Mary Robinette Kowal has snagged a Hugo nomination for her short story, Evil Robot Monkey.
Great. Just great.
You remember the first draft of that story I was so happy about finishing? The one I mentioned here, here, here, and here?
It's got a monkey in it.
A bioengineered, nanotechnologically-enhanced, talking monkey.
Way back in 1994, I was working on a little book about a freelance journalist with a camera in her eyeball, who sold snippets of newsworthy footage on an open online market sort of like a stock exchange. In late 2008, filmmaker Rob Spence set about having an actual camera implanted in his actual eyeball. Which, on the one hand, suggests to my apparently delicate ego that I was 14 years ahead of my time (not that it's the most original idea in the cosmos, but you get what I mean). On the other hand, it makes it less likely that I'll ever revisit and finish that story, because it's "been done."
So you can understand why I'm a bit deflated at the moment, and somewhat less than sanguine about finishing my robot monkey story and sending it anywhere.
Of course, they're not the same story at all, even though they both deal with the issues surrounding artificially created non-human intelligence. Hers is better: subtle! Mine's got guns and riots and schizoaffective poets in it.
Go read Evil Robot Monkey here, it's not long.
Great. Just great.
You remember the first draft of that story I was so happy about finishing? The one I mentioned here, here, here, and here?
It's got a monkey in it.
A bioengineered, nanotechnologically-enhanced, talking monkey.
Way back in 1994, I was working on a little book about a freelance journalist with a camera in her eyeball, who sold snippets of newsworthy footage on an open online market sort of like a stock exchange. In late 2008, filmmaker Rob Spence set about having an actual camera implanted in his actual eyeball. Which, on the one hand, suggests to my apparently delicate ego that I was 14 years ahead of my time (not that it's the most original idea in the cosmos, but you get what I mean). On the other hand, it makes it less likely that I'll ever revisit and finish that story, because it's "been done."
So you can understand why I'm a bit deflated at the moment, and somewhat less than sanguine about finishing my robot monkey story and sending it anywhere.
Of course, they're not the same story at all, even though they both deal with the issues surrounding artificially created non-human intelligence. Hers is better: subtle! Mine's got guns and riots and schizoaffective poets in it.
Go read Evil Robot Monkey here, it's not long.
Wait wait! If the camera eyes are the details and the details have devils and the devils are awesome, then couldn't TWO camera eyes be awesome?
Just over twice as awesome, by my reckoning.
A monkey turning a pot on a kick wheel? I got that far into the story and quit. Now a story about a person with cameras for eyeballs, now THERE is a story!
A much more imposing reason for not returning to that story is that it's either residing on one of a group of a half-dozen hard drives which may or may not include the drive I pulled from my Packard Bell laptop after returning from Mexico in 1995, or has been lost forever. But! Camera eyeball girl and her ghost cat are still in my brain. They may live again.