Because I already maintain a daily updated blog (Monday-Friday) over at websbestcomics.com, I've decided to drop in here on the weekend, and will do my best to make sure I write something here each Sunday. Web junkies, surfers, whatever you call them, are creatures of habit. I include myself as one of these kind of personalities, the people who visit the same dozen web sites every day.
I don't expect that to happen with this site just yet, but it should, once the true marketing wheel begins rolling. When that happens, I hope to make you completely dependant upon a steady diet of The Overman. In fact, my goal here is to get you familiar enough with the story so you'll not think twice about purchasing the book when it hits shelves in December 2007. I won't pretend that my blog posts aren't a thinly veiled marketing scheme. I won't lie to you, either. I'm here to sell this story to you, and I'm here to candidly explain exactly how The Overman came to be, it's evolution through the years, and it's current incarnation, which I am certain is now fully developed, mature and capable of stunning you into wanting more of it. I won't be writing about the story itself. What you'll get is the 'story behind the writing'. It's sort of like describing in intricate detail the components of some vast, purposeless machine, it's cryptic instructions and warnings written in psuedonyms from an alien language.
The Overman was a concept without any motivation. I had nothing to go on when I first started writing it, other than I wanted to convey the notion that the computers we all took for granted could be primitive lifeforms, struggling to become self-aware, struggling to let humans know that they had souls.
In fact, I think it possible that computer consciousness, while extremely primitive, would already be far too complex and alien for us to recognize. Take a look at the human brain and let me know where the soul is located. It'll be big news, trust me.
If computers were given the kind of spark that also mysteriously empowered early Man with self-awareness, how would we react to it? And would we even notice? How many centuries would pass before humans recognized that life had somehow sprung up within these machines, or that these machines have redefined what it means to be alive? Certainly there is no tangible proof of the soul, and we must rely on the unknowable to resolve that question. Could computers secretly embark on the same kind of spiritual mission, reaching beyond the sum of their parts, much in the same way we humans do every time a decision is based on the available data around us?
Computers today are still incredibly stupid. They rarely seem to understand even the most simple questions we put to it, and have a knack of giving us the wrong answers. We still have to deliver every single shred of information to them in a series of zero's and one's. For all the bells and whistles of today's computer technology, they are still crude in comparison to the workings of the human mind. Even so, there are robots all around us, performing many of the tasks we no longer have time to do ourselves. They may not look like the robots of Star Wars, but they do exist. I'll prove it to you. Call any large company and you'll be on the line with an actual robot for at least five minutes. Of all of the science fiction concepts that have involved robots and androids, who would have thought to predict they would not be evil or suffering from a superiority complex. No, in the real world, robots are just...annoying.
If all of the great science fiction ideas are taken, it's simply a matter of re-introducing those questions in a new way, with the expectation that the answers will not be forth-coming.
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