The Fading Voices From The Moon

"I have done things and been places you simply would not believe, and I keep that inside of me." — Mike Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot.
 
 "…Most people just look at [the moon] as something flat out there in the night sky. But I look at it as a sphere. I can feel the depth of it. I know that it's in inner space. I mean, I know that it's not at the end of that blackness." — Gene Cernan, Apollo 17 Commander.
 
Cernan passed away a week ago Monday. He was the last human to walk on the moon and spent more time walking its surface than anyone. (His crewmate, geologist Jack Schmitt, missed out my just a few minutes.) There are only six people with living memory of walking on on the surface of another world, and the youngest is 81. The Apollo program was a remarkable achievement, certainly worthy of the many books written about it, the people in it, both famous and hidden figures. But it's the words of the participants themselves that have always grabbed me.

Moonwalkers share the rarest and most remarkable experiences. Reading quotes from before and after their trip, it's clear it changed them. Few of them were known for (appropriately) expressing themselves before their journey. Ken Mattingly, Apollo 16 Command Module Pilot, once said, "Money should have been spent to find […] a Hemingway that can capture the feeling and describe, to say, 'I saw this. And I saw that. And I saw this.' That would have been worth the price of Apollo." 
 
And yet many of them became poets on the trip there and back. (For variety, Apollo 12 CMP, Alan Bean became a painter of some note.)  
 
Voices From The Moon is a hardbound collection of stories, quotes, and photos by those who went there. Edited by Apollo scholar Andrew Chakin, it lets the astronauts tell their own stories in their own words, from pre-Apollo Right Stuff-era all the way through the end of the program and its impact today. It's as much (or more) a photo book as a story collection, each page containing excellent reproductions of the most stunning restored photos from the Apollo archive. There is no e-book version, which is for the better. It's best seen and experienced in its physical form. (Much like the moon.) Published in 2009, it's not a brand new book. Then again it's not a new story. The only chapters being written in crewed moon exploration are obituaries.
 
Maybe my fascination with Apollo is just me romanticising a time I never knew. Cernan, Evans, and Schmitt's journey on Apollo 17 was the only one to happen in my lifetime, and I was just a few weeks old. I didn't get to see the people of Earth take crewed space travel from its first tentative steps all the way working driving to work on the moon in a short decade—not only training the astronauts, but the much larger task of building the machines and technology for them to do so.
 
But space travel is getting interesting again, both as an observer and commercially. We have had people living and working in space for sixteen continuous years, which is just as much of an accomplishment as Apollo, and couldn't have been done without it leading the way. So who knows what I might yet see humanity (and individual humans) achieve in my lifetime.

(A version of this originally appeared in a past issue of the Reader's Room. Subscribe to get it (and more good things) in a more timely manner.)

Talking It Out

“Hey Siri, add cinnamon to the grocery list,” I yelled from the kitchen.

Siri was sitting on the arm of the big sofa in the living room, not doing much of anything. “I’ve added it,” she called back a second later.

“Thank you!” I said, and continued making dinner.

She didn't say, “You’re welcome,” and I wasn’t cooking anything for her to eat. She’s just a bot that’s ported through my tablet. A thin physical front-end for a huge ad-hoc network of computers and a staggering amount amount of data, with meaty pattern recognition algorithms to glue them all together.

And yet I'd said, “Thank You.”

I can talk to Siri on my phone too, but she's more literally under my thumb. I’ve set it up so I have to hold a button for her to hear what I say. She doesn't talk back, but replies via text.

I never say “Thank you”  to my phone. I say it to my tablet all the time.

Somewhere between my phone and my tablet is a line. On one side is a tool, like a spoon or a car.  On the other is… a being—at least as far as my subconscious is concerned. It's something that I think is worthy of thanking for their work. I've never thanked my spoon or my car. Or even my tablet as a whole. I only thank it when we're having a helpful conversation, where I ask something, and it understands* and replies.

Everyone has this line, and everyone has it in a different place. Some people thank Google after typing every search, while others consider any digitally-mediated presence as less than human, even when they are all too human.

Virtual assistants are far from perfect—they're barely at the cusp of usefulness—but they’re moving tech into places it hasn’t been before, and its getting better quickly and transparently. Our virtual assistants are being called as witnesses in murders. (Kind of.) Or they're being asked to perform more intimate and domestic roles. (Yes, that link is SFW, but probably deserving of its own article. Or several dozen research papers.) These are the early days. Right now it's hard to predict all the ways we'll use vast supplies of hardware, data, and algorithms when they're wrapped inside something we treat like a person.

* Yes, it "understood" in these limited circumstances. It added cinnamon to my grocery list. It however doesn't know what cinnamon is or what a grocery list are for.

(A version of this was originally published in a past issue of the Reader's Room.)

Read: "Rebuilding" in Helen Literary Magazine

Helen Magazine teamed up with the Neon Museum to sponsor a bit of literary inspiration. The Neon Museum is one of my favorite places in Las Vegas, naturally full of untold stories. Thanks to the staff of both places, I was able to tell one of them. Rebuilding is more literary and less science fictiony than what you might be used to from me, but it's a nice short tale of two people building something new in the desert.

Read it now. (1300 words.)

Shards of Loyalty (Embassy Book 3) Is Now Available

The third book in the ongoing Embassy series is now available in paperback and Kindle ebook. An uncontacted extraterrestrial has just killed thousands, and the Embassy has decided that Acting Ambassador Benjamin Taylor is not the right person to meet this crisis. Even though the organization that he's given his life for has thrown him aside, allies and aliens conspire to keep him at the center of interplanetary events, sending him undercover and in over his head.

The paperback version is enrolled in Amazon's Matchbook program, which means when you buy the paperback you can get the ebook at a discount. At the moment that means free.

The fourth book, likely the last in this particular arc, is underway and progressing well. It should be available sometime in the summer of 2016. Click on "Updates" in the title bar to keep informed on its release.

Faults of Perception (Embassy Book 2) Now Available

For those of you who are anxious to get your virtual hands on the second Embassy book, Faults of Perception is now available for the Kindle (and those who are unafraid to convert kindle books to another format).

Book two once again finds Earth's junior ambassador in the middle of a meeting with aliens that goes terribly wrong. And that's before the assasin sends a bullet into the get-together. From there things get complicated. The Embassy is too mired in internal power struggles to effectively hunt an assassin, one who might have ties within the organzaion itself. It's up to Benjmain and a small group of allies to root out the assassin before they provoke a war with an extraterrestrail we know nothing about.

(As usual, the paperback version will be available about two weeks after the ebook debut.)