The Making of a Thriller: Part IV

The Making of a Thriller: Part IV

­­­Quantum Dualism? — We closed Part III of this blog series on a glimmer of hope that consciousness might in fact be a “real” thing, in some way separate and apart from the physical universe in which it finds itself. By the same token, this threatened to land us back...
The Making of a Thriller: Part III

The Making of a Thriller: Part III

Consciousness & Other Stories — When we left off last time we were marveling at the hoops that philosophers like John Searle and David Chalmers seemed willing to jump through in hopes of finding that mind is not simply reducible to gross materiality. And we closed...
The Making of a Thriller: Part II

The Making of a Thriller: Part II

Mind Games — As Part I of this “Making of a Thriller” blog series drew to a close, it alluded to a conundrum on which the plot of my technothriller Dualism was said to turn. Which is to say that Dualism the novel spends at least part of its time grappling with Dualism...
The Making of a Thriller: Part I

The Making of a Thriller: Part I

The MacGuffin Hunt — Two scenes and a thought experiment, that’s where my second technothriller, Dualism, started. For a while there after I finished writing Singularity, I thought I was done writing, period. I’d exorcised this incubus of an idea that’d had me...

Review: Anderson’s A Midsummer Tempest

Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest, 1974 — Imagine an alternate universe in which every word written by William Shakespeare was the literal, historical truth. Since that, in turn, would imply the existence of clocks capable of chiming the hour in Julius Caesar’s...