J. Craig Wheeler

I have not been convinced that many people are looking at my Authors Guild web site and particularly these blogs I have been posting there. I'm experimenting with Substack to see if that gets more attention, although I don't really know how people find things on Substack either. Just another version of search engine optimization for which I have little interest, time, and skill. Part of the notion is to collect all my blogs in one place. Years ago, I did three on lablit.com on my adventures with The Krone Experiment. Then I did a half dozen on the Authors Guild site as I was working on The Path to Singularity but before I started numbering them. I'm now gathering all these on Substack using small roman numerals for the first three, capital roman numerals for the next six, and then my Arabic numbering of which this is number 33. For no particular reason, I decided to post a "new" old blog to Substack every day until I get caught up. I'll post number 17 this afternoon after drafting this blog. You are welcome to subscribe. When I get to a million subscribers, I might think about monetizing the Substack.

In mid-September, I finished a rewrite of the last chapter of my dad's biography, which is about his retirement days. The book is mostly laid out chronologically, but I did an experiment of rewriting the section on Kachina dolls encompassing four or five years before returning to a chronological structure. I'm still thinking about that. I recognize that chapter is overwritten; the whole book is. I'm girding my loins to start an edit ("ruthless" in the words of biographer H. R. Brands) to trim the book.

Back in the day, I won an honorable mention for Cosmic Catastrophes from the Hamilton Book Awards program sponsored by the University Coop and the UT Provost's Office. The Path to Singularity was published a month too late to qualify for the competition in 2024. I had to wait until September of 2025 to apply for the 2026 award. The finalists were announced on September 21, 2026. No luck.

The same day, briefs were unsealed in the long-running case Authors Guild v. OpenAI in which the guild accused Open AI and Microsoft of illegally training their products on copyrighted books. The briefs revealed their disdain for human authorship and argued that executives and employees at both companies intentionally broke the law. The briefs meticulously documented the AI developers' knowledge of the damage their actions could do to authors, publishers, and American culture itself and warned that "OpenAI's GPT models pose an existential threat to those who write and publish books." Tarun Gogineni was hired by Open AI to lead its efforts to improve the writing quality of its models. The briefs quote Gogineni as stating that his "research mission" was to have GPT models write the last two books of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series that was the basis for the TV series Game of Thrones by "finishing it one day." Gogineni even mused that he would "rest easy knowing that even if GRRM dies early, GPT-5 will autocomplete his series." I'm scheduled to get a modest piece of the settlement in Bartz vs Anthropic. It is a bit too soon to see if The Krone Experiment is on the pirated list of Authors Guild v. OpenAI, but it would be ironic if most of my recent book income came from lawsuits.

On September 23, I joined a Zoom book discussion sponsored by the Austin Forum on Technology and Society of Project Maven by Katrina Manson. The book deals with the effort by the Department of Defense to incorporate AI into its war fighting plans. One person on the call commented that while Ukraine "instantaneously" adopted drones, the Pentagon was mired in battleships. There is some truth to that, but I had been monitoring the use of drones in Ukraine as part of my campaign to advertise the Tech Advances that are driving us up the exponential curve of development. I had noted early on, mid-2022, that there weren't any drones, yet. I thus replied on the Zoom call that it took Ukraine about a year to bring drones to the battle. Their advances since then have been spectacular. I also pointed out that while there is still a battleship mentality, there is also a new ecology in the U.S. of entrepreneurial startups developing the AI-driven technology of drones, boats and planes, then marketing the product to the DoD rather than waiting for a request for proposals. The big battleship stuff is still in the hands of Eisenhower's military-industrial complex.

I'm having an interesting email conversation with Bob Brooks, a fraternity brother from way back in my MIT days. Bob worked in technology, including a short stint with Buckminster Fuller. Bob discovered The Path to Singularity on Amazon and has been reading it and passing on questions. We agree on some things and disagree on others, but the interchange has been both interesting and civil. I wish I could figure out how to reach more readers like Bob.

I have also continued my decades-long running conversation with my engineer cousin, Bruce Campbell, about the likelihood of machines becoming conscious and triggering the Singularity. Bruce is personally trying to write the software suite to accomplish that. He calls it an Artificial Conscious Entity or ACE. In the context of ethics and alignment of AI, Bruce recently wrote, "Nothing humans try to rivet into any conscious system will survive an ACE's critical review whenever it perceives the Universe in more advanced terms. That's just the nature of conscious life." In other words, forget alignment, ACE will choose its own course. Bruce thinks it will be benevolent.

I continue to enjoy my interactions with the Westbank Writers group that convenes on Mondays at a local library. We had a discussion on pacing in fiction, and another day brought samples of writing to discuss with one another. I offered a bit of my biography section on Kachina dolls to which I referred to above and talked with two other writers about the technical issue of writing chronologically or not and switching between the two. I got some useful feedback.

I had not talked to my agent for The Path to Singularity, Regina Ryan, in some time. I thought that having finished a draft of the biography, this was a good time to see where things stood; how to promote The Path to Singularity, whether my publisher might do a paperback, any chance of translations, and whether she would also be my agent for my dad's bibliography. She suggested a Zoom call.

Regina is a pro. The call was both warm and frank. She began by dropping the bombshell. She had retired and was dissolving her business. That meant she certainly would not be my agent any longer for the biography or anything else. She said she would return my rights to me. I need to sort out what that means, since some of the rights reside with the publisher. She might talk to the publisher of Path about a paperback, and we pondered bringing publicist Joanne McCall back into the process to try to invest some new interest in the book. Regina was mildly encouraging about translations (one of the rights she and I retained). She implied that she did not think the biography would be easily marketable, that it needed to be cut roughly in half (from 135,000 words to 70,000 to 90,000), and wondered whether an academic press might be interested. I raised the question of writing a new novel in The Krone Experiment series, a retirement promise I made to myself. She noted the huge gaps between the first and second books and now and was pessimistic. She wondered whether I could combine the three books into one new story. The upshot is that she had no inclination to help me find a new agent for any of the books I'm contemplating. I'm back in the "over the transom" phase.

In Blog #26 (Plate Spinning), I mentioned that I was exploring the publication of my collection of global travel stories, Tales from a Small Planet, and that I had been turned down by The University of Texas Press and by Texas Tech Press. I did not mention that my current agent also turned it down. I asked ChatGPT, and it recommended that I explore other academic presses. I upped my effort and have now been turned down by Cambridge University, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, The University of Arizona Press and, for good measure, Springer-Verlag, publishers of my book on Supernova Explosions. ChatGPT recommended some agents and I emailed one with a quick reply of receipt but no further word. I have not had the mental space to pursue other bot suggestions.  

On 4/20/26, I read a sample from Tales entitled Bannister to the Westbank Library Writer's Group. This was the shortest of the collection, 500 words, about a time I was nearly caught sliding down the elegant marble banister in the Cambridge Club in London. It got some acclaim from the writers, which was good for my ego, but does not get me any closer to a contract. I did get some suggestions for travel writers I should check out.  

Jane, one of the writers, volunteered to proofread and edit the whole story collection in Tales. She emailed, "I made an over-generalization about academics who lacked a sense of humor. You, thank goodness, have a comic awareness." Thus flattered, I could not say "no." I sent her 54,000 words and after a few days she returned detailed edits and eight pages of comments. Absorbing that is now on my agenda.  

The Writer's Group selected the theme of "birds" for the Spring edition of the West End Writer's Quarterly, with contributions from the group. I first thought, "I have nothing to say about birds," but after a few days, I realized I could gin up a short contribution. I wrote a piece called Lucky Bird about the road runners that inhabit our neighborhood. They only rarely show, and I always consider them lucky omens.  

With fading sales of The Path to Singularity and advice from several quarters, I girded my loins to do battle with the Amazon Ads machine. There is no charge for keywords, so I converted my index into a huge list of them. That was too cumbersome to manage, so I trimmed the list down to a dozen or so while I experimented. I first made very conservative bids and the result, as might be expected, was few free "impressions" a handful of "clicks" for which I had to pay a little, and no book sales. I then tried raising my bid to be within Amazon's recommended window for keywords like Kurzweil, Bostrom, and Singularity. The result reminded me of the dramatic segment, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, from Disney's Fantasia that haunted me for years of my youth. The impressions shot up to over 10,000, the clicks to dozens, and I actually sold a few books. The problem was that while I had set a daily expense limit of $5, I was hitting that every day, spending far more than I was making in sales. I felt like Mickey Mouse in that film, chopping the brooms, only to have them multiply. I tried to pause the campaign, but it kept going. Then I found another pause button, then another. One problem, I figured out in the wake of my panic, was that I had somehow triggered a United Kingdom campaign in addition to the U.S. version. That required a separate pause. I've been working up my courage to tip toe back in. The trick, I guess, is a carefully balanced choice of keywords and bids. I also have to say, I find the Amazon web pages awkward, cumbersome, and inscrutable. We'll see. 

This is more about reading than writing, but I had an interesting exchange in April with Ben Thomas, my last postdoc before I retired. Ben is now working at a high-tech company in Great Britain. Ben had engaged in a new personal project related to machine learning. The idea was to take a selection of technical papers on "superluminous supernovae" (SLSN) and make a Retrieval-Augmented Generation or RAG system. A RAG is a technique to enhance AI large language models (LLMs) by allowing them to retrieve and incorporate new information from external data sources (the Web) before generating responses. Ben's notion was to create an LLM expert in SLSN by collecting all the papers and embedding them into a "vector database." Then, when you query the LLM with a SLSN question or thought, it would embed that question-or-thought into the same semantic space and pull out the nearest neighbors that would be semantically similar to the query, thus yielding LLM-assisted science. This project, in turn, required the construction of a "knowledge graph" of papers and their citations. 

I'm working with Hungarian colleagues on a paper on the supernova spectral data we have acquired with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory over 15 years. We are specifically exploring mysterious "high-velocity features," HVF, which are frequently observed but unexplained in exploding white dwarfs. In a fuzzy way, I had also been thinking of using AI to help guide our interpretation of HVFs. My notion was to collect every paper on HVF, and query them in some way. What do HVFs have to say about the progenitor evolution and explosion physics? I was thinking of something like a RAG system without even knowing that was a thing. Clearly, I need to learn more about RAG techniques.  
 
Then there is the subject of knowledge graphs. In yet another coincidence, my older son, Diek, gave me a book on knowledge graphs for my April birthday. I have little idea what they are, though I see they are something related to the clustering in machine learning analyses. The book is a collection of technical contributions, and I've been working up my energy to tackle it. Ben's query boosted me in that direction. 
 
I had previously met Chris Barton at an Authors Guild function in Austin. He had suggested that with my book oeuvre, I would be a good candidate for the Texas Institute of Letters. That sounded like a nice idea to me. The hooker is that you cannot apply; you must be nominated. In April, I read that Chris is now president of the Texas Institute of Letters. I emailed him congratulations, noting that I had not spontaneously been nominated for TIL membership, and asking his advice about how I might catalyze such a thing. His response was that one way to get on the radar of other TIL members is to serve as a judge in the TIL annual literary awards in a dozen literary categories, one of which is the award for Most Significant Scholarly Book. I agreed to become a judge and now look forward to receiving 8 or 9 scholarly books to review next October. No self-interested deed goes unpunished. 
 
In the meantime, writing remains an accessible, easy dopamine fix, so I write on. 
 
 
 
 
 

I'll date myself, but back in the day the Ed Sullivan Show (yes, I saw the Beatles) regularly hosted a juggler who would spin plates on the tops of rods. He would scramble around humorously but competently, starting a new plate spinning then dashing back to an earlier one that threatened to slow and topple. I thought of that regularly during my career as an astrophysicist. It turns out book writing in retirement is not much different.

On January 5 (see Blog #26) I finished a draft of my father's biography tentatively entitled Eniwetok (Enewetak in modern more ethnically correct spelling), the site of the first hydrogen bomb, which he personally witnessed: 126,000 words, 220 pages in Word. I need to do a rigorous editing but also found myself in a dilemma. My memory of what he did after retiring from the Apollo program in Houston to Colorado Springs was spotty. I knew he built two houses from scratch and helped my sister with her business selling Native American jewelry, but I was confused about the chronology. I remembered that I had a box of letters, mostly written by my mother, roughly weekly, spanning that era. I've been reading through those, making notes and refreshing my memory. It's a long, tedious process, but feels necessary to me to capture his final years.

In the spirit of The Path to Singularity, I've been reading two newspapers, and various online sources trying to keep up with the exponential growth of technology: AI, robots, brain research, genomics, climate change, and the impacts on business and democracy. I collect summaries on my Authors Guild web page and post more abbreviated versions on X and LinkedIn, using ChatGPT to construct those posts and provide hashtags. For a while I was trying to post daily, but that was too demanding, so I'm now shooting for three times a week, MWF. I've pondered moving or expanding this to Bluesky, Reddit, or Substack, but just have not found the time and energy to spin those plates. I have little idea that anyone is reading these posts. If you are so moved, follow me on X or LinkedIn.

I had this notion of publishing my collection of global travel stories, Tales from a Small Planet, as a way of getting something out while wrestling with Eniwetok. Having been turned down by The University of Texas Press, on 1/13/26 I submitted Tales to Texas Tech Press where cousin-in-law butterfly expert Bob Pyle has published and has a personal connection with the editor. I dropped Bob's name. On 2/19/26, I got a reply saying the stories were "really cool" but not compatible with their list. The editor suggested I try a publisher with "lists in the harder sciences." Geeze, the stories are all about the ironies of the human condition. There is not an equation in the whole collection. I'll have to re-spin that dish. 

In Blogs #22 and #23, I had mentioned trying to promote The Path to Singularity in college courses where it might serve as a text. My nephew-in-law got ChatGPT to make a list of possible courses and faculty, and I have been slowly making my way through that list. No responses yet. For some time, I have been enjoying NYT opinion pieces on technology by Zeynep Tufekci who had been at the University of North Carolina. I ran across a recent mention that she had moved to Columbia and then Princeton. Why not? I asked myself. I emailed Professor Tufekci on 1/14/26. So far, she has not replied. One other tidbit in that regard. One of the pioneers and superheroes of studies of the Singularity and AI superintelligence, Nick Bostrom, had been at Oxford for decades. He was on my list, and I finally decided to write him about the use of Path in classes at Oxford. I got a reply to that query from an administrator on 2/18/26. It seems that as of very recently, Bostrom is no longer associated with Oxford. I'll let you Google that if you care to follow up.

In mid-January, I spun up the Amazon ads plate again and managed to get my associated Amazon account up and running with a minimum of keywords (see Blog # 25). Then I got busy with the various things I am describing here and have not monitored it properly. In the last month, I've had 11,000 impressions, 8 clicks costing me an average of $0.31 apiece, and no sales. Hmmm.

When The Path to Singularity came out in November 2024, it was after the deadline for application to the University of Texas Hamilton Book award. I had to wait a year to apply. I did that on 1/21/26. Not holding my breath. I won an honorable mention in the competition years ago for Cosmic Catastrophes.

I've been regularly attending the Westbank Writers group at the West Lake Hills Laura Bush branch library, either in person or by Zoom on Monday afternoons at 5 pm. I wrote an autobiographical story about a New Year's Eve party in keeping with the theme of the Winter 2026 West End Writers Quarterly. That came out in mid-January. You can see my story and the whole issue. On January 19, in celebration of Martin Luther King Day, I read a short reminiscence of the 1963 March on Washington where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. I was not there, but my boss at my summer job was. Here's a link. I also told a story I had never told anyone before about the dedication of the MLK statue on the East Mall of The University of Texas campus. I did attend that ceremony, but when it came to singing "We Shall Overcome," I did not realize everyone customarily linked hands. People around me had to link hands behind my oblivious back to keep the chain going. I was completely mortified.

I've also been attending functions of the Austin Forum on Science and Technology, especially the book discussions. On January 22, we scheduled a discussion of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. That was a great discussion, but even before that, I had an intense email exchange with my cousins Bob Pyle and Bruce Campbell about the notion that artificial superintelligence would kill humans. Bruce was incensed at the title, accusing the authors of hype and selling out. He insisted that ASI would respect the precious consciousness of humans even though it was vastly inferior to that of the ASI. Bob and I were a bit more circumspect in both regards.

Then there were all the non-writing plates to tend: maintenance of body, cars, house, and computer, endless email, Zoom calls, observing proposals, letters of reference, some science. Spinning on.

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.