Chaos Program

Here’s what I hope will be a special treat for people: You can now download the full text (as a pdf) of Tree of Bones, my first novel. It’s a fantasy adventure about family, friendship and hideous undead evil. Download it. Read it. Pass it on. No charge (though small donations will be accepted).

I tried a few times to get a traditional publisher interested in publishing it. After a few (maybe more than a few) rejections, I decided to just toss it out on my website and let people read it if they wanted. That website no longer exists, though and, anyway, PDFs are more portable.

In its current form, the book is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

That means, for one thing, that I allow people to reproduce and distribute it, or even change it to suit themselves, as long as the following conditions are met:

• Distribution must be non-commercial in nature.
• I must be credited as the original author (same as on the title page suits me: “Tree of Bones by David Vandervort”).
• The book and any derivative works you make must be distributed under this same license.

None of that means you can’t ask me for more permissions, by the way. Or better yet, pay me for more permissions. But the rights described here are yours without having to ask or pay me.

The official description of this license can be found here http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.

More information about Creative Commons licenses can be found at http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses.

Hope you enjoy the book. If you want to after you’ve read it, come back here and leave a comment. I’d like to know what you think.

Download it here: tree_of_bones

update 12/7/2009: added the link to the specific license.

Should doctors be more than medical technicians?

I’ve thought of this question several times in the last few years, most recently in connection with two emergency room visits for my mother. She complained of (among other things) a very bad headache. Early on, one doctor ordered a ct scan of her head to see if there was maybe a tumor or something to explain the headache. The ct scan showed nothing out of the ordinary.

Here’s the bit that made me start wondering about doctor education, or intelligence or something: When the ct scan came back clean, the doctors then proceeded to completely ignore the headache. It was as if, when the test showed nothing, the problem simply ceased to exist.

This is the way not-very-skilled technicians operate. People who, in the IT field (my field) would be level 1 help desk and who would probably never progress beyond that level. Example (a real one):

Me: “I have a problem with my internet connection.”
Tech support: “I’ll test the line.” (pause) “The line is fine.”
Me: “Okay but I keep losing my connection.”
Tech support: “Restart your modem and check that it’s plugged in correctly.”
Me: “I did that. The modem is fine. There’s something wrong with the connection.”
Tech support: “I’m sorry sir but the line is clean. You need to check your modem.”
Me: “Aaaaaaaaauuuugggggghhhh!”

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One of the things that makes being a fan of science fiction a little difficult is the traditional absence of creativity in Hollywood products. That is, even on the rare occasions when Hollywood tries to do science fiction, they don’t generally try very hard to make it good or interesting. An even worse problem is the traditional ignorance of science in Hollywood and journalism. But that’s not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is that staple of TV science fiction: The Genius.

Notice that the word is capitalized. Not mere genius but more like Super Genius. The person with an intellect so enormous that he (usually, though sometimes a she, as characters Amanda Tapping played very well in Stargate: SG1 and much less convincingly in the deeply inferior Sanctuary) is a master of every science and all technology. Often these people are so brilliant they not only understand everything, they go far beyond what the rest of the world knows, inventing whole new sciences and extending existing ones to unimagined new heights.

In stories, these people have two functions. Those are to explain what is going on to the audience (and incidentally to the folks around them) and to come up with the one great idea that can save the day, or save the world, or at least save the story from a depressing ending.

The third, often unintended function, is to annoy the living hell out of the audience, especially those of us who know that that’s just not the way things work.
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