2020 - 07/2020 Meeting
Page Created: 01/14/20. Last Updated: 09/25/20.
ANGUS MCINTYRE
MEETING DETAIL
Meeting Date: July 11, 2020.
Meeting Site: Zoom Video Conference.
Attendance: 33.
Meeting Program: Talk / Q & A with Science Fiction Author.
Notes:
http://angus.pw/ (includes links to obtain his book)
He offered for people to send him an email and he could deliver a bookplate; specify if it should be personalized
Amazon link for book at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0756JN9KJ
Boing Boing posted a review at https://boingboing.net/2018/03/08/i-contain-multitudes.html
Newsletter Account
The following account is reprinted from THE STARSHIP EXPRESS Copyright 2020 Philip J De Parto:
Angus McIntyre spoke and answered questions at the Saturday, July 11, 2020 meeting of the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County. The meeting was held as a Zoom Video Conference due to the corona virus. The meeting had originally been scheduled at Barnes & Noble in Paramus.
Our speaker is the author of the book, THE WARRIOR WITHIN, published by Tor.com. He has written horror, steampunk, dystopic fiction and other works and has been published in a number of magazines and original anthologies. Born in London, he has lived and worked in Scotland, Italy, France, and elsewhere before moving to New York. His background is in artificial intelligence and in computational and evolutionary linguistics. He is also a photography enthusiast who maintains two websites for his pictures. <https://raingod.com/> and <https://disoriented.net/>.
Angus discovered science fiction as a teenager, and for about three years that was all he read. He devoured Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein and other classic authors. He was 18 when he decided it was time to get serious about improving his mind. He quit cold turkey and started reading serious literature. He would not pick up a genre book or think about writing for many years.
Angus became interested in computers artificial intelligence, and language, doing pure research on the evolution and diffusion of language and other subjects for a number of different companies in different European countries. He met author Charles Stross while both were working for a company in the U.K.
Mutual friends introduced him to his future wife, an American public health consultant who was visiting France while he was working there. They hit it off and maintained a long-distance relationship for a while before deciding that one of them needed to relocate. So Angus packed up his bagpipes and moved to New York to be with the woman he loved. They have been together for 22 years.
Our guest had written some non fiction and literary fiction while on his sabbatical from science fiction, but he was slowly drifting back to his genre roots, discovering newer writers like Peter Watts and Fonda Lee. Some of the linguistic research projects had speculative elements, and he began to blend these elements with a science fiction narrative. On a lark, he wrote two short stories in three days, applied to the Clarion West Science Fiction Writers' Workshop and was astonished to be accepted. He began writing regularly after Clarion.
His novella The Warrior Within is a space opera set on a tide-locked world whose people salvage the ruins of the more advanced race which originally dwelt there. There are bits and pieces of biotechnology of immense power which still function. There is a sequel in the works.
Mr McIntyre has a number of works set in various stages of development. He had ideas for three groups of stories in three different universes before realizing that he could integrate them into one future history by setting them in different times. He is a chaotic plotter and does not use chart to organize his timeline the way Robert Heinlein did.
Our speaker's linguistic background provides him with ideas for stories. He has an unpublished work set aboard a generation ship where the languages of the working crew and the cold sleep passengers has diverged after a few generations, a process which happens in the real world more quickly than you might expect.
Angus is much more interested in writing stories about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances than in stories with a special "Chosen One." He starts off with a general idea for a story and uses Scrivener to jot down ideas and scenes, but he does not construct a traditional outline. He said that the best advice he can give to a writer is to finish your work, submit the story to an appropriate market, and to keep submitting it until it is accepted. The people in the field who make it are the ones who are 100% committed to the process.
The audience had questions about artificial intelligence. Our speaker made the distinction between two types of AI: task oriented and autonomous. Task oriented AI is already here, it is effective, and it will continue to improve and propagate. General, autonomous AI is a different matter. We are a long, long way from that, and it is questionable if we will ever reach that point.
Information about getting a signed book plate appears on the 2020 - 07/2020 Meeting Page on the club website.
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Note from Angus
If anyone in your group bought a physical copy of the book and would
like a signed bookplate, please ask them to go to:
and send me a message. In the message, they should write:
- the name they want it dedicated to (or they can write 'signed only')
- any other message they want included
- the name and mailing address to send the bookplate to
- one word that sums up what they like best in SFF (e.g. spaceships)
(the 'one word' is because each bookplate has a unique design; if they
tell me what they like, I can try to find the best match).