You're probably familiar with the story of George Baily, played by Jimmy Stewart in the holiday time classic "It's a Wonderful Life." George, a decent man who has spent his life dedicating himself to his community, finds himself on the brink of ruin on Christmas eve. Just when he thinks all is lost, the good citizens of his community rally round to save him.
Below the fold, another George Bailey story. And I'm going to ask you to help him. And all you gots to do to help out is read this diary and press the "recommend" button.
Hello, my name is George Bailey
Well, actually my name is John Sundman. But I'm the guy I'm going to ask you to help. I am on the brink of ruin, and I need to come up with a lot of money by December 30, or I'm going to go into foreclosure. I'm 56 years old & only partially employed (for the last 13 months); my wife has health issues, and although our three children are legal adults, they all have serious issues and are in one way or another still dependent on us, and probably will remain so indefinitely.
A Proposal to the Citizens of Beford Falls
George Bailey ran a Savings and Loan. I'm a writer. I have some books for sale. If enough of you purchase my books (which you can do through my website, links below)--or even help me spread the word-- I'll get out of this jam. And we can help some other people while we're at it. I can't get them to you by Christmas, but I can get them to you in early January. They make good gifts (it's never too late!), good reading for snow days. Or set them aside for the beach.
I will donate 15% of the GROSS receipts of this little campaign, equally divided between the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and the Vineyard Committee on Hunger.
By the way, all of my books are available for free download, no strings attached. I only charge for the print versions. So you can check 'em out before sending any money.
My "good guy" credentials
I'm not a saint, but I've tried to be a good member of my communities -- in the town where I reside, in the USA and the wider world, and here on Kos. I've been a Peace Corps Volunteer (rural development in Senegal, 74-76), a Cub Scout/Boy Scout leader, president of the PTO; my wife and I are long-time Island Food Pantry volunteers and we run the Serving Hands pantry and the Family-to-Family program; I'm a volunteer fireman. I run a website that has provided key material support (in the way of investigative citizen journalism) to Net Neutrality and other first amendment issues, especially related to the FCC. By checking out my diaries and commends here (I've been a Daily Kos member for about 6 years) you can judge for yourself how I've contributed to this community.
The Books
Acts of the Apostles is a nanotech/cyberpunky thriller about nanomachines, neurobiology, Gulf War Syndrome, and a Silicon Valley messiah. Some people have called it geek cult classic, although sales are down because it came out years ago. Links to lots of rave reviews appear below.
Cheap Complex Devices, which puports to be a report on the Hofstadter Prize for Machine-Witten Narrative, is actually a meditation on self-awareness (human, machine, other) and a satire of academic artificial intelligence, in the spirit of Vladimir Nabokob's Pale Fire.
The Pains, my latest, just now at the printers, is an illustrated novella that tells the story of a perfectly decent person upon whom God, or the Universe, or Random Chance, or Chaos, or Whatever, decides to dump unending physical misery--and of how that perfectly decent person bears up with extraordinary grace under the onslaught. It's set in a universe that is part Orwell's 1984, part Reagan/Cheney's 1984, and part who-knows-what.
What People Have Said About These Books (glowing reviews)
Acts of the Apostles(winner of Writer's Digest's National Self-Published Book competition in 2001):
Salon said it is "a nanotech science-fiction thriller packed with everything you would expect a hardcore geek to like" but "it's also a book infused with a sensibility that you don't normally expect a 'hard science fiction' novel to have: real emotions, real heartbreak and a real sense of the craziness at the core of the human condition."
Slashdot said it's "Tom Clancy would write if he were smart."
Web guru Jeffrey Zeldman said "Almost everyone I know who is serious about the internet and has spent more than a few years working on web stuff has read John Sundman’s novel, Acts of the Apostles, your everyday story of bioengineering, Gulf War Syndrome, Trojan Horses, and millennium cultists. (If you haven’t yet read this classic underground thriller cum paranoid fantasy, do yourself a favor; it’s pretty great.)" Over in the UK, the literary critic who goes by the title the Grumpy Old Bookman said:
On 1 May of this year I mentioned the name of John F.X. Sundman, and said that I had read chapter 1 of his Acts of the Apostles online. I then took the liberty of suggesting how that first chapter might have been improved.
Well, I hereby apologise. In fact I grovel. I have now bought, with my own money, a copy of the entire book, and I'm glad I did. Having read it, I can tell you that this is a deeply impressive novel, especially as it seems to have been the author's first, and I can assure you that John Sundman needs no advice from me, or from anyone else, on how to construct an effective book. [. . .]
I have the very definite feeling that this is a book which will be read in 50 or 100 years from now, in the way that we now read books such as The War of the Worlds, 1984, and Brave New World. People will look at it and say -- see, that is what they were worried about at the end of the twentieth century. How quaint! Alternatively, they may read it and say How prescient! Let's hope it's the former.
More nice words from Geek.com, Bioinformatics.org, and the Canadian priemiere review site Good Reports, which said, "Michael Crichton couldn’t write a book this interesting."
Google can find many dozen similar reviews for you on the net.
Cheap Complex Devices
So as not to make this diary over long, and since you know how to use Google, I'll just link to one of my favorite reviews, by Rusty Foster, of Kuro5hin. (Rusty is the creator of the Scoop software that powers Daily Kos.) He said:
"John Sundman's long-awaited second novel, Cheap Complex Devices is finally finished. It is astonishing, on just about every level a book can be astonishing. [. . .] Rather than tell you the story of technology run amok, as Acts does, CCD runs amok itself, and takes you along for the ride. It is, taken altogether, a piece of writing that in lesser hands would almost certainly have crashed and burned in the most abject depths of pointless self-indulgence. But Sundman somehow walks the razor's edge perfectly and pulls it off. By the end, I wanted to clap at the sheer breathtaking feat of narrative I had just experienced.
As all reviews must, this one barely skims the surface of Cheap Complex Devices. The book itself is a very complex device, and would take a lot more words than this to really unwrap and analyze. I suspect that the end result of such an effort would be similar the results of Ray Kurzweil's "onion peeling" metaphor for the search for the location of human consciousness. Each layer you peel off, you still have a whole onion, albeit a slightly smaller one. And at the end, you have a lot of onion peels, and no onion at all.
Or, to put it another way, if you read one book in the waning days of biological humanity's monopoly on Earthbound intelligence, better make it this one.
The Pains,
This book is new! I have not yet seen a single review. Why not read it and be the first person to write one!
My Essays for Salon
While I'm at it, let me also pimp some essays I wrote a few years ago for Salon. How I Destroyed the New Economy, about my part in desecrating a sacred spot and how that caused the dot com bubble to burst; How I Decoded the Human Genome, about my short-circuited career as a moral philosopher, and Artificial Stupidity, about the eccentric hedonist Hugh Loebner's run in with the eminence grises of respectable computer science. All of my stories for Salon have made the Editor's Choice year-end list, but that didn't prevent me from getting snubbed at a big Salon writer's shindig.
Please don't let history repeat itself
Here's a tale that you may find sad, funny, or merely embarrassing, about the deprivations that I (and my family) endured during the years that I was writing my first book. It tells how we became homeless.
How to Help
You can buy my books by paypal here and by check-in-the-mail here. Or simply make a donation to help a struggling genius here.
I know we all have charity sob-story fatigue at this time of year. So I understand if you don't want to buy or donate. But would you recommend this, at least? I hate to add my voice again to that din. But were you in my situation, you'd do the same, I'm sure.