Colossus: The Forbin Project is a science fiction film made in 1970 about a rogue AI. I watched it around that time when I was probably 13. It blew my mind. It has dated surprisingly well. Of course, much of the technology portrayed—soldered transistors and diodes, spinning reels of magnetic tape, paper print outs—looks like stone age computing, but this is lodged within an underground complex that has the grandeur of that of the Krell in Forbidden Planet. The social mores on display are all cigarette smoking and casual sexism—though it seems quite liberal for its time in having quite a few of the scientists being asian or black. Despite all of these period features, at the core of this elegant film is a chilling science fiction conceit. The Forbin Project is a precursor to Terminator. It may not possess the contemporary techno-pizzazz of Ex Machina (see my review of that), but unlike that film—and bear in mind that it is fifty years old!?!?—it portrays, what is for me—a far more convincing and terrifying AI ‘other’. #ColossusForbinProject #ForbinProject #cultclassic #cultmovies #cultfilm #EricBraeden #JosephSargent #terminator #AI #artificialintelligence #sciencefiction #sciencefictionmovie #scifi #moviereview #moviesreview #movie #movies #movienight #movietime #RPintoReview ...

A Bonfire of the Vanities? We may be living in a New Renaissance, but if so it is one with a sting in its tail. Blog post on my site at https://www.ricardopinto.com/2019/11/07/bonfire_vanities/ Image by Polish Duo Koty 2 #RPintoBlog #digital #selfpublishing #capitalism #creativity #culture #economics #ecommerce #publishing #newrenaissance #future #abetterworld #abrightertomorrow #digitalcommons ...

The Third God—book 3 of the 1st edition of The Stone Dance of the Chameleon—took me 5 years to write. Partially this was down to my exhaustive perfectionism, partially down to it being 300K words—rather than the 200K of each of the previous volumes—partially because my house burned down and my father became demented and I had to wrestle with the ensuing family crisis and, ultimately, I became his financial guardian. My agent and editor told me that I needed to get the book written fast—my friends urged me to just bodge something together just to meet my contractual obligations. There was never any chance I would do that—it’s not in my nature. The crisis with my father led me into years of therapy. Through this I discovered that the Stone Dance was a mythological take on my family and childhood—that it was a sort of exorcism. I had no choice but to finish it in the same spirit that I had written the rest of it. Even if the publishing industry had not fallen off a cliff, the results may have been predictable. As it was, my UK editor, Simon Taylor, had to fight to have the book published. Tor, my US publishers, cancelled the contract—The Third God was not published in the States, nor even the paperback of The Standing Dead. Wolfgang Krege, my German translator, had died, and so Klett-Cotta declined to publish the book in Germany. The way this ten year odyssey ended was devastating. A throroughly reworked second edition will be released early in 2020. Covers © ##JimBurns #JimBurnsArt #JimBurnsCover #TheStoneDanceOfTheChameleon #TheThirdGod #Fantasy #EpicFantasy #GrimdarkFantasy #DarkFantasyBooks #scifi #RPintoWriter ...

The Standing Dead—book 2 of the 1st edition of The Stone Dance of the Chameleon—took me 3 years to write—partly because I pursued a Tolkien-like strategy of ‘working everything out’… It was published in 2002. The gap was too large, and the series lost a lot of its audience. To get it done even in that time, I broke the story earlier than I had intended—though, artistically, this ended up being a good decision—throwing even more material into the third and final book. The Standing Dead was a bit of a shock to some of my readers, because it turned its gaze from the opulence and grandeur of the Masters to tribes of lowly barbarians. A throroughly reworked second edition will be released early in 2020. UK and Portuguese cover © #JimBurns #JimBurnsArt #JimBurnsCover US cover © #MarkHarrison #MarkHarrisonArt #TheStoneDanceOfTheChameleon #TheStandingDead #Fantasy #EpicFantasy #GrimdarkFantasy #DarkFantasyBooks #scifi #RPintoWriter ...

The Chosen—book 1 of the 1st edition of The Stone Dance of the Chameleon. I made an attempt at writing this in the summer of 1982 (I think?), while I was still at university. More than anything else, it was a source for drawings—I fancied perhaps getting seriously into illustrating. This first attempt was pretty rubbish. I worked on ideas for it—especially the glyphs—intermittently during my computer games career. When Fantasy Forge collapsed, I started working on it properly. In 1996 I got myself an agent and, soon after, a publishing contract with Bantam Press—an imprint of Transworld. Subsequently I got a three book deal in both the US and in Germany. The Portuguese edition was negotiated some years later. There was a Dutch version too—published in two volumes, but nothing much came of that. The Chosen was published in 1999 and garnered some good reviews and was quite successful. A thoroughly reworked second edition of the Stone Dance is to be released early in 2020. UK and Portuguese cover © #JimBurns #JimBurnsArt #JimBurnsCover US cover © #MarkHarrison #MarkHarrisonArt #TheStoneDanceOfTheChameleon #TheChosen #Fantasy #EpicFantasy #GrimdarkFantasy #DarkFantasyBooks #scifi #RPintoWriter ...