Jule Owen

author, illustrator

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Tales from the CyberSalon  – #1 New Normals in Health

Posted by: Karolina Janicka in 2021 events, Next Event, Writing 6 days ago 0 58 Views

 

Cybersalon presents: ‘Tales from the Cyber Salon’; a series of interdisciplinary, technology and policy investigations through science-fiction storytelling. Spanning four events across the year, ‘Tales from the Cyber Salon’ will feature newly commissioned, speculative short stories written for the exploration of Healthcare, The High Street, Social Communities and Political Representation.

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Join us for our inaugural event on Tuesday, 30th March where we will be interrogating where we are, and where our current paths might be taking us in the technologization of healthcare.

To help explore our tales on this theme and those of scaling care, data protection, intersections with AI, robotics and machine learning we will be joined on the night by:

  • Dr Christine Aicardi – Kings College Informatics & Senior Research Fellow at the Human Brain Project 
  • Professor Lucy Hooberman – Director of Digital Media & Innovation at WMG, University of Warwick. 
  • Angus Fraser – Cybersalonista, Entrepreneur & AI Developer
  • Ryan Battles – MySense AI

Telling their tales on the night and providing their stories from March 22nd on Cybersalon’s Medium page to seed the discussion will be; 

  • Stephen Oram
  • Benjamin Greenaway
  • Britta F. Schulte
  • Jule Owen

Cybersalon Chairperson: Eva Pascoe

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Dr Christine Aicardi, Kings College Informatics & Senior Research Fellow at the Human Brain Project Foresight Laboratory Research interests encompass social, futures, and contemporary history studies of artificial intelligence broadly understood (autonomous, adaptive, evolutionary and intelligent systems; brain-inspired computing; robotics) and computational neuroscience,  aiming to trace some of their entwined genealogies and to situate them within wider sociotechnical systems and imaginaries, in order to understand their import for digital society.

Professor Lucy Hooberman, Director of Digital Media & Innovation at WMG, University of Warwick.  Co-author of three papers looking at GP’s responses to NHS ratings apps and how the public view NHS Choices and apps. Qualitatative research with NHS staff and citizens of the West Midlands to design an NHS digital health service, with Essential Research and Maverick TV. Current research interest is in the application of VR to the treatment of PTSD, designing a data and digital media literacy curriculum.  Lucy is a member of BAFTA and the RSA, and a documentary filmmaker. She is currently looking into the intersection of privacy, health data, data-driven government and Silicon Valley.

Angus Fraser, entrepreneur & AI developer in avionic and maritime drone rescue applications, founder of Visual Monitoring Face Mask alert tool for schools and retail and  campaigner for safe AI in Smart Cities. Angus speaks regularly at Cybersalon. Most recently on Facial Recognition technology

Ryan Battles of MySense AI

Stephen Oram writes science fiction. He is a founding curator for near-future fiction at Virtual Futures and a writer for SciFutures. His Nudge the Future collections have been praised by publications as diverse as The Morning Star and The Financial Times.

Benjamin Greenaway writes to avoid a life in politics and to shortcut the product development cycle. An unpublished amateur of short stories whose career in software engineering, start-ups, the web and education has taught him the benefits of a good story.    

Britta F. Schulte writes about technologies in elderly care: during the day as Research Assistant at the Bauhaus University Weimar and at night as @brifrischu. Their stories have been published in their PhD thesis ‘Homes for Life’ as well as various zines.

Jule Owen was born in the North of England. She now lives in the south, where the people are surprisingly friendly, the weather is warmer, and there are more museums, but she misses the wide-open spaces and the excellent quality tap water. Her working life has been spent helping businesses build online technology, including a short stint in the video games industry. These days, she helps build tech products that involve automation and machine learning. Her books are her creative response to the exponential growth of technological innovation in the era of climate change, with a bit of magic thrown in.

https://juleowen.com/2305-2/

Beware fake copies of my books being sold on Amazon

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Update – 20/01/2021

Amazon has now taken the pirated book down.

Update – 17/01/2021

Another fake book. This one is still live here – note the author name Jule Owen Mean Time Books does not link to my Author Central Page.  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08SJFL1W7

 

Update – 19th Dec 2020 – fake copies as seen below seem to have been removed by Amazon. Please keep an eye out for new ones and let me know if you see them.

Amazon’s process for author’s getting pirated books (and probably other copyrighted material) taken down off their marketplace is currently frustrating, completely non-transparent, time-consuming and takes days (it took me over 10 days to get this one taken down). Please make sure you are buying a genuine book from me rather than a pirate. Get in touch if you are not sure.

Original post: 18th Dec 2020

There are fake copies of The Boy Who Fell from the Sky being sold on Amazon marketplace. This copy is not being sold by me, so if you buy a copy you are paying someone who has illegally copied my book and is profiting from it. You are also being ripped off – paying way too much money. The book looks like this

You can get a real copy for free. What’s more, it is better formatted with a nice cover. Links to the official US and UK copies here

US here

UK here

Amazon was notified on 7th December but has yet to remove it (it’s now 18th December).

Official versions of my books are listed on Author’s Central in the US and the UK. 

Mindful that it’s Christmas, I didn’t want you (readers) to think it was some cool new version that I had published. It’s not. It’s the book you probably already read that’s been copied, badly formated and republished using an account not associated with me.  

Elidir. In the future, we will be history.

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It has been slightly surreal -preparing to launch a book about a (mostly) dystopian future during a pandemic, but at the same time weirdly comforting being in such familiar territory.

My characters’ lives are restricted by world events, far outside their control. They are physically confined and subject to the whims of the powerful and the shifting sands of politics.

Some things never change.

Elidir is set in 2472, in a world transformed by climate change. It is the second book in The Recoverist Quartet, following on from events in The Kind. 

In the first book in the series, we encountered a future where the privileged have retreated to cities with their own micro-climates. Super-storms and heat blast the land beyond these technological marvels. Yet life in the cities is far from perfect. Their populations are dwindling, blighted by a human-made genetic illness.

Isobel Twelvetrees who has been put outside the walls of her city to die in the heat for a crime she cannot remember committing.  In the desert, she finds people who survive by selling a quota of their children to the cities in return for food and water. Isobel joins forces with the Kind, a group who have embraced advanced technology banned in the cities. Together they work to free the desert people from having to sell their children. 

Elidir picks up when The Kind left off and tells the story of why Isobel was cast out from her protected life in the city.

In the late twenty-fifth century in a place in a place that was formerly the British Isles. The name has been erased from common use and forgotten by everyone but historians. The old buildings, ancient monuments and the familiar green rolling hills have also been obliterated. The coastline has been redrawn by rising seas. Cities have relocated to drier ground. They are islands in a desert of dust and rock. Over the centuries anything of use has been picked clean from the landscape.

Elidir is isolated., even in the context of a world where travel has become the privileged of a few powerful individuals. Elidir has been wiped from official maps because it underneath the mountain at its centre is an archive that preserves priceless remnants of western culture.

Isobel Twelvtrees and Mo Llewelyn are both fascinated by the past, each looking for answers to explain their current existence. Together they investigate a 400-year-old murder. But as they grow closer, their relationship threatens the beliefs and institutions that control them as well as those trying to protect deeper secrets.

More about Elidir here.
Link to Elidir on the UK Amazon store here and US store here. 

The conscious universe and blackhole recorders

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Two articles in The New Scientist grabbed my attention recently:
Is the universe conscious? It seems impossible until you do the maths
and
Black holes are hiding movies of the universe in their glowing rings

I have to say, I had looked to The New Scientist to be a grounding voice of sanity during the lockdown, and initially, I found the first article unsettling to my mental health, but now I’ve got used to it, and considered that I’m not the only person bothered by the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’, I’m feeling a bit better about it. 

The story described how people like Johannes Kleiner and Sean Tull are using mathematics to unravel the problem of consciousness. If you can’t access the New Scientist article because of the paywall, here’s Sean Tull explaining his work on YouTube (IIT which he mentions is Integrated Information Theory, an idea which has been kicking around for a while now).

The second story I found easier (existentially) to mentally process, perhaps illogically.

Following the success of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration’s producing the first direct image of a black hole, in 2019 and an eclectic group of scientists got together to try to understand what the image meant. They found that ‘the black hole’s gravity takes light from all directions, warps it and beams it to us as an infinitely recast image of the hole’s surroundings. The result is an epic movie of the history of the universe, as witnessed by a black hole, playing on a dramatically curved screen tens of billions of kilometres across.’ Well wow. Michael Johnson is one of the people behind this work. His details here.

Call for Stories: Near-Future Fictions 2019

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Virtual Futures’ Near-Future Fictions series returns in 2019 to continue its mission to reassert the significance of science fiction as a tool for criticising, interrogating, and navigating possible tomorrows.

Our aim is to promote stories that think critically about the sorts of technological developments that are just over horizon, and provide a unique perspective on contemporary concerns related to the perceived trajectory of scientific innovation.

Download the Call for Stories: https://vfutur.es/vffiction-callforstories

Submission Deadline: 02 December 2018

ANOTHER LOVING

Event Date: Tuesday 12 February 2019 RSVP: http://fb.com/events/2074361405947391/ Curators: Stephen Oram & Britta Schulte
Reproduction is the only constant in human history – from our beginnings as single cell organisms to the sexual practices we see today.
Many of our social behaviours have been built and altered by our attitudes towards reproduction and the methods of passing our genes on to the next generation. Technologies frequently manipulate this most basic of human instincts to produce new ways to sexually interact with one another.
We ask authors to consider how technological developments may influence the reproductive process, behaviour related to it, or the products of it. Authors may approach topics of courtship, contraceptives, conception, childbirth, or anything in between.

Reference Materials

AUTONOMOUS AGENTS

Event Date: Tuesday 12 March 2019 RSVP: http://fb.com/events/1149427488548242/ Curators: Stephen Oram & Vaughan Stanger
The consequences of automation are a key concern for a society that is exporting much of its decision making to algorithms, automation and artificial intelligence.
These decision-making entities operate on certain assumptions, biases and preconceptions about the world – many of which are inherited from those who programmed them. Despite this companies and institutions are introducing algorithmic thinking into the heart of their infrastructure at a rapid rate. They are allowing algorithmic cognition, whose processes of reasoning remain enigmatic, to manipulate and draw findings from the data it is fed.
From conflict to cosmetics, music to pharmaceuticals, construction to scientific research – and everything in between – we ask authors to intrigue us with stories that explore the potential implications of automating our lives. They may also consider who will be accountable for the results and how we should protect ourselves from accidental and deliberate use or abuse.

Reference Materials

BOUNDLESS BODIES

Event Date: Tuesday 9 April 2019 RSVP: https://fb.com/events/682455982111603/ Curators: Stephen Oram & Jule Owen
Bodies are often a product of the environment in which they are situated. Likewise, minds are partially shaped by both what they receive from the world around them, and the receptors that they use to process reality.
There is no guarantee that the Earth will be able to maintain its current ecosystems, or that the living beings of this world will remain on this planet. We are asking authors to consider how brains or bodies may adapt to different physical circumstances, and whether these changes will occur naturally or synthetically.
They may spin stories of manipulated creatures, novel forms of consciousness, distorted landscapes, or altered beings. They may also consider how lifestyles could be altered, minds may function, or bodies may be changed or even created.

Reference Materials

LASTING LABOURS

Event Date: Tuesday 14 May 2019 RSVP: http://fb.com/events/948697035336877/ Curators: Stephen Oram & Allen Ashley
Due to society’s advancement, changing economic systems, and shifts in what the population demands, the world of work will change seismically in the near future. Some jobs will become obsolete, others will change radically, and new roles will emerge. The changes, though, will not be limited to work alone. New industries may be born, new methods of exchange introduced, or entirely new economic systems developed.
Show us what goods we may be trading with, what currency we may be using, how industries may be created or altered, or what roles we may be employed in (if at all) by the time the future becomes the present. You may also wish to consider how, and in what, we will be educated and trained so as to succeed.

Reference Materials

Submission Instructions

Stories should be no longer than ten minutes reading time (around 1,000 words for stories). The author should be available to attend the event, preferably to read their work although alternative readers can be found.
Submissions should be emailed as attachments to: [email protected]
Please follow the guidelines:
    • Use the following email subject header template: Near-Futures Fiction, [Title of Work], [Name of Theme]
    • Include your name and title of your work in the document name using the following format: [Surname],[Firstname]_[TitleOfWork].doc (e.g. Doe,John_MyScienceFictionStory.doc)
    • Ensure attachments are editable file formats.
    • Please include a 50-word biography in the same document as the story.
  • Include any social media handles (Twitter etc.) and website if applicable.
Submissions for more than one theme are very welcome, but not multiple submissions for the same theme. Please send a separate email for each submission.
Successful authors will be notified in January 2019.

Submission Guidance

As additional guidance, those submitting stories should be aware of the following to ensure their submission stands the best chance of being accepted:
World Building – We are not searching for stories set on fanciful alien worlds or that feature technology so hypothetical it is almost unimaginable. Nor do we want post-apocalyptic landscapes, in which steam-punk bandits with laser guns are fighting mutated zombies. We are looking, instead, for stories of the near-future in which we can see our world, ourselves, and the potential implications or applications of technology currently being used, developed, or researched.
Avoid Cliché – Sci-fi is often the victim of the binary between utopia and dystopia – fiction in which all of our problems are fixed or created by a specific technology or technologies. In reality, our relationship with our technology never follows these simple categories – it is frequently a messier affair. Stories that seek to criticize, predict, or complicate realistically will be more successful than those intended to shock with apocalyptic visions or please with plastic paradises.
Inspiration – Each theme has been furnished with Virtual Futures content that is intended to provide inspiration and background information. Please be aware that it is not intended to provide a stringent direction for your story. Instead, these resources aim to provide you with both a brief introduction to some of the issues and areas, or debates your story may wish to tackle. There is no need to base, or even include this content in your stories – it is there as an aid, not an authority.

Press

Near-Future Fictions has been featured in Vector (from the British Science Fiction Association):

Video

Playlists of Near-Future Fictions stories can be found at: http://youtube.com/virtualfutures
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