2024 Again

see the blog post "1924"

 Year in review. By tradition, each year I have a blog post in which I summarize the past 12 months in blogging here at the wikifiction blog and also take note of the blog pages that have had the most page views (last year's review: 2023).

 January Jumps. Why did I include amphibian Merovae in my science fiction story "The Fesarians"? I'll blame the Aquans, an aquatic human variant imagined by Kōbō Abe for his novel Inter Ice Age 4. My year in blogging began with a commentary on Inter Ice Age 4. First published in 1958 - 1959, Inter Ice Age 4 included the idea of using computers to predict the future. Isaac Asimov's earlier novel The End of Eternity had previously explored the idea of using an advanced computer to predict alternate timelines, what Asimov called Realities.

Time Portal

 Synapex Linkages. The most visited wikifiction blog post in January was "Synapex Time", which has Part 4 of my science fiction story Time Portal. In that part of the story, R. Nyrtia is shown to be moving Dr. Twissell through time, using him as a means to spread some key tryp'At gene patterns that are useful for human telepathy. In 2025, I hope to continue the tale of Twissell's jumps through time, but sometimes I begin a fiction writing project that gets delayed for many years....

 February Fail. For example, in 2012 I began making plans for a sequel to the novel "Assignment Nor'Dyren", a 1973 science fiction novel by Sydney J. Van Scyoc. I was again thinking about that project in February of 2024 (see Exobiologist). However, in February I was terribly distracted by AI tools; chatbots and image generating software.

Claude the chatbot.

The most visited blog post for February was "Claude the Chatbot". Here is part of a typical conversation with the Claude chat bot...

Me (in February 2024): Does Anthropic provide any documentation for their Claude user interface?

Claude (February 2024): No, Anthropic does not provide any public documentation for a "Claude user interface" because I do not actually have a user interface that people can access.

While chatting with these Large Language Models, it is very challenging to keep in mind the fact that these chatbots have no actual intelligence. They have a complete lack of understanding of what they are saying and often fail spectacularly to produce useful output.

When I checked back on Claude today (in December), the default version was Sonnet version 3.5. Back in March I had access to version 3.0

Claude Shannon by Mr. Wombo.

 Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Yes, you can find documentation about using the Claude interface at https://support.anthropic.com and technical documentation at https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/. These resources cover topics like conversation basics, prompting best practices, and API details.

Me: I went to those two URLs and found no description of the Claude user interface.

Claude: I apologize for my incorrect assumption about the documentation. You're right - I checked those URLs and they don't contain specific documentation about the Claude chat interface elements and features. I should not have claimed they did.

Smuggling nanites.

 March Madness: More Models. The most popular blog post in March was "TNS 31", which has the 31st and final chapter of a science fiction story called "The Nanite Smuggler". I wrote that 61,000 word-long story in collaboration with the Gemini and Claude chatbots (read the entire story here). The story is set in the year 2040, when a young woman, Tyhry, tries to obtain advanced nanotechnology from aliens.

 The Tooth Brush Problem. My experiment of collaborating with chatbots to write a novel taught me that these Large Language Models are not good story tellers. They can't understand anything, particularly the subjects that I want to explore in my stories. The chatbots can churn out huge amounts of dreck, but I usually have to rewrite it in order to remake the chatbot output into something that I can tolerate.

 April Alice. Also in that "TNS 31" blog post were ideas for a sequel to "The Nanite Smuggler" which became a story called Vythoth the Chresmoscopist. That blog post with the first part of Vythoth the Chresmoscopist ("Nymerya Coryn") was the most visited blog post in April 🏆. "Nymerya Coryn" is the name of a religious robot (a name that Gemini invented). I've relegated the chatbots to mundane tasks like generating names for characters in my stories. Vythoth is a Fru'wu who explains in Part 5 of the story, "We Fru'wu have a device that allows us to View future events; the Chresmoscope." 

Figure 1. To be continued.

I've never completed Vythoth the Chresmoscopist. As shown in the image to the left (Figure 1), in April of 2024 I made plans for Tyhry could first obtain some useful information nanites (infites) from Vythoth the Fru'wu. My plan was for those alien infites to then make it possible for Tyhry to enter into the Asimov Reality Simulation and obtain other infites from Alice Wroke that would provide Tyhry with the required information for how to make a fully functional interstellar spaceship (this is a work in progress; see "D*", below).

Tyhry's alien body modification.
Image generated by Mr. Wombo.

 May: Mr. Wombo. The most visited blog post from May is Vythoth, which has Part 5 of the science fiction story Vythoth the Chresmoscopist. Tyhry establishes some tentative telepathic linkage to the mind of Vythoth, who then explains, "We Fru'wu have a device that allows us to View future events; the Chresmoscope."

Most of May was devoted to developing Vythoth the Chresmoscopist, but I also published a blog post called Image Gallery which holds 340 AI-generated images such as the one that is shown to the right. Sometimes Mr. Wombo generates images that do not fit the story that I am currently writing, but those images might be useful in the future. The image that is shown to the right might illustrate a bad dream that is induced in Tyhry when she has a vision of the future time when she uses medical nanites to revert her body to its tryp'At form. Why settle for just 4 breasts when you could have 8?

Figure 2. Under construction.

 June Jarnell. So far, I've published the first 8 parts of Vythoth the Chresmoscopist on this blog. Part 8 of the story was published in June. At that time, I wrote part of an account of how two Felydyans, Sorsyph and Oyub, acting as agents of Manny the bumpha, were able to help get Tyhry on the right track for discovering the secret of using sedrons for interstellar space travel (see Figure 2). 

Figure 3. image source

Some day I hope to complete Vythoth the Chresmoscopist, possibly using ideas from another story called "D*". In "D*", Tyhry visits the Asimov Reality (via Reality Simulation) and discovers the existence a secret sedron mining facility that is used by the Jarnell Corporation to make interstellar space travel possible in that Reality. The Jarnell Corporation is a front operation created by Manny the bumpha.

The most visited blog post in June is The Fesarians, a page I used to develop my thinking about a new Star Trek fan-fiction science fiction story that is called The Fesarians. I was inspired to start writing that story after I began my 2024 Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens (SIHA) and once again contemplated the idea of awarding another retro-SIHA for the year 2024.

9484 BCE (image source)

 July Jumble. Part 1 of The Fesarians was published in July in a blog post called A Fesarian Reality, which is the most visited blog post for that month. As fan fiction, The Fesarians is a sequel story for a Star Trek  episode called "The Corbomite Menouver". The Fesarians is set in the future of the Ekcolir Reality where I imagine that Star Trek's Vulcans are replaced by the tryp'At.

For The Fesarians, I imagine that Balok's gigantic interstellar spaceship has a "crew" that consists of a diverse and jumbled collection of many different alien species who have been collected from various worlds of the galaxy, including some humans who Balok collects in the year 9484 BCE (see both Figure 3, above, and the image to the left). Balok has advanced technology that allows for the creation of duplicate copies of the planet Earth.

 August All-stars. The most visited blog post from August is Science Fiction Baseball. That was the second of two baseball-themed blog posts from the summer of 2024 (the first was Alien Ghosts On Second). What if an alien such as Balok visited Earth and stayed around just to have fun playing baseball (see the image that is shown to the right)? In my imagination, an alien from a distant exoplanet with advanced technologies could easily become an All-star baseball player on Earth.

A plant-machine. image source

Also in August was a blog post called Book-Scrolls and Plant-Machines in which I continued my efforts to trick image-generating software into visually depicting future technologies that exist only in my imagination. Software like WOMBO Dream has an amazing ability to take a new idea and make it look old. For The Fesarians, I imagine that there is an advanced alien species on the exoplanet Elemacha-z. Those aliens prefer to shape their nanite components into the form of a plant-like creature, so those intelligent aliens initially go unnoticed by the human colonists. The image that is shown to the left plays around with the idea of a technologically advanced plant species.

collecting a Noema

 September Spies. The most visited blog post in September is The Xylo Clones, which includes Part 4 of science fiction story The Fesarians. When the human colonists on the distant exoplanet Elemacha-z finally realize that the plant-like Noema are highly intelligent, they attempt to establish telepathic contact with the aliens (see the image that is shown to the right).

image source

I love the idea that R. Nyrtia the positronic robot and Manny the bumpha can infiltrate human society and live among humans without being recognized as artificial life forms. That theme is included in my story "D*", but there is also a scene in The Fesarians where Nyrtia secretly uses the bodily form of Talia's sister, Gyulya, and spies on the colonists.

While thinking about Nyrtia's ability to secretly infiltrate the small human colony on Elemacha-z, I began imagining a computerized game called "Infiltrate" which would be about aliens who infiltrate human society on Earth (see the image that is shown to the left).

game token

 Another Game.
I asked Gemini to create a version of Monopoly based on an artificial intelligence theme. One of Gemini's proposed property sets was "The Stable Diffusion District" with these three properties: Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and Dream by WOMBO. Gemini suggested six tokens: 1) The Neural Net Node: a small, multifaceted metallic sphere with glowing lines crisscrossing its surface, resembling a simplified neural network node.  2) The Quantum Bit: a translucent cube with swirling colors inside, representing the superposition of states in a quantum bit (qubit).  3) The Robot Arm: a miniature, articulated robotic arm with a claw at the end, symbolizing automation and AI in robotics.  4) The Holographic AI: a small, transparent pyramid that projects a shimmering, holographic image of an eye, representing virtual assistants and advanced interfaces.  5) The Data Packet: a sleek, rectangular prism with a stream of binary code flowing across its surface, symbolizing the flow of information in AI systems.  6) The AI Chip: a tiny, gold-plated microchip with intricate circuitry etched on its surface, representing the hardware that powers AI algorithms. I had Mr. Wombo generate images for these sic tokens. Gemini also generated a game board and I pasted in the AI-generated tokens (see the image, below):

The Gemini chatbot suggested that the "GO" space be called "Launch the Singularity".

Xylo is carefully monitoring an
experiment with a telepathic Neoma.

 October Operation. The most visited blog post in October is Colorize. In that blog post I had fun using WOMBO Dream to colorize some old black and white story illustrations. One of my favorite images that came out of that experiment is show to the right.

Pregnant plant woman (image source).

Also in October, I had an entire blog post (called Kwononk) in which I explored the concept of an alien Halloween, from the perspective of image-generating software like WOMBO Dream. The image to the left shows an alien plant-like creature that has undergone an abdominal surgical operation revealing her baby.

John and Vera: a breeding
experiment with an alien plant.

 November Neoma. The most visited blog post in November is "Trying to Connect" which contains a rather looong discussion of plans for Part 6 of my science fiction story called The Fesarians. Since The Fesarians involves the plant like alien Neoma, I felt obligated to extensively comment on the John Carstairs stories that feature alien plant creatures.

horror

Also in November, the Gemini large language model invented the "notionator" (a device to stimulate creative thought) as described in my blog post called "Birth of the Notionator". Also in that blog post is a discussion with the Claude large language model about science fiction as a literary genre and how it gets linked to horror stories. 

For the image shown to the left, I tried to get WOMBO Dream to generate a horror-tinged image depicting the birth of a Noema. Sadly, the alien creatures did not really end up with the appearance of plant-people. That might be poor Gyulya about a year after she discovers some alien larvae in her bed.

image source

 December. I'll wait until 2025 to judge which blog post of December is the most frequently visited. However, in December I published a blog post in which the Gemini and Claude LLMs helped me devise the long jargony title "Chronoendosymbiotic Telepathic Transfer Protocol" for a science fiction story about the Sedron Time Stream. Claude even wrote a song about chronoendosymbiosis that could be performed as part of an opera (see the image to the right).

image source

Also in December, I blogged about the milestone of reaching 1,000,000 pageviews for this blog.

In December, I started a new science fiction story called "D*" which describes an attempt by Tyhry to investigate the Jarnell Corporation and the type of interstellar spaceship propulsion technology that was used to spread Humanity through the galaxy in the Asimov Reality. Tyhry discovers that clones of herself and Marda existed in that Reality and their replicoid copies were used as the secret agents of Manny who could infiltrate human society and spread key genes for telepathy.

2024: Retro-SIHA award.

My Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens took me to Korea, but once again I opted for a retro-SIHA, giving the award to the old Star Trek episode, "The Corbomite Maneuver". 

image source

The "The Corbomite Maneuver" was inspiration for my new fan-fiction science fiction story "The Fesarians" which is set in the Ekcolir Reality. In "The Fesarians", I re-imagine the alien Balok as a bumpha, thus inserting Balok into my Exodemic Fictional Universe.

The most visited blog post for 2024 is Nymerya Coryn 🏆 which includes Part 1 of Vythoth the Chresmoscopist.

Related Reading: 2023 in review

Next: the science fiction stories of Katherine MacLean.

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