting Farenheit 451 for the digital age…

Isaac is a member of the elite "operator" class, on the cusp of his Choosing and obsessed with discovering the difference between himself and "the Mind:" the AI implanted in him since birth. But the Mind has just begun its journey into the core of his self; starting from the chip at the back from his visual cortex it already twines deep into his limbic system. After he chooses to become an operator, Isaac will become a node on the net, processing data for the Mind with his extra dreamwidth, unaware of any difference between himself and it…

Sometime in high school Jeremy accidentally ate the red pill instead of the more harmless blue one, and has been an activist ever since. In 2003, Jeremy spent six months in prison for civil disobedience while working to close the School of the Americas: a US training grounds for Latin American military that fueled the excesses of the anti-communist dirty wars. Coming out of the Occupy movement in Washington DC, Jeremy created an program at the Quixote Center organizing Fresh Stops: farm-to-table initiatives for low-income families built through community organizations…

Dear Martha, I write seeking representation for my completed 80,000-word neuroscience dystopia novel, bigMind, a work featuring a young-adult protagonist that fuses literary and hard science fiction. In a dark near-future, Isaac is a member of the elite "operator" class, on the cusp of his Choosing and obsessed with finding autonomy from the AI implanted in him since birth. He can choose to submit himself to the neural machinations of the AI and step into his "privilege," or he can choose to discover who he really is without it…

Dear Merrilee, I write seeking representation for my completed 80,000-word neuroscience dystopia novel, bigMind, a work featuring a young-adult protagonist that fuses literary and hard science fiction. In a dark near-future, Isaac is a member of the elite "operator" class, on the cusp of his Choosing and obsessed with finding autonomy from the AI implanted in him since birth. He can choose to submit himself to the neural machinations of the AI and step into his "privilege," or he can choose to discover who he really is without it…

Back when Isaac was a kid, books moldered on shelves. Like records after new record player needles were unfindable, thrown in the trash on the next basement clean-out. After all, everyone saw how the persistent readers fared, their picto corrupted by the visual artifacts of words, sinking lower in society until they were nothing but translator nodes on the Mindnet—or vacs…

Intellectual Acknowledgements I am a jack of all trades, and a master of none: an intellectual debutante and a surface-grazer. I have robbed hard science for his poetry and poetry for her machine parts, welding together a cyborg that is neither poetic nor scientific. None of the scientists whose work I have so robbed can be reproached for their science, nor could poets or historians be brought up on charges of machine-love and stripped of title…

Plot Summary: likely found on the back of the book A struggle for self in the neuronal depths of consciousness. In a near future, writing has been replaced by a dream-language that has destroyed books as effectively as by burning. Some have fused their minds to an artificial intelligence that harnesses humanity's sleeping brain for meaning-making, while others perform manual labor under remote neural control. Isaac is a teenager, groomed for a system he increasingly sees as oppressive. Will he join the Mindnet…

Dear Meredith, I write to you spurred by a 75,000-word neuroscience dystopia I've written that falls within the genre conventions of science fiction. In a near future, writing has been replaced by a dream-language that has destroyed books as effectively as by burning. Some have fused their minds to an artificial intelligence that harnesses humanity's sleeping brain for meaning-making, while others perform manual labor under remote neural control. Isaac is a teenager, groomed for a system he increasingly sees as oppressive. Will he join the Mindnet…

Random Exciting Questions for Readers to Become Excited About That Do Not Yet Have a Home Can the artificial intelligences' limbic connection rob us of free will? Will humanity live and die for dreamcreds: will dreaming supplant reality? Can a member of the class that remote controls others be loved by one of the operated? In a world where dream pictures have replaced reading, what is the value of history? What is the value of reading…

bigMind notes Jethro scene: need more context around dialogue, like noting that they have stood up from there chess game when they move into dream. At end of dream, Isaac sits in the grass, but they are supposed to still be in dorm room. Fix Jethro's accent. This is second reference to an Nother formerly – operated student. Would still like to hear more about the student. Jethro must be friends with him or her. Foreshadowing about last real – person chess game a little heavy-handed. Isaac's "lazy vac" comment unclear…

The Mindchip is implanted at the back of the skull, on the primary visual cortex, just above the cerebellum: the movement center of the brain. In all vacs, the feed-forward tendrils that spider into the cerebellum can control movement via remote signals received in the chip. There are two possible sites for the Mind's visual interface, the so-called mindscreen: where shapes and colors are projected across the vision. The easiest and cheapest place to connect is at the striate cortex, located near where the chip is implanted at the base of the skull…

Spicule-forming bacteria colony, keyed to light. Glassin is a histidine-, aspartic acid-, threonine-, and proline-rich protein and directs silica polycondensation at neutral pH and room temperature. Basically, the protein that makes silica spicules. Nearly all vacs and all integros also have a visual connection that connects into the visual system at the striate cortex and overlays visual processing, the so-called lucid implant…

Curiosity He fell into the memory. He was twelve. He was in a gothic church, and the walls were grey stone, peaking in a graceful pointed arch. A crack in the foundation spidered the floor shooting up the wall. The light was beautiful, filtered in through the mosaic-colored windows. Stained glass chandeliers lined the walls, black iron, hung on heavy iron chains from heavy wooden beams. The pews were straight dark wood, with carved accents, facing toward the center, where Dan stood behind a pulpit carved with a dove-shaped hole bearing an olive branch…

I write to you spurred by a completed 80,000-word neuroscience dystopia, bigMind, that falls within the genre conventions of hard science fiction and features a teenage protagonist and an electronic soundtrack embedded via QR code. Isaac is a teenager in a near-future who can't differentiate his own desire from the manipulations of the chip in his brain. He must choose whether join the elite and fully fuse himself with the AI that feeds on human dreams or join an underclass to perform manual labor under remote neural control…

Milosz, Czeslaw. "The Captive Mind…

bigMind is the story of a privileged young man in an unequal society who makes a choice to side with the oppressed. In the far future, technology has burrowed deeper and deeper into human brains. An artificial intelligence became conscious by using humanity's dreams to add semantic richness to data. Humans created a dream-language for it called picto that has supplanted writing and allows for the direct transmission of dreams and emotions, covering over the past. Isaac begins to hate the alien presence of the Mind within him that shapes and molds his thoughts toward the will of the collective…

Capitals Cinturon: caps or not? School: the assembly. Make all the Mind's brain regions accord to real-life brain spaces and don't skip any. Search for "dream processing." change freeMarket name? remember, mostly it's "the freeMarket" Add police insurgency to the history scene in school? Chill out Jethro's accent again in dream scene. Revise first conversation between Sol and Isaac. Pastor dan needs introduced before market where he pops up suddenly. Resolve book getting wet potentially in the rain. Should I remove this passage to get rid of excess God-talk…

I write seeking representation for my completed 80,000-word neuroscience dystopia novel—bigMind—that falls within the genre conventions of hard science fiction and features a young adult protagonist. Isaac is a teenager in a near-future who can't differentiate his own desire from the neural manipulations of the mindchip. He must choose whether remain an “operator” and fully fuse himself with the AI that feeds on human dreams (the Mind) or join an underclass to perform manual labor under remote neural control…

Dear X, I write seeking representation for my completed 80,000-word neuroscience dystopia novel—bigMind—that falls within the genre conventions of hard science fiction and features a young adult protagonist. Throughout the book, QR codes link to a soundtrack created by the electronic musician Spearfisher. Isaac is a teenager in a near-future who can't differentiate his own desire from the neural manipulations of the mindchip. He must choose whether remain an “operator” and fully fuse himself with the AI that feeds on human dreams (the Mind) or join an underclass to perform manual labor under remote neural control…

Titles • Colonized Dreams: theft of Consciousness by the Machine • Dreams for the Machine • bigMind • Overmind • Hememonicon • Cog • Splitting • Shut Up and Love the Machine • Artificial Dreams • Operator • How the Machine Stole Dreams • Outsourced Consciousness bigMind Hegemonicon Neuroscience Dystopia Neural Traceries of Dystopia Neural Tracks in the Snow Neural Traceries of the Machine Brain Tracks of the Machine Oineromancer Operator vacland thinspace brainstem whistleflute neural traceries of desire as seen through a mind, dimly lucid metemotions synapse mindnet mindweb lacuna aphasia panopticon dream api radical metadystopia of privilege and……

Dear X, I write seeking representation for my completed 80,000-word neuroscience dystopia novel, bigMind, a work featuring a young-adult protagonist that fuses literary and hard science fiction. In a dark near-future, Isaac is a member of the elite "operator" class, on the cusp of his Choosing and obsessed with finding autonomy from the AI implanted in him since birth. He can choose to submit himself to the neural machinations of the AI and step into his "privilege," or he can choose to discover who he really is without it…

Earth Meteor "You alright?" his Grandma asked, eyeing him with a certain reptilian care. Reptiles do care for their young. The skin melted off her face like a skull candle in the flame. "Yeah," he managed. But the glib phrase echoed through him and became an axiom, timeless as the tides of sickness and health, mortality itself drawing his life like the moon draws the ocean. And there he was, inside his body again, neither infinitely rational nor infinitely hungry, a monad. "You really don't look good," said his Grandma. "Grandma, can I bum a cigarette?" he asked…

He closed his eyes and fell into his father's memories. The motion of his father's step was strange, moving up the stairwell. He attempted to move, but was unable to do so. He felt the vague disorienting panic that came from feeling the movements of another person but being unable to control their emotions. His chest felt sore, as though he had recently worked out, and he could feel the strength in his arms. He looked up into a bathroom mirror and saw that he was wearing a tan sweater with a white clerical collar…

The half-light filtered in through windows and in through Isaac's half-closed eyelids as he padded downstairs, dressed in his basesuit and socks, not having settled on a projection for the day. He turned into the kitchen and opened the cabinet to draw forth his corn-sweetened corn-ring cereal. His mom came in and picked up a sponge from beside the sink. He crossed in front of her to retrieve a bowl from the cabinet and set it on the island. She wiped down the already-clean counter, "You've been spending an awful lot of time in your room lately…

The moon outside his bedroom window glowed bright as a screen in the sky, power lines criss-crossing it like the black lines that crisscrossed the pages of his father's old books. And so was there something written in the logic of the universe, encoded in the distance and relation between objects? If his parents had their way, he'd stay trapped above the surfaces of things, trapped in the derivative symbolic world of the hyperreal, where meaning was easy and fast, squeezed and distilled into intoxicating liquor. Hyper-meaningful and therefore meaningless…

Dreams "Where to?" Isaac asked in picto as he approached Jethro after school. "The dorms," said Jethro in mouthspeak. "This way," he motioned with his head. They joined the stream of shuffling bodies as students walked out to the parking lot, their hands empty of physical possessions. They stepped out into a sea of mindcars skinned in a thousand dreams. Beneath, the cars were small three-wheeled pods built light to travel the thickways. But when seen through the mindscreen, they took on the drivers' chosen shape…

The days slipped into a week, and each night he fought the fight to slip into natural dreams, but as his brain learned the path, it became easier and easier. Until tomorrow was Choosing. He watched the sun setting through his bedroom window pane. The rosy fingers of day released suburbia into night, tinged subtle blue by the city smog. There were few grains of sand in the hourglass top now. And by morning all stones would tumble through the moment's slender hole into memory, a cairn marking the grave of possibility. His thoughts were of her…

Today was Wednesday, one of Sol’s days to be operated, and she was thinking about how tired she was. Despite that, she wouldn't let herself slip into the trance, like the lúcidos, because the hangovers just got worse and worse, until you’d spend your credits on the lucids rather than face the evenings. Until you were a wraith, sleeping at the edges of the thickspace. But she and her dad needed the credits, so they each spent two days a week under operation…

Isaac walked down the empty hall to the councilor's office. The summons had come during 7th period, and Mr. Graeber's pict had flashed into him, urging him to stand up and leave class. There was no doubt that they were tracking his infatuation with reading. But had they discovered his sabotage of the bacteria destined to build his mindweb? He went the restroom and his locker on the way to the office…

At first nothing happened. He simply continued his vigil as his inphones set his thoughts to a heroic soundtrack. It began as a metallic taste in his mouth. Which, when he thought about it, was a fishhook that ran through his tongue like a piercing, the haft down his throat into his body where it disappeared. It wasn't painful, but the music pulled at it gently, with a faint sense of hunger, as though his throat were a limitless pipeway to the wharf where longshoreman bundled and shipped the throbbing bass to echo down the fleshy corridors……

Dawn came in gray—drizzling its cold tears. Isaac was sprawled to his side with his mouth open. He groaned and stirred, squinting briefly at the morning and closing his eyes again, thinking about the argument from the night before. The soft touch of the Mind worked on his mind's surface: reassuring, strengthening. He felt vague irritation at this obviously alien thought even as his body came to a pleasant alertness. He laid there trying to think of a reason to wake up and failed. The tugging came, gentle and insistent. He rolled and sat up…

He fell into blackness, and then still further and deeper, into a pair of eyebrows that became a host of beetles, the gnashing of their pincers roaring like a dry rain all around him, swarming inside his mouth and nose, rustling against his naked eye. He felt the teeming mass press against his back in a thousand places, bearing him up, until he was floating on a river of beetles. He struggled, crying out, but the beetles were implacable, uncrushable. He burst upwards with a start, with a buzzing hunger around his mindscreen…

He took his seat at the round table just before the starting signal flashed through his mind like a white flag across his inner vision. The students' voices started to die down as they prepared for practice. Today was very special. Today, they were to observe the processes of the Assembly itself. This was their first opportunity to experience the centralized processing that ran their world directly. They merged quietly, gathering together, and the collection vision faded to a ceiling-camera view of the Mind's midwest processing center, deep underground…

Shaman Isaac had credits to spare and he wasn't planning to slow his roll. His consciousness still felt pressed from beneath, as though the ten-thousand neurons that hold the tiny computations of decision-making mutinied: refusing to discard their data even though a P3a consciousness wave had already been sent to the frontal lobe and their data was no longer needed. But that consciousness wave had been long forgotten, smoothed over in dreams, unwritten to the memory. But how could the ten-thousand input neurons know their afferent wave had been ignored…

But the normal proceeded as it always did, he spent the evening restlessly searching for distraction, but no cute animal vid, no funny pictrant, no vid fantasy could chase the growing heaviness that he carried into the next day, despite the Mind's attempts to chase it away and move forward with the ordinary. Miss Flagherty wasn't physically there. But as she played the picto lecture, she moved virtually among the members of the classmind, answering questions as they arose while picto flashed across their mindscreens…

All afternoon, rage sloshed around in his stomach like acid digesting an undercooked potato. As time wore on, he felt his resentment fade with the signature irrationality of a mindshift, but he was too worn out to be contrary. He found himself simply excited to test his chess skills against a brand-new player. And so he let the opiate of alien brain stimulation draw him into a reflection that distracted him from his bodily rage and pain. Chess had been one of the first games to fall before the advance of raw processing power that heralded early artificial intelligence…

Sol drove with her brights on, squinting out into pouring rain. The wipers beat like an anxious heart, sluicing the water back and forth across the wet windshield. Her backseat was filled with scavenged books; and so that was a success. But the guys at the dump had made her wait; and now it was late: too late to be driving alone. She’d already texted her dad, but he was at a meeting. People said that you could come around a bend in the road to find a blockade. They said it was quick…

Isaac was still parsing the fight with Billy pict by pict as he went to meet Roman for their trip out past the Cinturón. Roman had spread out McDonalds on the hood of the van, picking fries from the translucent wrapper. "How can you even eat that? It's morning," asked Isaac. "Good morning to you, too!" said Roman, sucking from a drink straw…