RE: Dad In the Machine (short story)
Fantastic stuff, like a script for "Black Mirror" but with heartfelt emotions which make it better.
couple of easter eggs:
"who Tommy"-- you wrote it at some point early in the ss.
Makes us want to listen to the full album and listen to the lyrics and then compare with your short story.
"How do you write women so well?"
The most quotable line in that movie, reminded of it here.
Just the little bit of pretending to be offended she did, to illicit a reponse she wanted from her brother. so almost-innocently manipulative. does a typical man do this?
We write emails to our kids who aren't old enough to read yet. Philosophies of life, things for which to look in life, wisdom, observations of them as babies and kids, a lot of stuff. This wasn't really available in the past, and we wonder if it's similar to maybe what the Rothschilds' elders did which make them so economically resilient over the ages? Maybe that's what Dynasty's do well? We transfer our knowledge?
Makes us think about the movie Avatar, that tree is obviously their "internet". Technology can be frightening, but it can also be a wonderful thing, and it can also be manipulated (like in your story at the end).
anyway, great stuff, thought provoking. Your short stories are more powerful than even your (first) book, is this one in your book of short stories? We might have to pick that one up, or will we have read them all by being here on Steemit over enough time?
Thank you, @harpooninvestor. As a man, writing believable female characters can be a challenge. The cliches are the low-hanging fruit right there for the picking, and they are so tempting. But writing in the first person as a woman is something else entirely. I'm glad to hear you think I did a decent job.
Three conflicts that I hope came across are scientist vs. artist, analog vs. digital, and gene vs. meme.
Tommy is the left-brained male who embraces technology as the answer to all his problems, and life's problems are issues to be fixed through technology. Kelly is the artist who accepts life's problems as experiences that are part of the tapestry of her life. Here's an example from the story:
Analog vs. digital is another conflict. As Tommy tinkers in the basement with his electronic components, Kelly descends the basement stairs toward him. The stairs creak horribly as she thinks how the wood has stored all of her dead father's past footsteps, just as a vinyl record stores sounds of musicians who are long dead. Tommy, for his part, has converted his father's memories from an analog, organic medium (his brain), to a digital magnetic one.
Finally, genes vs. memes is the biggest conflict. Are we a collection of genes or a collection of memes? The answer is both, but which is more important? What more represents who we are: DNA, or the words we speak and the ideas we have? Which has more longevity? Clearly, memes do. It is safe to say that none of Aristotle's genes are in existence today, not in whole. Yet we read his teaches 2,300+ years later. In our quest for immortality, memes win out over genes, but memes are more susceptible to mutation and being hacked.
A throw-away thought occurred to me, probably because I'm on Steemit. Is DNA the first blockchain? Aristotle's DNA (assuming he had children) has been broken apart and spread across all his descents across all of humanity. Would it be possible to recreate Aristotle using the fragments of his genetic code embedded in billions of people? I would say that is impossible, so could you say his identity has been distributed and encrypted across humankind? I don't know enough about genetics or blockchain technology to say, but I think it's an interesting thought.
Way deeper than we thought, actually. Did in fact pick up on the sister being more interested in the floorboards than the tech, also picked up on techie vs artist, but didn't really diagram it in the mind like an English professor might. And also fully thought about the main conflict, which again reminded us of some of the conflicts in the show Black Mirror. Black Mirror is all about the dark side of current or future technology, your story is actually better bc it touches on both light and dark, and finished light. Happy ending actually, which we like.
If Artistotle (did he even have kids? thought he was gay and his beloved "children" were his students? but we always confuse him with Socrates anyway) cannot be reproduced as a blank slate clone, then genetics would be similar to blockchain. But lot of nuances here. For one thing, "nurture" DEFINITELY matters, and think there's a large amount of proof to that at this point. In-vitro babies can even "learn" to eat (or like) certain things from what the mother was eating while she was in the womb-- so the gene-code of the baby can be changed in the womb, but more importantly the mother's genes change during her life, such that subsequent babies actually get her progressive genes. So the gene code can change over time, but blockchain is locked forever in the past, only the present (transactions) can change the block as it's being hashed out.
If James Clerk Maxwell weren't living in isolation without siblings on 1500 acres of his father's estate, would he have been so curious about how everything works? What if his equations had already been invented before he was a teenager, then what would his genes have accomplished.
If Jack White hadn't grown up poor and had more toys than that guitar he got while impressionable, what happens to him? All unanswered questions.
but yeah, your writing of a woman is above our head, just like a real woman. so you must know SOMETHING!