Editing SMARTS Made Me Smarter; Reading it May Do the Same for You
Excited to note publication for all my readers here of a new nonfiction book I edited in manuscript, SMARTS: The Boundary-busting Story of Intelligence. It’s by the award-winning science writer and talented narrative journalist Elaine Dewar. A more expansive subtitle appears on the half-title page in the printed book the author just sent me:
Computing slime moulds, political primates, masterful plants, altruistic robots, amoeba machines, high IQ chips, philosophers of mind using screwdrivers,
signals, spies, the brilliant life and mysterious death of Alan Turing, and the boundary-busting story of intelligence.
An intellectually stimulating aspect of this edit was discovering that, in astonishing variety of ways, as Dewar writes, “the process of natural selection can lead to the evolution of adaptive behaviors.” I learned that these creative adaptations occur in even the most primitive life forms, such as the slime moulds referred to above. Even more startling are neural networks, a product of artificial intelligence, whose development Dewar chronicles.
“A neural network is a radically simplified computer version of the real thing. Real neurons build physical connections to neighbor neurons which link together in a network as they receive and send electrochemical signals back and forth. The more neuronal connections, and the greater the intensity of these interactions between neighbors, the stronger the information bond between them: thus, we learn. Neural network-style computation enables modern computers to learn by changing or weighting the frequency of interactions between one part of a network and another.”
Dewar earlier wrote BONES: Discovering the First Americans, on the ancient peopling of the Americas, and THE SECOND TREE: Clones, Chimeras and Quests for Immortality, a kind of nonfiction version of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel ORYX AND CRAKE. I published both those nonfiction books when I was with Carroll & Graf last decade, after they had been edited and published in Canada, where Dewar lives. Suffice to say, I relished the chance to finally edit one of her manuscripts!
While each of the earlier books dealt to a large extent with the human past, here Dewar—who in the course of writing SMARTS visited with and interviewed a dozen or more top thinkers, inventors, and scientists working in the Smart realm—synthesizes their work, boldly imagining where research and emerging technology may take intelligence in the years and decades to come.
SMARTS is published by a new company called Debonaire Books, and is available via this link in a quality paperback edition and as an ebook. I’m tickled to have a copy of the quality paperback, shown below, and especially excited that during a visit to Toronto later this month I’ll be attending a party to launch the book. Here’s what it looks like:
Glad to Be Part of Publishers Weekly’s Coverage on Post-Corporate Life in the Book World
I’m glad to be one of three editors featured in a Publishers Weekly article about how editorial professionals with long careers in-house have re-made themselves post-corporate life. The other editors are Pat Mulcahy and Joan Hilty. It’s up online today, and will be a spread with photos in the magazine’s print issue on Monday. I’ll scan a copy of the print story to share on this blog when I get a print copy, but meantime here is a link to the story, headlined “Publishing, After a Life in Publishing.” In particular, I was happy to explain to PW reporter Calvin Reid the role that my blogs have played in my post-corporate career, which Calvin characterized it this way: “He launched a blog, the Great Gray Bridge, on his website, philipsturner.com, and got his first job, ‘by word of mouth.’ He credits the blog and his writing with bringing in work. ‘People come to my blog and find out that I’m offering editorial services,’ he said.”
Also very glad my author client Mike Orenduff and his superb six-book POT THIEF mystery series are both mentioned in the article, along with a mention of Open Road Integrated Media, the company where I licensed the books in 2013, to editors Tina Pohlman and Philip Rappaport. Until I get the print issue, Below are scanned images of each of the story’s three pages, and then a screenshot of the online story’s first six paragraphs. Please note I submitted three corrections for the story that have been input on the online version.
Readers of this blog, please note, I submitted three corrections for the story that have been input on the online version. For the record, they are: 1) In the 4th paragraph, while I was first “executive editor” at Carroll & Graf, I was “editor-in-chief” my last couple years there. 2) In the 5th paragraph, the author of the POT THIEF series is “J. Michael Orenduff” (not J. Michale Orendoff). 3) In the 14th paragraph, the correct quote about my writing is that I found I had the “psychic elbow room” to write, not “psychic space.”
The DOJ Just Doesn’t Get the Book Biz
Despite an overwhelming preponderance of comments that were critical of the proposed remedy in the agency model case involving ebook pricing, the Dept. of Justice announced a ruling yesterday that was a huge disappointment to me and many people in the book business. The DOJ rejected the arguments of many, including me, who pointed to Amazon.com as the corporation whose conduct warranted scrutiny, not the defendant publishers. Worse, the DOJ dismissed comments critical of the settlement imposed on three of the Big Six publishers as stemming from fiduciary self-interest. Although people are definitely concerned about their livelihoods, they are also concerned about the future of the business and whether publishers and authors are going to be able to carry on at all. The DOJ claimed it was all about consumers paying less, but I think to only look at price is to miss the larger picture. Unfortunately, I think Shelf Awareness got it right when they headed their coverage, “Justice Dept. to Book Industry, ‘Drop Dead'”.
Michael Dirda ♥s “The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure”
Readers of this blog may recall I’ve posted occasionally about The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, a new anthology I sold to Pegasus Books as literary agent. The last time I wrote about it, Oct 10, it had just received two excellent pre-publication reviews, from Publishers Weekly and AuthorLink. Now the book is out and available in bookstores and it continues to draw praise, the latest coming from Michael Dirda, a critic whose literary recommendations I’ve enjoyed for many years. Offering his annual roundup of gift books for the holidays, Dirda tendered this brief encomium:
The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure (Pegasus, $24.95), selected and edited by Lawrence Ellsworth. Captain Blood, Zorro, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Brigadier Gerard, Robin Hood; stories with titles such as “Pirate’s Gold” and “The Queen’s Rose”—this is just the gift for, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s words, “the boy who’s half a man, OR the man who’s half a boy.”
In the early 2000s, Dirda moderated a weekly online chat on washingtonpost.com in which he consistently offered erudite yet accessible book chat. I rarely missed one of them, and would often print out the whole chat to keep as a reference. In that forum, Dirda distinguished himself as the least snobbish of critics. No matter what readers might throw at him—whether asking about James Joyce, John Milton, or nearly forgotten authors of genre fiction—he always made smart and generous comments. He’s also an author, with several books to his name, two of which I’ve enjoyed (pictured below). It’s fun to have a book be included in Michael Dirda’s gift suggestions, so if you’re looking for a book for a certain kind of reader, someone who relishes pirate lore, swordplay, movies like “Captain Blood,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” and “Zorro,” the seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian, and the Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser, The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure is sure to strike the right chord. You can buy it via this Amazon link, where it is currently riding high as their #1 bestseller among anthologies of historical fiction.
Happy to Be Part of Blurb, Platform Connecting Writers with Quality Editorial Services
Glad to be a collaborator with Blurb, a new Web space where writers can find editors to help them hone their work, and other publishing services, including design. There’s a nice, clean look to editors’ profiles, like mine linked to here, and shown in the screenshot of it below. If you’re an author looking for editorial help, or know a writer who is, please have a look and get in touch.
The Sound of a Poet’s Voice
I was fortunate to attend an event remembering Dylan Thomas on the 61st anniversary of his death, November 9, hosted by my friend Peter Schulman and New Directions, Thomas’s longtime publisher. Pictures, reportage, and links at my Storify post and below.
Beginning of the End of Favoritism for Online Sellers?
I’ve never observed a consensus on anything between Amazon and the American Booksellers Association, but a new initiative from a bipartisan group of 10 U.S. senators seems to have found that improbable sweet spot, at least for now. Called the Marketplace Fairness Act, according to Publishers Weekly, a new law would have the “goal of […]