Electrifying Oral Tradition
How has story been told? Geoffrey Dutton looks at the evolving technology of story, from oral tradition to artificial intelligence.
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Geoffrey Dutton
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Her Own Devices is Geoffrey Dutton's second novel, to be published in 2024 by Guernica World Editions. His first novel, Turkey Shoot, published in 2018, won the Courage in Fiction award from Independent Publishers of New England. Since 2012 or so, he has littered the Web with hundreds of articles, memoirs, and short stories, some of which can be found at CounterPoint.org, Medium.com, Cowbird.com, SisyphusLitMag.org, thewritelaunch.com, and his websites ProgressivePilgrim.review and Perfidy.press. Geoff lives just west of Boston with his long-suffering wife, occasionally their peripatetic daughter, and two snow-white pussycats. His other passions include cooking and, in temperate months, foraging for wild mushrooms to consume all year round. He also cooks up a free monthly newsletter you can consume by subscribing at perfidy.press/subscribe.
On Telling a Fractal: Parsing Patterns in My Prose
When you look at a mathematical fractal, you see self-similarity; not only do different parts of the figure look almost alike, it looks the same as you zoom in and out of it, its form governed by the parameters of the iterative algorithm that generates it. Can narratives similarly iterate by filling time rather than space, recapitulating condensed or expanded versions of events and examples of themes?
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Tell Me a Fractal
Think of a snowflake forming around a molecule of water clinging to a tiny particle of something, how it blossoms and diverges as other molecules join in, seeking their hexagonal destiny, becoming a perfect thing of beauty. Then think of it melting, its sharp edges blurring, its interstices blotting out until it plops to earth. That’s a story, right there, in full surround. Matter, space and time at play.
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Two Novels that Strike Close to Home: On Finding Oneself in a Book
Geoffrey Dutton looks at the "book-within-a-book" literary device, as used in the 2015 novel Disclaimer— and his upcoming novel Her Own Devices.
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