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Sep 27 2017

To Be a Machine

To Be a Machine
Mark O’Connell
Granta

A personal journey of encounters with, and living among a selection of various ‘transhumanists’ – those who believe that humankind needs to use technology to advance beyond its biological nature, perhaps by extending lifespan indefinitely so we become immortal, or by uploading our minds to become digital entities, or by enhancing our bodies to become cyborgs, or by fusing with artificial intelligence. Those who see ‘biological nature’ as something to overcome.

It’s an intellectual journey of Mark getting to know some key figures and their ideas, but has its geographical side to it: you feel like plotting out the various flights and road trips. He has put in a lot of travel to write this book, a lot of time drinking beers and having breakfast with the people he writes about. There isn’t a single sentence where he references an email exchange. Mark seems to have sworn off digital communication – he wants to meet them in the flesh.

What’s fascinating about this account is that the authorial tone falters at times. There’s a common-sense tone that re-emerges as the main one. In this perspective, the various tribes of transhumanists are viewed with a sardonic wit. We smile with the author at their foibles or plain weirdness. We meet Max More who runs a cryopreservation facility where your dead body is frozen so it can be reanimated when technology has advanced to the point of scanning and uploading brains. Max More was born Max O’Connor, but announced in a fanzine many years ago: “I’ve changed my name to Max More in order to remove the cultural links to Ireland (which connotes backwardness rather than future-orientation.)”
But at other times the author confesses his anxieties about what the future may hold for us, and also his more existential fears: of death, of a lack of meaning to life. These fears, which are rather the preserve of religion and philosophy, are the driving energy behind many who turn to transhumanism. Mark astutely always tracks the childhood and formative years of his subjects, hears their stories of how they first caught the bug.

And to be honest, the parts where we see these West coast enthusiasts at their most bearded geekish fanatical are the most enjoyable of the book. It’s a good feeling to feel grounded in your own commonsense while reading about guys who cut into their own flesh to implant electronic devices the size of a cigarette pack. Or the anti-deathist who confesses he’s really looking forward to the future because of the sexbots.

But sojourns with the fanatical form only one facet of the book. Other players he encounters are far more formidable – either because of their hard-core scientific research, or their immense wealth, or their political influence. Randal Koene the neuroscientist is working on the problem of extracting the process of mind from the flesh of the brain. “As a PhD student in computational neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Randal was initially cautious about revealing the underlying motivation for his studies for fear of being taken for a fantasist or an eccentric.” There are wealthy and influential people willing to give his institution the odd million here and there. There are strong ties between transhumanism and the west coast milieu of tech entrepeneurs – and at key points with the military. A key advocate of transhumanism, and one of the most extreme, Ray Kurzweil, as hired by Google to set up a Singularity University training center for corporate executives. Billionaire Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) is involved in providing venture capital to several tech companies with transhumanist agendas to some degree. The wave of the future will emerge from the work these guys are doing. Sometimes when reading this part of the book I had to backtrack, check credentials, make sure that I wasn’t reading speculation from basement dwellers, but research from cutting-edge scientists. The challenge of figuring out how the brain works sounds thoroughly futuristic, but when the brain in question is that of a roundworm with 302 neurons, then it becomes a feasible scientific project. Just don’t tell the academic committee your real reason is to seek immorality.

Following O’Connell’s adventures among the tech visionaries, punks, and fanatics is an immersive reading experience, and a stepping-off path for those who want to discern the wave of the future. It’s sharply intelligent and erudite – referring easily to essays of Descartes, Karel Capek, ancient Greek philosophers, Gnosticism, and an obscure essay from Heinrich von Kleist. He’s not trying to assess the rigour of the scientific thinking: he’s rather looking at the motivations and often unexamined beliefs of the key players – beliefs which O’Connell demonstrates have surprising forebears:

“Beneath the talk of future technologies, I could hear the murmur of ancient ideas. We were talking about the transmigration of souls, eternal return, reincarnation. Nothing is ever new. Nothing ever truly dies, but is reborn in a new form, a new language, a new substrate.”

The conversations with Randal are a high point of the book, and O’Connell here is no Sunday paper columnist, but a deep thinker himself. “In the weeks and months after I returned from San Francisco, I thought obsessively about the idea of whole brain emulation.” This is evidently not a rhetorical flourish. He concludes this particular chapter: “I never loved my wife and our little boy more, I realized, than when I thought of them as mammals. I dragged myself, my animal body, out of bed to join them.” I don’t know Mark, I don’t know if this is the truth or if it is a view from a diminished and beaten-down concept of what it is to be human.

For me the book tied together a number of articles and news items that have attracted my attention in recent years. Hawking’s warnings of the dangers of AI, similar warnings from Peter Thiel, Bill Gates and back in 2000 from Bill Joy, Google’s development of Deepmind, recurring BBC articles with headlines that sound like straplines from 50s sci-fi movies, news items reporting in matter-of-fact tones on how AI systems are taking over the running of hedge funds.

The book made me, momentarily at least, despair of what fiction can achieve. If I wrote a novel about a character who was initially a performance poet, then joined the Quakers, then became a militant atheist and later a transhumanist – well, fiction wouldn’t be up to the task of depicting these transmutations. I find the real people in O’Connell’s book much more fascinating than those in fiction. I think of that moment in the movie Sideways where Miles is revealed to the dinner table to be a novelist, and a relative insensitively remarks, “There are so many fascinating people that are real. Why read made-up things?” Just a few decades ago the characters and drama in this book was the stuff of sci-fi and speculative fiction.

“People just routinely give themselves too much credit,” says Tim. It’s my personal favourite quotation of the book.
Tim Cannon is the de facto leader of a small group of cyborgs – people who have augmented themselves with machine, even if only a sensor embedded under the skin. The general thrust of Tim’s remark is that we are animals – meat machines – who like to big themselves up and throw around grandiose concepts of free will and creativity. I picture this sentence as the centre of a web of associations to scraps of philosophy, fiction, and real people I have known. It’s a life-stance that I keep coming across. “You make too much of things.” I don’t see it as necessarily a perspective from a negative and cynical personality. It can grow out of a need for rigour, a desire to cut through to the essentials and not trade in elusive concepts.

I reckon it’s the most stimulating and involving popular book to touch on these issues since ’The Mind’s I’ edited by Hofstadter.

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Jul 24 2017

Cill Rialaig residency

To be honest, I don’t quite know where Cill Rialaig is. I will check on Google when it’s time to go there. All I know is, it’s somewhere very very remote and I’ve won a residency there for autumn of this year 2017.

Many thanks to The Irish Writers Centre for offering this fantastic opportunity, and looking forward to meeting fellow recipients Sue Leonard, Fiona O’Rourke, Breda Wall Ryan, Anna Heussaff, Moyra Donaldson, and Kelly Creighton.

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Jul 24 2017

Stinging Fly Wheldon essay

“As was my habit at the time, my eye would alight on books that held promise of unlocking secrets of how the world works. Books described as ground-breaking or probing or uncompromising. At a book stall at Camden market the following blurb intrigued me:
When the letter came, inviting Alexander to attend an unspecified course of instruction, he somehow felt oddly compelled to attend. From that moment on, his world changed, all of his certainties and logic called into question.
The book was David Wheldon’s The Course of Instruction“

My essay in the Summer issue of The Stinging Fly on encountering David Wheldon’s early novels in my teenage years, and reading them again more than two decades later.

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Mar 20 2017

The Girl Missing from the Window

Doire Press

Nine stories set here & now in Ireland. O’Reilly brings the reader right into the story, right up close where it is difficult to pass judgement. There’s no purple prose, no chopped sentences, no ironic distance looking down on the characters from above. Instead there’s a keen interest in people and their motivations and predicaments. Often that predicament occurs at the interface between a common-sense approach to life and the complexities thrown up by the modern world.

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The opening story is about text bullying among teenage schoolgirls. The title What Rose Did, has an ominous ring. Rose Carney, we soon learn, hung herself from the branch of a tree. The story is related by Tracy, the mother of teenager Leanne. At first Tracy attempts to comfort Leanne, thinking she must be upset by the news. The family’s domestic routines are described, but as in the best horror movies, our perceptions have been subtly shifted and there is no comfort this familiarity.
“Saturday morning the boys were back playing the game Santa had brought them. I was in the utility room, sorting clothes by the washing machine. I could hear them arguing and, when it turned nasty, I found them rolling about on the floor, boxing, grabbing at hair, the game over.”
Harmless roughhousing, part of growing up? Or a hint of the darker side of human nature that cannot be eradicated?

Suspicions begin to grow around the role of the daughter, Leanne. It’s remarkable how depictions of the teenage girl lounging on her bed can seem so eerie. Her father seems to have a better intuition of what might have happened – but what kind of father is it who can so readily suspect his daughter of wishing someone dead? This is murky stuff indeed and the scene where the father tries to wrestle the incriminating mobile phone from Leanne makes for uncomfortable reading.

There’s a tension in many of these stories, a hint of dread. There’s also a lot a lot of soul – many of them have the impact of a ballad: there’s no startling twist but the emotive power catches you by surprise.

Guys and the Way they Might Look at You is about a couple whose marriage has grown cold; the man’s libido is apparently flagging. They remain remarkably civil to each other. They have children at university, yet they seem quite sporty, go to the gym, use the internet, and are in every way ‘modern’ for want of a better word. I liked the portrayal of this couple, who feel familiar to me, and yet they are not pinned to any familiar notions of Irishness as mediated to us. They hook up with a couple from Kerry, who likewise are presented just as themselves, and could be from anywhere.
This story was my favourite in the collection. It had a constant tension and also a hard-to-define atmosphere of unreality. If these people come across as unauthentic (though perhaps only to me), it’s not because they are not out there in the real world, it’s because they have never achieved authenticity in their lives.

In the best of O’Reilly’s stories there is no sense of artifice, the reader doesn’t ever think this is someone making things up. We are faced directly to reality. The writer Philip O’Casey makes an astute observation in his blurb when he says “some of them could be from today’s headlines.” And just as with many a newspaper story, you might well ask yourself “is this what the world’s coming to?”

The title story is another good one, with Irish men on the tear in Amsterdam.

Why didn’t social media tell me O’Reilly was this good?

PS Yes it feels odd to write about O’Reilly

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Feb 22 2017

Backstory of a book

This article first appeared on the Writing.ie website in September 2015.
The Backstory of a Book.

It’s been a year since my debut collection of short stories Greetings, Hero was launched to the world. My tales of drifters and deviants incapable of accepting any “central source of validation” were a long time in the making. The oldest was written in the Staatsbibliothek on Unter den Linden in Berlin, during a bitterly cold winter. Some others were written in Poznan, one in Prague, and several in Dublin. They were written slowly, left to mature, inspected, pruned with a buzzsaw to meet submission wordcounts, rejected, reconstructed, lost in virtual space, found again, re-edited. Subjected to the above cycle a few times, and perhaps somewhere along the line accepted by a magazine in Ireland, the USA or the UK.

The route of any book to reach the world is a tale of persistence and serendipity. I’d been writing for a long time. Three and half novels are buried deep in zip files on my hard drive. The first one was written using WordStar on a DOS machine, an old hand-me-down.

Read on ….

“You write beautifully and I have no doubt you are going to do very well,” replied one lit agent about the turn of the century. I didn’t doubt it either. I was living in Poland at the time, sending out submissions festooned with so many stamps that the address had to be squeezed in at the bottom. A package took three months to reach the UK. I knew nothing about the literary world. To give an idea of how out of touch I was, on a trip back to Dublin I enquired in Easons where the literary magazines were shelved.

Soon after I moved back to Ireland I began having success with short stories. Back then – before 2010 – there were far fewer lit magazines in Ireland. (For a while The Stinging Fly went on hiatus, and there were basically none.) I tried UK and American magazines too, and the acceptance emails began to trickle in. I owe a huge debt to the editors of these magazines – The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Prairie Schooner, 3am magazine, Stand magazine, and Unthology, among others – for their encouragement and patient editing, and for opening my eyes to what’s new in fiction. I never lost the feeling of being an infiltrator however – a person harbouring a deviant agenda, trying to smuggle himself into an environment where he did not belong.

By the time I had a dozen or so stories in various lit mags and anthologies, and another dozen unpublished, I began looking into the possibilities of getting a collection published. I sent off a fusillade of submissions, failed to get a lit agent interested, and continued for a couple more years to get individual stories published. I was working on plays at the same time. For some time I hoped that a breakthrough as a playwright would ease the doors open for a short story collection. After I got an Arts Council bursary I spent several months polishing the collection to completion, determined not to send out the collection unless it was fully ready. One literary agent replied it was a tough market, etc, but went out of his way to suggest three small publishers that I should try. (I guess this might begin to sound like a blues song, but the first publisher was for UK residents only, the second does not have open submissions, but mentors selected writers, while the third was in the process of winding up.)

I didn’t actually know of any recent writer, then, who had achieved representation from a lit agent following an unsolicited submission, and most certainly not for short stories. So I didn’t have any realistic hopes.

I knew the taste of good luck. A New York literary agent emailed me out of the blue once, saying he admired my story in the US journal Prairie Schooner, and had I a novel ready? I won the biennial McLaverty short story award. The very first play I wrote was accepted by the Cyclone Repertory and given a public staged reading at The Triskel in Cork.

But I lacked luck in the area where I’d sunk the most time over the previous decade. It was proving very very difficult to get either agent or publisher to read my collection. Advice from inspirational gurus on how to cope with rejection began to grate on me. I used to dream of rejection. I longed for the opportunity to be rejected. Years went by with nary a rejection letter. (To clarify, my method was to send out a query + synopsis + one story. I didn’t count it as a rejection if a publisher declined to view.) And every time I clicked on any book-related article, the Motivators were sure to be out in force yapping that rejection makes you stronger.

I began to feel it was arrogance to want to have a book published. Why couldn’t I be content to have single stories published indefinitely? Isn’t writing supposed to be its own reward?

My state of mind vacillated between a total conviction that if my writing was good enough, I would have been ‘discovered’ long ago by talent spotters of unknown origin, and an almost equally absurd belief that if a publisher would just read the damn thing, they would inevitably feel compelled to publish it.

Perhaps I did not have the aura of someone in need of a helping hand? Perhaps I was giving off the wrong vibes – I thought back to the last time I met an established writer. He asked how the writing was coming along, and I replied, “just battering away at it. Battering away.” Shouldn’t I have said: “Fantastic! I have a collection ready to go and I’m looking for a suitable agent. Hey, do you know any?”

I needed to move on to a novel or another play, but I also needed to take a more imaginative approach to getting my collection under the nose of a publisher. The big [UK] publishers state on their websites they only accept via an agent. By this stage I had about twenty-five short stories published and a McLaverty award, and I had not yet achieved a rejection for my collection. In a fit of hubris I composed a submission request to Faber & Faber. I referred to websites where lit agents state they do not handle short story collections. I quoted lit agents who said they hadn’t worked with an unsolicited submission in years. I edited it down to a concise 300 words, addressed it to a specific editor, and sent it off by registered post. The reply came back within days, saying sorry, but they would not read my submission. About a year later Faber announced they were bringing out a debut short story collection. Imagine my disgust when I learned that it was from a publishing industry insider with no previous stories published.
In retrospect my disgust was wise. I should have been guided by it, instead of letting a sense of professionalism overpower me. A big boo to Faber, and I prefer to read from publishers who spread their net further afield for debut fiction. I’d be a grovelling coward if I didn’t say that.

I kept up the campaign, trying several tactics, not neglecting honesty, to blag my through the barriers. In early 2013 the dream came through. Quercus emailed me and said “Word is correct: we are not totally averse to the notion of short stories.” A month later they got back, saying they enjoyed the stories but it’s a tough market etc.

This didn’t get me down. In this whole escapade of being and becoming, it was never rejection that got me down. Just over a month later an email bipped in the inbox from an outfit called Honest Publishing. They wrote that they had read my submission and wanted to know a bit more about me. I felt no tremor of excitement. I felt nothing. This was because I had never heard of them. I had no recollection of submitting. But the digital evidence was there.

First thing I did was Google the publisher. Their website impressed me. As trivial as it might sound, what struck me most was the covers of their previous books.

I got in contact and a few tentative emails were exchanged. I solicited the advice of some established writer friends. I let Penguin Ireland know the situation. Penguin Ireland had been the only other previous publisher to request to view the whole manuscript. They hadn’t rejected it, but had wished to view a resubmission in a couple of years. This was a major boost, but my style of writing was changing, I felt my new stories did not add coherency to the collection. Also I had no literary agent, and big publishers have a poor record of taking on unagented writers.

And then I heard that Mark SaFranko would be signed soon by Honest. Mark is a writer of noir thrillers and stories of blue-collar life, from New Jersey, USA. I had read some of his stories before and he has had plays produced in Ireland. Well, if SaFranko wanted to go with Honest, then I was more than honoured to be with them. And anyway, I liked the old-school simplicity of it all:
I submitted the damn thing.
They read the damn thing.
They got back to me with an answer.

Thus began a long tennis game of back-and-forth edits with the occasional dropped email to screw things up. The story of the cover design is an epic in itself – Slava Nesterov was the third artist to attempt the job.

I never got the chance to thank my publishers in print. So I raise a glass to the team at Honest: Chris Greenhough, Dan Marsh, the proofreaders, and also to the cover artist Slava Nesterov way out at the edge of the Urals.
The book slipped into the Irish literary scene without a ripple for the first six weeks. Then the English writer David Rose gave it an excellent review in Quadrapheme, and the following week Kevin Barry did the honours for a Dublin launch. A month later it had reviews in all three main Irish newspapers – a turbo boost for a book from an indie publisher.