Paolo Soleri, RIP

View 769 Saturday, April 13, 2013

Coming up for air. I have the taxes pretty well done now, although there is still some key punching to be done.

Had a good evening with old friends at the Writers of the Future dinner last night. Author Services held it in the building across the street from them, a sort of fancy all you can eat sushi and other Oriental stuff place called the Vegas Sea Food Buffet. I expect it was a lot cheaper for WOTF than some of the previous and fancier catered dinners they had and the variety of food was enormous and quite good. Sat with Yoji and Ursula Kondo and Todd McCaffrey. The only problem with the place was that it is quite large and while we had a section all to ourselves the general noise level was fairly high, which probably didn’t bother anyone but me.

Tonight we have opera tickets and tomorrow is the Writers of the Future Awards thing. Monday I will finish, print, and mail the taxes, after which we can get back to a more reasonable publication schedule, and clear out some of the accumulated mail. Apologies to all. The supporting forms needed for the taxes get a bit more complicated each year. TurboTax can handle it but it gets just a little more onerous, at least for me, every year. Ah well.

Thanks to all those who continue to subscribe and renew.

I should mention Paolo Soleri, RIP. He was responsible for the inspiration for Todos Santos, the arcology Larry Niven and I postulated in Oath of Fealty, the novel we set out to write after Mote. There was a California legislative committee looking into the California future back then, and it had me down to talk with them and some other futurists. One of their guests was Soleri, and after I had lunch with him and spent several hours in discussion with him I went out and bought his books, and Niven and I thought we’d try to see what it would be like to live in an arcology. It was a radical idea at the time. We visited the Richfield Towers in Los Angeles, and a number of the early closed Malls – they were a great deal less common in those days. And of course we were just starting on work with small computers, and we tried to work a lot of that into the story.

Obviously an S-100 computer was a big step forward over what there had been, and indicated directions Moore’s Law would be taking us, but we had to do a lot of extrapolation. We gave the computer some capabilities for communication within the arcology not available to those outside – now of course an iPhone lets everyone communicate with everyone else. And Facebook. None of those existed then. But oddly enough the story still holds up a lot better than I would have thought. Soleri invited Niven and me to go out to visit him in Arcosanti, and we always intended to do it, but somehow we never did and now we never can. I regret that. I only spent a few hours in his company a long time ago, but I remember him well, and we did correspond for a while but over time that dwindled to nothing.

Paulo Soleri, dreamer and futurist, RIP