Hi Alphas,
Welcome to Alphaday 5, Season XI, and what a busy day this is promising to be!
I’ll leave the seasonal greetings for a bit. This is our last Alphaday in 2014, and the festive season is looming, but I’m sure we’ve got plenty to share and things to discuss before we switch off from Alpha and enjoy the seasonal pleasures.
I’ll open the meeting with the list of items on the agenda, as follows:
This bulletin from me
- The Log, also from me this time
- The results of the ‘accident’ challenge from Olaf
- The collated entries for the ‘greetings cards’ challenge from Rosemary
- The brief for Challenge 5 from Suzanne
- The ongoing contributions to our showcasing with their independent schedule, also from Suzanne
- The (in-)famous Christmas Quiz prepared for us by Olaf which will keep us all scratching our heads, tearing our hair out and burning the turkey while we try to solve the impossible clues
Quite a menu, I’m sure you’ll agree!
Again, I’d like to thank all those who contributed to the treats listed above. Every Alphaday is a group effort; each one of us brings something to the table, and we all share and enjoy the fruits of so many combined talents.
I hope you sometimes check out our web site. It’s well worth a visit for up-to-date information about our group.
Thank you Rosemary, for keeping it going.
I’ll send out a separate progress report re. the book to celebrate the ten years of Alpha.
I’d like to welcome two new members to our group. They both responded to Olaf’s announcement that we might be able to accept another member, and I’m sure you’ll be delighted to welcome Leslie and Morgen to Alpha. They live somewhere in England and are dedicated writers. I look forward to their input to our activities.
I hope they’ll contribute to the next Log with some information about their work and their writing interests.
We don’t have a gender positive discrimination policy for our group. In fact we don’t have policies, full stop. We run on common sense.
However, if we did, we’d be in favour of introducing two more men into our group, and it might please the five who are already here. Am I right?
***
We’ve had some interesting discussions about science fiction recently. We were given useful recommendations for sci-fi reading (whether unanimously agreed upon or otherwise) from those of our members who’re knowledgeable about the genre.
Funnily enough there was an item in the news (UK) which, to my mind, brings the genre of sci-fi into the limelight once more.
Stephen Hawking issued a dire warning to mankind that developing AI (artificial intelligence) could threaten the human race because technology moves faster than evolution and the human brain wouldn’t be able to keep up with AI.
Grist to the mill for sci-fi writers?
Might this be a greater threat than climate change?
My reaction was, ‘So what’s new?’
But then I’ve always preferred literature to science, and that inevitably weakens my argument for some people.
Great writers have offered similar warnings before. There’s a famous poem by Goethe called ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’; there’s Shelley’s drama ‘Prometheus Unbound’; Byron’s Poem ‘Prometheus’; Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus’… to mention just a few.
Good old Prometheus, who stole the fire from the gods. The warnings that we shouldn’t meddle with matters too powerful for us humans were delivered in antiquity, more than two and a half millennia ago.
Christine