Does Daniel H Wilson owe me a career?
I’ve been reading Robopocalypse by Daniel H Wilson.
Its ok, it’s essentially like someone said “You know what I want to write, how sky net came into existence?! And how we fought it!”
Publisher: “But that’s copy-write material…you can’t do that”
Wilson: “What if I don’t call it Skynet?”
It has a lot of Blade Runner references and if Daniel H Wilson didn’t watch Colossus the Forbin project like 20 times before writing it then I’ll eat my theoretical hat (my head is too big for hats, I look silly).
Anyway there are some cool bits, the best bit is definitely the story of the old Japanese man who fights off the Akuma (Bad Robots) with his Senji (Good robots) and is basically the robot whisperer. The philosophical basis for imbuing machines with soul and the surrounding ideas are fascinating and it’s clear that Daniel H Wilson has some talent. So being bereft of good books to read I wondered if Daniel H Wilson had any other books I might like, a quick Wiki reveal that he also wrote “How to survive the Robot uprising” a book that I’d heard of, had been recommended to me a few times but I’ve never read. He also wrote “Where’s my Jetpack?”…..OH! He’s THAT guy. The guy who I jokingly always said stole my shtick.
Somewhere in my house I have a tape, a VHS tape of me, ranting in front of an audience of nearly 300 people. This was planned; I’m there in a crushed velvet shirt, long hair wild, and face red as I read off a typed sheet of ideas.
I am asking where is my jetpack? Where is my robot butler? Why are there no tubes sucking us everywhere? (Big laugh, double entendre that I didn’t get at the time). Where the promise of science of the 50’s held for us?
It is the last day of summer school 2000 we are having the debate. The great debate “The world should have ended on the 1st of the 1st 2000 as predicted”
I am on the affirmative team. I am the first speaker.
I start by acknowledging that I am essentially arguing that we should all be dead but I feel that this isn’t an untenable position. After all what was the 20th century but a march of days almost all disappointing? The promise of the future and the actual future comprised of such a shortfall that the living should envy the dead. Then a laundry list of broken promises, hovercraft should be so ubiquitous by now that I should have inherited my dad’s old one. My robot butler should be opening the door for me, why am I not taking a day trip to the base on the moon via space elevator? You’ll have to take my word for it, but I was on fire. I ended by asking, do we think that the 21st century will be any better, will the prophecies of Gibson, Vinge, Scott or Kurzwell take any better than the ones of Wells, Verne, Gernsback or Nation?
I didn’t think so.
And so I ended what I thought was a unique, original, funny take on what was a really weird topic for a debate.
This isn’t my first time in front of an audience but it was probably my biggest audience and probably my biggest success up until that time. And I loved it.
At the time though I probably thought of it as a diversion, I had serious aspirations of being a musician and though I enjoyed writing and performing it did seriously eat into the time I was trying to spend sleeping, shagging people and dreaming of being a musician rather than actually being a musician.
But a few years later when I saw “Where’s my Jetpack?” on book shelves I was a little miffed, “ugh, some bastard stole my idea!” Which was a little unfair…there was no way I was going to turn that little performance piece into a book, well not at the time anyway, still good ideas are at a premium. And I might not have been the first person to articulate this idea, not even in this way, I might have been subconsciously plagiarising someone, although I can’t find who that might be….Leo Mcgarry asked the exact question in 2004 on the West Wing. The same year that David Zondy started his excellent website “Tales of future past” which is basically a man pining for a promised future that never was. And Wilson published in 2007 so by that time it was certainly in the public conciseness. And so I just had to add it to other ideas that I had, that people had stolen like “Cube”. Except they didn’t. They just had the ideas in parallel. The guy who wrote Cube in Canada had no way of knowing that I had written a role-playing adventure that was basically exactly the same and run it for a few friends in a park late in 1997. And this Daniel H Wilson guy was an American and had no way of seeing a performance that I had given in 2000 at Melbourne Uni?!?!
Excerpt from his Wikipedia page:
Wilson attended Booker T. Washington High School, graduating in 1996. He earned his B.S. in Computer Science at the University of Tulsa in 2000, spending one semester studying philosophy abroad in Melbourne, Australia at the University of Melbourne
Huh………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Now that’s actually pretty vague, did he earn the degree in 2000 or did he study in 2000 ? When was he actually in Melbourne attending Melbourne Uni? Was he at summer school? I don’t remember an American attending my summer school philosophy classes but I was quite drunk/distracted at the time. It doesn’t prove that he was there when I gave my speech or if he was that he was in the crowd that day. Also there is the great piece of advice that Abraham Lincoln once gave “Don’t trust anything on the internet”. But man….it puts what I once thought in the realm of the impossible, suddenly into the “Well that might have actually happened” camp.
Weird huh?
The truth is that this kind of thing happens all the time, not plagiarising but parallel ideas. And it’s a poor writer who complains about the loss of one idea, if you’re a writer then you should have hundreds of them all of varying quality but hundreds non-the-less. I got many that I haven’t shared with the world. But it did teach me something. Share it or lose it cause sooner or later someone else will have it and then it’s gone.
I started to write a novel, it was based on an acquaintance who was a tram driver who ran a little old lady over and got like 3 years paid leave. When he got back to tram driving he kept talking about having another go at a little old lady as the paid leave was great. I set it in Frankston, had the guy morph into a train driver and changed it so that he joined the Met specifically to get paid leave as he was trying to run someone over. It was dark, a little funny but unsettling even to me. I started writing it in 2002. I never got very far as the ending as it was mapped out depressed me.
In 2010 I was asked if I’d like to review a movie that was getting a DVD release here. The 2008 movie “A deal is a deal” it’s similar enough that I stopped writing my book altogether.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_and_Out
So I doubt that Wilson actually ripped me off, but it would be interesting to know if he was in the audience that day or if he even had a friend tell him about it. The difference between Wilson and myself isn’t that he stole an idea and I didn’t it’s that he actually got off his ass and wrote a book and writing a half-way decent book is really hard. As is evidence by all the people that write shitty ones. One day I might do it myself.
Chris Tyler is a twisted, bitter old man who blogs, writes reviews for various websites has a podcast and is basically appalled that people pay him to write. He has had successful shows at the Melbourne International Comedy festival and has less resisted selling out as many have resisted his attempts to buy in. This year he is considering a return to stand-up comedy, because you’re not a real person unless your self-esteem is closely linked to the approval of strangers you wouldn’t spit on under other circumstances.
Its ok, it’s essentially like someone said “You know what I want to write, how sky net came into existence?! And how we fought it!”
Publisher: “But that’s copy-write material…you can’t do that”
Wilson: “What if I don’t call it Skynet?”
It has a lot of Blade Runner references and if Daniel H Wilson didn’t watch Colossus the Forbin project like 20 times before writing it then I’ll eat my theoretical hat (my head is too big for hats, I look silly).
Anyway there are some cool bits, the best bit is definitely the story of the old Japanese man who fights off the Akuma (Bad Robots) with his Senji (Good robots) and is basically the robot whisperer. The philosophical basis for imbuing machines with soul and the surrounding ideas are fascinating and it’s clear that Daniel H Wilson has some talent. So being bereft of good books to read I wondered if Daniel H Wilson had any other books I might like, a quick Wiki reveal that he also wrote “How to survive the Robot uprising” a book that I’d heard of, had been recommended to me a few times but I’ve never read. He also wrote “Where’s my Jetpack?”…..OH! He’s THAT guy. The guy who I jokingly always said stole my shtick.
Somewhere in my house I have a tape, a VHS tape of me, ranting in front of an audience of nearly 300 people. This was planned; I’m there in a crushed velvet shirt, long hair wild, and face red as I read off a typed sheet of ideas.
I am asking where is my jetpack? Where is my robot butler? Why are there no tubes sucking us everywhere? (Big laugh, double entendre that I didn’t get at the time). Where the promise of science of the 50’s held for us?
It is the last day of summer school 2000 we are having the debate. The great debate “The world should have ended on the 1st of the 1st 2000 as predicted”
I am on the affirmative team. I am the first speaker.
I start by acknowledging that I am essentially arguing that we should all be dead but I feel that this isn’t an untenable position. After all what was the 20th century but a march of days almost all disappointing? The promise of the future and the actual future comprised of such a shortfall that the living should envy the dead. Then a laundry list of broken promises, hovercraft should be so ubiquitous by now that I should have inherited my dad’s old one. My robot butler should be opening the door for me, why am I not taking a day trip to the base on the moon via space elevator? You’ll have to take my word for it, but I was on fire. I ended by asking, do we think that the 21st century will be any better, will the prophecies of Gibson, Vinge, Scott or Kurzwell take any better than the ones of Wells, Verne, Gernsback or Nation?
I didn’t think so.
And so I ended what I thought was a unique, original, funny take on what was a really weird topic for a debate.
This isn’t my first time in front of an audience but it was probably my biggest audience and probably my biggest success up until that time. And I loved it.
At the time though I probably thought of it as a diversion, I had serious aspirations of being a musician and though I enjoyed writing and performing it did seriously eat into the time I was trying to spend sleeping, shagging people and dreaming of being a musician rather than actually being a musician.
But a few years later when I saw “Where’s my Jetpack?” on book shelves I was a little miffed, “ugh, some bastard stole my idea!” Which was a little unfair…there was no way I was going to turn that little performance piece into a book, well not at the time anyway, still good ideas are at a premium. And I might not have been the first person to articulate this idea, not even in this way, I might have been subconsciously plagiarising someone, although I can’t find who that might be….Leo Mcgarry asked the exact question in 2004 on the West Wing. The same year that David Zondy started his excellent website “Tales of future past” which is basically a man pining for a promised future that never was. And Wilson published in 2007 so by that time it was certainly in the public conciseness. And so I just had to add it to other ideas that I had, that people had stolen like “Cube”. Except they didn’t. They just had the ideas in parallel. The guy who wrote Cube in Canada had no way of knowing that I had written a role-playing adventure that was basically exactly the same and run it for a few friends in a park late in 1997. And this Daniel H Wilson guy was an American and had no way of seeing a performance that I had given in 2000 at Melbourne Uni?!?!
Excerpt from his Wikipedia page:
Wilson attended Booker T. Washington High School, graduating in 1996. He earned his B.S. in Computer Science at the University of Tulsa in 2000, spending one semester studying philosophy abroad in Melbourne, Australia at the University of Melbourne
Huh………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Now that’s actually pretty vague, did he earn the degree in 2000 or did he study in 2000 ? When was he actually in Melbourne attending Melbourne Uni? Was he at summer school? I don’t remember an American attending my summer school philosophy classes but I was quite drunk/distracted at the time. It doesn’t prove that he was there when I gave my speech or if he was that he was in the crowd that day. Also there is the great piece of advice that Abraham Lincoln once gave “Don’t trust anything on the internet”. But man….it puts what I once thought in the realm of the impossible, suddenly into the “Well that might have actually happened” camp.
Weird huh?
The truth is that this kind of thing happens all the time, not plagiarising but parallel ideas. And it’s a poor writer who complains about the loss of one idea, if you’re a writer then you should have hundreds of them all of varying quality but hundreds non-the-less. I got many that I haven’t shared with the world. But it did teach me something. Share it or lose it cause sooner or later someone else will have it and then it’s gone.
I started to write a novel, it was based on an acquaintance who was a tram driver who ran a little old lady over and got like 3 years paid leave. When he got back to tram driving he kept talking about having another go at a little old lady as the paid leave was great. I set it in Frankston, had the guy morph into a train driver and changed it so that he joined the Met specifically to get paid leave as he was trying to run someone over. It was dark, a little funny but unsettling even to me. I started writing it in 2002. I never got very far as the ending as it was mapped out depressed me.
In 2010 I was asked if I’d like to review a movie that was getting a DVD release here. The 2008 movie “A deal is a deal” it’s similar enough that I stopped writing my book altogether.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_and_Out
So I doubt that Wilson actually ripped me off, but it would be interesting to know if he was in the audience that day or if he even had a friend tell him about it. The difference between Wilson and myself isn’t that he stole an idea and I didn’t it’s that he actually got off his ass and wrote a book and writing a half-way decent book is really hard. As is evidence by all the people that write shitty ones. One day I might do it myself.
Chris Tyler is a twisted, bitter old man who blogs, writes reviews for various websites has a podcast and is basically appalled that people pay him to write. He has had successful shows at the Melbourne International Comedy festival and has less resisted selling out as many have resisted his attempts to buy in. This year he is considering a return to stand-up comedy, because you’re not a real person unless your self-esteem is closely linked to the approval of strangers you wouldn’t spit on under other circumstances.