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.
The problem for Isaac is that a former elite with a removed limbic interface will likely become a lúcido: the shell of a person who living for first-person dreaming, ordinary world twisted to nightmare.
But how will Isaac discover the contours of his fate? Writing has been replaced by a dream-language that has subsumed and altered all human knowledge, destroying books as effectively as by burning. In exploring the underclass world, he meets Sol, a teenager whose mother left to become an elite and whose rage-stricken father is engaged in revolutionary struggle. She teaches Isaac to read to learn secrets that could free her mother, but falls in love with him in the process despite their class difference. But in a moment of danger, Isaac assumes control of her body to save her life, and she remembers his identity as the member of the elite: necromancer of bodies. Without Sol, Isaac has split from the AI, his friends and his future. He ingests a hallucinogenic drug that promises a third way: freedom within the elite class. But choice was always an illusion and at the end of the book the AI assumes control of Isaac’s body, deletes his memories, and moves him off to his dark future. bigMind ends on this note of narrative completion with a sequel planned.
My B.A. in Cognitive Science: Logic provided the intellectual framework necessary to research the area of dream harvesting for AI consciousness-making. I’ve used that to create a plausible science for a brain interface that uses light-gated ion channels to gain read/write access to the human emotional system. I am in love with science fiction and fantasy novels, and, though I tried to plunge myself into work both profitable and justice-making, I was not content until I returned to my original career plan: become a science fiction writer.
Nonetheless, I am a tenacious programmer and technical project manager, the father of two children and happily married. The book’s main character and experiences are drawn from my variety of personal experiences: a six-month prison stint for social justice, hitchhiking, drugs, forced mental health escapades, and struggles in various social movements like Occupy. I blog as a faith-based progressive radical for HuffPo, Sojourners, ReadWriteWeb, Good Men Project, and Justice Unbound. I have my own platform at glassdimly.com with roughly 200 reads per day. Since my novel is now complete, I will begin actively seeking new publications in the areas of futurist politics and scifi. My novel has absorbed every free moment these last six years, including the neuroscience research and my wide reading on the craft of writing. I believe you will find me pleasant to work with, responsive, and meticulous.
Sincerely,
Jeremy John
The Project
This book is a (semi) literary autobiography enclosed in a hard neuroscience shell. It reads like a dystopic scifi novel about the future of humanity and artificial intelligence. But the core of it is a personal reflection on my experience at the barrel-end of mental health treatments, my six-month prison stint for social justice, drug experiences, and struggles against consumer capitalism in various movements. It took six years to finish, through the birth of two children. I’ve a spent a full-time year on it, writing, when you add it all up.
My B.A. in Cognitive Science: Logic provided the intellectual framework necessary to research the area of dream harvesting for AI consciousness-making. I’ve used that to create a plausible science for a mind/brain interface that uses light-gated ion channels to gain read/write access to the human emotional system. Well… plausible enough.
My novel is not Greg Bear, Ben Bova, or Kim Stanley Robinson. Nor is it Ray Bradbury or Kurt Vonnegut. It strikes a middle path between hard science, ideas, character development, and plot. My literary lights are U. K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Greg Egan, Maria Dora Russell, and Ray Bradbury. The prose is quite varied.
As a web developer and social entrepreneur I’ve got professional communications and project management skills, an eye for technical detail, and a developed social media platform. As an author, I’ll be pleasant, communicative, and engaged. Oh, and I’m tenacious.
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? Or will he forsake his privilege for love, learn to read, and spend the rest of his life remote controlled by those in power: choosing either poverty or the struggle against the Mind-eating pull toward the dreamscape? But if his limbic connection is removed, can his conditioned brain even learn to regulate itself? Or will he end up a lúcido: the shell of a person who lives to consume dreams?
Now you may be wondering, is this a word of hard science fiction? I have done my research: I have a B.A. in Cognitive Science, and as an autodidactic computer programmer, I’ve been able to keep up with the fields of artificial intelligence and neuroscience. To answer the question: my work is rooted in the psyche—the human—and the story it tells is cribbed from my autobiography. If I have succeeded, I have neither subordinated the poetry to its machine-parts nor machine-parts to the poetry.
There is a long controversy that scientists in the field of neuroscience are resolving: are affects a suitable scientific subject? For most of us in the world, this is a question from the lunatic fringe. Regular humans do not share neuroscience’s disinterest in the affects—this was a scientifically necessary conceit designed to root the field in biology without being swayed advanced psychoanalytic theory. The question for us humans has always been how our affects correspond to neural activation regions. But psychoanalytic theory and neuroscience are merely sniffing one another’s tails and have yet to enthusiastically procreate. So yes, my novel is bi-directional: from the psyche and the introspection of consciousness downwards, and from the traceries of neurons and their electrical firings upwards. (has yet to inspire a child).
The problem is that if one were to truly implant a chip in the brain of a human with electrodes spidering into the deepest brain-parts, we’d have no free will. “Free will,” or executive function, is (posited to be) located in the frontal lobe, and cannot reliably stimulate other neural regions like an electrode can. So the struggle against one’s neural implant breaks from the paradigm of hard science—in order to create a feasible character and plot.
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. He becomes increasingly interested in “vacs”—the underclass—because they exist apart from picto and the Mind, offering him a glimpse into an uncolonized world. He finds a book in his parent’s basement and carries it with him, working to understand how to access the book’s prompt: the wrong way to approach a paper book. In his struggle, he sabotages the designer bacteria that are destined to lay the mindweb that will give the Mind deeper control over his limbic system. He clashes with his parents and his best friend, Billy, over the seeming violence of the Mind and its structuring of his life and society.
He begins to attract the attention of the school counselor, who places him in a special “Vac Studies” class where he follows around one of the intelligence-gathering “eyes” of the Mind. In his observation, Isaac meets a former operator, Bob, who has had his emotional interface removed and can’t properly regulate his emotions any longer. Bob spies on the activities of vacs organizing toward armed overthrow of the Mind.
But Bob’s cover is blown, and Isaac helps Roman abandon Bob to his fate in a dilapidated trailer. Isaac reads this as an attempt to “scare him straight” and quits Vac Studies. He drifts away from his family and his best and only friend, Billy, as they fight over his new interests.
Isaac feels desperate to differentiate himself from the mind. Even though the Mind blurs his memories in sleep, Isaac find his way out into the thinspace to a vac market, where he meets a shamanic figure called the Jaguar who is said to be able to hack the mindChip. The Jaguar robs him of his car and dreamcreds and leaves him unconscious in a field, in the rain, but with some sort of drug in his pocket bearing a picture of Alice in Wonderland.
As he hitchhikes back, he meets a vac girl, Sol: a book-lover whose mother left her to become an operator and a father who, in his grief, hates operators and participates in the revolution that has entangled Bob. Sol wants to figure out a way to re-wire an operator brain through intellectual and spiritual exercises in order to someday liberate her mother, and offers to teach Isaac how to read.
Sol gradually teaches Isaac to read using Fahrenheit 451 as a primer. He learns to control his own emotions through silent meditation and moves further from the Mind and his past life, falling in love with Sol. Just after they make out in the forest for the first time, Isaac’s mindscreen alerts him to the presence of a poisonous spider whose fangs are quiveriring right near Sol’s hand. To save her from death, he operates her briefly. Weeping, she separates from him, reminded of his inalterable identity vis-a-vis her people.
On the eve of his choosing, she hasn’t responded to any of his messages. So he opts for a third way and ingests the Jaguar’s hallucinogen. He has a vision of what the Mind truly is. When he comes to his senses, his “choice” turns out to be an illusion. The Mind operates him and marches him toward his vac work assignment, his memory of his former life fading, primed to become a lucid addict.
In the planned sequel, Isaac is an amnesiac and lucid-addicted vac when Sol finds him and helps him remember. They are pulled further apart as Isaac chooses rage in revolutionary struggle and Sol moves toward contemplation.
word salad
ragey curious obsessive
finding the pith, differentiate, splitting, spiritual, rebellious, driven, bored, frustrated, explorative, superficiality, surfaces of things, dig below the surface to strike the body of history, oppositional, adversarial, against the grain, contrarian, analyticical, questioning, meddlesome, nosy, inquisitive, seeking, wayward, conflicted