Kirjahaku

Following the purchase of a box at a garage sale that contains, among other things, an interview with an unknown artist, a novelty post card, a travel chess set, technical papers, unpublished stories and a coloring book, the unnamed author of this epistolary novel suddenly finds himself standing at the intersection of language, art and technology. It is a busy intersection. While waiting for the bus to show up, he uses the time and the tools at hand to answer those ageless questions that have kept so many great minds busy over the millennia. What is the true nature of consciousness? What is the difference between language and reality, especially when you're trying to state the facts? What is art? What isn't? Does every political system eventually evolve to totalitarianism? How quickly can things change before the human mind stops caring one way or the other? Is virtual reality destined to become the best low cost alternative to physical reality for the poor and destitute? Why is it that every time you change lanes in rush hour traffic the lane you are in stops moving and the lane you were in takes off? Are ghosts real? Do aliens believe in them? The novel Art & Technology attempts to answer these and many other equally important questions.

"M" is Michael Aro's dark, satirical commentary on our twenty-first century global monoculture of capitalism, technology and entertainment. It presents the stories of a bookstore clerk, a five-dimensional alien, a cabal of nine individuals who control the worlds political, socio-economic and religious institutions, an orphan genius, a group of monks on sand mandala tour, and Artificial Intelligences modeled after Tesla, Nietzche, Erasmus, Joan of Arc and Barbie. The result is a devastatingly funny critique of contemporary civilization.

Frank Mead believes that humanity is plunging headlong into a mass extinction event and no one and nothing can stop it. To pass the time while waiting for the worst to happen, he is writing a personal history filled not only with happy childhood memories but with loneliness, violence, sexual abuse and alienation. In other words, he is describing a typical Southern childhood. Before he can finish, his life and work converge, mutating into an entirely new form of hero's journey: Frank has recently agreed to participate in an experiment to determine if it is possible for a human to peacefully coexist with an all-knowing artificial intelligence. The AI is the creation of Aaron Zizaki, a billionaire game developer who is trying to create a super intelligence able to inhabit a living human being. Believing that humans are on the verge of self-extinction, Zizaki plans to create a transhuman race with the compassion and wisdom necessary to solve the problems of war, greed and suffering without having to eliminate homo sapiens in the process. The events that follow lead Frank to wonder whether he and the AI are about to unleash havoc on the world, save it, or both.

Simple is the first book in The Third of Three Trilogies. Divided into three sections, its poetry describes day to day life in 21st century America, a time and place which promises to be one of the most interesting periods in human existence. Portions of the book have appeared in Dan Waber's November 2010 Project and in Unlikely 2.0. Michael Aro is the pen name of Michael Harold, an award-winning author, visual artist and inventor whose books include the two trilogies The Names of Things and The Apocalypse Trilogy. The Names of Things explores the relationships between language, art and technology and contains the books Red Moon, somewords and Art & Technology. The Apocalypse Trilogy contains the dystopian novels M, The Rapture and A Brief History of Civilization. His writing is based on his personal experience of the contradictions and general insanity surrounding race, sex, religion, money and politics that are part of daily life in the 21st century.

Thirty-Two Poems Derived from Random Word Associations is exactly that. Each poem in the collection was created from random word samples taken from a classic text. The books from which the poems were made include well-known works such as Aesop's Fables, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Call of the Wild and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Other works include Kafka's The Metamorphosis, The Prince, The Kama Sutra, Paradise Lost, Jane Eyre, Sons and Lovers, Satyricon, Pascal's Pens es, Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Picture of Dorian Gray. These poems are not your typical machine generated texts. These poems are poems in every sense, insightful, beautiful and deep, each as different in style and context from the others as is the book from which it was derived. A number of the poems have been previously published in Jonathan Penton's Unlikely 2.0.