Bedtime Stories for Emergent Artificial Intelligences

That is the working title of just one current writing project. Check out unfiction.org for excerpts.

What I am trying to do with the fiction

I have been a published writer (freelance journalist) for twenty years. I have had articles, reviews and essays published more than a hundred times, probably closer to 150 but I haven’t counted recently, and I have been paid (modestly but consistently) for every word in print. This is tremendously liberating, in that I have no burning desire to see my name in print more than it has been. I am quite literally (and literarily) set free from ambition, adrift in a sea of endless possibility.

I can contrast this to the tempestuous beginnings of my architecture career, when I was (in retrospect) quite toxically ambitious in my twenties even if I never did anything unethical or bad as such. It was just a vibe, and a bad one, boring to be around. Billy Connolly, legendary Scots comedian, has said ‘I avoid ambitious people’. I have learnt why the hard way.

Fortunately for me (and my friends and work colleagues) I got over it, comprehensively, and I am in a good place with the day job (my business providing architectural consulting). This gay abandonment of ambition has freed up my time, my head and my hands.

What to do with all this freedom

So the question is what to do with this excess of psychic freedom. Enter the fiction projects. It has been said ad infinitum that to be a writer one has to be a reader first, and so I turn quite naturally to the exemplars and heroes of my own reading career. Of many, the three who form a triad of influences for the current project, the Bedtime Stories, are John Mortimer, Italo Calvino and Stanislaw Lem. Yes these three are all dead white men, but they are not the sum total of my influences - just the three who have a bearing on my current fiction. Even dead white men have something to offer on occasion.

If I had to identify what each offers the fiction, I would say it is the gentle but acerbic (oxymoronic?) wit and elegance and simplicity of the prose of John Mortimer, particularly the Rumpole books; the utter clarity and archetypal resonance of the works of Italo Calvino, in particular the Italian Folktales and the Invisible Cities; and the mind-bending, endlessly imaginative and delightfully playful (not to forget amusing) stories of such Lem works as The Cyberiad. Calvino’s posthumously published ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’ also played a role in my education as a writer, and I particularly love the memo on ‘lightness’.

The aspiration I have for my fiction is as follows. I want to write works as elegantly written as a Mortimer; as iconic, timeless and archetypal (universal) as a Calvino; and as imaginative and genuinely speculative as a Lem (and if I can get there, as graciously humorous as a Lem too). I have no idea if I will pull this off, but I invite you to follow along as I explore and learn.