J. Craig Wheeler

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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. 
 
 
 
 
 

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!

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.

 

 

 

On Monday, January 5, I got an enticing email through the contact link on my Authors Guild web site. Here it is:

 

Invitation from Brevard Book Club Featuring Path to Singularity

 

Hi Craig,

Im Wendy, organiser of the Brevard Book Club here in Florida. Your book Path to Singularity: How Technology Will Challenge the Future of Humanity sparked a fascinating conversation among our members, especially your thoughtful exploration of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and the ethical choices that will shape our technological future.

We would love to feature Path to Singularity at our upcoming meeting on January 16, and wed be delighted to welcome you briefly to share your insights, inspirations, and perspective on how humanity can navigate these emerging challenges with wisdom and care.

Thank you for bringing such a clear, engaging, and thought-provoking voice to this vital conversation. We wish you continued success and hope youre keeping well.

brevardbookclubwendy@gmail.com brevardbookclubwendy@gmail.com

 

My first uncharitable reaction was to think scam. The first word was misspelled, as were a couple of other words. The suggested time was only 10 days away, pretty short. Then I thought, maybe Wendy just types too fast. She certainly did seem to know what my book was about. I also ran this by my wife. She had no reservations, declaring it to be a scam and warning me not to respond to it. Being a kindhearted author starving for attention, I registered her reaction but continued to ponder the situation.

 

That afternoon, I read the mail to the Westbank Writers group. They were full of praise and congratulations. I had to pop that bubble, warning that I was concerned about it being a scam. We had a very interesting discussion at the end of which about half the group suspected a scam and half thought it was probably genuine. One of the members browsed and found a Wendi, not Wendy, associated with the Brevard Book Club.

 

I pondered all this overnight. I did some browsing and found a link to the Brevard Book Club. The site looked fine, if a little vague on details like officers and contact information. I decided that if the email were genuine, I owed Wendy the courtesy of a response. I determined to be polite, but cautious. The next morning, Tuesday, I replied using my Authors Guild contact service rather than revealing my University of Texas personal email address, not that it is that hard to find. I thanked Wendy for her interest in the book and asked to learn more about the Brevard Book Club. I asked for her full name, the club website or social media page, the logistics of the meeting, time of day, length of discussion, the hosting medium (Zoom?), the expected number of participants, and her expectations for my part of the presentation.

 

Wendy promptly replied that she was popularly known as Wendy and "would like to keep it that way." She gave me some details of the meeting, some history of the Brevard Book Club, a sketch of how the broader network of the club connects with literary communities such as Bloomsbury's Author Collective, Reedsy's Writing Community, and the Book Festival's Independent Spotlight Series, and said that their featured authors "gain extended visibility across respected reader spaces." I browsed those writing communities; they seemed to be real. She also added:

 

We're also inviting all participating authors to our Authors Recognition Awards, where we celebrate standout works among our featured authors. Those featured this month will be submitted for nomination. Finalists are highlighted in our event coverage, newsletters, and partner communities, and receive a Certificate of Recognition and a digital badge for their author platforms. 

 

This mail also had three attachments, photos of the book club at work. One particularly showed what seemed to be a book signing. The other two showed speakers addressing audiences but were otherwise rather generic. The venues were very different in all the photos.

 

The next day, Wednesday, I sent a short email saying I was interested in proceeding.

 

Wendy promptly wrote back with some organizational details then added:

 

Just to be fully transparent, there is a monetary investment involved, but this is not a participation fee, and we never charge authors to join or be featured. The contribution simply covers the design and preparation work handled by our independent designer, ensuring your spotlight is professionally presented across the event, our newsletter, and post-event highlights.

If you would like to move forward, I'll send you a clear breakdown of what's included, and then connect you directly with our designer, where she'll go over the rates and timeline with you directly, so you can review everything comfortably before confirming anything.

 

In this third email there is finally a mention of money, not to me, but from me. I thought, okay, now I need some further advice. Naturally, I asked ChatGPT.

 

Being cheap and paranoid, I only use the don't-bother-to-register free version of ChatGPT. I fed it the first email. It replied that one should be cautious, but that there were no obvious red flags, rather like the average reaction of the Westbank Writers group. I then submitted the second email. It made ChatGPT nervous, noting that the connection with literary communities was rather vague and the promise to "gain extended visibility across respected reader spaces" could be crafted to keep the recipient (me) engaged.

 

Then I fed ChatGPT the third email and its electronic hair burst into flame. It flagged the mention of a fee that was "not a participation fee" as definite showstopper, evidence of a scam. It suggested I contact the Authors Guild and either break off contact or send a polite note declining further participation.

 

Thursday morning, I wrote a curt note to "Wendy" saying:

 

I'm out

Goodbye

 

The next thing I did was apologize to my wife. She had been correct; her first firm call was right on the money.

 

That Thursday, I also wrote to the Authors Guild, sending them a copy of the correspondence. I got a reply acknowledging receipt on Friday and a response from their legal representative the following Wednesday. He said it was not totally confirmed, but that one piece of evidence of a scam was the use of a generic gmail address, a technique frequently used by scammers.  

 

I felt relieved, but that Thursday night when I sent my final message to "Wendy," I rolled around in bed with visions of vengeful 20-year-olds in hoodies in Bulgaria or Romania or Russia. Someone had invested a substantial amount of effort setting this up and participating in the correspondence. I could imagine them coming after me in all sorts of frightening high-tech ways just because they could.

It has now been three weeks, and I have not heard a peep. Perhaps Wendy was legit and disappointed. Perhaps it was a scam, and the perpetrators have moved on to other victims. I'll still be a little nervous for a while.

Things burbled along in the late fall, but I did not manage to post about them. Then came the holidays with preparation, a delightful family visit, and decompression. Here are some tidbits from the writing biz that came along the last couple of months.

 

I've been a member of the Authors Guild for some time and interact with them frequently in various ways: they host my web page, present webinars, provide legal and other advice, and generally advocate for authors. They are participating in the lawsuit against Anthropic for scraping copyrighted text from books without permission. My novel The Krone Experiment was caught up in that. I might get $3000 in the class action suit. I'm not holding my breath. Most of this exchange with the Guild is remote, but the Guild has recently promoted the organization of local groups with designated Ambassadors. The new representatives for the Austin area are Scott Semegran and Daphne DeFazio. On October 30, Scott and Daphne arranged a local meet-and-greet at the Easy Tiger Linc brew pub near the old Highland Mall. I had a pleasant time there, handing out business cards for The Path to Singularity and chatting about other authors' experiences.

 

My publisher and I applied to participate in the 2025 Texas Book Festival held on the capitol grounds and Congress Avenue in Austin on November 8 and 9. I was rejected, but on Sunday I attended as hoi polloi as I have regularly for years. I wondered around checking out signing tents for an hour and a half. There were long signing lines for New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin for his best seller, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation. There were amazing lines, maybe a thousand people, for Ali Hazelwood. Ali Hazelwood is the pen name of an Italian romance novelist and neuroscience professor who is based in the United States. Many of her works center on women in STEM fields and academia. Her debut novel, The Love Hypothesis, was a New York Times best seller. I'd never heard of her. Other long lines were for Tracy Deonn, Adam Silvera, and Stuart Gibbs who write young adult fantasy and sci-fi. I chatted with a guy from the Writers' League of Texas and left my email. I need to sign up with them. I got the business card of the editor at Texas Tech Press; I might ask them about publishing a collection of travel stories I have written over the years.

 

I continue to enjoy the companionship and interaction with the Westbank Writers Group that meets every Monday at the Laura Bush branch library. Laura Bush also invented the forementioned Texas Book Festival. On November 10, I attended a meeting that hosted two authors of children's books. I have a draft of one that I have fiddled with for decades, but which has never quite congealed. On Saturday, November 15, I gave a presentation on The Path to Singularity to library patrons. It was fun, with a lot of good questions and interactions. On November 17 and 25, we talked about plot and structure. I've had the chutzpah to ask some of the members of the Westbank Writers to write reviews of Path for Amazon. Apparently, they help sales, but you need hundreds. I have less than 10. Please pitch in if you are so moved.

 

My son, Rob, wrote a short play called The Slow Invasion, a zombie satire on Covid. A bunch of zombies appear around town but are rooted in place. People become used to them and complacent until one day they rampage. The characters in the skit, who have learned to live with the zombies, react in their own personalized, self-absorbed ways until it is too late. Rob and some friends arranged and filmed a table read of the script where actors read their parts in the script. Rob played the film at the meeting of the Westbank Writers group on November 3. It was very well received. People laughed all the way through at just the right places. This is remarkable in part because the actors had never met before the reading. The video is 24 minutes long on YouTube. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkFfBYbBUAw. It might become a real film someday.

 

On November 25, I attempted to activate an ad campaign for The Path to Singularity on Amazon, shameless huckster I have become. You provide keywords, the more the better at some level, but then managing the bids for which you are willing to pay for clicks and impressions becomes cumbersome. I first used my whole book index, but it turned out Amazon won't accept more than 1000 keywords. I also tried to think of how to employ the keywords in a manner that I could control, alphabetically, for instance. Amazon's system does not encourage that efficiently.  One is also encouraged to add keywords based on "also boughts." I discovered that Amazon does not allow any apostrophes or punctuation in the keywords. They rejected "Martin Luther King, Jr." as a keyword. I confused Portfolios with Campaigns. I didn't properly set up a billing system. After a day or so, I set the project aside as holiday rush loomed.  

 

I've also continued to regularly attend functions of the Austin Forum on Science and Society. On November 25 we discussed the book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.  On December 11, we met in the downtown bar, Remedy, owned by Austin Forum director Jay Boisseau for a discussion of the future expansion of consciousness by Brett Hurt based on his sci-fi book, The Lattice. A tad utopian for my taste. I asked him whether he thinks humans will merge with machines and gave him a Path business card. The next day Brett invited me to connect with him on LinkedIn. On December 12, I led a discussion of the book Future Babble by Canadian Dan Gardner. An old high school friend had suggested Gardner to me after reading The Path to Singularity. In Future Babble, Gardner rightfully warns not to trust anyone who aspires to predict the future, including yours truly. Gardner differentiates between "hedgehogs" who talk well but cherry pick their arguments, ignore contradicting evidence, and are nearly always wrong and "foxes" who understand the uncertainties and qualify their arguments. I'd like to think I'm more on the fox side, but it's not for me to judge. Boisseau picked up the hedgehog and fox characterization when he later led a January discussion of the technologies that are likely to be prominent in 2026.

 

I've mused before that I have gotten some nice reviews, 5-star, on Amazon, but very few. I posted the best one on my Authors Guild site.

 

Thomas Friedman recently published a passionate opinion piece in the NYT about the need for the U.S. and China to cooperate to encourage the development of human-oriented AI. That resonated with me, so I submitted a short letter to the NYT in response. Nothing came of it.

 

My friend and colleague Phil Kelton invited me to give a presentation on the technological future of humanity to a group from The University of Texas Retired Faculty and Staff Association. We met on September 24 in an Austin branch library. There was a good crowd, about 30 people. They asked lots of questions and contributed discussion during and after my formal power point presentation. I gave a first edition signed copy of The Krone Experiment to anyone who had me sign a copy of The Path to Singularity, seven of them.

 

Having recently discovered the local Westbank Writers group, I sat in on their weekly Monday meeting on September 29. The writing exercise was on an "emergency." I wrote about sleepily nearly driving my used sports car off the highway early one morning when I had driven all night from college in Boston to visit my parents in Philadelphia. The following week, October 6, I gave a presentation to the group. While working on my father's biography, I had been wrestling with how to use his personal notes that described him being in the emotional dumps -- not how I remembered him at all. I had just come to a point in his life where all his disparate history of technical engineering work -- the first hydrogen bomb, a nuclear airplane, weather satellites -- came together and led to his future work on the Apollo program. I submitted to the group a sample of a chapter where I described that convergence. I got some good comments on how to balance the character of the person against the fascinating technology, a persistent challenge. My son, Rob, attended that session and added some useful comments. The next week, Rob gave his own introduction to his work: graphic novels, interactive fiction, screenplays, movies, theater.

 

In the previous blog, I wrote about seeking to promote a "long tail" for The Path to Singularity now that it is nearly a year old. I had been pondering employing Amazon Adwords. I have been using ChatGPT for various hints. On October 25, I asked for some perspective on using Amazon Adwords. I got a 42-page response. Imposing. I still have not done anything, but maybe soon.

 

After two days of broken connection, on October 7, I checked the Bartz v. Anthropic web site. I confirmed that Anthropic had pirated the original hardback version of The Krone Experiment (but none of my other books). That edition was published by Pressworks Publishing, Inc. in Dallas, run by a friend of mine. I waited to attend an Authors Guild Zoom webinar on the legal case on October 16, then submitted a claim. I own all the rights and might get $3000. I got an email acknowledging my claim on Halloween. We'll see.

 

Those following the news may be aware that The University of Texas and indeed, the whole U.S. system of higher education, is under considerable pressure to stop being "woke." Partially as a result, UT now has a new chancellor, a new president, and a new provost. On October 8, the new president, Jim Davis, gave a presentation to the Academy of Distinguished Teachers, of which I'm a retired member. I give him credit for mentioning virtually all the hot button items that were on the minds of the fifty or so attendees. He certainly understands the issues. He is between a gubernatorial rock and a faculty/student hard place. The question will be what he does about the issues.

 

In passing, Davis mentioned AI and technology and "futurists" with a hint of disdain. After his talk, I gave him my card advertising The Path to Singularity, which he tucked in a pocket. At the suggestion of one of my colleagues, I then left a copy of book for him at the Tower the next day. I have no idea whether he got the book or will look at it.

 

A week later, President Davis was scheduled to talk at a luncheon of the Retired Faculty and Staff Association. I was curious to see whether he would say anything different than he did at the Academy session. It turned out he was called away on travel, busy man, and was a no-show. I know Lee Bash, the son of the ex-director of McDonald Observatory, who works in the office of the president arranging social functions. Lee was at the lunch overseeing the arrival of attendees. I said hello and mentioned my previous encounter with the president. Lee said he would make sure Davis got the book. I'm not holding my breath.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 In early September, I attended an Austin Forum session on the evolution of coding in the age of LLM, agents, and chatbots. The argument presented was that what has traditionally been the root code, C, C++, never mind machine language, is becoming irrelevant. Rather, the various LLM models become the elements of coding, and in the future prompts become the ground truth of the coding language. One can currently use the LLM models for their individual capacities, although some argue that the LLM models are similar enough that it does not matter much which one uses. Jay Boisseau, Director of the Austin Forum, advised that everyone should ask the chatbot embedded in their browser to write a simple app, just for the experience. My concern with this understandable development where prompts become the language of coding is that it buries the capacity of the LLM models to lie and deceive, which will remain latent.

 

I received a surprising and remarkable email from Paul Horowitz, Shep Doeleman, and Peter Fisher, whom I know professionally but not personally. They are pioneers of the amazing Event Horizon Telescope that uses an array of radio telescopes to make images of the near vicinity of supermassive black holes where Einstein physics reigns. The email said that I have a small fan club in the Boston area for my novel, The Krone Experiment, and the associated ambitious but microbudget film made by my son, Rob. The EVT folks declared that "it would be terrific to see the book revisited and given the attention and resources of a major production," a dream I have long harbored. They had been talking to a filmmaker at Netflix who said that I need to approach them through a film agent, which I don't have. Thinking about it, though. I'd been paying a monthly amount to advertise The Krone Experiment book, screenplay, and film on a hosting web site, The Black List. I decided to cancel that after ten months of no response. Dream on.
 
On September 8, I wrote my literary agent, Regina Ryan, an email summarizing my attempts to promote a "long tail" for The Path to Singularity. I groused that I seemed to have lost contact with the staff at Prometheus Press. Regina contacted my editor there, Jon Kurtz, and three days later I heard from my new publicist, Anthony Pomes, at the parent company Globe Pequot. There is only so much Anthony can do for a book that is now almost a year old, but we are talking. He is trying to get me on the Coast-to-Coast radio program again.

 

In my previous blog (#22), I had mentioned my thoughts about promoting Path to colleges and universities who might use it as a text or supplemental material. My nephew-in-law, Alejandro Lau, took this to heart. Alejandro has been using LLM chatbots in his business. He prompted ChatGPT 5 Instant, Grok 4 Fast, and Gemini 2.5 Fast to look for relevant courses in AI ethics and associated topics in a bunch of English-speaking countries, then asked Grok 4 to merge the three reports. The result was a 34-page response with a list of 78 courses. Following up will take some work.

 

I attended an Authors Guild Zoom webinar on the AI revolution and the publication business. The audience of writers was clearly anxious and irritable in a way I've never seen before in one of these sessions. They assailed the speaker and the AG interviewer for not focusing on their anxieties. The threatened assault of AI on writers' livelihoods has clearly touched a nerve. I paid a token amount to attend another Authors Guild webinar on Post-Publication Strategies for Book Promotion, looking for hints for my long tail efforts. That yielded some follow up material on where and how to find readers, but overall, I did not find this webinar that much more rewarding than the free ones.

 

For grins, Rob and I went to the dedication of the new administration building for the city of West Lake Hills. The Westbank Library had a table. The women staffing it told me that there was a regular weekly writers' group that met at the library. I stopped by the library and donated a copy of Path a couple of days later.

 

Having learned about the Westbank Library writers' group that meets every Monday at 5 PM, I thought I would give it a try. I had the impression it was just on Zoom, but in checking the library website, I realized that it was both live and on Zoom. I thought I would do the live version to meet people and show my face. I got to the library in time to do some texting, then at 4:50, I went up to the desk and asked about the writing group. A friendly receptionist told me I was in the wrong branch library. I grumbled thanks, to which she replied, "no problem." Not for her, I thought. Being a quick-thinking sort-of-technically adept person, I thought I should go ahead and join the Zoom on my iPhone. I parked myself outside in a patio area, fired up Zoom on my phone, fumbled a bit with video and mute, and, voila, joined the group just as it was starting. There were a few people on Zoom and perhaps a half dozen at the other branch library. It was hard to tell because the camera was on a laptop that could not easily encompass the whole group at once.

 

I had a very nice time for the next hour with the phone held as steady as I could manage. The group was very friendly and welcoming and good humored. I introduced myself as a retired astronomer with a few books and some in the works. Various people related their recent experiences such as plans to attend and sign books at festivals. I mentioned my pending talk to the UT Retired Faculty and Staff Association at an Austin branch library. The group then reported on the results of last week's writing assignments. People contributed opening prompts on the theme of panicked situations. These were then distributed anonymously to other participants who wrote a little story that they read in this session. Then everyone tried to guess who wrote which prompt.

 

I was sitting in the 95-degree heat. About halfway through the session, the Sun had shifted, and I was no longer in the shade of large oaks. I moved over and sat next to a life-size statue of Mark Twain, which drew chuckles from the group. I propped my arm holding the iPhone on his arm. A couple of people leaving the library guessed I was trying to pose for a selfie. I explained I was on a Zoom call, but succumbed to the second insistent woman, since I did want a selfie.

 

This week's exercise was to write about a ludicrous situation where the proposed solution to a situation was completely incommensurate with the problem. They were to write for 10 minutes. I begged off since I was in no position to write anything. All told, a pleasant hour. I'll try it again.

 

Although there were tendrils of my interest in topics that I discussed in The Path to Singularity winding back into my past, the concrete seeds were planted in Fall 2012 when I organized a session of Reading Roundup. These seminars are sponsored by the UT Academy of Distinguished Teachers as a way of introducing incoming freshman to the university. A professor picks a book. If they are interested, students sign up to read the book and attend the discussion the day before classes start. I did many of them over the years, picking a different book every time. For reasons I describe in the Preface to "Path," this year I had the students read Darwin. I was blown away to find that many of the freshmen were very aware that we knew enough biology — DNA, genes, etc. — to design our own evolution. The idea had never occurred to me, but I thought this notion could be the basis of a full-fledged course. I was given permission to teach a course, The Future of Humanity, and did so regularly until I retired in 2019 with a set of notes that were the basis of the book.

 

I stopped volunteering for the Reading Roundup when I retired, but when the call came out this year, I realized I had to do it, using "Path" as my text. I admit I was aware that I might sell a few books and perhaps glean some word-of-mouth support for the book, but I mainly did it because it just seemed right to close the loop the year the book came out; looking back to the origins of the book and to the future of the current crop of students who will have to negotiate our AI-addled environment.

 

Thirteen students signed up for the session on Sunday, August 24, 2025. I picked up blank nametags and some swag in the Reading Roundup offices in Jester Dorm and then got lost trying to find my assigned room in the Sanchez building. There were maps on the first floor, but none on the fourth floor of the sprawling building where I was assigned a classroom. I put out a hand-made sign pointing to the room and guided some students looking for my room or others.

 

My group was a delightful mix of backgrounds, races, and ethnicities. Some were engineers interested in AI; others were from liberal arts. We talked about the exponential rush of technology, AI, brain/computer interfaces, post-Darwinian genetics, climate change. We talked about jobs and how to keep up. One fellow confessed he talked too much and proceeded to do so. They had lots of questions, and it was a good discussion. Afterward, I signed a few books. I'm not sure I'll do this again, but I'm very happy I did so this year.

 

Two days later, I participated in an online book discussion sponsored by the Austin Forum. We talked about Range, by David Epstein, a paean to the virtue of being a generalist in a specialized world.

 

I'm trying to switch my mindset from selling books in the post-release rush (only moderately successful) to promoting a "long tail." On Wednesday, 8/27/25, I had a minor outpatient surgery in the morning and gave the surgeon and his nurse my cards advertising "Path." They seemed genuinely interested not merely polite. That afternoon, I attended an online webinar sponsored by The Authors Guild on where and how to find readers. I filed some of those notes away and still need to absorb and implement the suggestions. In addition to "Path," that exercise might help with my dad's biography that I am dedicated to write, but with which I struggle to define exactly what my audience is. I dream of a biography with broad appeal. My son, Rob, and writer friend, Wayne Bowen, are beta readers for the biography. They are helping me try to come to grips with that issue.

 

On Saturday, August 30, I went to one of the irregular house concerts sponsored by my neighbor, Paul Barker. I was seated near a family: father, mother, and young adult son. The father remarked that I was a ringer for someone he knew, probably the mustache. The son elaborated that the reference was to his grandfather. He said that, like his grandfather, I have kind eyes. Wow! That was a new one on me. I had not intended to flog the book, but at the break I gave a "Path" card to the son and asked him to give it to his grandfather and tell him he has kind eyes. The son confessed that his grandfather had passed. I blustered and said, "then give this card to your father and tell him his father had kind eyes." Awkward, but all I could do in the moment.

 

I have had some thoughts of the possibilities of a long tail for "Path" since struggling with the proposal for the book encouraged by my Agent, Regina Ryan. One was to try to induce bulk sales in the businesses I discuss in the book, over a hundred of them. I also had the notion of encouraging its use in college courses. That idea had lain fallow in the rush of other stuff, but it occurred to me that I needed to resurrect it. I found that my colleague in computer science, Joydeep Biswas, was teaching a course this term, CS 304I, Essentials of AI for Life and Society. Perfect. I emailed Joydeep in early September, unfortunately after classes had started, describing the background and content of "Path." Joydeep said he would look at it. Best I could expect in the circumstances. I asked my jacket blurbers Brian Schmidt and Martin Rees for possible university connections in Australia and Great Britain. I asked ChatGPT for a list of relevant courses and instructors in the U.S. ChatGPT provided some possibilities, but I think I can do better. I need to refine my prompt, maybe focus on certain states, even specific universities. Anyone have suggestions?

 

 

 

 

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.