Morgan Freeman is dead. Again. If anyone is in any doubt, just check his Wikipedia page, because if Morgan really had died, the Wiki faeries would have swooped in and sprinkled pixie dust on his date of departure from the land of the living between one blink of the beating heart of the internet and the next.
In typical good spirits, the un-dead acclaimed actor laughed off his untimely demise. But the false report got me thinking, because it’s eerily similar to a story that influenced me some time ago, the one surrounding the equally untimely and entirely false report of George Clooney’s death during a motorcycle holiday around Italy.
So far, I’ve been working on A Darkening of Fortune (Wraith being its former and provisional name) almost the whole of 2012, and it has been the most difficult novel to date.
As some may remember, I’ve already written a large novel, which came very easily. However, that really isn’t the same here.
Presently, I have a written plan of how the end of the novel must be re-written, and it’s a substantial task.
I’m hoping to have a final draft ready for my editor by the end of the week. But I won’t allow myself to be rushed with this, not with so much depending on this first novel.
Google have released a preview of Project Glass and a glimpse into a world where they see people wearing spectacles designed to specifically make use of augmented reality.
Sound familiar? Maybe not to you, but to me, it’s nothing new or particularly ground breaking, as it’s something I wrote about many years ago, which I dubbed “pre-vision” because no one had yet coined the aforementioned phrase:
“Truly useful technology is often passive, working away tirelessly, doing whatever is required to be done, to be invoked at a time of our choosing.
An example of persistently good passive technology — both from a solutions and an ergonomic point of view — would be a pair of spectacles. These things have been around for centuries and their design has varied little, the same being true of our facial physiology, to which spectacles are specifically designed for.
Our view of the world is always a sensorial affair, but our world is predominantly defined by our view of things, in a very literal sense, which makes these remarkable gadget glasses so appropriate.”
More recently, I included my take on the technology in A Darkening of Fortune, my next science fiction crime thriller:
“Those from the affluent parts of Asia are often the most distinctive, as many would be seen wearing spectacles, though not for opthalmic relief, but as an aide to their viewing pleasure, supplanting hand-held devices and supplementing their vision. They instead see the always-on digitally augmented brave new world, an enriched sprawl of virtual overlaying the real, as street performers walk through imaginary rooms made visible, which slide about their bodies as if they were the centre of motion, and interactive banner adverts, hanging the length of buildings, billowing in the wind, with children jumping up to touch them, just to see the cartoon characters chase each other up the immaterial fabric, laughing as they go, advertising the culinary delights found within one of the many Asian restaurants.
A young girl ushers her friends into a giggling huddle as she stands before them, and with the thumb of one hand to the forefinger of the other, she makes a landscape frame in front of her, and with a blink, she takes a photograph. A human gesture, when observed by the ever vigilant gaze of technology, is empowered in a myriad ways these days.”
