Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary

73 today. Abundant thanks to all who have wished me well on social networks or email. Carol and I are healthy, and Dash still gets occasional zoomies, even at sixteen and change.

Some time back I mentioned a classical music composer I discovered on KBAQ: Doreen Carwithen 1922-2003. Probably her best-known work is Suffolk Suite (1964), of which the third movement has become a big favorite of mine. I mention her because she was born the year my father was (1922) and I always thought “Doreen” was a 50s name. Why, I’m not entirely sure. I’ve never met a Doreen and only saw one on The Mickey Mouse Club. Of course, there’s more than one name popularity graph online. I checked the Shoestring Baby site’s name visualizer, and sure enough, Doreen Carwithen was an outlier for 1922. The name peaked about 1956, which is toward the end of my age cohort. Odd that I’ve never met one.

This morning at Mass at St. Patrick’s, the weekly announcements (projected on huge screens around the largish U-shaped nave) included one for a session entitled “Theology and AI,” to be held July 15 in the parish hall. I spoke briefly with the man who will be giving the lecture, and it sounds fascinating. The focus will be on the ethics of using AI. I’ve written SF stories about AI for over 50 years, and ethical issues have come up more than once, especially in “Silicon Psalm,” which was published in Asimov’s in 1981. The lecture’s still two weeks off, but I’ll report here after I participate.

For my birthday dinner tonight we’re having tenderloin steaks, polenta, and one of our biggish rainbow salads. I’m going to open the last bottle I have of Gnarly Head’s Authentic Black dark red blend, which has been out of production for a year or two now. I bought up the last six bottles I could find, and opened them on holidays or special occasions. Tonight’s is the last. I’ve tried a lot of dark red blends since then, and finally found one in the ballpark: Red Drop Dark, from Red Drop Wines. Weirdly, Sprouts seems to have an exclusive distribution agreement with Red Drop for the Phoenix metro, and none of the other wine shops I’ve checked have it. California, ~$10. Like Authentic Black, it’s a little off-dry and very fruit-forward. If you like dark reds, try it.

A couple of people I know have grinned and asked me what I want for my birthday. What I want is simple: more reviews of The Everything Machine. If you’ve read the book, please consider dropping a review on Amazon, and/or anywhere else known for publishing book reviews. Utterly no AI was used in the creation of that novel.

“73” is basically a ham radio code for “farewell” or “best wishes,” and it’s a little unsettling to be 73, having known the code now for the 52 years that I’ve been licensed. (This especially since so many of my ham friends are now SK’s, that is, Silent Keys. As I tell them in my prayers sometimes, 73 ET CUL.) I keep thinking I should organize a one-time net of hams who know me from my magazines, books, and Contra. Ideally on a Sunday night after supper, perhaps on 20 meters. If you’re interested, email me and let me know your preferences or suggestions. (My first and last names separated by an at sign, dot com.)

And once again, thanks for all the best wishes. Friendship is the cornerstone of the human spirit, and for my life, that cornerstone has served me unshakably well.

Father’s day. I’ve posted a lot about my father here down the years, but I’m not sure I ever did better than my post for Veterans Day, November 11, 2015. Today’s schedule is a little tight, so what I want to do is post that entry again in its entirety. I’m also posting a very old photo of my father and his two kids, taken Christmas 1957. I was 5; Gretchen was 13 months. I have few good photos of my dad while I was growing up because my mother knew nothing about photography and didn’t like fooling with his expensive twin-lens reflex. So maybe this was taken with another camera. I simply don’t know. I scanned the snapshot print and here it is. He taught me a lot before he was struck with severe oral cancer in 1968, two months after my 16th birthday. He might have taught me more had he remained healthy longer, but what he did teach me…hey, read about it below. The Kleenex box on my desk here is empty, and I need to run to the pantry and fetch another.

November 11, 2015: Kick Ass; Just Don’t Miss

Veterans Day. I haven’t posted much lately. Hey, how many more times do you want to hear “I threw another metric shitload of stuff into boxes”? That’s been my life, more or less, for several weeks.

Well, today, I was packing books and other things in my office into boxes (yet again) and happened upon the little box of things that came to me from my father: his gas company tie tack, a Lane Tech prom favor, his Holy Name Society lapel pin, one of my grandfather’s medals from WWI, his WWII service medal, his Ruptured Duck, his corporal’s stripes, and finally–by then I had to reach for a Kleenex–his WWII dog tags.

My father signed up for the Army the day after Pearl Harbor. He was 19. He wanted to be in the infantry, but he had a crooked leg and a limp and didn’t qualify. The Army told him to finish his freshman year of college at Northwestern, and told him there’d be a spot at radio operator school waiting for him in June. There was some grumbling, especially since he hated the accounting curriculum his father had browbeaten him into taking at Northwestern, but so it was. That June he went to Scott Field in southern Illinois, and became one helluva radio operator. He was in the AACS (Army Airways Communication Systems) and could copy Morse in his head at 30+ WPM and hammer it out on a beat-up Olivetti mill all night long. He had a job and threw himself into it with everything he had–that was his way–but what he really wanted to do was shoot Germans.

This always puzzled me, and it had nothing to do with my ancestry–or his. It took me decades to figure it out, and I had to dig for clues in a lot of odd places. He told a lot of stories, and I heard a few more from my mother and Aunt Kathleen, his sister. Once I was in my forties and had put a little distance between myself and my father’s long, agonizing death, I could deal with the troubling reality: My father was a wiseass, a snot, a fighter, a dare-taker. He was suspended several times from high school for fighting (and once beat the crap out of a much taller kid after the kid had stabbed him in the stomach in wood shop) and took a fifth year to finish. Limp or no limp, he had at age 45 broken up a fight in Edison Park single-handed, while my little sister watched in astonishment. He was literally throwing teenaged boys in every direction until they quit beating on a smaller boy at the bottom of the pile. Limp or no limp, he dove into deep water once and hauled a drowning man back to shore under one arm. (He was all muscle, and swam like a shark.) I used to think of him as brave, but no: He was fearless, and that is not the same thing.

To be brave is to do what you know you have to do in spite of your fear. To be fearless is to just wade in and kick ass, damn the consequences. There were consequences, like six stitches in his stomach and being held back a year in school. I hate to think what might have happened if he had made the infantry. I might have ended up being some other man’s son.

He knew this, of course, and as I grew into my teens I think he was trying to guide me away from fearlessness and toward bravery, not that I had ever shown the least measure of fearlessness. (One of his weirdest failings as a parent was this unshakable assumption that I would grow up to be exactly like him.) He had a saying for it: “Kick ass. Just don’t miss.” The lesson was not to let fear paralyze you, but instead let it calibrate you. Fear can turn down the volume on your enthusiasm and force you to take stock of your resources and your limitations. I got that, and have done as well as I have by balancing enthusiasm with discernment. Only one other piece of advice from my father (“If you’re lucky and smart you’ll marry your best friend”) has ever served me better.

As I’ve mentioned here a number of times, our Colorado house is positioned on the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain such that we can hear the bugle calls (and cannon!) from Fort Carson, two miles downslope. We hear taps most nights, and I realize (now that most of the house is at last in boxes) that I won’t be hearing it a great many more times, and almost certainly not again on Veterans’ Day. Tonight I will go out on the deck again and salute both the brave and the fearless, my father and countless others who have kicked ass in the service of their countries. Some missed, many didn’t, and the lucky ones came home to tell their stories and raise their (sometimes peculiar) sons.

I am by no means fearless, and I sincerely hope that I never have to be truly brave. However, if I ever have to kick ass, I will. And thanks to a man who knew the difference between bravery and fearlessness, when that time comes, I will not miss.

Long past time for a little silliness here. When I was (I think) five or maybe six, the Latin Mass was the only Mass, and I remember wondering what the priest was saying but especially what the choir was singing. The choir, having a dozen or so members, was louder than the celebrant—and, well, fuzzier. So consider the Agnus Dei, which was one of the numerous things the choir sang during High Mass at our church in that era:

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi
Miserere nobis

What I heard was a little different:

On this day, they told us we got a moonbeam.
We say, “Hey, we know this.”

This was repeated three times. The fourth stanza ended in “Dona nobis pacem,” and in truth I don’t recall what I heard in that. I got a kid missal when I started grade school, and that put an end to the mystery.

But I was thinking of that when a sort of puzzle occurred to me: Using words to encode other words when both sets of words used (mostly) the same phonemes. That’s basically what I did with the Agnus Dei. The encoded version would be nonsense, of course, but if read could suggest the original.

I was reminded of something called a rebus, which you don’t see much anymore: The use of small pictures or icons to represent phonemes. Decades ago, I drew a rebus on a valentine card I gave to Carol. Above my signature, I drew a picture of a bumblebee and a tunnel with tracks running out of it. Carol looked at the valentine, giggled, and said, “Be cave?” It’s been an inside joke between us ever since.

So consider this encoded stanza of a forgettable and mostly forgotten pop song from the early 70s. You don’t need to remember the song to decode the puzzle. (If you do remember the song, well, you’re probably as old as I am, and just as into goofy pop music.)

Hare shawl deer swear bear
Anne eye dried nought two stair
win isle luck tatter tulips.

See if you can decode it. The phonemes aren’t absolutely identical between the uncoded and coded text, which makes it harder to decode and thus more of a puzzle.

I call this sort of puzzle rebus-ish, since it’s a rebus done with language, and not pictures, nor single letters, which are called gramograms, as in the canonical gramogram conversation:

FUNEX?
S,VFX.
FUNEM?
S,VFM.
OK,LFMNX.

I do wonder if somebody else has put forth this kind of puzzle and coined a word for it. I’ve never seen anything of that sort. Independent invention is a thing. I independently invented the blog in the late 90s, having never seen the word nor read one of the (very few) blogs that predated my VDM Diary.

So see how long it takes you to figure it out. And if you’re so inclined, concoct one of your own and post it in the comments. Try it!

Everybody’s going nuts over AI—and tossing endless billions into the AI funding pot. I’m skeptical (about that and plenty of other things) and I run tests now and then to see whether that skepticism is justified.

Hoo-boy! Got another Grok crock in a hammerlock, to coin a (useless) phrase.

Last night when I was beginning to wind down for the night, I decided to throw another question at Grok, the X/Twitter AI. Here’s the question: "What are Jeff Duntemann’s humorous works of SF and fantasy?" Here’s what it said:

Jeff Duntemann’s humorous works in science fiction and fantasy, based on available information, primarily include:

1. Firejammer (Science Fiction, 2017): A short novel (or novella, depending on classification) that’s a playful homage to 1960s-90s pulp sci-fi. It follows a shapeshifting alien, Flammenwerfer O’Bernt, who crash-lands on Earth and gets entangled in comedic misadventures with humans. Readers on Goodreads (4.0 rating) praise its lighthearted, humorous tone, witty dialogue, and absurd scenarios, comparing it to Douglas Adams or Robert Sheckley. Its brevity and focus on fun make it a standout for humor.

2. Short Stories in Ten Gentle Opportunities (Fantasy/Science Fiction, 2016): This collection of short stories blends humor with speculative elements. Notable stories include:

   • “Whale Meat”: A comedic fantasy tale about a magical spell gone wrong, with absurd and whimsical consequences.

   • “Drumlin Boiler” and “Drumlin Amplifier”: Part of Duntemann’s Drumlin series, these stories mix fantasy with quirky, humorous worldbuilding, featuring magical artifacts and eccentric characters in a steampunk-inspired setting. Readers note the dry wit and clever premises.

   • Other stories in the collection, like those involving time travel or oddball tech, often carry a satirical or lighthearted edge, though not all are overtly comedic.

Notes:

• Duntemann’s humor leans toward witty, satirical, and absurd rather than slapstick, often poking fun at genre tropes or human quirks.

• The Cunning Blood (2005), his other major novel, has some satirical elements but is primarily a serious hard SF thriller, not a humorous work.

• His short fiction, especially in Ten Gentle Opportunities, is where most of his comedic fantasy and SF shines, as he experiments with whimsical ideas and quirky characters.

• Limited information exists on other humorous works, as Duntemann’s output is relatively small, and some stories (e.g., from Drumlins or Soul Bent series) remain unpublished or obscure.

If you’re the least bit familiar with my fiction, you’ll probably spot some elements of Grok’s acid trip. (Calling them “hallucinations” is a slander on the word “hallucinations.”) So let me lay them all out in a bulleted list:

• Firejammer was published in 2019, not 2017.
• It takes place on an alien planet, not Earth.
• Although there is some humor on the surface, the novel’s theme is serious, and there is plenty of danger, mayhem, and potentially fatal situations.
• There are no shapeshifting aliens in the story, certainly none named “Flammenwerfer O’Bernt”. (The German word Flammenwerfer means “flamethrower.”) I checked several search engines and saw not one hit for “Flammenwerfer O’Bernt.” Grok made it up from whole cloth.
• I checked Goodreads, where Firejammer has 3 reviews. None of the reviews emphasize its humor, nor compare the work to Douglas Adams or Robert Sheckley. Maybe this is picking nits, but the novel has earned a 4.6 rating there, not 4.0.
• Ten Gentle Opportunities is humorous. But it’s a novel, not a collection of short stories.
• “Whale Meat” is a dead serious fantasy story, without any humor at all.
• I have attempted but never finished (much less published) a time-travel story, and don’t much care for them as a category.
• There is no story named “Drumlin Amplifier” by me or anyone else. Intriguing title, though.
• “Soul Bent” is not an SF book series. It’s a rock band.

You get the idea. I think the problem is this: If you ask an AI like Grok about a well-known figure, author, musician, whatever, you’ll probably get correct answers, with perhaps an occasional slip. I’m not famous but I’ve been around for a long time and there is plenty of material about me online. It looks like, when Grok doesn’t have enough information for a quick answer (what I quoted above happened in less than ten seconds) it starts making things up.

The one thing Grok simply can’t say is, “I don’t know.”

I am supremely puzzled by one thing: Grok completely botched descriptions of two of my books, both of which are published on KDP and have detailed descriptions posted there.

Anyway. You get the idea. Be careful with AI. I think of it as the poltergeist of computing: It throws data around, emits odd statements, and tells lies anytime it damned well pleases.

Digging through a box of my (very) old manuscripts, I’m finding things I wrote long ago that I had more or less forgotten about. One of those is a song. No, scratch that. It’s not a song. It’s a lyric. A song has to have a melody. And in trying to write a song, I discovered that I have no talent whatsoever for creating new melodies. I think it was Mozart who said that tunes were always walking into the back of his head. The one time I tried to compose a tune, they ran screaming.

Carol and I attended a couple of high-school Catholic retreats in 1970 or thereabouts, and also took part in a new wrinkle in Catholic culture called a “guitar mass.” These were held in the church basement, and included songs that weren’t anything like the hymns we knew. They were melodic, upbeat, affirming, and strong in their statements. One of these was a well-known song by folk guitarist Ray Repp called “To Be Alive.” It was manic and borderline political and I’m sure rubbed traditionalist church people the wrong way, but considering the pre-Vatican II church that we all grew up in, it was bogglingly infectious. Less bouncy and more thoughtful was “Easy Come, Easy Go” by Kevin Johannson, which I much liked and often whistled when I was working in the basement on a telescope or something.

I’m pretty sure it was “Easy Come, Easy Go” that prompted me to write a song in a similar vein, with perhaps a little more religion in it. I got the lyric down quickly. Words, no sweat. Music, heh, no chance. Here’s the lyric to a tuneless song I called “I See God”:

In every sunrise there’s a glow,
In every dawn a light
To help me look and see and know
The things that fly and crawl and grow
That weren’t there last night.

For every day is different; new buds on life’s tall tree.
And I see God in everything, in everything that be.

I know things change with time and tide;
Today will soon be gone.
But though today’s grown old and died
I watch the tears today has cried
And see tomorrow born.

Then all its shape and all its sound will sing new songs for me
While I see God in everything, in everything that be.

Life’s a very precious thing,
Whatever turns it takes.
And glad I live the days that sting
For hurt’s a very tiny thing
Against the good He makes.

For as He brought me to this day, He brings this day to me,
And I see God in everything, in everything that be.

Sure, it’s sentimental. Corny, even. Remember that I was 19 when I wrote it. Keep in mind that it’s not a poem. It’s a lyric. And without a tune it’s incomplete. I had no idea what to do with it back in 1971. So I did what I was good at: I wrote an SF story around it. Really.

The story (called “I See God,” natch) involved a race of high-gravity aliens who gently take over Earth without saying why or what they’re up to. They are building enormous inexplicable machines all over the planet, with high-tech roads running between the machines. One of the aliens, Caeliph, suffers a vehicle malfunction while tearing down a road from one machine to the next. He ejects from the vehicle and watches it go into a ditch. In poking around the rural area he finds himself in, he encounters a small group of human teens, who when they see him, shrink back in fear from a “tightfist” (what humans called the aliens) but also shout “I see God!”

It turns out that this quirk originated with one of the older teens who plays a guitar. Every time one of the kids sees something he or she has never seen before, they say, emphatically, “I see God!” The leader of the group plays the song for Caeliph and the group sings it. They explain it as best they can, but Caeliph is an engineer, not an anthropologist. Humans are not supposed to know that the Ynyr (the tightfists) are building a hyperdrive for planet Earth, because the Ynyr know that the Sun will soon go nova. Their plan is to move Earth to a similar star system before the Sun blows up and takes Earth with it.

When Caeliph is picked up by one of his colleagues, another Ynyr, Gwerrbach tells him that the humans appear to be catching on to the Big Plan. “They are more intelligent than we thought,” Gwerrbach says. It’s the first time Caeliph has heard one of his colleagues admit that humans aren’t stupid. “I see God,” Caeliph says with a certain wry satisfaction, and roars off into the sunset to continue his job of saving Earth.

Even I could tell that the story wasn’t good enough to try to sell to one of the magazines, so I tossed it into a box full of other manuscripts, and went on to other, better ideas. I wrote the first draft of “Our Lady of the Endless Sky” in 1972, and sold it (my very first sale) to Harry Harrison’s Nova 4 anthology in the fall of 1973.

Sure, not every story is publishable. But every story is practice, which helped me down the road as I began to sell my tales to the mags and anthologies on a regular basis. I offer this advice to writers: Whether or not your juvenalia passes that test, don’t erase it or throw it away. Above all else, it’s the best way possible to remind yourself how far you’ve come.