'Tis a far, far better place I go...

Don't you hate moving house? I do. Each and every time I do it, I swear that I will never do it again. Ever.

Yet I always end up breaking my vow. There are aways excellent reasons why it must be done, reasons that hold more sway than the vague memory of how awful the ordeal was last time.

So you'd think I'd avoid moving my blog to a new platform at all costs, wouldn't you? Especially one like this where 75% of my traffic is referrred from other people's sites? (I love you all, you wonderful people!)

But I made the mistake of downloading Wordpress and installing it on my website - just to have a look, you understand, I didn't mean to cause trouble. But I fell in love with it. It is so feature-rich, so flexible, configurable. There are so many widgets and plug-ins, so many options!

So I started working on a Wordpress blog, to see what my writing blog could look like with all this extra wonderfulness. And, in no time at all, I was hooked.

Now, I'd like you to click on this link and go across to the new site. Don't worry, you can still keep reading this post. (If you're already there, the link will be disabled, so please stop clicking it and read on.)

If you'd clicked the link like I asked you to , you'd be there now, enjoying all that techno-goodness.

As time goes by, I will move over completely to the new bog, so be warned. If you have a link to my blog on your own blog, or on a web-page, you should update it now. My links to your blogs - if I have any - have all been taken over there and that is the only place I will keep up-to-date from now on. So, if you have my blog bookmarked, you should update your bookmarks to point there too. Don't waste a moment, do it now!

I'm really, really sorry for the inconvenience. Honestly, I hate to do this to you.

Just in case you're a forgetful procrastinator, I will continue to put up duplicate posts at this old blog for a while, until I'm sure everybody's links have been redirected. I'll be sure to let you know before I stop double-posting.

Meanwhile, get over to the new blog, take a look around, and enjoy a better browsing experience.

Definitions for the Perplexed

Anyone new to the writing business will probably be as vague as I am on the meanings of certain publishing terms. If you're not in the industry, and you haven't had a book published, you might be unsure about terms such as; 'ARC', 'galley', 'proof', 'mech', and so on. Even if you're hip to the jive, you might still not quite grasp the difference between a 1st galley and a 2nd galley.

Well, thanks to one of my favourite bloggers, Editorial Anonymous, you can now bandy TLAs and obscure jargon with the most hardened industry professionals. For a few days now, EA has been doing a series of posts called 'Definitions for the Perplexed', wherein she defines a whole slew of such terms in her usual, clear and concise style.

As soon as I saw the series title I thought, 'Hey, that's me!' If you have the same reaction, I suggest you start adding these invaluable posts to your bookmarks collection.

Singularity: What's the Point?

I like blogs that mull ideas.

One idea that is uber-trendy in sci-fi just now is 'the singularity'. It's basically Raymond Kurzweil's prediction that, one day soon, our understanding and technical sophistication will enable the emergence of human-machine hybrids (or just intelligent machines in some versions) which, with exponentially-increasing speed, will rapidly 'upgrade' themselves beyond our understanding. It's a version of the future that tends to end badly for the poor hom saps left behind. So get your brains augmented now guys or you'll miss the boat.

I suppose I'm rather sceptical. Kurzweil's writings tend to be all breathless and excited, with half-formed ideas shooting out in all directions. Wonderful to nibble at now and then but ultimately unsatisfying - like chocolate eclairs. It's not that there is nothing in it - far from it - I just don't see it going the way Kurzweil so obviously longs for it to go. Nor do I see advances in biology, computing, AI, nanotech, etc. ever amounting to a 'singularity' as such. (I wish he'd called it 'The Phase Transition' or something more sensible - 'singularity' is such a bad name for it.) It's hard to believe humans could ever create anything 'transhuman' or, if by some miracle we did, it's hard to see us ever letting it survive. (I also have a strong suspicion that anything 'transhuman' would be so flawed it wouldn't survive long in the wild anyway.)

There is a sense in which the path to transhumanity started when we first began using tools and building shelters - certainly when we stopped hunting and gathering and started farming. Building that first city was probably our biggest mistake! It's hard - probably impossible - deliberately to go back from where you are once that process has started. Of course, there are forces outside our control (climate change, peak oil, pandemics, religion) which could drive us backwards whether we like it or not. Perhaps, if we could develop our intelligence a bit, we would all see what a silly mistake it had all been and take another path.

Anyway, thanks to Sue Lange, writing as Scusteister Schwamp, for reminding me about all this with her Singularity Watch blog. Sue seems to see us all ending up in completely artificial environments one day but I don't see it as inevitable. Some may want it. Many will not. Personally, I would like to live forever - but I'm not holding my breath waiting for the singularity to make it possible.