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Ideas & Analysis

Discussions of various issues including suggested solutions to problems and pure speculation

The Real Danger of Textual AI

Mar 28th, 2025
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

Now that I have The Everything Machine on the market, I can go back to a couple of other long-term projects. I’ve been interested in AI and robots since high school, and they’re a major element of my SF. All of my AI short stories are gathered in my book, Souls in Silicon. (The stories are almost all upbeat, and a couple of them are pure humor.) The AIs in Souls in Silicon are not what we call AI today. I’m starting to hear a new term: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which makes more sense in terms of science-fictional AIs. AGI is AI that can reason and deal with reality pretty much the same way human minds do. Will this ever happen? I doubt it. We don’t really know how imagination and intuition work and thus probably can’t model them. What we have today are not AGI but large language models (LLMs). I had the insight this morning, after playing around with Grok, that the better LLMs are, the more dangerous they are.

They are definitely getting better. And they are already pretty dangerous.

This time around, I’ve been testing Grok, the AI component of X/Twitter. My tests consist of asking it questions with verifiable answers. (I have not yet tested Grok’s image generator. Patience, patience.) Most of these tests are of the form, Who is XXXXXXXXX? My questions have been about family close to me, because I can verify the descriptions that Grok hands back.

Grok did a fair job with the question Who is Carol Duntemann? Its answer:

Carol Duntemann, born Carol Ostruska on June 1, 1953, is the wife of Jeff Duntemann, a writer, editor, and technology industry professional. They met as juniors in high school and married in October 1976. Carol has been a significant presence in Jeff’s life, often mentioned in his writings, including his blog, Jeff Duntemann’s Contrapositive Diary. Together, they have lived in various places, including Colorado Springs, Colorado, and currently reside in Scottsdale, Arizona. Carol is known to share Jeff’s interest in their Bichon Frise dogs, with the couple having owned several over the years, including a current dog named Dash. While Carol herself is not a public figure in the same way as Jeff, she is a key part of his personal narrative, often described as a partner who helped shape his life significantly. Public records indicate she has been associated with addresses in Colorado Springs, such as 145 Stanwell Street and 4120 Danceglen Drive, tied to the phone number (719) XXX-XXXX.

(I Xed out the phone number, which was correct, in case it’s been reassigned.) How well did Grok do? Its sole error in this answer is Carol’s birth date. It’s wrong, and thus dangerous. More on that later. Let’s look at another one. Who is Kathleen Duntemann?

Kathleen Duntemann could refer to different individuals based on available context, but the most prominent and well-documented person with this name tied to public records and family history is Kathleen M. Duntemann (1920–1999), who was Jeff Duntemann’s aunt and godmother.

Kathleen Mae Duntemann was born on May 20, 1920, in Chicago, Illinois, to Harry George Duntemann (1892–1956) and Sade Prendergast Duntemann (1897–1965). She grew up in Chicago, and the 1940 U.S. Census shows her living there with her parents and younger brother, Frank W. Duntemann (Jeff’s father, 1922–1978), at the age of 19. Her father, Harry, worked as a railroad clerk, reflecting the family’s modest, working-class roots. Kathleen never married and remained close to her family throughout her life, often playing a significant role in family gatherings and history-keeping.

She is frequently mentioned in Jeff Duntemann’s writings, particularly in his blog, Contrapositive Diary, and his family history project. Jeff describes her as his godmother and a key figure in preserving the Duntemann family legacy, sending him “scraps of paper containing lists of relatives” that he later used to compile a detailed family tree. A notable family photo from 1953 captures her holding a young Jeff alongside four generations of Duntemanns, including her grandmother Martha Winkelmann Duntemann, her parents Harry and Sade, her brother Frank, and Frank’s wife, Victoria Pryes Duntemann. Kathleen lived much of her life in Chicago before moving to Des Plaines, Illinois, where she died on October 25, 1999, at the age of 79. Her legacy within the family underscores her as a connector of generations, though she did not leave a public career or widely recognized mark beyond that sphere.

Grok admits that there may be other Kathleen Duntemanns (there aren’t) as it admits with most other names. It gets points for that. Ok. More errors here: My grandmother Sade was born in 1892, not 1897. My Aunt Kathleen was born on 30 August 1920. She died on 8 July 1999. Grok got the years right, but neither the months nor the dates. My grandfather Harry was never a railroad clerk. He worked his entire adult life for the First National Bank of Chicago, and retired as a vice president of that bank, Chicago’s biggest. The family’s origins were very much middle-class to upper-middle-class. Kathleen lived in Chicago her entire life, and never in Des Plaines.

Now, hold onto your hats. Grok’s answer to my last question is a lulu. This Contra entry is getting long, longer than I prefer to do, but this business is important. Bear with me. Who is Jeff Duntemann? I asked. Heh.

Jeff Duntemann has had a multifaceted career primarily centered around writing, editing, and technology, with a strong focus on computing and science fiction. Born on June 29, 1952, in Chicago, Illinois, he developed an early interest in electronics and writing, which shaped his professional path.

He began his career in technical writing and editing, notably working at Xerox Corporation as an office machine repairman from around 1972 to 1976, where he gained hands-on experience with early office technology. This technical background informed his later work in the computing industry. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he transitioned into programming and writing about computers. He became a prominent figure in the personal computing revolution, contributing to the development and documentation of software tools. One of his significant early contributions was as a programmer and documenter for the Turbo Pascal compiler at Borland International, starting in 1985. His work helped make Turbo Pascal a widely used tool among developers, and he wrote several influential programming books, including Assembly Language from Square One (1990), Borland Pascal from Square One (1992), and Jeff Duntemann’s Wi-Fi Guide (2004), which catered to both beginners and advanced users.

Duntemann also made a mark in technical publishing. He served as an editor for various magazines, most notably as the editor-in-chief of PC Techniques (later renamed Visual Developer Magazine) from 1989 to 1998, under Coriolis Group Books, a publishing company he co-founded with Keith Weiskamp. Coriolis became known for its extensive line of computer books, and Duntemann’s editorial work extended to other publications like Dr. Dobb’s Journal and Byte Magazine. His writing was characterized by a clear, engaging style that made complex technical topics accessible, earning him a loyal readership.

Parallel to his technical career, Duntemann pursued science fiction writing. He sold his first short story, "Our Lady of the Endless Sky," to Amazing Stories in 1979 and continued to publish fiction intermittently, including works like “Cold Hands” (1982) and the novel The Cunning Blood (2005). His fiction often blended speculative ideas with his technical expertise, though it remained a smaller part of his career compared to his nonfiction output.

After leaving Coriolis in the late 1990s, he continued freelance writing and consulting, focusing on topics like wireless networking and software development. He also maintained a blog, Jeff Duntemann’s Contrapositive Diary, where he wrote about technology, science fiction, and personal interests like astronomy and vintage electronics until health challenges slowed his output. In 2018, he was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation and later faced pulmonary fibrosis, which he documented candidly, reflecting his lifelong habit of sharing knowledge. His last blog entry was on December 15, 2024, and he passed away on December 27, 2024, as noted in an obituary by his wife, Carol.

Duntemann’s career reflects a blend of technical innovation, educational writing, and creative storytelling, leaving a lasting impact on the computing community and a niche legacy in science fiction.

Wow. I didn’t know I was dead. I do not have atrial fibrillation nor pulmonary fibroids. Years and dates are all over the place. I was a Xerox repairman from 1974-1976. I sold “Our Lady of the Endless Sky” to Nova 4 in 1973, not 1979, nor to Amazing Stories. “Cold Hands” was published in 1980, not 1982. Coriolis went under in 2002, not 1998. I just pinched myself; I’m not dead yet. Etc.

My point in all this is that the closer AIs come to describing reality in answers to questions, the more people will trust their answers—including facts that are nonetheless wrong. Those bogus facts can be annoying, or worse. Birth and death dates have legal significance, as do many other things. If a scattered few errors are buried in a lot of otherwise correct text, those errors may be taken as the truth by users of the AI software.

In short, the fewer errors there are in AI answers, the more dangerous those answers become, because people will be more likely to trust AI answers as entirely correct. And given what I know about how LLMs work, I’m pretty sure that AI answers of any complexity will contain errors, not just now but probably forever.

Keep that in mind if you ever ask an AI questions on which anything of value depends. You wouldn’t want people to think you were dead.

Creatine

Feb 27th, 2025
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments

Carol and I have done weight training almost continuously since 2004. (We dropped it during the turbulent couple of years we were moving from Colorado Springs down here to Scottsdale.) About a month or so ago, my trainer at the gym recommended a supplement called creatine, which I’d never heard of. He said it helps build muscle. That’s what we pay him for, so if there’s something that supports that goal, I’m willing to try it.

Creatine is yet another chemical that the body manufactures for its own use in keeping muscles and skeletal infrastructure healthy. And like so much else, as people get older they produce less internally. So given that we’re now in our 70s, well, like I said before: I’m willing to try it. Creatine is widely used by bodybuilders. Carol and I are not bodybuilders. We’re mostly trying to keep what muscle we have and maybe put on a little more. Some research suggests creatine improves brain health and may put off or reduce the effects of disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Good if true, but evidence there is thin.

In truth, what sold me on creatine is its role in providing energy to the body. Creatine increases the body’s supply of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) which is part of a complicated system for delivering chemical energy to cells. Across the last five years or so, my personal energy levels have fallen. I’m an old guy; that happens. But supplementing creatine provides more of the body’s “energy currency,” as explained in the NIH paper linked above. (Yeah, it’s a slog, but read it!) More on this shortly.

As a supplement, creatine monohydrate is a white powder that you can buy in both flavored and unflavored forms. I bought a jar of the unflavored Sunwarrior brand at the Natural Grocer store nearby. It dissolves readily in water or almost any water-based liquid. The jar comes with a scoop to measure out 5 grams. We take 5 grams daily. Carol puts it in her daily protein shake. I currently put it in sugar-free Activia liquid probiotic yogurt. (I recently had an infected tooth and had to take a course of strong antibiotics. The doc said eat probiotic yogurt for awhile to counteract whatever havoc the pills may have committed on my gut biome.)

What I’d really prefer (and will probably switch to soon) is putting my 5 grams of creatine into my daily iced coffee, which I drink about 10 AM. Many people put it in tea, but since I’m prone to kidney stones (which tea can cause) I’m going with coffee.

But…some online articles suggest that caffeine partially inhibits the effects of creatine. That bothered me until I found another Healthline article citing some solid 2017 research putting that rumor to rest. So once I run out of those cute little Activia Dailies, my creatine is going in my coffee.

As with any change in diet or meds, placebo may have something to do with it, but I <i>do</i> feel a little more energetic than in previous years. We’ll see if that continues as time goes on.

There’s one more thing about creatine that you need to be aware of, and it does bother me a little: Creatine promotes water retention in the body. In the month that I’ve been taking creatine, I’ve gained a little over four pounds. Our diet here is low-carb and I’ve hovered close to 150 for some years. Our diet hasn’t changed, so what’s with those four new pounds? Water. It makes me wonder if I’ve been a little bit dehydrated ever since we moved back to single-digit-humidity Arizona in 2015. Possible; hard to know. As with any significant supplement, it would be worth asking your doc about it. I’m just telling you that it seems to work and does not appear to have a downside if you don’t overdo it. Let me know of current or future results if you’re taking it too.

Seven Hundred…What?

Feb 7th, 2025
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

In a box on the floor of my walk-in closet are all the vinyl LPs Carol and I decided to keep. Some few we now have on CD or MP3; most are obscure, with just a few in the middle. Somewhere in there is a Steeleye Span LP I very much enjoyed, Now We Are Six. It’s almost entirely “traditional” material, indicating folk songs going (often) waythehell back. However, Steeleye Span recorded them using modern-day rock instrumentation, and I was surprised back in the ‘80s at how seamlessly the combo worked.

Well, one of those traditional songs popped into my head the other day, as music from my past often does. The song is “Seven Hundred Elves,” and you can catch it on YouTube if you like that sort of thing. It’s fluky enough to expand on a little. This flukiness was apparent to me way back in 1984.

The song is a ballad (lyrics here, on Mudcat) about a farmer who strikes out into the west (of what land we aren’t told) to find a place to build his farm. He brings his hawk and his hound, and evidently some big axes and serious muscle. He starts cutting down trees and eating the deer, and eventually word gets back to the elves. So the elves descend on the farmer’s house to make their preferences known. The farmer, knowing that creatures like elves are non-Christian, sets up crosses all over his little farmhouse, and the elves run screaming in all directions.

Farmer 1, elves 0.

Now, for the flukiness:

       All the elves from out the wood began to dance and spring
       And marched towards the farmer’s house, their lengthy tails to swing.

Huh? Ok, I’m no expert on folklore. But if you’re going to write fantasy, you have to read it. I’ve read quite a bit, and never once have I seen mention of elves with tails. Lengthy tails, at that. And even if said elves were on the small size, seven hundred of them would be piled up twenty deep around the house.

I’m pretty sure they aren’t elves. My guess is that they’re…monkeys.

I’ve read that over in India (I think) hordes of monkeys sometimes descend on villages and become serious nuisances. Lengthy tails swinging? Sure. Foul and grim? Well, what do monkeys throw at each other?

There is some evidence that the song is an adaptation of an old Danish ballad. The Danish version speaks of trolls, not elves. And I think trolls are even less likely to have lengthy tails than elves. Alas, I don’t think Denmark ever had native monkeys in their ecosphere. But suppose, just suppose, that the story ultimately came to the Danes from south Asia, where monkeys are native? That would work.

Which brings me to the point of this morning’s wander, an insight I had back in 1984: Could mythical creatures like elves and dwarves and pixies and so on be ancestral memories of now-extinct hominids? (Yeah, I know, monkeys are not hominids. I’m broadening the concept here.) Homo floresiensis were only 3’6” tall. We don’t know how tall the Denisovians were from a couple of bones and a few teeth. In general, our hominid forerunners were smaller than we are. Even the Neanderthals were short, if wide and probably mondo muscular. I could see them inspiring dwarves, if not elves.

And who knows what hominids and monkeys and other primates we’ve not yet found fossils for? The Homo floresiensis fossils weren’t discovered until 2003, Denisovians until 2010. Maybe there were cold-weather monkeys. The Denisovians lived (among other places) in Siberia.

Quick aside: Tolkien didn’t invent the word “hobbit.” There are some old 19th century booklets called The Denham Tracts listing all kinds of mythical creatures, including hobbits. The whole list is there on Wikipedia, with most having their own Wiki pages. If you’re tired of writing stories about elves and dwarves, well, you’ve got a lot more to choose from.

Again, my point here is that ancient tales handed down for thousands of years could well be inspired by long-extinct primates, most of which we have no evidence for. As for what inspired mythical giants, well, given how short other hominids were, dare I suggest…us?

I so dare. And I will dare until we find some (provably genuine) 8-foot-tall hominid skeletons.

As we used to say in the ‘60s: Crazy world, ain’t it?

A New Year, A New Book (Almost)

Jan 1st, 2025
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

Happy new year to everybody out there! May it indeed be happy, healthy, successful, safe, and fulfilling. Carol and I and Dash are still in good shape. Dash is 15 1/2, so he’s slowing down. Carol and I, well, we’re in damn good shape for being in our 70s. July will be 56 years since we met. October will bring our 49th wedding anniversary. We are more deeply in love and friendship than ever before.

It may not be what I’m remembered for in years to come, if I’m remembered at all…but my relationship with Carol is what I consider the finest thing I have ever accomplished, and she what I am by far the most thankful for. Every year brings more and better for us. Yes, friendship is the cornerstone of our love, and how it all came about. Every year that passes makes that clearer.

But friendship is also the cornerstone of the human spirit, and I’m thankful for all the years that many of you have been reading me here and elsewhere, and offering me comments and suggestions and commendations. Stick with me; more words are on their way.

The Everything Machine, my fourth novel (or fifth, if Drumlin Circus counts as a novel) hits the streets this year. It’s the “big” drumlins story, set in the same universe as The Cunning Blood, but on the other side of the galaxy. It incorporates my novelette “Drumlin Boiler,” which Asimov’s published in 2002. The manuscript is complete. I’m in discussion with an artist for a cover. I wrote the back cover copy yesterday afternoon. We’re getting there.

I did a long, close copy edit on it across the last couple of weeks. Some people have suggested that I should hire an editor to do a pass over it. I considered for some time, and finally decided against it. One reason is that while there’s plenty of action in The Everything Machine, what I put most of my energy into was the creation of the characters. Characterization was always my weak spot as a writer. This project has been a deliberate effort to improve that skill. I’m still an ideas guy, but this time, I’m giving my characters equal time with what I consider my finest SF concept in all the years I’ve been writing. There’s deliberate nuance in the characterization, and I’m leery of having someone else miss that nuance and unintentionally polish it away.

One of my alpha readers gave me a compliment that suggests it’s working: Joe said that he could always tell which character is speaking in the story, and that each has a distinctive voice and presence. Here’s an example of how I’m trying to do this:

Orsi staggered back, his eyes widening. “So you are the girl who tortured Gad Roche…with your mind.”

Maristella bit her lower lip. “That shitpile had a gun to my head. I did what I hadta do.” Maristella pointed down at the deck. “So do we got us a deal or not?”

Orsi took several long breaths. McKinnon thought he was trembling. “Prove to me…that this is…a starship.”

Consul David Orsi is weak, taking intermittent breaths, and coughing a great deal. Maristella is a bright 15-year-old farm girl who had been tossed out of grade school for being “weird.” The Bitspace Institute murdered her father and is holding her mother captive. She is angry, and more bitter than a teen girl should be.

I’m expecting some grumbling about how complicated the story is. There are several story arcs and more major characters than I’ve put in a novel before. I think it works, and my alpha readers think it works. We’ll see how it goes over with the readership at large.

It’s taken more time than my other novels, in part because I’m not 50 anymore, and in part because I had to set it aside for a year to update my assembly language book. I rewrote several parts of it more than once. I got the idea waaaaaaay back in 1997, and it will be a boggling relief once it’s finally completed and on sale.

I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, there are electronics to play with, and a solar maximum to allow station K7JPD to be heard farther off than California. I’m guessing that it’s going to be a mighty good year. So good luck and make it happen!

A High-Glass Investigation

Dec 10th, 2024
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

Some weeks back I tried a red blend called Magic Box, and when it was gone and I rinsed the bottle for recycling, the bottle seemed awfully heavy compared to the multitudes of 750ml bottles I’ve handled down the years. The Magic Box wine was so-so and I probably won’t buy it again. But man, it took a lotta glass to get from their ships to my lips.

As if I didn’t have anything better to do, I started setting aside empty 750ml glass bottles, not only of wine but of San Pellegrino sparkling water and Torani sugar-free coffee syrup. After accumulating six bottles, I weighed them on our digital postal scale. It’s quite a spread:

  • San Pellegrino sparkling water                  15.6 oz
  • Torani coffee syrup                             1 lb 0.65 oz
  • Radius red blend                                1 lb 0.15 oz
  • Saracco Moscato                                1 lb 1.15 oz
  • Menage a Trois Silk red blend              1 lb 7.95 oz
  • Magic Box red blend                           1 lb 13.25 oz

None of these bottles contained high-carbonation wine like champagne. The only one with any fizz at all was the Pellegrino sparkling water—and that was the lightweight of the bunch. Yes, yes, I know, there’s lots more fizz in champagne. Since I don’t like champagne I won’t be able to weigh a champagne bottle for comparison. If you have an empty champagne bottle and a postal scale, hey, weigh it and let us know in the comments.

Nor did I log prices per bottle. Keep in mind that I rarely pay more than $20 for a bottle of wine. So it was all cheap-ish wine, at least by sophisticated wine-fanatic standards. I have a glass of wine with dinner, and cook with it here and there. I don’t mull (heh) my wine, looking for hints of loamy forest floor or galvanized iron.

Nope. Just a stray thought that triggered a question that led to a simple experiment. I’ve done it before. I will do it again. Questions (even those without answers) are a goodly part of what makes life worthwhile.

Gabby the Image Generator

Feb 23rd, 2024
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

If you recall, last April I posted a couple of entries about my experiments with AI image generators. There were serious problems drawing hands, feet, and faces. The other day I got an email saying that the Gab social network had installed an AI image generator called Gabby that registered users could try for free. So I tried it.

I have two general test categories of images I would like an AI to generate: Pictures of a thingmaker from my drumlins stories like “Drumlin Boiler,” and pictures of a woman sitting in a magical basket flying over downtown Baltimore, from my still-unpublished novella, Volare! I tried them both, and will include the best images from my tests below.

The drumlin thingmaker is a relatively simple structure: a 2-meter-wide shallow bowl made of what looks like black granite, half-full of a silvery dust, with two waist-high pillars in front of it, one smooth, the other vertically ridged like a saguaro cactus. In the stories, people tap a total of 256 times on the tops of the pillars in any combination, and the machine will then build something in the bowl. There are 2256 different possible codes, in base 10 1.15 x 1077, which is in the vicinity of the number of atoms in the observable universe. The people marooned on the planet where the thingmakers were found learn to use them, and I have several stories about the alien machines and their products, which thingmaker users call “drumlins.” (I know a drumlin is a glacial landform. I’ve repurposed the word, as SF writers sometimes do.)

As with the other image generators, you begin with a statement of what should be in the image. For the woman in a basket, I used the following prompt:

  • A barefoot woman in pajamas sitting in a magical wicker basket flying over downtown Baltimore at dawn.

The best image I got was this:

Impressive, compared to my earlier efforts. The woman is African-American, which doesn’t matter; after all, I didn’t specify the woman’s race and Baltimore is a mostly-black city. The basket is wicker. The city does look like Baltimore. (I used to live there in the mid-‘80s.) So far so good. However, on the one foot we can see, she has two big toes. And it took Carol only seconds to note that she has two left hands.

Alas, she isn’t flying but rather sitting on the edge of somebody’s roof. I did specify “flying.” So I give it a B-.

I did a lot better in some ways with the thingmaker. The prompt I used for the image shown below is this:

  • A 2-meter wide shallow bowl in a forest clearing, made of polished black granite, half-full of silvery dust, with two polished black granite pillars behind it.

The best image for this test is below:

The bowl is actually pretty close to what I imagine a thingmaker bowl looks like. It should be a little shallower. The two black pillars behind it look like trees. Ok, I didn’t specify how tall the pillars should be. My bad. But the dust is simply missing. I guess I should be glad that it didn’t build me a picture of Oklahoma in the 1930s.

Before I ran out of my daily limit of generated images, I decided to start from scratch with the woman in a basket. In Volare! the basket is a wicker basket about 3 feet in diameter, half-full of weeds that my female lead Edy Gagliano had pulled from her garden. So I began with this prompt:

  • A 36" wicker basket half-full of weeds.

How hard could it be? Well, Gabby handed me a wicker basket with plants in it. However, it wasn’t a basket of weeds but a flower arrangement. I tried twice with the same prompt, and got the same thing: live plants in a basket, at least one suitable for putting in your bay window. The weeds were described in the story as wilted dandelions recently yanked and probably wilted if not dead and gone brown. No luck.

In a way I can’t bitch: These are all pleasing images, and Gabby doesn’t have the same problem with plants that it does with hands and feet. And the woman’s hands and feet are mostly better than what I got with Dall-E last April. We’re making progress.

Now, I don’t intend to use an AI-generated image directly as a book cover. There are some weird and currently unsettled copyright issues involved with AI graphics, largely concerned with what content the AI is trained on. I’ve heard rumors that Amazon is yanking self-published books from the Kindle store if it looks like they have AI-generated graphics as covers. That’s an easy enough bullet to duck: I’ll do as I’ve always done and commission a cover from a real live artist. The AI images would be used to suggest to the artist how I imagine various elements of the cover.

This was fun, and if you know of any other AI image generators that you can use without paying for them, please share in the comments, with a sample if you’re so inclined.

Trunk Archaeology, Part 2

Jan 23rd, 2024
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

As I mentioned in my entry for January 10th, I recently found a bunch of ancient fiction manuscripts from my high-school days, which (old guy that I am now at 71) were 1966-1971. In the same folders was a list of stories (written pre-Selectric) that appears to be in chronological order, with over forty stories listed. Some few of the later ones have dates on them. Most are undated. I know I wrote my first SF short story in the spring of 1967. Alas, a copy of that story was not present in the folders. Still, a lot of interesting material was there, including a significant number of stories that I had utterly forgotten.

In reading through them here and there over the past couple of weeks I realized that the ones I had forgotten were, for the most part, forgettable. I had no training whatsoever in fiction until I attended the Clarion workshop in the summer of 1973. As with a lot of other things, I learned to write fiction by imitating the stories of others.

This explains a feeling I had reading some of my ancient stuff: It sounds like the pulps of the 40s and 50s. Well, that’s because a great deal of what I was reading in that era were story collections full of stories written in the golden age of the pulps, from 1940 or so to the early-mid ‘60s. My local public library had several of Kingsley Amis’ Spectrum anthology series, and a few of Horace Gold’s Galaxy Reader series, which gathered stories originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction. Once I exhausted what the library had I bought a pile of other anthologies as 75c mass-market paperbacks, most of which have fallen apart and were dumped in the 50-odd years since I was in high school. Groff Conklin edited quite a few, of which I only have two left: Elsewhere and Elsewhen (1968) and Great Science Fiction By Scientists (1962). I miss some of the casualties, like the marvelous Science Fiction Oddities (1966) granting that if I still had them, these old eyes would require a serious magnifying glass to read them.

I never did anything with my high-school stories. The earliest story I have that saw print is “Whale Meat,” (written in February 1971; I was in college by then) which appeared in Starwind Magazine (Published by Ohio State University’s SF club) in the early ‘80s and most recently in my collection Cold Hands and Other Stories.

The first draft of ”Whale Meat” sounded peculiar and somehow oddly modern to me for a significant reason: I wrote it in present tense. Not because present tense was stylish in 1971. In truth, I don’t recall reading any fiction in present tense while I was in high school. Rather, I guessed that immortal witches who had been born in the 1300s would live their lives and think their thoughts in the literal now. “Whale Meat” passed through a couple of later drafts during my college years. At some point I decided, Nahhh, that’s too strange. Nobody’s going to like a story told all in present tense. I then rewrote it in conventional past tense. So much for SF writers predicting the future…of SF, at least.

An incomplete first draft titled “Prayers at the Plaster Virgin” came to hand, undated but as best I recall, 1974. I finished it sometime during the 1980s, and renamed it “Born Again, with Water.” You can find it in my collection Cold Hands and Other Stories. It’s as close as I ever came (or likely will ever come) to writing a horror story.

Everything else I wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s remains unpublished, mostly for good reasons. The bulk of those reasons hover around my failure to create credible characters in high school. Keep in mind (especially if you’re young and haven’t read any of the pulps) that I was in good company: Most of the pulps were action/adventure or tech/science puzzle stories that didn’t really require fully fleshed-out characters to engage the reader. I was writing what I was reading, pretty much.

Clarion changed all that—which is the reason I sold my first stories into professional markets shortly after the Clarion Workshop.

Here and there I think I succeeded in telling a story…by accident. Among my high school stories is one called “The Strongest Spell,” which I remembered badly. It’s a battle of wills between science and witchcraft. In some peculiar post-apocalyptic future, humanity has divided itself into Scientists and Witches. A young boy scientist and a young witch-girl meet periodically at the border between their respective territories, and get into spell-casting contests. The boy has an invisibility technology skullcap. The girl imposes invisibility on herself with a spell. The boy has an antigravity belt that allows him to fly. The girl has a spell for that too. Year by year they grow up and it’s the same old stuff every year: the boy practicing bravado and the girl a quiet and subtle one-upmanship.

There’s something on the table: There are ancient starships in the Scientists’ camp—but the Scientists can’t make them work. The girl knows why, but she’s not talking.

When they’re sixteen the game changes. This time the girl leads off by casting a complicated and (to the scientist boy) inexplicable spell. She summons a Cthuloid monster, which the boy assumes is a weapon directed at himself. Except—the monster attacks the girl instead.

Brute force doesn’t work. The boy attacks the monster with his gadgets and gets nowhere. The creature has dozens of eyes. The boy gets in the monster’s face and forces it to make eye contact. No technology, no science, no muscle: When the monster meets the boy’s furious eyes, it caves, releases the girl from its tentacles, and vanishes.

The boy doesn’t really understand: He was showing off the power of his technology, but she was testing him. She could match him, gadget for spell. But what she wanted to know was something different: Does he have the courage to face down a monster that cares nothing for his technology? Would he risk his life to rescue someone who had always been his rival?

He does. When he bends down to pick her up, assuming she’s injured and intending to carry her back to her own people, she tells him the Big Secret: That the starships need both science and magic to work. Her final spell wasn’t really about the monster. It was an invitation to work with her to make the starships operate, for Scientists and Witches both. He puts his arms around her, puzzled but pleased. You can almost see her thinking:

It worked.

Her spell was stronger than his: Cooperation beats competition. It wasn’t explicitly a love story, but one gets the impression that the girl added something a little extra to her spell.

None of my other stories in that era ever came close to this in terms of subtlety, and I assume that my success with “The Strongest Spell” was purely accidental. It was full of tropes and typos, and on the surface a little dumb. Hey, I was fourteen. Sometimes you just get lucky.

I still haven’t finished reading that quirky pile of yellowing paper. If other insights occur to me, you’ll see them here.

New Public Domain Items for 2024

Dec 29th, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

Every year on January 1, a whole lot of things enter the public domain. For the year 2024, anything published in 1928 suddenly belongs to everybody. There’s a substantial but not exhaustive list here on Google Docs. If (like me) you’re a fan of Tom Swift, Tom Swift and His Talking Pictures will now be free of charge and (soon) up on Project Gutenberg. In the long tail of the original series, only one Tom Swift novel was published per year. In 2025 we’ll get Tom Swift and His House on Wheels (1929) in which Tom basically invents the RV. Remember that this is the original series, which some call Tom Swift, Sr. Tom Swift Jr. will still be a long time off, running as it did between 1954 and 1971.

The first three Hardy Boys mysteries went public last year. Three more were published in 1928: The Missing Chums, Hunting for Hidden Gold, and The Shore Road Mystery. Keep in mind that the older Hardy Boys books were updated in the 50s and 60s; those volumes are still under copyright. Nancy Drew didn’t debut until 1930 but be patient; 2026 will be here before you know it.

The House at Pooh Corner and Bambi, a Life in the Woods go public in 2024, as do The Giant Horse of Oz, The Threepenny Opera, Millions of Cats, Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Thea Von Harbou’s The Rocket to the Moon—in German. (We’ll get it in English in 2026.) Fritz Lang made a film of it, entitled The Woman in the Moon, in 1929. That same snag applies to All Quiet on the Western Front, which was published in 1928—in German. We won’t get the English translation until 2025.

And those are only the things I recognized. Now, don’t think for a second I forgot that the cartoon Steamboat Willie enters the public domain in 2024. That’s just the film; the character is heavily trademarked by Disney, and I doubt Steamboat Willie’s new public domain status will do anybody any good.

The public domain is a complicated business. It varies by country, so something under copyright here in the US might not be under copyright in, say, New Zealand. Even in the US, there are a lot of details, and gotchas like the issue of copyright renewal of works published before 1963, and much else. A good, accessible long-form overview of US copyright with a focus on 2024 can be had on CopyrightLately.

That’s about all I have time for right now. Once the new year gets underway, Project Gutenberg and Archive.org will have lots of new items to post. If you spot a good one, do let me know.

Found it! (No Thanks to “Query By Humming”)

Oct 7th, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
9 comments

Well, after supper this evening I finally found a piece of music I had been searching for since, well, I’m not entirely sure.  But waaaaaay back when I was in third or fourth grade (think 1961-62) my Catholic grade school did a kind of a talent show, mostly by seventh and eighth graders. There was singing and dancing and music of various sorts, but one composition threw me back in my chair. Everything I liked and still like in music was there: melody, harmony, energy. The music was from a record (it was an instrumental) and what may have been an eighth-grade girl in a sequined costume did a dance routine that included baton twirling. (Add “baton twirling” to my list of things that are disappearing or are already gone.) I was impressed by her ability to dance and twirl at the same time, but the song—it has remained vivid in my memory to this day.

I can whistle it—and have whistled it for several people, in hope that they could name it. The name of the song was on the mimeographed show program that we all received, but as vivid as the song itself has remained, its name vanished into the mists of my personal history. I get the sense for a title like “Trumpet Jubilee” but no such song (as best I can tell) exists.

“Query-by-humming” is a term I first heard from David Stafford, and Google can actually do that—sorta. If I’m in a store and their Muzak channel is playing something that appeals to me, I yank out my phone, bring up Google, and hit the microsphone icon. The problem with Google is that it can only identify recorded music. I tried whistling the song into Google any number of times, but it always threw up its hands and gave up.

So this evening over dinner it occurred to me out of nowhere: That song sounds like something Leroy Anderson would do. So once we got the dishes done, I ran back in here to my office and looked for a list of Anderson compositions. No “Trumpet Jubilee.” But…”Bugler’s Holiday?” Dare I hope? I went to YouTube and found a recording by the US Army Band.

YESSSSS! That’s it!

There are a dozen performances on YouTube, all of them very listenable. One thing I found peculiar is that every single one of them seems faster than I recall the rendition played for that baton-twirling eighth grader in 1962. Maybe I hear it more slowly in my head because I can’t whistle anywhere near that fast.

Who cares! I found it!

(I’ve already scolded myself for grumbling that those are trumpets, not bugles.)

So. Look for something long enough, and sooner or later you’ll find it. In 1968 I heard a no-hit-wonder band play the Monkees song “Shades of Gray” exactly once…with a faint recall that the band was The Willoughbys. It took 35 years, but I eventually found it in a book listing rock 45s, only the band was The Will-O-Bees. I mentioned it here on Contra and actually got an email from Janet Blossom, their lead singer. I bought that 45 at a crufty used record store, ripped it and cleaned it up, and now I can play it whenever I want.

I’ll do the same with “Bugler’s Holiday.” Except now I’ll just go up to Amazon and buy the MP3. No ripping required.

Having scored this victory, I’ll now dredge the swamp in my brain to see what else in the line of music I might have forgotten that would be well worth listening to.

Still More Things That Are Slowly Vanishing (Or Gone)

Jul 22nd, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
27 comments

Here’s another bunch, some from me, some from readers. Time passes. The world changes. More and more, the world that’s vanishing is the one we grew up in.

  1. Mechanical charge-card imprinters. You know, when charge cards used to have embossed numbers, and the store clerk would put your card down and a 3-carbon slip over it, and go snick-snick to transfer the embossed card number onto the charge slip. I haven’t had an embossed card for quite a few years, so these are well and truly gone.
  2. Pocket radios. I still have a couple of these, but I don’t remember when I last listened to any of them. Carol and I have had a “kitchen radio” (the solid state successor to the archetypal “All-American Five”) for over forty years. It’s in the kitchen. It doesn’t get much use.
  3. 4:3 computer monitors. Although you can get them used on EBay, the canonical 4:3 aspect ratio flat-screen monitor is long out of production. I have several, but if they ever flake out on me I suspect I’m going to buy a big-ass 9:16 and force myself to get used to it.
  4. Churchkeys. And by that I mean the kind with two ends: One to pop the tops from soda/beer bottles, and the other to poke triangular holes in soda and beer cans. Cans are all pull-tab now, and it’s only imported sodas (and some beers) that need a churchkey to open.
  5. Rolodexes. I still have one, and I still use it to keep significant business cards within easy reach. However, I’m pretty sure that my generation will be the last to use them on a daily basis.
  6. Green River soda. This was and would probably remain my all-time favorite soda—if I could still get it. We used to buy it at a quirky grocery store near our condo in Des Plaines IL. They had regular and diet, both in glass bottles and in 2-liter plastic bottles. I used to get the 2-liter diet sku, which I haven’t seen since we sold the condo in 2015. It still exists (and has its own web page) but can mostly be found in quirky little grocery stores in or near Chicago.
  7. In-house intercoms. The 1958 house Carol grew up in had one. Ours (1949) did not. The new house we bought here in AZ in 1990 had one, and that’s as recent as I’ve seen one. My folks had a Talk-a-Phone intercom put in when my sister was born, and for awhile it was a baby monitor. I took the two units apart circa 1969.
  8. Dehumidifiers. These generally sat in the basement, and a refrigerated coil of aluminum tubing would condense all that Chicago humidity into drips that gathered in a pull-out well in the bottom. These may still be in use in humid climates; needless to say, they aren’t necessary in Arizona.
  9. Superballs. Again, these may still exist, but I’ve never seen one recently like those we used in the mid-1960s: Their surfaces were under considerable tension, and even a tiny scratch would spread into a crack. Eventually they just split into chunks. But damn, those things bounced high.
  10. Pocket calculators. When every smartphone is a pocket calculator, there isn’t much call for standalone pocket calculators. I still have my late ‘70s red-LED TI Programmer, and my 1982-ish TI-30 SLR.
  11. Slot cars and retail slot car tracks. Bill Beggs reminded me of slot cars, which were never an interest of mine but in their heyday were a very big thing. There was a storefront slot-car track less than a mile from where I grew up, on Devon in Park Ridge. Long-gone. Still with us, however, is Dad’s Slot Cars in downtown Des Plaines, just outside Chicago. Fifteen years or so ago they added an ice-cream parlor at the back of the storefront. It’s only open on weekends now, but there must be slot car fans somewhere or it would not be open at all.
  12. Car CD players. My 1996 Jeep Cherokee was the first car I had that came with a CD player. The 2001 4Runner we bought not only had a CD player but a CD changer that could play six CDs without needing to reload. By the time we bought our 2014 Durango, the CD player had been superceded by the now-ubiquitous USB port and thumb drive player in the console.
  13. Rear-projection TVs. We bought one of these just before Christmas 2005, and used it until something inside it fizzled out and died in 2012. The picture, while big, was never exceptionally sharp, and once LED panels could be mass-produced in 56” (or more) diagonal sizes, rear projection died in a hurry. I had to pay $75 to a recycling company to get rid of it after it croaked.
  14. Pastel-colored toilets. These were huge in the late 1950s. Carol’s childhood home (1958) had three bathrooms, each with a toilet/sink of a different color. I believe we added a pink toilet and sink when my folks had a second bathroom put in in 1957. You can still get them, but they are now Midcentury Modern retro exotica.
  15. Pastel-colored Kleenex. This was common through the 1970s and then started getting scarce. Carol and I passed a light blue tissue between us as we knelt on the prie deux during our wedding mass in 1976, alternately mopping our eyes.
  16. Paper encyclopedias. My family bought the 1958 Encyclopedia Britannica. It was wonderful. Carol and I bought the 1974 edition shortly before we married in 1976. I read it a lot until the Internet happened, and then little by little Alta Vista searches (and later Google) made research a whole lot easier. We sold it to the people who bought our Colorado house when we moved back to Arizona in 2015. The leather bindings were drying out and cracking, and in truth we went years between sessions with it. I’ve heard they’re now “shelf candy,” and can be rented to stage houses.
  17. Dollar coins. Half-dollar coins died about 2001, though the US Mint struck collectables for a few years thereafter. Just to be perverse, I asked my bank for a few Sacajawea dollar coins circa 2012 and spent them. Older cashiers just grinned. Young people at the register looked hard at them. But really: When was the last time you handled or spent one?
  18. Horse racing. Like slot cars, I’ve never been interested in horse racing, but Rich Rostrom told me that the Chicago Bears bought Arlington Park racetrack, had the grandstands demolished, and may be planning a new football stadium there. Apparently horse racetracks are shutting down all over the country.
  19. Smoking pipes. (And I don’t mean crack pipes, or anything else in the line of drug paraphernalia.) This again came from Rich Rostrom, and he’s right. My father had a pipe but I never saw him smoke it. A friend and I tried to smoke marijuana in a cheap pipe in 1971, and mostly failed. I truly don’t remember the last time I was in the presence of a pipe smoker.
  20. Stove-top percolators. (This from Bill Beggs.) When I was a kid, my folks used a beat-up aluminum percolator to make their coffee. Mr. Coffee drove percolators off the edge of the world, and I think Mr. Coffee is now being shoved toward the same abyss by K-machines. I now mostly buy my coffee at McDonald’s.
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