J. Craig Wheeler

I summarized the 30-year family Krone Experiment adventure in Blog #30. After posting the film on YouTube on June 9, it got a few views the first day and then took off in exponential growth with a doubling time of 1.5 days. By Saturday, June 20, there had been 678 views, far more than the number following these blogs, so something else was going on. It was not clear how many people actually watched the whole film. There were few comments. My favorite was a fellow who said he had really liked The Krone Experiment and Krone Ascending books, but was pissed at me for not writing the third novel in the series. The views grew to a total of 3,600 then stopped on the Fourth of July. Clearly, there had been some kind of YouTube algorithmic manipulation. Asked ChatGPT about this history. It said, ask YouTube. YouTube has its own AI, which artfully dodged the question. Back to getting 3 or 4 views per day. Not sure of next step. As expected, Black List rejected me as a candidate for their fall screen writing workshop.

On June 15, I Zoomed an Authors Guild webinar with a panel of three agents. I asked whether there was a bias against old folks. All three rushed to deny such was the case. I have my doubts.

On June 22, I joined an especially interesting meeting of the Westbank Writers group. The guest of the day was Dean Bredeson, who writes under the pen name Anthony Dean. He was joined by his wife and movie-maker son who advocated Black List for support of screen writing (see above). Bredeson is a professor of instruction in the UT Business School. In an experiment to see if he could make a little money writing, he has been self-publishing a sci-fi series with Amazon's Kindle Direct. He wrote the first book, The Voided Man (about life as a prisoner in a cosmic void), in three weeks in 2024. It's a good story, although it overstates the brightness of a supernova in one plot point (very few supernova experts among his readership, I suspect). By the time of our meeting, he had written a total of 11 books in the series in 1.5 years (I was blown away. It takes me 11 years to write one book!). He reported on his experience. He advocated Kindle Direct for self-publishing and argued that a writer must have a series and publish regularly to attract readers and make a buck (another strike against me; my interests are too eclectic). He talked about the art and science of Amazon Ads: use phrases as keywords; avoid copyrighted names/titles (I used them); newbies famously overpay for ads; blogs are not worth it (I enjoy doing this one); register with US Copyright Office. He wrote several hours a day, morning and then evening. He writes 700 words per hour (I can do 1000 if the subject is in my head). He left us with an exercise, to answer two questions: To what do you aspire? What is your goal for tomorrow?

Thus motivated, I reactivated my Amazon Ads account for The Path to Singularity with phrases as keywords. I started with the price I would pay at $0.50 per click, then inched up to $0.75 on 7/7/26, then to $1.00 on 7/13/26. I got little reaction. I checked in with ChatGPT to see what it thought about phrases as keywords, how to navigate the Amazon Ads web page, and recommendations on how to sell books. It turned out that most of my previous impressions and clicks and the 8 previous sales were all on the simple keyword "ai." I turned that keyword back on and sold a single book on July 26. The sale price of that book was more than I paid for the clicks, but of course, I only get 15% of the sale, so I'm basically losing money. I fiddled with keywords and prices a bit more and will watch that for a while.

I heard somewhere, maybe a local bit on our NPR radio station KUT, about a UT psychology professor, Paige Harden, who had written a book on twins raised apart, a powerful technique for separating the effects of genetics and environment, nature versus nurture. I contacted her and proposed giving her a copy of The Path to Singularity in exchange for her signature on her book, Original Sin, which I promised to purchase and read. She agreed, but with summer travel we did not get together until July 9. The book was fascinating, not quite what I expected. It does involve twin research but delves into the ethically murky issue of when and how one deserves to be punished for a transgression. The deep question is how we should think about it if a person is just unlucky and trapped in circumstances in which they have no control. That is where original sin comes in. You are bad because of Adam and Eve, not anything you personally did. In Hardin's bailiwick, there is evidenced from twin studies that bad behavior is substantially, but not totally, genetic, inherited, but our modern justice system makes no allowance for that. Hardin concludes, if I may simplify, that these issues deeply entwine nature and nurture, that these two aspects cannot be cleanly separated. We had a very interesting discussion in her office, and I now have an autographed copy of her book on my study shelf.

I've been regularly chipping away at editing my dad's biography. I'm in the final chapter incorporating a lot of personal correspondence from my parents on their retirement when they built two houses by hand and made the transition from the Apollo program to the business of Native American jewelry and Kachina dolls. You'll have to read it to make sense of that.

I've been experimenting a little with Substack, posting the notices I have been sending to LinkedIn and X. I'm thinking of using that as a vehicle for these blogs but have not found the time to focus on the nuts and bolts of that.  

On July 22, The Austin Forum on Science and Society did an interesting Zoom book discussion on Infinity Machine, a biography of Demis Hassibis, the brilliant founder of the company DeepMind, now owned by Google. His father is a Greek Cypriot and his mother is Chinese from Singapore. He was a chess prodigy at four. Later, he developed the machine learning code AlphaZero that beat the world's human champion at the game of Go and then won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the AI code AlphaFold that essentially solved the previously intractable problem of protein folding. Put your vita up against that!

The local chapter of the Authors Guild held its recently-constituted quarterly meet-and-greet sessions on July 30. In an interesting wrinkle, they scheduled author readings. The venue was Alienated Majesty Books near the corner of 29th and Guadeloupe in the little shopping center that hosted Oat Willie's for a long time (but no more). I drive by all the time and had no idea they had opened a couple of years ago. About 20 people snacked and chatted before the readings. I made one new acquaintance, Gary Keith, a retired UT professor of political science. He does a Substack under the pen name Demosthenes in which he comments on the political world. In retirement, he decided to try his hand at writing fiction. He published his first novel, Austin Blues, a year ago with Atmosphere Press, a local hybrid publisher with which the author shares the cost and receives full editorial support. I asked him if he included Clifford Antone in the story, and he said, "Of course!" The main plot line concerns an episode where The University of Texas refuses tenure to an acclaimed faculty member and offers no explanation nor venue for appeal. Gary made it up a few years ago while he was writing his story. Sound familiar? I promptly ordered a copy from Amazon which arrived today, 8/2. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Gary also gave what I thought was the best reading of the evening. Rather than an excerpt from his novel, he read a poem; his meditation about getting old, his version of raging against the dying of the light. His delivery was dramatic and emotional. Rather than choosing from a work in progress, I decided to read an excerpt from The Path to Singularity on AI-catalyzed mind reading, telekinesis, and mental telepathy. Amid all the furor over AI, I don't think this topic gets enough attention. My presentation seemed to go okay. Three or four people asked for my book business cards with the declared intention of buying the book. I wrote to Alienated Majesty Books a couple of days later, inquiring whether they would stock The Path to Singularity and host a reading and book signing. We'll see.

Long ago while listening to a colloquium at Harvard, I had the glimmer of an idea for a science thriller novel. I've written blogs on that experience which I should resurrect in some fashion. It took me over a decade to write The Krone Experiment and then get it published with modest success in both hardback and paperback. I've since written a sequel, Krone Ascending, and have notions of at least a third in the series, Krone Triumphant.

The next big chapter was when my son, Rob, and I wrote a screenplay, and Rob turned it into a remarkable nearly zero-budget film in the early aughts. He had an Austin-based cast and crew (including UT astronomy grad students) of about 60 people. He killed sheep, sank boats, and destroyed buildings. I played the crazy scientist who is brain dead through most of the film. Rob filmed it all with great energy and imagination on a Canon XL-1 shoulder-hefted digital camera onto MiniDV cassettes. Rob also wrote and recorded the background music, did graphics, and edited the whole thing.

The film had only minimal success in festivals and did not launch Rob's career as a film director as he (and I) had hoped. Things languished, although I nurtured a dream of having the film remade by a "real" production company. I have fitfully tried to promote that over the years without really knowing how to do so.

The decades have brought progress: faster computers, larger drives, automatic closed-captioning, AI, and registration with the Library of Congress. Recently, it all came together with renewed energy. Encouraged by a chance encounter with Google's Gemini chatbot only slightly marred by excess sycophancy, Rob found that there is an enthusiastic fan base for MiniDV film. It turns out there have been only about three dozen full length feature films in the MiniDV format. The Krone Experiment is one of them. Thusly encouraged, Rob released the full film on YouTube on June 9.

The way YouTube works, there must be a minimum number of "watch hours" and subscribers before the film can be monetized. Rob needs it to go viral. As proud father and shameless hustler, I urge you to watch the film, like it, share it, and subscribe (just a button to push) and tell your friends and family and total strangers about it.

The YouTube link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S5MyAVU1Pw

If you would like to start with a small dose, the snappy official trailer (to be updated with higher resolution) is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YefApDkjyFI

Rob has recently been recording and posting weekly YouTube segments with his friend and colleague Tom Chamberlain who played CIA staffer Vincent Martinelli in the film. Its called Tom&Rob Chat. They talk (left-leaning) politics, popular culture, history, and film. In their most recent posting, also on June 9, they discuss the developments that led to the film posting. Give that a look if you are interested in behind-the-scenes weeds. The discussion of The Krone Experiment begins at minute 17:27 and runs to 35:41: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLJnkzFTn08

It is not directly related, but they then segue into a discussion of Interactive Fiction that you might find interesting.

In other news, I attended a session of the Austin Forum on Science and Society on the burgeoning AI agents that talk to themselves. Anthropic announced its Mythos chatbot that is so effective at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities that it was not released to the public. We are watching the "singularity" unfold in real time.

I follow the New York Times coverage of AI developments. Tom Friedman had an interesting opinion piece arguing that rather than competing, the U.S. and China should be working together to control the potentially negative aspects of AI. See Mythos above.

In a conversation at the weekly Westbank Writers group, I discovered that the Writers' League of Texas sponsors awards for books in various genres. While my current project, my father's biography, is not yet ready, I've been trying to engineer the publication of my collection of short travel stories, Tales from a Small Planet (see Blog 29). I submitted "Tales" to that competition. Successes are announced in October.

I had a major disruption in late May. One Saturday morning, I found that neither my Word nor Powerpoint were working. After a welter of emails with the UT IT people, it turned out that Microsoft had changed the licensing of its Office 365 products so that various riffraff like staff, visiting faculty, and emeritus professors no longer had access to the desktop apps, only the online versions. This caused me major heartache. The online version treats footnotes differently and you cannot copy and paste footnotes from that version. I tried to make a backup on Apple Pages, but the footnote structure was not preserved. In trying to copy and paste the draft from online Word to Pages, I inadvertently deleted the entire online book draft. I've now spent three weeks trying to recover the text and footnotes from various versions and backups. The basic solution turned out to be simple, although it took weeks to reveal it. I paid $8 from my emeritus funds to get a license that gives access to the Office 365 desktop apps. I'm now back to using the desktop Word but still struggling to reconcile text and footnotes. A major irritation is that this licensing change was implemented with no warning. Usually, such changes are advertised well in advance with plenty of follow up reminder emails. Pain in the patootie.

Where does the time go? It's been a little over two months since I last posted. Then a week shot by after I drafted this. Not that I haven't been busy. In addition to non-astronomical things, I've been heavily involved in helping to write and edit a paper on the polarization of supernovae that promises new insights into asymmetrical propagation of the thermonuclear burning fronts in Type Ia exploding white dwarf events. I also found myself involved in a rather tense personal intra-group conflict over contributions, credit, presentation, and choice of journal. I think the contretemps is now substantially smoothed over.

I noted in Blog #27 that I had finished a draft of my father's biography about the first hydrogen bomb and other 20th century technology and noted a box of letters from my parents in their retirement years in Colorado Springs. I ended up doing a crude typed transcription of those letters. That gives me a searchable digital base to draw on to sort out the chronology while they built two houses, helped with my sister's business selling Kachina dolls (a long story in itself), and cushioned her through a divorce. That transcription alone took a large part of last two months. I hope it was worth it. I'm now working my way through the draft biography, attempting to streamline it and render it more readable.

On 2/12/26, I was contacted by a representative of OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. They had heard good things about my presentation on the technological future of humanity I'd presented to the Retired Faculty/Staff Association and wondered if I could give a similar presentation based on my book The Path to Singularity. The hooker was that they were looking for a talk in spring, 2027. I warned that with things changing exponentially rapidly, the topic might be rather different than now (witness Moltbook's self-conversing AI agents, Anthropic's Claude Mythos that revealed thousands of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and generic threats to cybersecurity from quantum computing), but I agreed to give a presentation in January 2027. Unless it is canceled by our robot overlords.
 

I sampled various webinars from the Authors Guild, one way back on 2/2/26 on side gigs for authors. Not sure I learned a lot from that one. Another on 3/12/26 was entitled Amplify Your Story: How Writers Can Build Literary Visibility, and one on 3/16/26 covered Promoting Books Without Social Media. I have mentioned in previous blogs my screenplay for The Krone Experiment and my dream of having it made into a streaming film or series. To that end, I had posted it on Blacklist.com back in 2025. Nothing immediately came of that, but then the Authors Guild did a webinar on 4/14/26 with two of the leaders of Blacklist. They are Black, hence the name, which I presume is an ironic poke at J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy. I picked up some hints I might try to pursue. On 4/16/26, I attended the second annual Authors Guild Austin Meet and Greet. I had a couple of interesting conversations about Amazon ads and the use of Substack.
 

I attended the local Good Systems and UT Robotics symposium in the Alumni Center on March 3 and 4. Some good talks and a few folks to whom I could flog The Path to Singularity. One was Yi Mao, a pleasant woman who is the CEO and Managing Director of ATSEC, a local information security firm. She was interested in taking a group of her people to McDonald Observatory, and I did a little to catalyze that. They will visit on May 2. In return, I fished for the possibility of giving them a talk on the future of technology, maybe with an honorarium since they are a business. Instead of that, Yi offered a free lunch, and the possibility of a keynote talk at a later time. I agreed and will meet with them on May 13. I'll try to update my spiel. Do we control our technology, especially AI, or succumb to it? Do we flourish in an age of AI-induced abundance or suffer social disruption in an era of hyper-rapid dislocation?

I attended the semi-annual meeting of the department and observatory Board of Visitors on March 6 and 7. It is always good to schmooze and to hear excellent talks from young people. I passed out a few business cards for The Path to Singularity.

Kelsey Piper is a brilliant writer on technology and its social effects. She wrote for the online Future Perfect hosted by Vox. I have been reading her for years and quoted her in The Path to Singularity. I had tried to contact her with no luck when the book came out. In early March, I attended a quickly scheduled lively panel discussion on the dust up between Anthropic and the Pentagon as to whether Anthropic would allow its AI Claude to be used for autonomous weapons and spying on civilians. To my surprise one of the panelists, computer scientist Scott Aaronson, mentioned Piper's name during his presentation. Turns out he knows her personally. I asked for an introduction and contacted her, offering her a signed copy of the book. She is now working for The Argument (a substack publication that tries to make the case for liberalism as distinct from progressivism, populism, and MAGAism). She replied graciously, and I sent her the book on March 11 but have not heard back.

I have been regularly attending the Westbank Writers Group on Monday's at 5 PM, either in person or by Zoom. One of our most interest sessions was on 3/16/26. We examined samples of writing by humans and by AI and then voted on which we preferred and which did we think was AI. The result was basically chaos, with people all over the map. One bit was generic astronomy-for-poets boosterism for the glories of astronomy that any astronomer could have written. I voted for human, but it was AI. Another piece that I liked very much touched on the spiritual aspects of science. I voted for AI, but it was Carl Sagan.  

I also regularly attend sessions of the Austin Forum for Science and Society, especially their Zoom book discussions. On 3/25/26, we tackled Enshittification by Cory Doctorow. Yup!

Twenty-odd years ago, my son, Rob, and I wrote a screenplay based on my novel, The Krone Experiment. Rob made it into a full length, microbudget film. One of the best experiences of my life was watching the enthusiastic volunteer film crew turn my ideas into a movie. The film did not go anywhere at the time. One of the fantasies I harbor is that someday, somehow, I will strike a deal to remake the film with a proper budget, maybe with a streaming service. Last December, I listed the project with an online outfit called The Blacklist that makes screenplays available to professionals. I recently got the faintest whiff of interest from a young graduate of a film production school. That led me to wonder if my rights were properly protected. That, in turn, led me to wonder whether it is worth my while to set up a limited liability corporation, LLC, to protect and pass down the rights to my books and the screenplay. On June 23, my sons and I had an hour long Zoom call with a friend, a lawyer who handles such things. We decided that my current meager book income is too small to warrant such a step. My will is probably adequate, and if lightning should strike, we can cobble up an LLC in a couple of weeks.

I griped in a previous blog (#15) about my Prometheus publicist leaving and not hearing who her replacement would be. After another couple of weeks, I checked the Marketing and Sales information that Prometheus had originally provided to me and confirmed that after a certain interval, my book would be put on a backlist. I wrote to my agent, Regina Ryan, asking her opinion of the matter on June 24 and got a typical honest blunt reply. She was not sure about the formalities of a backlist but said that publishers often give books about three months to see whether they are going to flourish. We have not sold out the initial hardback print run - no one's idea of flourishing - a disappointment to me and those who supported and depended on me. I may have been lucky to get six month's support from Prometheus. On July 12, I realized that the Prometheus link to "Path" had been broken or removed. It turns out you can find the publisher's link to the book by tunneling into the Globe Pequot web site, but that means that the QR code on the special business cards that I have been handing out don't link directly to the book.

I had another idea to promote the book, a local TV appearance, and wrote to my editor again on July 14 about publicist assistance. The mail bounced. I then wrote to Regina and got a revised email, higher up the corporate structure at Globe Pequot rather than the Prometheus imprint, and wrote again on July 15. No response yet. I may forge ahead on my own.

In late June, I nominated myself and The Path to Singularity for a Chambliss Writing Award sponsored by the American Astronomical Society. I shared the award with my friend and colleague David Branch in 2017 for our book Supernova Explosions. The AAS is looking primarily for textbooks and may not want to duplicate an award. We'll see. On July 17, David and I got a note from our editor at Springer Verlag saying that the book was still doing remarkably well for a technical book of its sort and inquiring whether we might do a second edition. It's not that clear to either of us that much has changed in the intervening eight years.

I attended a webinar on June 26 presented by futurist Peter Diamandis on research progress on extending lifespans. Some have the goal of living long enough to live forever as aging is "cured." There were 785 people on the call. I was a little naughty. After Diamandis gave his pitch I wrote in the chat "In case you are interested, in The Path to Singularity (I embedded the link), I discuss some of the possible ramifications of extending lifetimes." At least one person DM'd me that she would buy my book.

I've been working on the logistics of delivering a keynote address to Tory Technologies in Houston in August (see also #15). Tory wanted to buy some books to hand to certain people and arrange to sell books to others that I could sign at the symposium. My cousin-in-law, naturalist and author Bob Pyle, told me that he tries to arrange local independent bookstores to handle book sales at his signings. I contacted one Houston bookstore that explicitly advertised that they handled such sales opportunities, but they declared they were already booked in August. I contacted a Houston Barnes and Noble but after a couple of days I had the insight to ask the first bookstore for another suggestion and they referred me to Good on Paper, which embraced my suggestion enthusiastically. If things work out, I'll do a book signing at their store after doing the Tory gig. I spoke to the CEO and CTO of Tory on a Zoom call. We agreed I would participate in a panel discussion as well as giving the keynote address and reviewed the coordination with Good on Paper for book sales. I've drafted my keynote in PowerPoint but still need to think about the panel discussion.

Bob Pyle recently read The Krone Experiment and the sequel, Krone Ascending (both available on Amazon). Then he read The Krone Experiment again and sent compliments which I deeply appreciated from an accomplished wordsmith. He also had a brilliant suggestion for a plot device for the third book in the series, Krone Triumphant, which remains on my bucket list.

I have a friend, John Tonetti, whom I met when he first serviced our rudimentary solar-boosted water heater 30 years ago. Shameless shill that I am, I had told him about "Path" on one of his recent service visits. On June 30, he emailed to say that he had listened to an Audible copy of the book as he drove his service truck, which he found to be "as stimulating, fascinating, and humiliating an experience as I have had since my days in Social Theory Seminars at the UT Austin Graduate School of Sociology some fifty years ago." He then listened again sitting at his desk and taking notes. I am deeply flattered.