My Muse Teases Me

I keep coming up with great ideas for plot or character issues of complications at the worst times.

The best ideas seem to come when I’m driving or on the phone or at times like tonight while I was out for a wonderful 6 mile run. By the time I finish with whatever I’m doing (get off the phone, find a place to pull off the road or get home and peel off my sweaty clothes), the idea seems to have evaporated. Now, I do keep a notebook with me for times when I can jot down any of the gems that pop into my mind under less-than-life-threatening circumstances, but it seems like the best ideas always come when I’m ill-prepared to record them.

Do they do that just to antagonize me? Grrr!!!

About the Title of the Book

The seed for this novel was planted in 1994 when I met Hans Moravec at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. He gave a speech about the state of the art in robotics and predicted that the memory and processing capacity of computers would someday outperform the computational abilities of the human brain. He suggested that future robotic deep space explorers would have the same independent deductive and interpretive abilities that humans have without the biological needs and limitations. Finally, in front of a roomful of world-renowned biologists, he predicted that the next major step in human evolution might involve the development of electronic offspring that would continue to evolve as purely electronic beings and that it would be that evolutionary leap that would allow us to colonize space.

As a scientist and a dreamer, I wonder now, as I did that night 15 years ago, when the first of us will upload the entirety of our memories, desires, dreams, biases and fears to electronic media where sophisticated software will carry out the same deductive calculations that we now call "thought." Certainly we have bounded, rather than crawled, closer to realizing that possibility over the past decade and I believe that the day is fast approaching when the first human e-clone will be born.

This story is about the dangers we face as we approach that event horizon unprepared, unchecked and unaware of the consequences or freeing a dualistic human consciousness from its own mortality. The characters in this story will face choices about the value of the biomedical and biotechnological advances they work to create. For some, it will become necessary to re-examine their own ideas about boundary between of life and death, the ethics of the modern medicine and the meaning of family.

In a 21st century world where technology is beginning to blur the boundaries between real and virtual lives, The Moravec Threshold will challenge your beliefs in everything.

Countdown to NaNoWriMo 2009

The Moravec Threshold is my NaNoWriMo 2009 project.

Since the contest requires writing more than 50,000 words on one manuscript in the month of November, I decided to focus on this novel since it's been pestering me to write it for a few months now. This BLOG will host excerpts from the text as it flings itself from my fingers along with photos from the month of literary abandon.