J. Craig Wheeler

 

I had a little adventure that began on August 14 when I received an email that read:

 

Dear Professor Wheeler,
I hope this message finds you well. My name is Richard Flanagan, a bestselling author with a deep passion for storytelling that connects intellect with heart. I recently came across your remarkable body of work both your scientific contributions and your novels—and I have to say, I'm genuinely inspired. The way you bridge rigorous astrophysics with accessible, compelling narratives is nothing short of masterful.
As a fellow author, I'm always seeking to connect with writers whose work pushes boundaries and stirs curiosity. Your career spanning hundreds of scientific publications, award-winning teaching, and thought-provoking fiction speaks to both precision and imagination, and that's a combination I deeply admire.
I'm reaching out because I believe in the power of shared inspiration and dialogue. I'd love to exchange ideas, explore the craft from both the scientific and literary perspectives, and have some real talk about scaling up books while still writing with heart. I'd also be glad to support your work however I can, whether through sharing your books, collaborating, or simply exchanging creative energy.
If this resonates, I'd be delighted to continue the conversation. Either way, please know that your work has found a fellow admirer who values the impact you've made in both science and storytelling.

Warm regards,
Richard Flanagan
Bestselling Author

 

I was, I admit, flattered. I mean, "The way you bridge rigorous astrophysics with accessible, compelling narratives is nothing short of masterful." I didn't know Richard Flanagan from Adam, but a quick browse revealed that he is a Booker Prize winner from Tasmania. On the other hand, the mail sent off scam alarm bells. It did not ask for money, but the tone was somehow off. I let it sit for a couple of days. The email had come through the "contact" button on my Authors Guild web site that does not reveal my actual email. If I wrote, that would reveal my email address, but that is not so hard to find, on the university web site, for instance. I decided to reply and wrote a brief email outlining my writing "career" such as it is. I mentioned my blog and asked if I could add him to the mail list. He wrote back with some gracious comments and said he would be happy to read the blog. I added him to the mail list of the previous one, #20.

That is where things sat until I got this email a few days later, on August 18:

 

Dear Professor Wheeler,
I hope this message finds you well. My name is Laura Restrepo, an international bestselling author, and I recently came across your work and impressive journey both in the sciences and in fiction. I'm genuinely inspired by how you've bridged rigorous research with storytelling that reaches wider audiences. As a writer myself, I'm always looking to connect with fellow authors who bring depth, vision, and heart to their work. I would love to exchange ideas with you on the art of writing, the scaling of books, and the inspiration that fuels our stories. Your career stands as a remarkable example of both intellectual achievement and creative courage, and I would be honored to learn more about your perspective. If you're open, I'd love to connect for a real conversation whether about your novels, your popular science writing, or simply the creative journey itself. I also believe in supporting fellow writers however I can, so please know I come with genuine interest in your work and respect for your career.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Warm regards,
Laura Restrepo
Bestselling Author

 

Whoops!

 

This changed the perspective completely. The emails are not identical, but clearly from some common template. Still no request for money, but scam bells were ringing louder. For what it is worth, Laura Restrepo is a respected Columbian author. Hope springing eternal, I labored to determine a way both could be legitimate.

 

My next step was to contact the Authors Guild, to get advice and because their web site was the catalyst for these emails. I wrote their legal department asking, "Can you give me any insight into what is going on, legit or not?" I got a prompt reply from staff@authorsguild.org saying it might take two weeks to respond. After that, I could follow up.

 

I waited three weeks and then did some exploring on my own. I asked ChatGPT. I'm trying to use ChatGPT a little just to get my hand in the AI LLM revolution. Even then, I exercise my paranoia and reticence to share data with OpenAI. I just use the browser version and don't login, never mind paying $20 per month. I'm also cheap.

 

I cut and pasted both emails into the prompt and asked for ChatGPT's perspective. The reply was swift and definitive. The gmail addresses were probably bogus, check with author's publishers or agents. Good that there was no request for money. Most likely solution, a case of "author imposter," which is apparently rather common. ChatGPT suggested I contact the Authors Guild. Contacting the legitimate authors was possible, I suppose, but there are practical walls even getting contact information on agents and publishers. That did not seem worth the effort.

 

It has now been nearly six weeks. Perhaps I'll ping the Authors Guild again. I've also, against common sense, considered writing "Richard Flanagan," telling him (I'll bet on a "him") I'm onto his imposterism, and that I would put him onto my blog mail list if he would tell me his real story.

 

On the positive side, someone is looking at my website. Also, the Bartz v. Anthropic class action lawsuit was settled in favor of authors whose work was pirated.

 

I'm plugging away on my dad's biography: hydrogen bombs, nuclear airplanes, Moon landings. One of the issues with which I'm dealing is that I have a raft of recorded material, letters among family members, and my dad's notes-to-self about both personal and professional things. If I use too much of that, it bogs down the story. On the other hand, there is something to say for incorporating the original voices of the participants. The question is one of balance. In the first draft, I think I have overdone in trying to capture the original voices.

 

I had the thought that I could and should consult with an expert. I've had the pleasure of the acquaintance of the historian H. W. Brands for a long time. He taught my kids at a local private school while he was working on his PhD in history at The University of Texas at Austin. He taught for a while at Texas A&M, commuting from Austin to College Station, then got a faculty position at UT. He has been a prolific producer of well-received historical biographies. I attended a panel discussion at the Texas Book Festival last November in which Brands was one of the participants. I gave him one of my business cards for The Path to Singularity and asked whether he might meet with me at some point to talk about the art of writing biographies. He said yes!

 

It took me another six months to work up the courage. I finally emailed him and inquired whether we might meet up in late May. He was on his way out of town for a couple of weeks but graciously agreed to meet on June 5th at the Starbucks on the corner of Lamar and Barton Springs Road. We had a delightful hour chatting. He agreed that original material can be useful but argued that one needs to be ruthless in boiling it down to only the essence. I confessed to having a great problem flushing my words once I had written them. Brands said he left behind more words than he published. He thought my tentative title, Airplanes, Rockets, Satellites, and the Eniwetok Bomb: The Saga of a Twentieth Century Engineer, "needed polishing." I'm not sure I learned anything from him that I didn't already know in my gut, but I was glad to have had the conversation. Ruthless.

 

Over the years, I have written some stories of my travels around the world, trying to capture the interesting contrasts of cultures and the little ironies that make life interesting. It was that collection of stories, tentatively called Tales from a Small Planet, that I originally pitched to my agent, Regina Ryan. She did not think it marketable and responded, "what else you got?" from which question The Path to Singularity was born. Given the delay between getting "Path" published and the long timeline for my dad's biography, I thought I would try again now that Regina knows who I am and what I do. I emailed her again on May 15 and renewed the query. I put her in a bit of an awkward spot. She responded on June 9 in a gentle but blunt way. She said my sample story was "charming," but that the collection was "not really strong enough or earthshaking enough to attract a publisher." She's a straight shooter. Still, I would like to publish the collection. I could turn to Amazon, but I may try contacting the University of Texas Press or the Texas Tech Press where I might have a contact. For my astronomy colleagues, many of these stories involve people you know, some identified and some not for obvious reasons. You are welcome to try to figure out who the latter are.

 

On June 11, I finally got around to registering The Path to Singularity as Human Authored with the Authors Guild. I added my novels, The Krone Experiment and Krone Ascending and my popular astronomy book, Cosmic Catastrophes, as well. The Authors Guild grants to Licensees a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, revocable, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the Human Authored mark in connection with Licensee's marketing, publication, distribution, sale, and offering for sale of Licensee's book, provided that it is Human Authored.

 

On the seventeenth, the Austin Forum for Science and Society organized a presentation on the current status of quantum computing at the Google building downtown. I knew that Google had a shiny new sail-shaped building right on the north shore of Lady Bird Lake. What I didn't know was that Google also owned another tall building just a block away. That is where we convened; the 22nd floor had a terrific view to the south across the river. I toted a copy of a new book on the technological future of humanity written by a member of the Austin Forum, Mike Ignatowski, that I had really enjoyed and hoped to get Mike to sign. He was a no-show at that particular meeting. The speaker had a lot to say about the current status of quantum computing and its future prospects, especially when combined with the power of AI to address crucial ultra complex issues, curing disease and climate change.

 

Two days later on June 19, the Austin Forum sponsored its monthly Zoom book discussion with Mike Ignatowski leading the conversation about his own book. I had hoped to get my copy signed before this discussion. The title of the book is Navigating Our Future Challenges: Facing the Dangers of Collapse and Paths to a Hopeful Future. Mike self-published it on Amazon with the notion that as things exponentially accelerate, he can easily edit the book and republish. Whereas I tend to overwrite (and then am unable to trash my excess words, see above), Mike writes spare powerful prose. I appreciated that he stressed the fact that we are shaped by our human evolutionary history, something that will always differentiate us from our machines that are born in a lab or factory. Mike captured this by saying we did not evolve to be scientists. Exercising the scientific method does not come naturally; we must work hard at it. We did evolve to be lawyers. Strongly espousing our point of view despite apparent facts to the contrary does come naturally to our evolution-guided brains. I said at the Zoom call that there were only two things I liked about Mike's book: the writing style and the content.

 

There are still about 300 million people in the U.S. who have not read The Path to Singularity. If you liked it, tell a friend. Even give it as a gift.

For a while in May I contemplated making a serious run at soliciting keynote speaking opportunities. My agent, Regina Ryan, and my independent publicist, Joanne McCall, both pointed out that many authors make their real income in that way, not from book sales. A woman at an Austin Forum on Science and Society meeting pointed out that doing keynotes is a "real job." I ended up voting with my body. I turned back to writing on my father's biography. It's always been writing that centers me. Still, if another keynote opportunity fell into my lap, I would pursue it. Just saying.

 

On May 7, I attended a dinner meeting of the Austin Forum Board, of which I am a lowly member. I fell into an interesting conversation with William Fitzgerald and Stephanie Scales of Bárd, a technical writing consulting company. They are trying to compile a catalog of human intelligence which they have provisionally titled "Human Documentation." At a previous board meeting, I had teased William by saying that Human Documentation was a rather meh title. I rashly promised to come up with a better one. At this dinner, William teased me back, pointing out that I had not done so. A long discussion ensued.

 

That night, I awoke in the middle of the night with various thoughts racing through my sleep-addled brain. I thought that a catalog of human intelligence does not capture the breadth and depth of the topic. In pondering this, it seemed to me that Homo sapiens are a way point, not the end of human intelligence. One can consider where and how human intelligence will go in the future, by pure biological evolution or by melding with machines. It roiled in my head that a while a catalog of human intelligence is not an infinitesimal point, it is a very small dot in the continuum of intelligence that begins with stromatolites, bacteria, and continues to plants, trees, animals, humans in the past and present and humans beyond in the future, other biological intelligence, extraterrestrial of all sorts, biomarkers less intelligent than us but also the possibility of hugely advanced biological intelligence and biological/machine melds. How, my sleepy mind asked, can one establish clear boundaries between human and "other" intelligence. What is the difference between machine ASI and biological ASI? That led me to sleepily ponder the question of the meaning of human. Human as opposed to what? "Inhuman" does not intrinsically mean evil but could encompass alien as well as machine. I also found myself thinking about the relationship between "intelligence" and "creativity." Creativity seems to involve thinking things that have never been thought before, but of course much creativity involves extrapolating things that have been thought or done before. How, I asked myself, do you encompass art in the context of intelligence? A popular exercise is to think of things that humans do that machines cannot, an increasingly small set. Machine thinking may involve things that no human can or has done. Already we have machines that can strategize in a manner that no human has or can do. Prime examples are the products of DeepMind like AlphaGo Zero or AlphaFold. I fuzzily concluded that the dimensions of intelligence are huge, less than, comparable to, or greater than current human intelligence, and, that there is diversity even among humans. I found myself conflating intelligence, thinking, and creativity, never mind consciousness.

 

What a jumble.

 

I wrote a summary of this sleep infested core dump to William and Stephanie the next day. Who knows what they will make of it? What I did not do was come up with a better name than "Human Documentation."

 

On May 19, I finally formally registered my novels, The Krone Experiment and Krone Ascending and The Path to Singularity with Created by Humans. Created by Humans is an organization that promises to handle licensing that ensures that some sort of royalty is paid by firms that use an author's work to train their AI LLM models. I don't know whether this will work or not, but it seemed a useful experiment. I had vetted the notion of registering with Created by Humans with Regina Ryan. The registration process required some to-ing and fro-ing by email, but I got it done.

 

On May 29, I participated in another Austin Forum book discussion, this time on Reid Hoffman's new book, Superagency. Hoffman is a tech titan who founded LinkedIn. He has an optimistic view of what AI will do for humanity, as long as we avoid all the existential threats.

 

I spent most of my writing time in May working on father's biography. I discovered a bunch of correspondence dating back to the mid 1920's and am trying to incorporate that into what I've already written of that era up into the 1950's when he witnessed the first hydrogen bomb, Ivy Mike. One challenge has been the correspondence from my beloved Grandmother Wheeler, Vernie. Vernie had the charming but frustrating habit of dating her letters with just the day of the week. A typical entry would be "Sat. P.M." I engaged in considerable detective work using other correspondence and the text and context of her mail to see where it fit chronologically. One letter was sent on a Tuesday after she returned from voting. I checked the calendar. Aha! Elections always happen on Tuesdays in November, and I deduced we were talking about midterm elections on November 2, 1942. I went on to other things, but this rattled around in my head. There were some things that didn't quite fit. Finally, I went back and realized that she was talking about Tuesday November 2, 1936. I'd been off by six years.

 

I'm posting examples of technology advances every weekday on X and LinkedIn, my quest to document the exponential growth of technology. Spoiler alert. It's still growing.

 

I've been tending to the mechanics of book marketing and publicity.

 

Prometheus has a marketing reserve of 150 books. We've sent out 63 so far. I have a list of individuals and companies whom I mention in the book and for whom I need to collect addresses. I made a list of companies mentioned in "Path" and used ChatGPT to provide tentative addresses. I need to refine that and identify individuals in each one who might read and propagate the book. Geeze, I sound like a salesman, not a writer.

 

I had done the Artificiality podcast with Dave and Helen Edwards on November 19. Dave posted the link on January 19.

 

I did the AI, Government, and the Future podcast with Max Romanik on Jan 22. They had provided a set of questions that were a variation on the theme but presented some challenges. I spent some time drafting answers to the questions and torquing the answers to raise some issues that they did not. I anticipated that Max would work his way through the questions as presented to me and he did that for the first couple, but then he skipped the order and combined some questions phrased in another way. That threw me a little at first, but I quickly decided substantially to abandon my prepared answers and just listen to his queries and respond as best I could. A central theme was what, exactly, do we do to keep control of AI. I kept coming back to "its complicated, but…" more than I would have liked, but I think I was cogent. 

 

This podcast was done on Riverside that only runs on Chrome. I could not use the Zoom trick of shrinking the video box and sliding it up near my camera. I played with Riverside beforehand and found I could simply shrink the whole Chrome window and move it up to the top of my screen near the camera so I would, I hope, look as if I were looking at the camera. In action, however, I left my notes open on my desktop and referred to them. That probably drew my gaze aside. We'll see what the YouTube version looks like. I remembered to center my mic and to take my glasses off. They should post the links in about a week,

 

I've arranged a three-fer for early February: a podcast on February 5 with Brandon Zemp of BlockHash, on February 6 with Izolda Trakhtenberg of Your Creative Mind, and with Dan Turchin of AI and the Future of Work on February 7.

 

I asked ChatGPT to "Give me a list of popular podcasts that focus on technological developments and their impact on society." I got 21 and added three more from my original book proposal. Chloé Hummel, my marketing contact, tried to contact them and found most were inactive or serving small audiences. I'll try to refine my ChatGPT prompt. Prometheus has an Instagram account. We'll try to turn up some influencers there. I can't believe I just wrote that sentence.

 

I made some arrangements to attend the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, do a book signing at a Barnes and Nobel in Fairfax, VA, and visit my son and his family there. Various personal things led me to call all that off.

 

When teaching my Future of Humanity course, I asked students to bring examples of advances in technology to class as part of our program to "Be Aware" that I still want to advocate and promote. I began to experiment with getting ChatGPT and Claude to compose Tech Advance posts to X and LinkedIn with hashtags. I had to play a little with the prompt and edit a tiny bit but got an X post at 280 characters with my Authors Guild url and some nice hashtags. I found Claude to be a bit flowery and have in practice mostly used the results from ChatGPT.

 

I spent some time moving notes I had made over the last 6 months to my Authors Guild site. I'm now converting those tidbits to posts on X and LinkedIn. I have it somewhat automated now. I had about a hundred items to go to catch up with my notes and have been doing one a day for the last month or so. I may drop X and/or use Bluesky.

 

I thought briefly about Tik Tok and got an account but then all hell broke loose. I'll hold off on that. Probably too much work, anyway.

 

I gave an inscribed copy of "Path" to my friend and colleague John Scalo who has influenced my thinking on so many things in so many ways over the years. I also gave an inscribed book to Kay Firth-Butterfield, an AI and technology expert whom I met through the Good Systems group on campus. We talked about getting together, but she is writing her own book with a deadline of the end of January, so I just mailed it.

 

The Provost had scheduled a reception for faculty authors on January 22, but we had a hard freeze (down to 23 F some nights) and the reception got postponed to February 5.

 

On January 23, I led a book discussion of "Path," a roughly monthly event organized by my friend and ex-student Jay Boisseau, Director of the Austin Forum on Technology and Society. We had an excellent lively discussion of machine consciousness and related issues. We had 42 people online, of whom 6 or 8 actively contributed to the discussion. Good fun. Kind things were said of the book, but I noted in the beginning that it is different to lead a discussion of your own book rather than being a fly on the wall in a discussion by others. I remarked that I wasn't terribly excited about the title chosen by my editor and found out later that was one critique among the participants. I'm sure they had other issues they were too polite to bring up. I wish they had.

 

I found a little time to work on my next major writing project, a biography of my father I informally call Eniwetok. He participated in and witnessed the first hydrogen bomb explosion. I'm about 2/3 done but discovered some old notes that give insight into his college days at Berkeley. Those have taken some time to organize and absorb.

 

 I'm scheduled to do a reading, Q&A, and book signing at our preeminent Austin independent bookstore, Book People, on January 29. I hope to see some of you there.