Benjamin Dancer's Blog - Posts Tagged "patriarch-run"

“Everything was wrong. Everything. Billy wanted to talk to the sheriff. But if the law was just now arriving, any amount of hurt could have come to his mom.”
-PATRIARCH RUN

I'll be reading from my literary thriller PATRIARCH RUN Tuesday, 22 April, at 7pm, at the BookBar in Denver. If you're in town, it'd be great to see you.

PATRIARCH RUN can be read as a quest for a father, Billy's search for his mother. An Adventure Passage, if you're an Open School Alumni. I'll be highlighting that theme Tuesday evening.

4280 Tennyson St.
Denver, CO. 80212
720-443-2227
The BookBar

PATRIARCH RUN is a thoughtful and character driven literary thriller. Think of it as Jason Bourne meets Good Will Hunting.

All April proceeds from PATRIARCH RUN will be donated to Jefferson County Open School. The school coordinates with Lighthouse Writers Workshop to bring local authors into the classroom. The purpose of the fundraiser is is support that program.

Patriarch Run

The technological singularity is an event after which, theory says, everything will change. Everything. It is theorized that the singularity will happen once computers can think for themselves. A concept that is beginning to find its place, not only in technological circles, but in the cultural mainstream. Transcendence, a film starring Johnny Depp, takes on this theme.

In a technological singularity the potential for good is unlimited. So is the potential for evil. According to the dark narrative, the rush toward the development of artificial intelligence (AI) will be humanity’s undoing.

That humans are about to destroy themselves has been in the Zeitgeist for some time. It is the premise behind the rise in popularity of post-apocalyptic stories. When I think back to my adolescence, I remember The Terminator. A generation later came The Matrix. Now we have The Hunger Games and Divergent. All of these stories are relating an anxiety most of us share, that humankind is really messing things up.

The technological singularity borrows its name from astrophysics. A singularity is another name for a black hole. We know that once you cross the event horizon of a black hole, there is no coming back.

What happens once computers start thinking for themselves? It’s a theme I explore in my literary thriller Patriarch Run:

“There are some hair-raising potentialities. First of all, we’re talking about a software that evolves at an exponential rate. So whatever it can do now, it can do exponentially better tomorrow and better the day after that and so on. A software that will eventually design its own hardware, design the machines to build that hardware.”

“You’re talking about a factory.”

“Eventually, yes. But we are not concerned about a factory in the conventional sense.”

Jack stopped at the gate, waiting for the explanation.

“With access to nanotech manufacturing, a computer like Yan Shi could build anything, do anything. Evolve at a pace never seen before on this planet. In the intelligence community, we call this the Technological Singularity.”

“As in a black hole?”

“Precisely. We are living at the event horizon. They call it the Singularity because, just like with a black hole, nobody knows what happens once you cross this line. Only that everything changes.” The Colonel led him through the gate and across the tarmac to the Cessna’s gangway. “It’s all theory. Theory that is taken very seriously by a heretofore neglected niche of the intelligence community.”

“To be clear,” Jack offered, “we’re talking about Terminator, The Matrix.”

The Colonel stopped at the top of the gangway. “As cautionary tales, yes, we are. But there’s also a best case scenario.”

“Which is?”

“In the right hands, this might be the technology we need to solve the great problems of our age. Unlimited, clean energy. Hunger and disease would be topics of history. We might be talking about the next stage in human evolution.”

They sat facing each other in the cabin.

“You’re saying this computer could usher in a new age?”

“Perhaps. But only the dreamers are looking that far ahead. You and I have a more immediate concern.”

“Which is?”

“How long do you think it would take for a computer brain evolving at an exponential rate to become intelligent enough to make the entire digital security apparatus of the United States obsolete?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither does anybody else.”

Jack opened the window shade.

“We’ve known that the country has been vulnerable to a cyber attack on its power grid for years. A blackout which would effect everything from tap water to food production. Such an attack wouldn’t require a super-intelligent computer. It could be done from a college dorm.

“Now imagine what a cyber attack planned by Yan Shi might look like. It is the consensus of the heretofore neglected niche of the intelligence community that if an attack with a high enough level of sophistication were executed against the power grid and other critical infrastructure simultaneously, the nation would be unable to recover.”

The Cessna Citation accelerated down the runway, lifted its nose and was airborne.

“That’s a grim prediction.”

“Yes, it is.”

You can find this blog post at: http://its-not-all-gravy.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-technological-singularity.html

I came across this sentence in this book some years ago. Seemed simple enough. But I couldn't stop thinking about it. It haunted me. There are five or six sentences in the world like that. It changed my life.

"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

This might sound silly, but this Amazon review brought me to tears today. There goes my man card.

Review Link

5.0 out of 5 stars
June 25, 2014
By not a natural "Bob Bickel"

This review is from: Patriarch Run (Paperback)

The farther the reader gets into Benjamin Dancer's Patriarch Run the clearer it becomes that the author is not interested in writing just another science fiction suspense thriller that entertains readers but teaches them little or nothing of value. Dancer's novel is written by someone who has thought deeply and seriously about the story he wants to tell, and he's not afraid of taking chances, both stylistically and thematically, in telling it. There is more than enough action, suspense, and brain-taxing mystery to satisfy even readers most demanding of forceful diversion and head-spinning adventure and misadventure. However, from the outset it's abundantly clear that an author with Dancer's deeply tragic sense of life is not going to be satisfied with a novel that provides high-spirited and satisfying enjoyment, leaving the reader maybe a bit drained, but satisfied and untroubled.

Instead, Patriarch Run departs sharply from the usual import of even the most gratifying and well-crafted reader-friendly fiction by forcing us to acknowledge painful truths, as well as the most compelling and important aspects of that which we cannot know. If we're honest with ourselves, when we're at our most deeply introspective we find little that consensus would judge to be noble. We often discover that we have good reason to question our motives and even doubt our fundamental decency. Patriarch Run forces us to see this by lifting the veils of narrow self-interest and perhaps unavoidable naivete. Characters who are unambiguously heroic are hard to find in Patriarch Run, and for the most part they know it. Nevertheless, Dancer shows us that if we had the breadth of knowledge and keenness of vision to see people in the total context that gives rise to their lives, the imperfections that we find in ourselves and others would be explicable as unavoidable outcomes of all that goes into making us distinctive human beings. This kind of vision, however, is not something that comes with living in our mundane world, even if we've briefly experienced a glimpse of a preternatural alternative under extraordinary circumstances.

Patriarch Run is suitably fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty. We meet characters whose commitment to a courageously patriotic life, something to which they give their all and repeatedly risk everything, learn that patriotism, as they have understood it, may set one on a fool's errand, one that causes harm and reinforces injustice rather than benefiting citizens at large. However compelling the evidence, this is a hazardous turn for an author to take in our hyper-politicized environment, especially when he finds a rough equivalence among self-promoting big governments throughout the world. It's to the author's credit that he knows that even good people with the most laudable objectives can't transform an impersonal organizational behemoth into something that we can stand by, proud and protected. Little wonder that deciding what is the right thing to do becomes so muddled in philosophical and practical difficulties in Patriarch Run. Who knows? Maybe the Neo-Malthusian catastrophe so ingeniously pursued by Jack, the father of the novel's protagonist, is the most humane way to go.

We all know that pain is a part of life, but Dancer's novel forces us to acknowledge it in inescapably personal ways that I found unnerving. The killing of a bison for what may or may not be a good reason, is such a commonplace sort of event in our carnivorous world that my almost tearful response to the head-shot death of the leader of the herd seems silly. But in Patriarch Run, death is not a remote abstraction, an unnoticed part of everyday life. It's real, painful, and deeply sad. The exchange of gunfire between Billy, the protagonist, and Jack is perfectly explicable in ways that all can see. But it dramatically emphasizes the heart-rending confusion that is an unavoidable part of life as we live it. It also illustrates the insane predicaments that can both unite and separate a father and son in a contemporary dialectic of kinship.

In a real sense, Billy has two fathers, one thoroughly admirable to the end, and the other a denatured victim of the world he sought to set right. It seems likely that if their roles had been reversed early on, they would have traded places, one becoming a contextually determined approximation of the other. Does Billy see this? And what will he make of it? Questions raised by this truly fine novel.

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Amazon is running a sale on my literary thriller PATRIARCH RUN. It's only $0.99! We're running a campaign to boost the book's ranking. Would you please consider purchasing the story? That would go a long way in supporting me as an author. Thank you.

Here's a review:

5.0 out of 5 stars This World Is Hard On People, June 25, 2014
By
not a natural "Bob Bickel"

This review is from: Patriarch Run (Paperback)
The farther the reader gets into Benjamin Dancer's Patriarch Run the clearer it becomes that the author is not interested in writing just another science fiction suspense thriller that entertains readers but teaches them little or nothing of value. Dancer's novel is written by someone who has thought deeply and seriously about the story he wants to tell, and he's not afraid of taking chances, both stylistically and thematically, in telling it. There is more than enough action, suspense, and brain-taxing mystery to satisfy even readers most demanding of forceful diversion and head-spinning adventure and misadventure. However, from the outset it's abundantly clear that an author with Dancer's deeply tragic sense of life is not going to be satisfied with a novel that provides high-spirited and satisfying enjoyment, leaving the reader maybe a bit drained, but satisfied and untroubled.

Instead, Patriarch Run departs sharply from the usual import of even the most gratifying and well-crafted reader-friendly fiction by forcing us to acknowledge painful truths, as well as the most compelling and important aspects of that which we cannot know. If we're honest with ourselves, when we're at our most deeply introspective we find little that consensus would judge to be noble. We often discover that we have good reason to question our motives and even doubt our fundamental decency. Patriarch Run forces us to see this by lifting the veils of narrow self-interest and perhaps unavoidable naivete. Characters who are unambiguously heroic are hard to find in Patriarch Run, and for the most part they know it. Nevertheless, Dancer shows us that if we had the breadth of knowledge and keenness of vision to see people in the total context that gives rise to their lives, the imperfections that we find in ourselves and others would be explicable as unavoidable outcomes of all that goes into making us distinctive human beings. This kind of vision, however, is not something that comes with living in our mundane world, even if we've briefly experienced a glimpse of a preternatural alternative under extraordinary circumstances.

Patriarch Run is suitably fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty. We meet characters whose commitment to a courageously patriotic life, something to which they give their all and repeatedly risk everything, learn that patriotism, as they have understood it, may set one on a fool's errand, one that causes harm and reinforces injustice rather than benefiting citizens at large. However compelling the evidence, this is a hazardous turn for an author to take in our hyper-politicized environment, especially when he finds a rough equivalence among self-promoting big governments throughout the world. It's to the author's credit that he knows that even good people with the most laudable objectives can't transform an impersonal organizational behemoth into something that we can stand by, proud and protected. Little wonder that deciding what is the right thing to do becomes so muddled in philosophical and practical difficulties in Patriarch Run. Who knows? Maybe the Neo-Malthusian catastrophe so ingeniously pursued by Jack, the father of the novel's protagonist, is the most humane way to go.

We all know that pain is a part of life, but Dancer's novel forces us to acknowledge it in inescapably personal ways that I found unnerving. The killing of a bison for what may or may not be a good reason, is such a commonplace sort of event in our carnivorous world that my almost tearful response to the head-shot death of the leader of the herd seems silly. But in Patriarch Run, death is not a remote abstraction, an unnoticed part of everyday life. It's real, painful, and deeply sad. The exchange of gunfire between Billy, the protagonist, and Jack is perfectly explicable in ways that all can see. But it dramatically emphasizes the heart-rending confusion that is an unavoidable part of life as we live it. It also illustrates the insane predicaments that can both unite and separate a father and son in a contemporary dialectic of kinship.

In a real sense, Billy has two fathers, one thoroughly admirable to the end, and the other a denatured victim of the world he sought to set right. It seems likely that if their roles had been reversed early on, they would have traded places, one becoming a contextually determined approximation of the other. Does Billy see this? And what will he make of it? Questions raised by this truly fine novel.
Source: www.amazon.com/review/R1P1IFRTQC7KXQ/...

Tonight I signed a book contract with Conundrum Press. They'll be publishing my literary thriller Patriarch Run.

Vanilla ice cream all around at our house. Vanilla is how I roll.

The backstory is that I put the novel on Amazon in April as a fundraiser for the Guest Writer Program at my school. The school coordinates with Lighthouse Writers Workshop to bring local authors into the classroom. The story got some good attention on Amazon and here, raised a bunch of money, and now it's time for the next step. The story is in the good hands now of some competent professionals.

Patriarch Run

I just had a wonderful interview at It Matters Radio. You can listen to it at the link below.

Ken is a gifted host. I really enjoyed myself on the show.

http://www.spreecast.com/events/rites...