Tag Archives: victoria n. alexander

PopMatters: Sean Miller interviews VN Alexander

popmattersArtificial intelligence is all the rage these days. Case in point: while I was watching football this past weekend, there were two television commercials in heavy circulation during the games that featured AI avatars—Siri and Watson—having life-like conversations with actors.

As you may know, I have a few opinions about the prospects and limitations of AI. Recently, I had an email chat with novelist and philosopher of science Victoria Alexander about AI, art, and chance. Alexander’s work focuses on the uses of chance in nature and in fiction and the changing conceptions of chance in science, religion, and art. What follows has been lightly edited for clarity. Continue reading

Locus Amoenus reviewed on Luxury Reading

luxuryreadingReviewed by Cal Cleary

Victoria N. Alexander seems to dislike a lot of things. She seems to dislike the obese, who are either willfully ignorant or weak and corrupt. She doesn’t like medication – surely, PTSD and depression aren’t so serious as all that, the book wonders? She doesn’t like money or GMOs or really mass-produced anything–what do you mean you can’t afford artisan, organic everything? You aren’t – shudder – poor, are you? Bullies and conspiracy theorists, at least, are given a semi-sympathetic eye, but at its worst, Locus Amoenus reads like little more than an organized list of Alexander’s least favorite things about modern American life. Continue reading

Galley proofs for Locus Amoenus are in

The galleys (review copies) of Locus Amœnus  came out today. Permanent, the publisher, will be sending them to Library Journal, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly and various other trade review publications.

Locus Amœnus will be out very, very soon.  You can pre-order from Permanent or from Amazon at a  15% discount.

Cover for Locus Amœnus

lacoversmallHere is the final cover design for Locus Amœnus, which will be released at the end of April.   The novel is a dark comedy/tragedy, a revision of Hamlet set in rural upstate New York in 2009.  I requested a graffiti font for the tile to add a bit of irreverence to contrast the pastoral scene.  The designer chose to use a  bullet-holes-and-blood font to make it look like a thriller.  The story does involve an old murder, two accidental deaths, some bloody noses and an allusion to Shakespeare’s heap of bodies at the end of his play, but no one actually gets a mob-style hit in Locus Amœnus.

You can pre-order from Permanent or from Amazon at a  14% discount.

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Permanent announces 2015 titles

PP-logo__2_The Permanent Press, which will be publishing my novel Locus Amœnus, announced its 2015 titles today.  I am pleased to find myself among some very talented writers.  I am also happy to discover that several of the sixteen novels on the list have anti-war themes; one takes on drone warfare, another economic disparity; a couple of them are pretty quirky; one even invokes Hamlet, as mine does.

I like the company.

From the catalogue:

LOCUS AMŒNUS by Victoria N. Alexander Continue reading

How can art and science interact meaningfully?

Based on a talk at the Leonardo Art and Science Rendezvous (LASER) meeting in NYC on April 12, 2014, Victoria N Alexander, PhD discusses how art can benefit science through a biosemiotic perspective. This is the second video in the “Science, Art and Biosemiotics” series, produced and directed by Lucian Rex

 

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Locus Amœnus on “No Lies Radio”

lacoversmallI just sent my manuscript off to the publisher a week ago, and, as luck would have it, I got a call from Andrew Steele, host of  No Lies Radio, asking me to do an interview on the theme of the book.

The program will air Thursday, January 23, 2014

Here’s a summary of the story: In this dark comedy, a 9/11 widow and her son, Hamlet, have retreated from Brooklyn to the idyllic rural countryside upstate, where for nearly eight years they have run a sustainable farm. Unfortunately their outrageously obese neighbors, who prefer the starchy products of industrial agriculture, shun their elitist ways (recycling, eating healthy, reading). Hamlet, who is now 18, is beginning to suspect that something is rotten in the United States of America, when health, happiness and freedom are traded for cheap Walmart goods, Zoloft, endless war, core curriculum, and environmental degradation. He becomes very depressed when, on the very day of the 8th anniversary of his father’s death, his mother marries a horrid, boring bureaucrat named Claudius. Things get even more depressing for Hamlet when his friend Horatio, a conspiracy theorist, claims Claudius is a fraud. The deceptions, spying, corruption, will ultimately lead, as in Shakespeare’s play, to tragedy.
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The Choice Issues in the Health Care Bill: eating meat and reading literature

Two extremely important issues–that are not strictly health related–are holding up the health care bill. These are: whether the government should help fund abortions and whether the government should help fund end-of-life consultations between patients and physicians. Anyone who knows my novels knows that I’m a feminist and so would expect me to support Pro-Choice, and I do. Anyone who has read Naked Singularity knows that I would fight for choice on the issue of euthanasia too. Nevertheless, I think both should be withdrawn from the bill. Here’s why: Continue reading

Smoking Hopes is now available as an Ebook

My first novel Smoking Hopes was released in hardcover by The Permanent Press in 1996.  I’ve wanted it to go to ebook for a long time now, for reasons that I’ve been writing about in my “Literary Fiction” posts. Mainly the ebook appeal involves copyright protection for authors as well as greener practices for the globe. So I was really glad to see The Permanent Press go digital.

Teleology revisited

Teleology is the study of the purposes of action, development and existence. Its practitioners believe nature is purposeful. An ancient and enduring form of inquiry that has been out-of-fashion among educated people for centuries, teleology’s slow, steady decline as a scientific discipline began in the 17th century with the birth of modern empiricism and continued to plummet apace with the rise of the Enlightenment, Darwinism, and quantum mechanics. Nature is not purposeful, it was said, and those who continued to think it was were primarily spiritualists, artists, or madmen, who credited the guidance of gods, muses, or fate. Continue reading