Science Fiction

Six Degrees of Separation – Wifedom…

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Six Degrees of Separation is an excuse to peruse six favourite books linked to an initial offering by our host KateW and eventually link them back to the beginning. Kate W offers us big themes in her choices and since I have been participating, these have included – being adrift in Time, Friendship, Memory, and Romance. This month we have the biographical Wifedom and the theme for me will be that of wives albeit mainly fictional examples – also, three of the books have been adapted for screen…

I have not read Wifedom (as is usually the case with Kate W’s suggestions) but I would like to after reading what Amazon has to say about the book. – At the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue.

“I’ve always loved Orwell,” Funder writes, “his self-deprecating humour, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on.” So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation.

Eileen O’Shaughnessy married Orwell in 1936. O’Shaughnessy was a writer herself, and her literary brilliance not only shaped Orwell’s work, but her practical common sense saved his life. But why and how, Funder wondered, was she written out of their story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder re-creates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War in London. As she peeks behind the curtain of Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer—and what it is to be a wife.

A breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the twentieth century, Wifedom speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past. Genre-bending and utterly original, it is an ode to the unsung work of women everywhere.

The Aubrey–Maturin series of novels by Patrick O’Brian have been compared to the works of Jane Austen – exhaustively researched plots drawn from the annals of the British Royal Navy and transplanted into Patrick O’Brian’s fictional Master and Commander series, these books are as equally character-driven as they are portrayals of the events of life in the navy during the years of the Napoleonic wars and I urge anyone who fears such books to be too technical or militaristic, to try them. No better example – beyond the two main protagonists Aubrey and Maturin, than the portrait of the eventual wife of Captain Aubrey – Sophie. The life of any sailor’s wife would be hard and full of fear of her husband never returning, long periods of absence, varying financial fortune and many other forms of uncertainty, but in Sophie we have a wife of heroic qualities to match the vicissitudes heaped upon her – a wife who takes charge of Aubrey’s home life every bit as much as he is captain of his ship at sea! The rather battered cover below depicts Sophie’s first appearance in the series of books alongside her future husband…

Another wife heaped with vicissitudes along with her husband, is Raynor Winn in her autobiographical account of how she and her husband, having lost their house and business due to a treacherous friend and having simultaneous with their homelessness, receive a diagnosis of her husband’s terminal illness. They decide that with nowhere else to go and nothing to be done, they will spend the summer walking the coastal path from Somerset to Dorset around Devon and Cornwall. No spoilers but their endurance trial brings unexpected rewards and Raynors’s support of her husband is exemplary… Below is the very beautiful cover designed by Angela Harding.

If the three wives portrayed so far have been long-suffering, among other things, Cathy in East of Eden, by John Steinbeck, is the one dishing out the suffering, beginning by running away after burning her parents to death – she is a character of pure evil – described as having a “malformed soul”. Steinbeck regarded East of Eden as his magnum opus even though other books are more famous, Cannery Row (previously covered by me), The Grapes of Wrath and that much studied in school – Of Mice and Men. Despite being made into an iconic film featuring James Dean, I venture to suggest that not so many people have read the epic family saga East of Eden. Indeed the film only deals with part of the story and I wonder if Steinbeck would be disappointed that his magnum opus is not the one that time has accorded that accolade to.

The title East of Eden comes from the fourth chapter of Genesis, verses one through sixteen, which recounts the story of Cain and Abel and the whole book – accused by some of being “moralistic” certainly deals with big themes – good and evil, brotherly rivalry, love and depravity and as always with Steinbeck we are treated to a portrait of the life and times in the Salinas Valley, California. There is a saying about writing that “big themes are dead weights” and whilst this is undoubtedly a weighty novel, it is still a great read from a master, even if not his master work…
The cover below makes as sensational a view as it can of the central drama of two brothers torn apart by the inexplicably evil Cathy.

Another painful marriage is depicted in On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan – an author not renowned for being the most cheerful in his writings, the unfolding of this depiction of a virginal couple on honeymoon in an as yet sexually unliberated 1962, is excruciating in the extreme and yet, such is the quality of the writing – you cannot look away… on Chesil Beach has been turned into a film.

Many of the writers I have covered in my 6 Degrees are writers I read long ago but Nicola Griffiths is a new favourite whose canon I am working through in order, from Ammonite (Lesbian science fiction) to her current amazing historical novels featuring Hild, a powerful woman from Britain’s pre-medieval history. Between these wildly divergent books linked only by their themes of strong women and excellent writing, comes the Aud Torvingen series of which Stay is the second book. Aud is not exactly your typical P.I. as she is a woman of independent wealth but in each of the three books she conducts investigations, willingly or unwillingly and (spoiler alert) – she also falls in love in book one and in book two has to deal with the loss and the grief over her lover. Although Aud does not find the happiness of marriage until book three, Stay is a portrait of a wife thwarted and her response by throwing herself into “a series of physical, moral, and emotional challenges that she has been dodging for weeks, months, and years – none of her choices are easy.” What more can we ask from a book…

My last link, slightly tenuously back to Wifedom, is The Fourth Hand by John Irving. It is a tale of a wife who is so dedicated to her husband that – well here is what the Penguin blurb says:- While reporting a story from India, a New York television journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion; millions of TV viewers witness the accident. In Boston, a renowned hand surgeon awaits the opportunity to perform the nation’s first hand transplant. A married woman in Wisconsin wants to give the one-handed reporter her husband’s left hand, that is, after her husband dies. But the husband is alive, relatively young, and healthy…
The widow supplies permission for the transplant but then demands visitation rights with the hand – a typical thought experiment of a plot from the masterful John Irving. This is the first of John Irving’s books that I have included in 6 Degeees but once discovered, I devoured his early books such as The World According to Garp and several of his books have been turned into films. I recommend some of his later books too, such as Till I Find You about tattoos and tattoo artists. Irving has repeated elements that crop up in many of his books – bears, hotels, wrestling but however far-fetched some of the things Irving writes about may seem to be, they make you think about life in a clever and enjoyable way – no wonder he occupies half a bookshelf of mine!
The link back to Wifedom – the extraordinary connection between and support/dedication of a wife…

6 Degrees of Separation – Romantic Comedy…

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Six Degrees of Separation is an excuse to romp though six favourite books linked to an initial offering by our host KateW and eventually link them back to the beginning…

I must admit, my heart sank when I saw the title of this month’s 6 Degrees because romantic comedy is not a genre I have much acquaintance with but I soon realised that of course, I have read romantic comedies – even if they were written long before Chicklit was a twinkle in some publicist’s eye – so I turned to the nearest bookshelf to my desk…

Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy does what it says on the tin according to our host/challenger KateW who read the book simultaneously with a bestie with whom she was on holiday and who had brought the very same holiday reading – the stars had aligned and much laughter ensued. I don’t think I will be buying this book (as I did with last month’s starting book which I am enjoying immensely) and KateW’s review tells me quite enough to give the flavour and wit of this book!

Looking at my bookshelf, my eye alighted on the plays shelf where Oscar Wilde -Five Major Plays stood proudly alongside The Complete Plays of George Bernard Shaw so for my first and second links I chose The Importance of Being Earnest and Pygmalion respectively – what! It doesn’t say they can’t be plays – they’re in books!

Here in the final lines of Wilde’s evergreen romantic comedy are not one, but three love stories resolved…

GWENDOLEN. I can. For I feel sure that you are sure to change!
JACK. My own one!
CHASUBLE (to Miss Prism). Leetitial (Embraces her.)
MISS PRISM (enthusiastically). Frederick! At last!
ALGERNON. Cecily! (Embraces her.) At last!
JACK. Gwendolen! (Embraces her.) At last!
LADY BRACKNELL. My nephew, you seem to be displaying signs of triviality.
JACK. On the contrary,’ Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.

Enough embracing to qualify I think! On to Pygmalion George Bernard Shaw’s modern (for its time) update on the Greek story of the sculptor who fell in love with his creation which in turn, became the musical My Fair Lady. My volume was a gift to my father from his father in 1939 and maybe a first edition since there is no list of reprints. Believe it or not, I did read some of these plays as a teenager and even attempted some of the prefaces in the accompanying volume – and they are reputed to contain more words than the plays themselves. GBS was a socialist and the character of the professor and his life-changing relationship to Eliza is supportive of a change in attitudes towards women…

Sticking with plays – especially ones that have been turned into musicals, we next turn to The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare which went from highbrow(ish) to lowbrow when it was transmogrified into Kiss Me Kate! Katherina is an admirably feisty woman who is contrasted with Bianca, her younger sister “the ideal woman”. One might regard both this and Pygmalion as misogynistic – they certainly portray misogynists, but I side with those who feel that they are poking fun at the misogynists. This play gave rise to several musicals and films and is arguably the origin of some of the most major memes in romantic comedy…

Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship That Sang books, are not exactly romantic comedies and though they might make great plays, they are sci-fi novels but whether hard or soft is hard to say. Suspend your technological disbelief – definitely, but at the heart of these books are the sometimes romantic but wholly intriguing relationship between a girl who is literally enrolled, in fact, installed as the “brain” of a spaceship, and the “brawns” with whom she is paired. Spoiler alert – no sex is possible…

No one would seek to classify The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith as a romantic comedy either, but neither are they your standard detective procedural either and over the course of the books, we do get to see the developing relationship between Mama Ramotswe and her eventual partner – Mr J. L. B. Matekoni and this is definitely part of the oddball charm of this series.

So having stretched the rules with plays as well as novels, my last link is a poem, originally published in a magazine though books are available too… The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock – or Prufrock as it is known – by T.S. Elliot, is the poem credited with starting the Modernist movement in poetry. I link it back to our starting book of Romantic Comedy, because, like that novel, Prufrock is all about the anguish of alienation, self-doubt and creating what-if scenarios in the head – and whilst Prufrock does not give us a “they lived happily ever after” ending, it is gently humourous as it travels hopefully…

6 degrees of Separation – Time Shelter

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This is a post in the 6 Degrees of Separation run by Kate W. over at books are my favourite and best in which she gives the starting point of a particular book and invites you to take a journey through 6 other books of your choice, all connecting in some way and perhaps ending up back at the beginning – why not have a go yourself? Challenges are to writing, what scales and arpeggios are to those learning musical instruments, they exercise the faculties, but unlike scales, this challenge is most enjoyable, teasing out as it does, the connections, at a thinking level, between books…

In Time Shelter a 2020 novel by Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, Gaustine, a psychiatrist, creates a clinic for people with Alzheimer’s disease in Zürich which works by immersing patients into rooms containing articles from past decades and stimulating their memories of that period. The narrator is tasked with collecting the artefacts with which the rooms are stocked and travels throughout Europe to complete his mission. But soon the clinic is attracting healthy people who also want to escape a mundane present reality and return, nostalgically to other decades.

This rang a massive bell with me because some thirty-five years ago, I came into contact with a charity called Age Exchange in London, propelled by Pam Schweitzer MBE who pursued funds with the indomitable spirit that is ideal for such a role. They did exactly what the fictional clinic did – trained reminiscence workers to assist suitable dementia patients in recovering memories from the past using a library of artefacts gathered by the charity in Blackheath. The Exchange part of the charity’s name arose because they gathered reminiscences on various themes such as “Can we afford the Doctor?” and turned them into plays (that one was about Britain before the National Health Service) and performed them in schools thus recycling memories through the generations!

Time Shelter is a satire on nostalgia, populism, irony and melancholy and though I had not read it, I have ordered a copy…

Timequake is a 1997 novel by Kurt Vonnegut Junior (yes – him again!) in which he makes the world relive a decade of their lives with no possibility of change – a study of determinism in which he asserts that people have no free will. As so often with Vonnegut, he weaves personal and family history into the tale with the wry humour which is his hallmark. I think I read this book so long ago that it was back when I still used libraries to source my reading material…

The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (such a Wagnerian-sounding name!) is a book that I had read before watching the film adaptation and although it was a faithful adaptation of it, I still prefer to imagine a story as told in its original form. This book takes further the idea of not being able to be in control of one’s destiny. The eponymous wife is powerless to know when or for how long her husband will disappear into the past or future including her own any more than her husband who is at the mercy of a genetic mutation that plucks him in and out of his timeline at random, each know things about the other’s past and future at different times, often uncomfortably so. This book is a thought experiment, a “what if” but like much speculative fiction, it ultimately reveals more about how we as human beings are than how we might be in the unlikely event that time travel is possible…

A Connecticut Yankeee at the Court of King Arthur by Mark Twain is a satire about monarchy and feudalism. We meet another hapless time-traveller – a Yankee engineer called Hank Morgan who awakes after a bump on the head, to discover that he is in the past at the court of King Arthur. He decides to use his skill to improve the world with his modern knowledge so the book also celebrates Hank’s homespun ingenuity and his sense of the rightness of democracy. Although he ultimately fails (darn that determinism), the book marked a move by Twain from portraying the America of the Gilded Age, to more progressive values.

If Hank’s time travel left him in the service of King Arthur, then our next hapless hero is forced to become a king having descended, albeit distantly, from Charlemagne. The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck sits on my bookshelf in a very battered state having belonged first to my father as a young man – it was published when I was just two years old. In a kind of false flag operation by the French communist party, Pippin Héristal, an amateur astronomer is proclaimed King of France (in order that the French people may have something to rebel against – which they eventually do!). Like Hank Morgan, Pippin Héristal tries to make the best of what has been thrust upon him by doing what he thinks might make a difference but fate is already against both of them…

In the next link, another man is tested, this time by two different and opposing societies – in The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, the world of Urras is a capitalist society divided into two competing superpowers  – so much like our own world. The habitable, but resource-poor moon of Urras, is Annares and 200 years before, the rebellious factions of Urras have been sent or volunteered to go there where they have formed a society based on anarcho-syndicalism. Given the lack of resources and the inefficiency of the societal model, Annares is not exactly a thriving place to live. The leading character is Shevek, who Le Gin identified as being based on  J. Robert Oppenheimer – often referred to as “the father of the atomic bomb” and who regarded his involvement in the Manhattan Project as that of a physicist and on seeing the first test of the Trinity bomb, said he thought to himself “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”. Of the subsequent use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he told President Truman he felt he had “blood on my hands”, which did not go down well. In The Dispossessed. Shevek has a similar quandary when he tries to develop a General Temporal Theory and is blocked by a jealous superior and frustrated by his obligation to contribute manual work to society. He decides to go to Annares where he is welcomed because the capitalists see in his work, the opportunity to develop a spacecraft that will make crossing to the stars possible. But while capitalism thrives on his work, Shevek becomes involved with a new revolutionary underclass… Once again, Ursula Le Guin gives the lie to the writing maxim that “big issues are dead weights” – you just need to be a brilliant writer to incorporate them into the right story!

After such erudite stuff, the last book of my six may seem a little frivolous in style, but it contains all the elements we have seen on this journey, a man thrust out of his own time and/or place, into a different world in which he must try to do his best to survive, thrive and even contribute what he knows to the betterment of the society he finds himself in. A Princess of Mars (Barsoom) – is a genre-busting novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, he of Tarzan fame, and in his Barsoom series, he gives us – planetary-romance, fantasy, sword and planet, and post-apocalyptic speculative fiction from before those terms were even minted! This is not a science fiction book that depends on technology such as spacecraft since the hero – John Carter – transitions to Mars without explanation when in a tight spot on Earth and later returns, again without any control on his part. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ works are full of violent action and derring-do, but the breadth and depth of his imagination made him a huge influence on many later writers – Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, James Cameron, and George Lucas to name a few.

Finally, what links A Princess of Mars back to Time Shelter, is nostalgia – just as the “healthy” people in Time Shelter, are drawn to use the retro rooms of the clinic because they are fed up with their contemporary lives, so A Princess of Mars harks back to a rose-tinted view of American past – the frontier life when the good were good, you knew who was bad, and men were men and women swooned –” “the good old days”…?

Exploring and Evaluating Generative AI Number Four – Working with AI and the Women’s Issue…

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During the month of April this year, whilst participating in the A to Z Challenge, I was privileged to encounter the work of Misky whose blog It’s Still Life, showcases two distinct things, poetry written by Misky and illustrated using Generative Artwork created by Misky using the Midjourney AI app. So amazing were these images to someone who is in part, a visual artist, that it inspired me to make an exploration of Generative AI for myself. At the same time, AI has been hitting the headlines big time and mainly for its use in text generation and the impact it might have on jobs and since writing is another thing that I do in my day job, I was also intrigued to see whether AI might be of any use in a company such as I work for. (I am the gradually retiring General Manager of a food manufacturing company). It has been a fascinating voyage of discovery and to cap it all, lying awake at 4 o’clock this morning, I found myself listening to “The Conversation” on the BBC World Service and what should be the topic, but AI with special reference to the involvement of women. So – mind on fire, I am going to draw this series together, although I freely acknowledge I have but dipped my toe in the waters of AI and I may return to the topic in the future…

To recap the three articles I have already written:- In the first one, I tried out ChatGPT to see what it research and write about one of the topics from my A to Z and immediately encountered the phenomena of AI hallucination – the ability, in fact tendency of AI to make things up. I also “showcased” my first attempts at visual collaboration with the Midjourney bot .
In the second report, I compared ChatGPT to Writesonic which produces more lengthy articles – testing them against a typical (for me) work assignment.
In the third report, I looked at the most controversial assertion about AI – that AI might in the future, eliminate human beings – Terminator-style and referenced articles that thoroughly refute the need to worry about that particular outcome – go re-assure yourselves! However, there are many things about our present and future use of AI that do bear looking at and these were raised in the episode of “The Conversation” that woke me up this morning. The programme, presented by a woman, featured two women working in the field of AI, one a philosopher and one an expert in data analysis and as well as the general concerns that need addressing about AI, they highlighted the general lack of representation of women in the field of AI – only one CEO, qualifying women failing to get jobs in the industry and so on. They did however point out that one of the changes to AI itself in recent times, has been the accessibility of use – no longer do you need to have a degree in computer programming – you could make your first interaction with ChatGPT in the same time it would take you to query something on Google. Which brings me back to Misky…

Misky was not only the inspiration for my (deepish?) dive into AI, but was extremely helpful and encouraging to me at the outset, itself a reflection of how women tend to be more collaborative, good team players – a fact which the contributors to “The Conversation” suggested is a good reason for women to me more involved in AI companies, in reviewing the implications and in forming the regulation which is undoubtedly necessary around AI. A few days ago, I was delighted to meet Misky face-to-face on a Zoom call after many text interactions online and one of the things that she shared in our too-brief call, was that she had had some push-back from certain readers of her blog, about the use of AI images. I would like to talk to her more about these issues, but the participants in “The Conversation” raised the issue of how artists, whose work has been studied by AI to create new images “in the style of”, are being short-changed. You may have been wondering about the image at the top of this post – I created in Midjourney by prompting it to “imagine” Knaresborough railway viaduct “in the style of Hokusai” – a master of Japanese woodblock prints. I have used this subject as my test piece for exploring what Midjourney can do as you will see in the previous post. Now Hokusai is long dead and so the issue of compensation is hardly an issue, but another group of more recent artists might object. I am working on a spoof post – “How to Make a Body” a tale of human reproduction in the style of an Internet recipe ad although, like Misky, the writing is all my own, I wanted an illustration to fit with the tone of the piece and prompted Midjourney to “imagine” a woman in a hospital bed, holding her newborn baby and with her husband leaning in “in the style of a Ladybird book cover”. For those of you who may not be familiar with Ladybird books, they were written for children starting in the 1940’s and running until the 1980’s and they feature a distinct style of illustration.

A typical Ladybird book cover

In recent years, a series of spoof books in the Ladybird style and aimed at those who had grown up with the original series, have been vert successful, for example…

A cracking spoof…

I had no idea whether Midjourney would be able to fulfil my prompt, there are lists of artists’ styles you can use with Midjourney but I hadn’t seen this one – I was not disappointed!

I am keeping my powder dry as to the final image I chose but this first set of four (Midjourney shows off by producing not one, but four attempts in under sixty seconds) – which was done to the prompt of “A new mother in a hospital bed with her husband leaning in as she holds their new baby in the style of a Ladybird Book Cover” has misunderstood my intention and the mother is holding a magazine rather than a baby – though the graphic style is very Ladybird book-like. I acknowledge that I am still only a beginner in my use of prompts with all the forms of AI I have tried so far and there is undoubtedly an “art” to getting it right which is why I said “I created in Midjourney”. Although I am a competent watercolourist, screen-printer and other forms of illustrative art, I could not produce images such as the above and certainly not in sixty seconds. So, how much of this creation is my prompt, how much is the brilliant programming behind Midjourney and how much is owed to the various artists who could produce the illustrations of the Ladybird books? I cannot begin to answer that question but it does raise an issue which needs considering in formulating regulation around the use of AI. Meanwhile, like Misky and I, jump in and have a go and get a feel for yourself of the answer to the god-like feeling of creating with an AI tool…

Much of the debate around the consequences of the rise of AI, is around its impact on jobs and the potential losses and gains. As I described in my first report, the development of computer spreadsheets swept away the lowly positions in Accountancy but opened up many more jobs at the high end of the profession and although this might be the hope for AI, that it liberates us from the menial and allows us to create new roles – roles which might be beyond the capability of AI to imagine, at present, it is not just the menial tasks that are being threatened by bots like ChatGPT, but some roles higher up in various industries. Having said that, given the tendency of AI’s to hallucinate, I wouldn’t trust an AI’s writing without an experienced human checking the output of any writing before sending it out! Also, when you are a creative individual yourself, then trying to get AIs to produce exactly what you have in mind is tricky. In my 2021 A to Z challenge, I was trying to complete a science-fiction novel and the exercise gave me enough momentum to indeed finish it a few months later. Then I set about creating a book cover for it – to feature the final denouement – a tense scene set in a space-elevator on the edge of space. I prepared the background view by Photoshopping some NASA photographs looking the length of the Red Sea towards Palestine, painted in a great river estuary as per my planet, and then superimposed some 3D elements which I drew up in AutoCAD and finally added the title and my name. You can see this below, however, I felt that the result was not quite up to the standard of artwork commissioned by big sci-fi publishers and imagined that in the unlikely event of the novel being published, an improved version of the cover would be substituted for my “sketch”.

© Andrew Wilson 2022

Back to today, and naturally, I thought it would be a good test of Midjourney to see whether it could be used to produce a better version of my cover. Well, the first attempts were brilliant style-wise, but nothing like the image I wanted and many attempts followed to no avail…

My prompt read “space lift arriving at 300 miles above Earth like planet over Sahara like region array of cargo containers spread out in one layer small spaceship approaching“Midjourney couldn’t understand Space lift and I had to change lift to elevator, it couldn’t understand “array of cargo containers” but it did have all the sci-fi style I wanted. So then I decided to create a space view background without the lift and substitute it into my own cover illustration. Bingo!

© Andrew Wilson 2023

Still I hanker for the crisply detailed images of the elevator that Midjourney is capable of if only I could prompt it correctly – so a work in progress… What this exercise does show, is that it is possible to use AI for the things it can do better in combination with human talent.

In Conclusion…

This exploration of AI has felt like a marathon and it is just one person’s experience and I am really only at the beginning of my exploration, I’m sure I will find both text and image-generative bots to be of use in my future work and play. I urge you all to experiment for yourselves, form your own judgements (and please share your results by linking in the comments), join the debate over the regulation of AI, and explore other artists, in particular, Misky, who began this journey…

Exploring and Evaluating Generative Artificial Intelligence Number Three

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I decided to make a Header Image (above) for this little series of posts and have retrofitted it to the two previous posts here and here. So I asked the Midjourney app on Discord, to depict a silver-skinned Android, firstly, standing at an easel painting, and then at a computer typing. I am fairly sure that the AI known as Midjourney had no sense of the irony of asking it to anthropomorphise an Android doing these activities, because current forms of AI are so far from having the sentience required to appreciate concepts as subtle as irony. Spoiler alert, I approached this evaluative exploration with certain preconceptions about the likely conclusion although I didn’t know for sure, how those conclusions might be reached because I didn’t know how AI’s work, in detail. What I am going to show you today is what I have learned, but I am also going to link you to a very erudite analysis of why we should not be worried about AI taking over the world – in a piece called “Why the AI Doomers Are Wrong“, Nafeez Ahmed explains why the direction of travel of AI development, simply can’t lead to a human-brain-like sentience. I will quote from his article later.

First of all, look at the left-hand side of the header picture, in particular, the easel. On close inspection, you can see that the easel is the wrong way round and that the painter/android, is standing behind the easel. Midjourney produces four images by default, in the remarkable time of about 60 seconds which is almost like magic – indeed, in 1962, Arthur C. Clarke, a science fiction writer, stated in his book “Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible” that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. So despite the apparent magic of creating these images so quickly, the AI has made a fundamental mistake that reveals that it doesn’t really understand what an easel is or how it should be used. Nafeez Ahmed is mostly talking about text generative interactions with AI – ChatGPT and the like, but what he says below, is equally applicable to images generated by AI…

The stunning capabilities of the new chatbots and their uncanny ability to engage in human-like conversations has sparked speculation about sentience. Yet there is zero tangible evidence of this beyond a sense of amazement.
What many miss is that the amazing nature of these conversations is not a function of an internal subjective ‘understanding’ by an identifiable entity, but rather the operation of algorithms made-up of hundreds of billions of parameters trained on massive datasets of human text to predict words that should follow given strings of text. {…} This is not a breakthrough in intelligence, although it is, certainly, a breakthrough in being able to synthesise human responses to similar questions and thereby mimic patterns in human interaction. This model of AI, therefore, cannot, in itself, generate fundamentally new knowledge or understanding – let alone sentience.

Nafeez Ahmed

Nafeez goes into great detail about how the research is headed in the wrong direction and indeed, how it is unlikely it is that it will ever succeed in equating to human sentience, so if you want to put your mind at rest about a Terminator-style future in which humans are subjugated by machines – nip on over and read the full article. Meanwhile I am going to show you some more examples of how Midjourney gets things “wrong” and how to get the “right” results and what that says about how useful such a programme can be.

You interact with the Midjourney app by sending it a message (just as if it was really an intelligent entity) containing a prompt, and once you receive your four images, you can choose one to enlarge, if you are satisfied with it, or run variations on one or all of them. Here is the prompt that produced the above set of images. “Silver android painting at an easel by Roy Lichtenstenstein” – the AI places most importance on the object at the beginning of the prompt, then on the activity described and lastly, it attempts to produce the images, in this case, in the style of the Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein – famous for painting s in the style of close-ups of comic book pictures. These close-ups show the dot screens that were used to shade the illustrations of the comic book plus the hard black outlining and Midjourney has picked up well on these style features, particularly the top right and bottom left pictures. The top-left shows a sculpture vaguely resembling an up-cycled easel made of silver and the bottom right shows a silver-skinned figure with dot-screen effect, holding a brush and painting a picture but with no easel. In the [op-right picture, the top of the easel is just showing in the bottom corner and the android “artist” is holding a small blank canvas in her hand and drawing on it. Having seen the header image at top, and these pictures were as near as I could get to what I wanted, from multiple attempts, you can see that what I wanted was an all-over silver-skinned android and in the images above, top-right has a human face although “her” body is robotic – perhaps cyborg is a better description, whilst the other pictures show a sculpture, a woman and a totally abstract figure. So I decided to change the prompts to “Robot” rather than “Android” which produced better results. The reason I had started with “Andriod” was because robots range from automatic hoovers that move around your rooms looking like little miniature flying saucers sucking up dirt to more anthropomorphic devices – which is what I wanted.

“standing silver robot painting at an easel by Roy Lichtenstein” produced(among others) the above image in which the robot, possibly standing, is grasping what looks like the top of an easel but the “painting” does not appear to be on the easel. So I tried “Robot standing painting at an easel” and got this rather cute robot who looks like he is sitting on an invisible chair – “Hey Midjourney” just because you don’t show the chair, doesn’t make it standing!” Notice that with the style reference to Roy Lictensten gone, this image is very different. I would like to show you more of the iterations but Midjourney froze and when I reinstalled it, it had lost the entire session of work – you just can’t get the staff…

Another thing that I have discovered in my experiments, is that both Midjourney and ChatGPT, like to add unspecified embellishments – remember in my first report, how ChatGPT found the correct explanation for the phrase “Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” but then added a totally made up explanation? Well Midjourney does the same thing too. Here is a picture of the railway viaduct at Knaresborough in West Yorkshire , an hours drive from where I live.

https://www.visitharrogate.co.uk/explore/knaresborough

I wanted to see if Midjourney could produce a collage image using fragments of maps which it tried but didn’t really understand the concept – although I am not saying that it can’t, but at the very least, my prompt wasn’t sufficient (one of the oldest sayings amongst computer programmers is “Garbage in – garbage out!”) Here is Midjourneys best effort…

There are some map elements and the whole scene has been chopped up and rearranged but not in a way that makes sense – this one is closer to the real view…

But my first attempt, before I added the collage style, was simply to see how Midjourney would find and represent the viaduct and it generated the four images below. The top left image, Midjourney has added another railway running beneath the viaduct, likewise, lower-left it has added a canal and in the images on the right, Midjourney has transported us into a past sans Knaresborough and a post apocalyptic future where vegetation is growing over the viaduct.

Enough with all the pretty pictures – what does all this reveal about the way that the AI Midjourney works! Referring to the work – Erik J. Larson in his book, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, Nafeez Ahmed cites a summary of the work by Ben Chugg, lead research analyst at Stanford University (Iknow – quotes within quotes) as follows:-

“Larson points out that current machine learning models are built on the principle of induction: inferring patterns from specific observations or, more generally, acquiring knowledge from experience. This partially explains the current focus on ‘big-data’ — the more observations, the better the model. We feed an algorithm thousands of labelled pictures of cats, or have it play millions of games of chess, and it correlates which relationships among the input result in the best prediction accuracy. Some models are faster than others, or more sophisticated in their pattern recognition, but at bottom they’re all doing the same thing: statistical generalization from observations.
This inductive approach is useful for building tools for specific tasks on well-defined inputs; analyzing satellite imagery, recommending movies, and detecting cancerous cells, for example. But induction is incapable of the general-purpose knowledge creation exemplified by the human mind.”

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-false-philosophy-plaguing-ai-bdcfd4872c45

Nafeez goes on:-

Current AI has become proficient at both deductive and inductive inference, with the latter becoming a primary focus.
Larson points out that human intelligence is based on a far more creative approach to generating knowledge called ‘abduction’. Abductive inference allows us to creatively select and test hypotheses, quickly eliminate the ones which are proven wrong, and create new ones as we go along before reaching a reliable conclusion. “We guess, out of a background of effectively infinite possibilities, which hypotheses seem likely or plausible,” writes Larson in The Myth of Artificial Intelligence. {…}
And here is Larson’s killer diagnosis: We don’t have a good theory of how abductive inference works in the human mind, and we have no idea how to recreate abductive inference for AI: “We are unlikely to get innovation if we choose to ignore a core mystery rather than face it up,” he writes with reference to the mystery of human intelligence.
Before we can generate genuine artificial intelligence that approaches human capabilities, we need a philosophical and scientific revolution that explains abductive inference. “As long as we keep relying on induction, AI programs will be forever prediction machines hopelessly limited by what data they are fed”, explains Chugg

https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/why-the-ai-doomers-are-wrong?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

To relate this back to my experiments with Midjourney, the AI could identify what an easel looked like and include it in an image but it didn’t really know what it was or how it was used. Easels are probably present in thousands of pictures of artist’s studios as well as adverts but I bet there isn’t a Painters 101 that “First you will need an easel and this is how you use it” because when a human artist goes into a studio and sees canvasses fixed into easels, even if he has never seen one before, he is there to paint canvasses and it is obvious what they are and what they are for. It might be obvious to a human being with our ability to use inference, deduction and abductive capabilities, but an AI might identify an easel, but without finding a clear description of the usage, it cannot fully fathom how to use it…

As for the the tendency to add extraneous details, well the algorithms that govern Generative AI’s, are designed to mimic human conversational style, so when it has found a relevant answer to the requested information or task, it looks to extend the conversation in what it has learned might possibly follow – it doesn’t know whether it is true or not, because that is way above it’s paygrade ( a metaphor which it probably wouldn’t understand either). This phenomena of AI’s making things up is called hallucination – a very anthropocentric term…

I will make one more report on my attempts to get exactly what I wanted from Midjourney and how I found a compromise to be able to work with the results…

Z is for Zeppelin flyers of the future…

humanist55

 My original aim for this year’s A2Z Challenge was to use the month of posting to complete a science fiction novel and post both an adjunct to the novel-writing process and a chapter a day. Unfortunately, April saw a big blip in my day job so writing these posts was as much as I could do  – but I have built up momentum, developed some key ideas and received some helpful comments from You – Dear Readers! If anyone wants to receive the balance of chapters when written, please leave an email address in the comments. Meanwhile, Hawaii 2, having all its difficulties with jet flight, has revived the slow form of transport popularly known as Zeppelins.

War has so often been a driver for technology and scarcely less than in the field of aviation, Germany first developed the serious use of airships and deployed them as bombers against Britain during the First World War due to the fact that they could carry heavy loads, and travel long distances with great fuel efficiency. Their size and slowness made them easy targets and their use of hydrogen as the lifting gas made them vulnerable to fire. The destruction of the Hindenberg as it came in to land after a trans-Atlantic flightare iconic – a bolt of lightning is thought to have ignited the aluminium-painted skin of the airship and the comparatively slow burning (rather than explosive) hydrogen allowed a few survivors to escape.


By this stage, between the world wars, Britain had built a larger and even more ambitious airship – the R101 which also crashed and burned on its inaugural flight  – my mother was at school when the airship passed overhead on its doomed flight.

Sister ship of the ill-fated R101 showing the size compared to a modern airliner…

Airships made a return to the world with the use of Helium instead of Hydrogen, though not with anything like the scale of the great hydrogen airliners and only for commercial no-passenger activities – (although the vehicles continue to proliferate and diversify). Aeroplanes took over the niche of mass passenger air-transport but now, the environmental cost of flying needs to be factored in as we struggle to achieve zero-carbon targets…

The problem with helium is that it is officially a rare element – not in the universe where it is the second most common element, but here on Earth where only limited supplies exist. Furthermore, once you put helium into your birthday balloon and it eventually leaks out, the atmosphere will carry it away and it will eventually float off into space to be lost forever. Helium is a finite and non-renewable resource that now turns out to have many important uses such as cooling superconductors so throwing it away in birthday balloons is a great waste…

As the author of “Train Wreck”, I hereby generously endow Hawaii 2 with large reserves of helium making the use of airships possible and desirable. They may be slow, but like the canal boats in the 19th Century, once a flow of freight traffic was established, the slow speed did not matter. On Hawaii 2, the issue of jet engines not being feasible, quite aside from their polluting potential – something strictly guarded against on Hawaii 2 – airships are ideal. Electric, hydrogen cells, solar panels – all of these could be employed to power the slow but curiously graceful airships of the future…




Y is for Youthful Idealism…

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   If you have been following this blog’s A2Z Challenge then you will know that I have been trying to finish a novel, “Train Wreck”, and publishing a chapter below each post – at least until day 15 when I ran out of completed chapters – there is another one in progress – but if you have been following the novel and would like to receive the balance of the chapters – let me know in a comment. Meanwhile, more speculations as we reach the penultimate letter…

I had to resort to the dictionary for inspiration for today’s letter “Y”. Nothing from my book “Train Wreck” had leapt to mind. So Youth it is – and first I thought about two minor characters in one of Shakespeare’s plays (can’t remember which one), who are lamenting the fact that by the time they are old enough to have acquired wealth, they will be too old to enjoy it so why can’t money be given to the young and work left to the older generation? Or words to that effect – if I could remember the play, and the characters, I would check it out…

In the utopia that is Hawaii 2, Shakespeare’s characters would have found their dreams met – people of all ages, none of whom are richer (in money terms) than anyone else, are all provided with a Universal Income which allows them to spend their youth doing – well, whatever they want, or nothing at all, whilst still keeping body and soul together. (Should I, as a Humanist, use the word soul, without heavily qualifying it? That’s another story…) True, no one can have flashy cars or other trappings of a “rich” lifestyle, but you don’t miss what you don’t know and on Hawaii 2, no one has those trappings to be jealous of.

Given that many great ideas and work are achieved by people in their Youth, this is perhaps a very good idea although it is equally arguable that adversity -struggling to make one’s way in the world, both financially and intellectually – is the mother of invention. Will the youth of Hawaii 2 waste their young lives experimenting with drugs and bohemian living in Lowtown (Chapter 9) or will they throw themselves into whatever line of work has captured their imagination? Some will do one, some the other and who is to say either route is better or worse for achieving youthful brilliance…

The other thing which is associated with Youth, is Idealism. Here on Earth, we are well on the way towards the climate disaster which is the precursor to my book – the cataclysm that forces mankind to flee to the stars. And why are we headed in that direction? Because a small number of very rich people want to get richer at any cost and damn the consequence!. And because a great many other people, who I shall call Middle Class, are still bamboozled by the desire to attain wealth themselves, that they too are unwilling to face the hard choices which need to be made in order to avert the looming crisis. It is perhaps, a human trait that leads, politicians, in particular, to fail to deal with problems that are only going to manifest to the next generation when they will no longer be around to take the blame. The picture at the top is taken from an article pointing out that “Climate strike is not youthful idealism. It’s survivalist.” Greta Thunberg is not sweetly idealistic but deadly serious in pointing out what we are many of us failing to regognise.

Inequality, such as exists on many levels from the world economy down to individuals, is a great driver of idealism and Idealism tends to view the world in black and white, but as we grow older, trying to put idealism into practice, we become aware of shades of grey – things are more complicated than we youthfully imagine which is not to say that idealism is wrong and realism an excuse for doing nothing – rather that once the heady genius of youth is past, then the experience of later life should and can, be employed to tackle the things which are difficult, nitty-gritty rather than broad strokes…

As well as Realism, Idealism can also give way to Fanaticism which can be either good or bad, depending on the subject and form it takes. But for most of us, I feel, we find a balance, if we are driven beyond our youthful idealism into tempered realism and a life of service to our causes – a balance between living life for ourselves and living for what we can contribute to the world. As individuals, we come to recognise it is a relay race, not an individual sprint, and we must both receive and pass on the baton of our life’s work, be it practical, intellectual or emotional (not necessarily in that order). That can be difficult – as a teenager, I became fascinated by the idea of Bonsai – trees not only kept miniature, but sculpted into extraordinary shapes emanating nature. I soon learned that the most incredible, ancient-looking examples of this craft, were indeed ancient and that their current custodians had inherited them for a previous master and would hopefully find an apprentice to pass them on to. Sadly, I knew of no Bonsai master and my Bonsai dreams shrunk smaller than a Bonsai tree…

W is for Word-count in SciFi…

humanist55

   If you have been following this blog’s A2Z Challenge then you will know that I have been trying to finish a novel, “Train Wreck”, and publishing a chapter below each post – at least until day 15 when I ran out of completed chapters – there is another one in progress – but if you have been following the novel and would like to receive the balance of the chapters – let me know in a comment. Meanwhile, this post is for writers and readers alike and more questions than answers…

Whether you are a pithy poster of blog pieces or a verbose vendor of sagas, how much do you think about the length of the pieces you write or if you are a reader, do you have a length which you feel comfortable with and reader or writer, how does that vary with the category of writing?

These days, does anybody formally describe their book as a novella rather than a short novel? There are all sorts of guides, rules and categories but since I am writing a science fiction novel I understand that they are allowed to be longer than the publishing industry standard because of all the descriptions of new worlds that might be expected. Wikipedia has an article about the Hugo Nebula Awards who specify the lengths for competition categories.

From this, you can see that the novel word count begins at 40K which seems quite small went many other authorities suggest 90K for the average fiction novel – up to 120K for SciFi. One of my favourite “SciFi” authors – Kurt Vonnegut, used to give ideas for short stories to a fictional SciFi author who pops up in many of his books – Kilgore Trout – which I always assumed was because he had many ideas for stories that he couldn’t be bothered to flesh out and they demonstrate that you can convey the essence of some stories in no more than a paragraph…

So I have now reached that magical 40K which means that I can stop worrying about the length and just write what I feel I need to include – but if any of read the story so far – do you agree? Do you have a sense of “Train Wreck” being halfway through (or less) or do you think it needs a great deal more?

I have been involved with graphic design for 50 years since I joined the Printing Society at school and learned to set lead type. Later, in my first proper job, I designed forms and booklets for the Greater London Council and everything we sent to the (optical) typesetter, had to be counted up and the size of the type and its line-spacing calculated first – a process known as casting-off and very tedious it was… I have just scanned a page of Iain M Banks “Hydrogen Sonata” with my phone camera, character recognised the image and posted it into a word programme to obtain a word count of 298 words per page and since the novel has 605 pages, then this hefty paperback has a whopping 180,290 words and with the depth of Iain’s imagination and comprehensively developed “Culture” books, one does not tire of his books at any length.

Also, from that period of graphic design is the boilerplate text known as “Lorem ipsum” which is shown at the top of this post. Because it is in Latin, it is used to mock-up a design where you don’t want viewers to be distracted by the meaning of the content. Even in Latin, it is quite meaningless and you can find it on the web if you need to use it.

So should one play by “the Rules” or follow your heart on the length of the book – please give me your feelings, general or specific – go on – hit that comment box…




X is for Xenobiology – stranger than Science Fiction…

humanist55

  If you have been following this blog’s A2Z Challenge then you will know that I have been trying to finish a novel, “Train Wreck”, and publishing a chapter below each post – at least until day 15 when I ran out of completed chapters – there is another one in progress – but if you have been following the novel and would like to receive the balance of the chapters – let me know in a comment. Meanwhile, if you imagined Xenobiology to be the study of aliens – think again…

When researching the V post on diseases in space, I imagined that Xenobiology would be the subject to mine for information, the word Xeno being from the Greek Zenos meaning Stranger/Alien– but no – that was Astrobiology. Xenobiology has very down to earth goals trying to solve issues of disease right here on Earth – albeit in a very strange way.

Earth life uses the genetic code based on DNA and RNA – nucleic acids that carry information to let us construct our bodies (but also diseases and viruses!). Xenobiology attempts to use nucleic acid analogues, expanded genetic code and non-proteinogenic amino acids. Wait! This sounds like GM – Genetic Modification which some people think is A Very Bad Thing! Well yes and no! The modification of genetic action of cells is so radical that it may include substituting an entirely synthetic genetic mechanism and the aim of that is to make conventional GM safer.

One of the great fears about GM is the “horizontal gene transfer” and its possible effects on humans and the environment. Xenobiology aims to firewall genetic changes by replacing the whole or parts of the genetic mechanism. If you love geeky stuff, go read the Wikipedia article or if you want the layman’s version try this.

In fact, Xenobiology might be a tool in Astrobiology since it sheds light on quite other ways in which life could be structured on alien worlds, but you only have to look to the deepest oceans on Earth to find such alien life chemistry. Down there in the total dark, exist microbes that use chemosynthesis based on hydrogen sulphide instead of the carbon dioxide of photosynthesis – something quite unimagined until their quite recent discovery. If such different life chemistry is possible, why not different gene chemistry?

I don’t pretend to understand Xenobiology but I see that it is a fascinating branch of science and I have given you a signpost if you want to go there…

V is for Virus and other Lurgys in SciFi…

humanist55

 If you have been following this blog’s A2Z Challenge then you will know that I have been trying to finish a novel, “Train Wreck”, and publishing a chapter below each post – at least until day 15 when I ran out of completed chapters – there is another one in progress – but if you have been following the novel and would like to receive the balance of the chapters – let me know in a comment. Meanwhile, on a subject which we have all become unwilling experts…

An artist’s illustration for NASA’s Astrobiology Program. (Image credit: NASA)


There is a genre of Science Fiction known as Microbial Science Fiction – who knew! An article defining the sub-genre also lists some of the prime examples of the genre – although I would have placed the genius of HG Wells in his “War of the Worlds” right at the top of the list. In that book, the Martians who have invaded Earth are finally destroyed not by our less advanced military apparatus, but by Earth germs. Many of the sub-genre’s books have it the other way round, instead of aliens coming to Earth and taking ill, it is either a mysterious illness that falls to Earth or earthmen encountering microbes on their future travels through the universe.

There is a real science- Astrobiology – which attempts to understand the origins of life on Earth by considering it in the widest context of Earth as a planet, in a vast universe, which presumably supplied the raw materials of life at the very least, and perhaps life itself – this is known as “Panspermia” – the seeding of life via comets or some other, unknown mechanism. Not to be confused with Xenobiology which I will look at tomorrow.

Realistically, and who on Earth would suggest that SciFi should be realistic, what are the chances of encountering microbes that would endanger us, on a new planet such as Hawaii 2 in my book “Train Wreck”? 

The study of microbes includes virology, mycology, parasitology, and bacteriology and in the age of Covid 19, who has not learned the creepy way viruses break into their hosts cells and subvert them to the production of more viruses – so much so that the cell literally bursts – releasing more viruses… How “Alien” is that! However, the bigger picture for viruses is that they are uniquely tied to our DNA gene-based method of reproduction – they run a parallel (arms) race that arguably stimulates our immune system to constantly adapt to the new threat – although if the little blighters didn’t exist – we wouldn’t need to adapt anyway, and does that adaptation help with anything other than the threats posed by viruses? It is a measure of how closely related to other animals we are, genetically, that with quite small variations, viruses can jump species birds/ pigs/ humans. If we reach other planets, viruses may not be one of our problems – other than any we might take with us because the gap between us and aliens might be too big for viruses to jump…


Bacteria and fungi are a different story, they can be opportunistic and whilst not as cell-specific in their preferred home as viruses, they might well thrive on another planet, both the ones we take with us, and ones we might encounter there. – If the Panspermia theory turned out to be correct, it might turn out that through the (panspermia) bacteria, our DNA based evolution and reproduction could mean there are new lurgys waiting for us and quite able to affect us. Here on Earth, fungi, whose original niche in the environment might be, say, a rainforest, is capable of finding a new niche in human lungs, so they are a prime candidate for causing infection by alien versions should they have evolved there.

Our bodies carry so many microbes that for 30 trillion human cells, we have on average about 39 trillion microbial cells making us only 43% human but remember, many of these microbes are helpful to us and we would be very ill if they were magically removed. It is a question of internal ecological balance and sometimes, the microbe balance within our bodies is upset, and then we are ill without the addition of any extra, ill-making microbes. Astronauts usually isolate before missions to make sure they don’t come down with colds, for example – imagine sneezing in your space helmet…

If we transport so much microbial matter about our person, then the very environment of space might upset our microbial balance, zero-gravity, solar-radiation, lack of fresh food – all of these might enhance an unfavourable mutation of microbial DNA – not very sexy for a science fiction plot though – not unless the resulting illness makes its victims go whacko…

And hey! Parasites! Once again, there are examples on Earth that make SciFi plots look tame – read the grisly story of how ant behaviour is manipulated to make them climb grass in order to be eaten by cows as part of the lifecycle of a parasitic flatworm here. Or another unfortunate ant who is host to and eventually killed by a fungus growing out of it. The fungus also exerts mind control to get the ant to find the exact location required for the fungus to thrive…


Of course, much Science Fiction that is concerned with other topics, simply sidesteps the microbial hazard – before the airlock opens on a new world, the computer samples the atmosphere and pronounces it safe in a few seconds or else it is assumed that human medicine will be a match for anything alien worlds can throw at it or else the whole issue is simply ignored. Well I have to hold my hand up to the latter, so far at any rate, I have described Hawaii 2 as an Eden like planet without apex predators of any threat to mankind, let alone any microbial menaces. I suppose that it is not the real subject of the Speculative Fiction of which “Train Wreck” is an example but hmmm…I still have a long way to go, many pages to fill…