Those who crave fame don’t truly appreciate anonymity. And those who have fame try to hide from it. Most of those who manage to achieve fame guard their privacy with a zeal approaching fanatical. Many of the famous yearn for anonymity. And yet we live in a world that prizes celebrity; everyone seems to want their 15 minutes of attention.
My grandmother, who was anything but famous, survived the Russian Revolution, World War I, World War II, Stalin, endless depressions and recessions, before she died in peace in her bed in California. Regardless of how many times we asked for details of her life story, she always insisted that walls have ears and what we don’t know can’t hurt us. She was paranoid of the powerful to the very end. She had learned the hard way that fortunes, health, and family can be take away on the whim of those with more. She learned that there was safety in anonymity.
For artists and writers having a wide audience is a commercial requirement if they want their work to be bought. Agents and publishers want to work with those with an established market prior to making an investment in an artist. They want proof of viability. But many artists aren’t good at sales and most suck at marketing themselves. It’s a problem.
Some people shout their opinions to anyone who will listen. But I can’t help but notice that lately there are more and more people in my orbit that are newly guarded about expressing political beliefs. There’s a sense that raising one’s head above the trenches can get it shot off.
I’m reading a collection of short stories, “The Best of The Best: 20 Years if the Year’s Best Science Fiction” edited by Garder Dozois, that includes the story “Trinity” by Nancy Kress. The story is about a scientific search for God — finding proof beyond doubt that a higher being exists. There’s a convoluted story line about twins and clones and medical experiments, etc. But the conclusion — we are but an unintended consequence of some action of a higher being who wasn’t even aware of our existence until the moment we forced our presence into its consciousness — is all about the fear that comes when our anonymity is punctured and we are noticed by the all-powerful for the first time. What comes next? How much of our freedom is lost when we are on the radar of those who have power over our lives? My grandmother spent her life being paranoid about this. The walls have ears. But so many of us are continuously fighting for attention, for the world to take notice of us. Sometimes that can go poorly.
The idea of unknowable consciousness is an intriguing subject of fiction. I’ve certainly dabbled with such storyline more than once. And as part of this month’s indie authors giveaway, I’ve included “Good Girl”. It’s a crime mystery about Artificial Intelligence and failure to communicate with such “other”. I hope you enjoy it or some other work in this collection! Happy reading!
Note about the featured image. My story, Good Girl, is about breakdown on communication between AI and her makers. So I asked an AI to generate an image with this prompt: “can you make an image of an all powerful being noticing a human for the first time”. I thought it was interesting that the “all powerful being” was very humanoid…