Author: Marjorie Kaye Noble
I'm a writer. My name is Marjorie and name on my blogs is marjorie kaye. For my novels, I'm M. K. Noble. I live in California. I have worked as an actress, a casting director and a teacher. I have written two novels. The first is a horror novel, The Demon Rift. Besides the horror element, it spans a 120 years, ending in 2004 in an Ohio shopping mall. The mall culture echoes our recent past, the town square that has since become Facebook, etc. Babylon Dreams, a science fiction novel, set entirely in VR concerns life after death programs. Currently, I'm writing the sequel, Shemathra's Realm, a VR version of Animal Farm. Also, my short story, The Seventh Folding of Willow Sprite is available on StrangeFictionszine.com. I would love it if you read my work and will gladly answer any questions. Thanks for stopping by.
Babylon Dreams book trailer
Protected: Babylon Dreams trailer
A link to the Kirkus review of Babylon Dreams
Eva, the smiling robot is blue
You’re a little creepy, Eva.
Deja Vu, a First Contact: There and back again
This weekend, I read Déjà Vu, a First Contact novel by sci fi author, Peter Cawdron. The big question is always: Are they friend or foe?
It’s the beginning of the 22nd century as we meet Jess, a young astronaut. Jess is busy doing maintenance while floating outside a huge spaceship, orbiting the Earth days before blasting off to a distant star system. Cawdron’s strength is with moment- to-moment details that put you there. Another is his extensive knowledge of what’s going on in astrophysics and where it might lead. Jess is tired and eager to complete her tasks so that she can re-enter and get some decent sleep. Jess’s spacesuit has become uncomfortable. A strand of hair is driving her nuts and she struggles to ignore it as thick padding on her fingertips makes push buttons a challenge.
Like Jazz, the protagonist of Cawdron’s My Sweet Satan, Jess must cope with shifting realty. In Jess’s case, reality shifts again and again.
The scene replays, but instead of the Earth, Jess sees another planet, a massive gas giant ringed in ice. Jess and we as readers are confused when we’re back to maintenance and the pesky strand of hair. The scene repeats, but Jess sees the strange planet again as she experiences her death when her ship explodes. And there’s something else—lots of eyes and they’re all looking at what’s left of her. Then she’s outside the ship again.
Not so fast, what’s going on? We and Jess want to know.
Jess starts questioning her reality and begins to mix it up, ditching the chores and doing space somersaults as her alarmed crew members panic. Then Jess finds herself in several familiar/unfamiliar environments, including Africa where she’s being chased by a lion and then slogging through a snowscape. Wtf is going on? We and Jess want to know. By force of will, Jess has escaped an amusement park time loop (you-are-there) VR fun ride and now finds herself in a huge part-time science lab.
Her sudden manifestation startles the young scientists who have been tinkering with what’s left of her, taken from the pieces of her ship, destroyed thousands of years earlier.
Much of Earth was destroyed when another spaceship bound for this same system exploded before it left orbit. Humanity made its way back technologically and here we are! What’s left of Jess is a chunk of brain resting in a glass jar with some wires. Okay! I love VR! Jess is understandably upset. The young scientists do their best to make her VR life comfortable and she learns that everyone is neuro-linked to “Veritas,” a super Google. Jess makes the best of it, including ignoring the flirtations of a young maintenance worker whom she calls “Pretty Boy.” Then Jess is attacked by the many-eyed aliens. Because the bad ET’s don’t know that she’s virtual, she and her brain jar escape with Pretty Boy’s help.
Pretty Boy takes Jess and her brain jar to see his grandfather, Gal. We learn that humanity is confined to a few small domed settlements on a hostile moon.
The oppressors are a coalition of AI’s and the many-eyed aliens who look like sea slugs. Gal gives Jess a whole new robot body that looks just like her. It’s a fem-bot with a cute little cabinet in the chest for her brain jar. When Gal asks why the many-eyed slugs would want to help the AI’s, Jess (she’s an astro-biologist) tells them that it’s all about what’s for dinner and we’re on the menu. When the aliens track Jess and her friends down, Jess grabs a flamethrower, sweeping it through rows of eyes ala “Say hello to my lil’ freh’ you alien bastards!” At last, taking one alien out, Jess dies in battle.
It is thousands of years later and Jess finds herself back on Earth. Her welcoming committee is a woman and a cow.
Humanity is back, but like the time after the other spaceship exploded, making half of the Earth uninhabitable, it’s been a struggle. Everyone is dirt poor, emphasis on the dirt. Somehow, Jess has been brought back, brains, body and all to the far future where there is no indoor plumbing. Regardless, everyone knows who Jess is and she’s treated like Beyonce.
Why? Jess has been brought back for a purpose. She’s going to the Moon
in a spaceship built from plans ala Apollo 11. I’ll leave it there, other than to say that before the denouement, Cawdron gives a detailed account of what the Apollo astronauts overcame, the importance of what they achieved and why people need to know.
I really enjoyed this book and read it in two sittings. The unpredictable plot kept me invested.
As to what happens at the end, does Jess complete her mission?
I’ll say this: In Galaxy Quest, a film made several years ago, a character’s motto is “Never give up; never surrender!” Some of us never do.
The Southern Reach Trilogy. Down the Rabbit Hole of Area X, A Review
Recently, I read Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer.
A film, based on the first first book of the trilogy, Annihilation had just been released. The trailer was so intriguing that I decided to read the book.
Annihilation, the first book of VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy, is a fascinating read.
Area X includes a stretch of the Florida Coast, an island, a lighthouse and a sinister ecosystem. The Southern Reach is a research facility just outside the “Shimmer.” Focused on determining the nature of the threat posed by Area X, they continue to study it. Area X has existed, unknown to the public for decades.
An opaque barrier encloses Area X and it destroys anything—human or animal—that tries to enter.
Testing the barrier for openings, soldiers drive hundreds of unfortunate rabbits into the mysterious border. Some rabbits are torn apart; others disappear into Area X. Finally a “door” is discovered and a series of teams goes through. Almost no one returns. Those who do make it back have little or no memory of what they encountered.
Annihilation, the first of the trilogy, is a first person narrative. Identified only as the “biologist,”
the narrator is part of a four-member team that enters Area X. She learned of Area X when her soldier husband, whom she had presumed dead, returns to her. He had taken a top-secret assignment. His long absence meant something had gone wrong and he wasn’t coming back. When he returns, his affect is blank and confused. He is unable to remember what happened. In a matter of weeks, he dies of cancer. She wants to know what happened. What caused his death?
The biologist is, to say the least, self-contained.
In fact, when it comes to the how much influence her fellow humans have on her, the biologist is self-shrink-wrapped. On the other hand, when it comes to “Nature” and its myriad of habitats, she’s all touchy-feely. A mossy pond with lots of bugs, amphibians, animals and reptiles is her idea of great getaway. For the biologist, Area X, with apologies to all those poor rabbits, is Wonderland and she is Alice. Her account of what she experiences as she explores Area X is compelling and hypnotic.
Like “the biologist,” the other three are identified as their professions—psychologist, anthropologist and surveyor.
Names are verboten. From the beginning, team members are suspicious of each other. Other than where to go, what to do next and where to camp, there is little communication.
Looming in the distance is a lighthouse, thought to be the heart of what was wrong with Area X. At dusk she hears something moaning.
The lush, sinister landscape, crawling with strange insects (velvet ants?), a place where animals seem coldly observant, leads the team to an anomaly, something not detailed on the map, which was derived from satellite views and the limited information provided by survivors of Area X.
The team decides to explore the “anomaly,” a circular stone pit.
Stairs descend into the darkness below where the walls are covered with a strange biblical verse. Tiny plants and moss form the letters. While closely examining the writing on the walls , the biologist is exposed and contaminated. The result is she gains a heightened awareness and becomes sensitive to her surroundings.
Later, she returns to the “anomaly” and descends into the darkness.
What she encounters at the bottom of those stairs propels the reader into a dreamlike landscape of distorted reality and shifting timelines. The biologist’s alienation from her fellow humans makes her the perfect vessel for the strange nectar produced by Area X.
This book is a compelling narrative; I simply couldn’t stop reading, so I didn’t.
Authority is the second book in the “Trilogy,” Unlike Alienation, Authority is written in third person. “Control,” identifies a man, John Rodriguez, an outsider who is called in by the “Director” of the research facility. Control will investigate the reappearance of the “Biologist” and discover the truth of what occurred during the mission.
The tone of Authority is straight out of The X Files.
It’s rife with paranoia and conspiracy theories. We do learn more about the history of Area X and those who were there at the beginning. Like Annihilation, reality and time shifts as “Control” realizes that his name no longer defines him. As he struggles, Area X draws closer.
Like Annihilation and Authority, I found Acceptance engrossing and entertaining.
But at the end of the Acceptance, I had still had more question than answers. From the beginning, when reading Annihilation, I kept trying to define the why, the process that led to Area X. Throughout Acceptance, characters struggle to do the same. Through the characters’ search for answers, VanderMeer offers hints now and then, pieces of a puzzle that fail to define Area X clearly.
Like Lovecraft, VanderMeer’s Area X conveys something that regards us as disposable. It’s sinister and unknowable.
As far as a summer read, if you like science fiction rendered in rich, complex prose with a huge dollop of enigma, I recommend Area X, The Southern Reach Trilogy. But be warned, like a summer tan, long after you finish The Southern Reach Trilogy, the effects of Area X may linger.
Disney’s new VR Jacket
From the Washington Post: 4/26/2018
Hugs and punches and snakes, oh my . . .
I’ll take a hug but hold the snakes.
Oh, what a tangled web…
Dear people who read my posts:
I will be posting my reviews, past and present, of horror and science fiction movies, TV series and novels here.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Children of Time
a Review
***Spoilers***
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Children of Time, consists of two narratives that alternate throughout. They share a beginning and come together at the end.I loved this book and highly recommend it to anyone who loves science fiction,I found one story was riveting, the other, less so.
The beginning is set in the future, hundreds of years from now. We’re on a top-secret space mission, light-years away from Earth.
The mission is to ensure humanity’s survival. As the ship circles a planet, destined to be a new Eden, Dr. Avrana Kern, a scientist whose ego is the size of a supernova, prepares to complete her mission. Kern heads a team that will“seed” this new world (she secretly calls “Kern World”), delivering a huge cylindrical crate filled with young apes, (a barrel of monkeys). Soon, this package of primates will land on the new world.
Accompanying the apes is a case filled with a genetically engineered virus. The plan is for the apes to settle in their new home while the virus spreads, accelerating their intellect, along with civilization-building social skills. The end result in a few generations will be a new type of human, one not contaminated by the toxic mix of warring ideologies that threatens to destroy humanity. Kern, who seems ever more annoying, calls them “my monkeys.”
Back on Earth, some people want humans to continue to evolve by using genetics as well as developing more powerful and sophisticated AI systems. The other group rejects the whole “super human” and “super Hal” ideas. We should stay our “natural selves” (though that hasn’t seemed to work out so far). There are wars, terrorists, pollution and poverty—all the things that say home sweet home.
Not so fast Dr. Know-it-all, because just as the ape barrel and barrels of other Earth fauna are launched, bombs planted by a crew member, a spy of NUN (Non Ultra Natura!) explode, killing the apes and the entire crew except Dr. Kern, who manages to escape in a sentry pod where a designated crew member (who was the NUN bomber) was to orbit the planet until the accelerated evolution of the apes signal developing technology and the time to call Earth Central.
Clearly not happy and wishing there had been time to give the traitor a piece of her impressive mind, and seeing her favorite barrel burning, she despairs. Never one to give up, Kern is determined to round up more monkeys and try again. She sends an SOS back to Earth. Knowing that her message will take decades to get there and then decades for help to come, she decides to put herself in cold storage.
But the ship’s computer isn’t happy and peppers Kern with “what-if” questions. Rolling her eyes, Kern uploads her mind. AI Kern can make decisions while keeping her physical self zip-locked until it’s rescue time and she’s defrosted.
Two stories, told in alternating chapters, stem from Kern’s attempt to create a new branch of the human family tree.
One takes us far into the future, hundred of years after Kern’s message. We’re on the ark ship Gilgamesh which carries what’s left of humanity. Years of war not only destroyed the Earth but all of the settlement planets. People take turns coming out of cold storage to operate and maintain the ship and to look for planets suitable for colonization. During the time out of storage, people continue to age, a good reason to limit these active periods.Attempts with test colonies have ended in disaster. Things are getting testier on the ship. As always, factions develop and there’s fighting.
If this continues, soon, we’ll go the way of the dodos. If humanity is to survive, we must find a new home and oh look, there’s a pretty green planet! Let’s check it out.
The second story is the one that I couldn’t put down. All the main characters are spiders. You see, even though the monkeys didn’t make it, the virus did, as well as a barrel filled with spiders, antsand other creepy crawlies. Barrels intact, small mammals also survive. The virus works its magic not on the mammals, but on the spiders.
Tchaikovsky, who is a zoologist, shows us the evolution of creatures I occasionally find in my shower before sending them to their next life.
Beginning with two spiders that collaborate in bringing down their prey, each spider chapter chronicles the way a spider society might evolve and what challenges it might face as it develops a credible technology. Portia is one of the names given to certain lady spiders that play major roles in each stage of the spider evolution story. Bianca is another. The name of Fabian pops ups up for male spiders. To each Portia, the light moving across the night sky is a god. The light comes from Kern’s Pod.
When the Gilgamesh encounters the spider world, all on board are excited. Then the pod AI, Kern, who has observed signs of intelligent life on her pet project, assumes that somehow, a few of the simians survived. She threatens to destroy the Ark. It mustn’t contaminate “her” monkeys. The sentry pod carries formidable weapons, more sophisticated than the dated technology of the Gilgamesh. The ship leaves, hoping to find another promising planet. They don’t.
Eventually, they come back.
At this point, neither AI Kern nor the Gilgamesh crew knows that the planet has smart spiders.
Along with technology, culture and politics, new social norms develop. Male spiders are smaller than females and considered less intelligent. Led by one of the Fabians, they fight for equal rights.
Progress means it is no longer socially acceptable to eat the father of your children.
Eventually, after centuries of wandering the galaxy and finding no suitable planet to call home, the Gilgamesh returns to Spider World. As they orbit the planet, the ship’s crew is horrified to see what’s looking back at them from the surface. The planet’s current tenants glare back at them. Each face has more than two eyes.
Just before the crew scours the Gilgamesh in search of a big can of Raid, AI Kern readies the big guns.
Although a little unsettled by the results of her planet seeding, Kern is determined to protect her eight-legged “children.” By this time, the spiders have made their first forays into space
and the arachnid versus the humans battle is on.
I loved the outcome of this three-way showdown. It was a resolution I had not already guessed. It surprised me.
I did have issues with the Gilgamesh story. I had difficulties with the dialect of the Ark humans. It often sounded like British generic-bad-guy-speak. I realize that my American language filter was my problem, but for me, it was an obstacle in terms of following the narrative and investing in the characters, especially because of the continued war between factions. Also, there was little character development. The brief time the characters were active might partially explain this.
Even the people on board, who aren’t on your friends list on the ship Facebook page, are members of a seriously endangered species. This should have led to some serious survival kumbaya.
Literally in the same boat, these humans never seem to just getalong nor do they learn anything other than ways to keep alive. Finding a new home is not the only priority.
A new attitude would help.
In contrast, the author details the ways spiders might converse and explores aspects of a fictional spider culture.
The wars for dominance between spider colonies and assaults by armies of marauding ants fascinated me.
Using his knowledge of spiders, Tchaikovsky imagines the development of arachnid literature and art.
Religion (the Kern Pod/God) plays an important role in their values plus conflict between belief and non-belief drives much of the story.
Mr. Tchaikovsky’s award-winning Children of Time was worth my time.
I may read it again. Spider lover or not, lovers of sci fi should make room on their reading list for
The Children of Time.
What Dreams will you share on Facebook?
What if you could record your dreams and make a home movie?
I participated in an experiment that was part of
Daniel Oldis’ research on dreams, some of which is detailed in this CNN article (link is below).
CNN: How close are we to recording our dreams?
Wearing a device that recorded my brain waves while I slept, I became lucid and signaled to an online dream lab which recorded the signal.
Or as the little girl said in that long ago “Shake and Bake” commercial, “Ah helped!”
From AR: “The Ring” Holy crap!
Up close and personal, the Tinder date from hell:
Wolves in the Walls : VR and Neil Gaiman
The Nature of REALity
FROM: Pharnygula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The Nature of Existence
Posted on: February 3, 2011 9:40 AM, by PZ Myers
I forgot to mention that I did attend the local screening of The Nature of Existence, the new movie from Roger Nygard in which he traveled the world asking various people grand questions about the meaning of life, etc. It was entertaining, and it is subtly subversive of religious views, so I will recommend it. But I do have a few reservations that I was also able to bring up in the Q&A after the movie.
One thing that was alarmingly obvious when watching it is that almost all the gurus and authorities and religious figures that he interviewed were male. There were exceptions — the 12 year old daughter of his neighbor (who was an unrepentant atheist, and I thought the most sensible voice in the whole movie), a lesbian priest, the wife of a pastor — but otherwise, this show is one long sausage-fest. When I pointed this out, Nygard was apologetic and recognized that this is a significant omission, but explained that he simply hadn’t noticed when he was filming the material. Isn’t that the whole problem, that we’re oblivious to these omissions of half the population of the planet? Article: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/02/the_nature_of_existence.php
Posted on: February 3, 2011 9:40 AM, by PZ Myers
How Virtual Reality Will Change Who We Are
FROM BIG THINK
Parag and Ayesha Khanna on April 5, 2011, 7:22 PM
Today marked the publication of the new book Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution by Jeremy Bailenson and Jim Blasocovich.
Infinite Reality gets inside all of the technologies and animation that we now take from granted, from Wii video games to movies like the Matrix and Avatar, and explains how this virtual reality is changing our reality.
In this video on the book’s website, the authors discuss how the human mind perceives interaction with digital avatars as real, opening a whole new world of possibilities for shaping the mind outside of normal social contexts:
Jeremy is the director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), and Jim, one of the original pioneers of virtual reality, teaches at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Very much related to the scope of this book, Jeremy’s recent research has shown the surprising ways in which just a few minutes spent in the virtual environments he has constructed change how we view ourselves and each other once we step back into the real world.
Unafraid to forecast decades into the future, Bailenson and Blascovich are at the forefront of showing how the lines between physical and virtual are blurring in our emerging hybrid reality. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in how the next generation of the Web – 3D immersive reality – will shape and transform us as we engage with it.
DaVinci Surgical Robot Plays ‘Operation’ Board Game, Saves Cardboard Life (Video)
FROM: SINGULARITY HUB
by Aaron Saenz April 7th, 2011
Modern life teaches us funny lessons like: if you can’t win at a child’s board game, use a multimillion dollar robot to cheat. PhD students at John Hopkins University’s Lab for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) ran into some trouble playing the classic board game Operation which requires you to remove tiny plastic organs from ‘Cavity Sam’ without triggering his electric alarm system and killing him. Their failure is a little daunting considering these guys are the next generation of surgical innovators. To overcome their limitations, those students hooked ‘Sam’ up to the da Vinci robot system from Intuitive Surgical. The video below shows the results. While this was all just a good natured joke, I’m glad the da Vinci robot and LCSR are getting some decent publicity from it. These robots, and the surgeons who use them, are saving thousands of lives each year and pushing us towards the future of medicine.
Huge Object brushes by Soyuz Spacecraft April5 2011
Transhumanism for Children
FROM SINGULARITY
by Nikki Olson on March 31, 2011
It is often pointed out that Transhumanism shares many features with religion. It answers questions regarding the nature of the world and humanity’s place in it, it offers guidance on how to live, and inspires hope. However, there are a number of important things distinguishing it from a religion, such as the lack of belief in a Deity and its emphasis on the empirical method and reason. Another distinguishing feature relates to the obstacles associated with teaching Transhumanism to children.
Although being religious as an adult entails contemplation of many of life’s more difficult questions, following a religion can and does occur at very young ages. Children are able to contemplate God to some extent, usually via the anthropomorphized metaphor of ‘the father’, they are able to associate simple moral behaviors with ideas of reward and punishment, and they become enthralled in the ‘magic like’ elements of religious miracle.
Are children capable of contemplating Transhumanism?
Article: http://singularityblog.singularitysymposium.com/transhumanism-for-children/
Giant Squid Eye, 2008
From the Smithsonian: http://newsdesk.si.edu/snapshot/giant-squid-eye
Giant squid have the largest eyes in the animal kingdom—at up to 10 inches in diameter, they are the size of a dinner plate. These massive organs allow giant squid to detect objects in the lightless depths where most other animals would see nothing.
The giant squid is among the largest invertebrates on Earth—with lengths measuring nearly 60 feet. Giant squid can descend to 6,500 feet and are known to be aggressive hunters.
The eyes, on either side of the head, each contain a hard lens. An image is focused by changing the position of the lens, as in a camera or telescope, rather than changing the shape of the lens, as in the human eye.
This item is one of 137 million artifacts, works of art and specimens in the Smithsonian’s collection. It is not currently on display.
More information at http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life-ecosystems/giant-squid
I’ m sorry–could you please repeat that?
The perils of voice recognition:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ&feature=player_embedded#at=16
marjorie kaye's Babylon Dreams 