Memories of the 28th Century

Recently, I was talking to someone about some of the works of Samuel L. Clemens, AKA Mark Twain. I was encouraging the other person to read Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi, both of which are memoirs, rather than fiction. Then we touched on the matter of most of Twain’s fiction not being all that good. But that made sense, because Twain was a reporter of considerable experience, so he wrote in a reportorial fashion.

Good reporters are honest people who are inclined to accurately ...

I was asked today when I would be posting to my blog again. Alas, I have been busy trying to get my novel into shape for publishing, so I confessed that and decided that I should start plugging my novel. When I last looked, it was about 93,000 words and formatted as a trade paperback came to about three hundred pages. The title will be “Harry’s Time Tours, Inc.” I had been thinking of it as Studies in Causation, but I have been having trouble remembering that title; although it might be a good title ...

Fact and fiction are often presented as opposites. Fiction is made up, fabrication, lie, etc., but the real difference is in the attitude of the teller. Many things have been presented as fact that are far from being actual fact. It might actually be that the majority of things presented as fact are not factual, but it is difficult to tell the difference. It is interesting that I just watched the truly strange video “Massachusetts” by Ylvis, a Norwegian band; it is a satirical praise of Massachusetts, ...

One of the ways that I annoy humans is to refuse to ask or answer the question “How are you?” It isn’t that I treat the question as some Germans, who will answer the question in extreme detail, which is why they usually just say “Hi.” No, I regard the potential answers to be inaccurate in some significant way, because people are horrible at self-characterization. Of course, many people just automatically say “Fine and you,” which is close to no answer. Fundamentally, humans aren’t very good at describing ...