Brian D. Buckley

Yesterday I submitted a story to Strange Horizons.

Mostly, when I write stories, I just post them here. But this time, I felt like branching out. I decided to send it to some sci fi magazines and see what happens. The worst they can do is say no.

And now, we wait.

Strange Horizons says they usually respond in three weeks, and always within 40 days. So one down, 39 to go.

Yeah, I’m nervous. I’ve done this kind of thing before, but not all that often. The worst they can do is say no, but we writers are a narcissistic breed. “No”s hurt.

Yet the publishing world is set up in such a way that you get a lot of “no”s. It’s nothing personal, just how the game works. I’d like to get published in Strange Horizons, but if I can’t, I’ll submit again somewhere else – and again, and again.

And if this story can’t find a home, that’s okay too. I’ll post it on the blog. I’m already thinking up ideas for my next one.

Win or lose, it’s good to be back in the game. Writing exists to be read, and writers live to be published. Let’s see what happens.

If you haven’t yet watched the new Cosmos show with Neil deGrasse Tyson, you might want to check it out.

I caught the second episode recently. Turns out, there’s a giant lake of methane and ethane on Titan, the moon of Saturn. It’s called the Kraken Sea, and it’s the size of the Caspian Sea on Earth. That’s it up above, in all its radar-y glory.

To recap: Saturn has its own moon that’s so big it’s called Titan and it has actual lakes of liquid methane and one of them is named after the Kraken, and we know about it because we shot science there on a rocket. This is a real thing in a real place. This is the universe we live in.

That is all.

I watch a lot of TED talks, and this one by Ajit Narayanan got me thinking. It’s called “A Word Game to Communicate in Any Language.”

Let’s say you want to write an article, and you want it to be readable by the widest possible audience. The usual way would be to write it in English (or whatever your native language is) and have a team of translators type up copies for as many languages as they know. But this takes a lot of time and people, and you’re still probably going to miss out on the less popular languages.

Narayanan’s idea is radically different. He’s created an app that lets you pick symbols and draw relationships between them to express concepts in a language-independent way. For instance, if you want to say “The dog barks,” you’d tap the dog icon and connect it to the bark verb, and voila! A universal concept. This web of ideas can then be automatically translated into every language under the sun.

The AI geek in me loves the elegance of this idea, but I’m not sure it would work as advertised.

First, composing your universal article seems like it would take a lot longer than writing in English. You’d have to type a word, grab the symbol for it, put it into your idea-web, type another word, attach it with the correct relationship or verb, and so on. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a pain to me, especially when your sentence is less like “The dog barks,” and more like “The outcome of this year’s summit on the effectiveness of economic sanctions remains to be seen.”

Second, revision would be a lot tougher. It’s hard enough in English, but now you’d have an extra layer of complexity to deal with. You’d have to compose in your universal language (Narayanan calls it Free Speech), read it over in Free Speech, revise in Free Speech, then convert to English, read it over in English to make sure the “translator” rendered it correctly, then fix whatever errors interfere with the Free Speech to natural language conversion, and then hit publish. Yikes.

And finally, even if all that works correctly, what kind of writing would this generate? An automatic process to turn concepts into words seems like it would create dull, lifeless prose. This is already a huge issue in academia and bureaucracy. Do we really want to automate the problem?

But maybe this has more potential than I give it credit for. What do you think?

A while back, I mentioned that I’ve started using Rosetta Stone. I had to put that on hold for a while, but now that I’m feeling better, I’ve jumped back in. I’ve gotten to Level 2 (out of 5 total in the whole course). Each level takes a month or two.

So how is it?

For starters, it’s getting difficult. We’re at the edge of what I remember from high school and college, so the free ride is over – I actually have to learn from Rosetta itself. We’re getting into past tense, indirect objects, and other grammatical stuff that really makes me think. Vocabulary is easy, but grammar is a mofo. That said, the only way to master it is practice, and that’s exactly what Rosetta Stone gives you tons of.

What about the central idea of Rosetta Stone – immersion, forcing you to learn Spanish by throwing away English? It’s working…reasonably well, I’d say. A few times I’ve “cheated” by going to Google Translate to figure out what the heck they’re talking about, but mostly I’m able to figure it out as I go. Again, though, I have a lot of background in Spanish already.

Despite a few minor gripes, I’m pretty satisfied. After all, I’m learning Spanish, which has been a lifelong dream. I’m very curious how fluent I’ll be at the end of all this.

All Betsy’s doing, of course. Anything that looks delicious, you can assume she made it. If left to my own devices, I would be eating lukewarm hot dogs, sans bun, with expired ketchup.

By the way, yes, I know the posts have been short lately. Trying to take it easy on myself as I ease back into the old routine. Still recovering from the illness.

…so I’ll just focus on that. See you tomorrow!

1. Beijing
2. Moscow
3. Istanbul
4. Reykjavik
5. Sydney
6. Gaborone
7. Buenos Aires
8. Madrid
9. Rome
10. Seoul

What’s at the top of your list?