"All art is ultimately about the creation of art," was the kind of reductive thinking that made me drop any pretense of continuing in academia after I finished my MFA. While I thought that was a marginally better stance than taken by the folks who insisted that all "texts" were fungible (which led to one student, when we were assigned to write a review of a short fiction collection published in the last year, instead wrote a scholarly paper covering his thesis chair's years-old volume of television criticism, which the professor accepted as equivalent), the whole discussion put me off literature for years and I scuttled back to programming, where at least when things didn't make sense there was some chance of fixing them.

Oddly enough, I happen to be reading this book right now (though my edition is titled "An Island Called Moreau"). I had just finished re-reading Wells and Silvia Moreno Garcia's "The Daughter of Doctor Moreau" (a re-telling of the story set in colonial Mexico), and thought I'd try Aldiss's version. I am still trying to decide if he wrote it as a satire or not.

When I was a co-op student employee at IBM in the late 80s, I was given a desk in what was otherwise a storage room piled with stuff that had been used and then set aside. One box contained a 5140 convertible laptop with one of each peripheral "slice" -- printer, modem, expansion ports -- and the full set of technical manuals.

I was allowed to take that beast home with me. I learned so much tinkering with that machine. Eventually, I sold the whole set at a ham fest and I have regretted it often.

Nice to see an appreciation of it, though I would never have looked at it as alligator-like.

Any details to share re. specs, operating system?

That was almost 40 years ago, so little I recall other than it was an 8088 variant in there, the peripheral bus was unique to that machine and the only documentation was in the tech manuals (as opposed to the hardware reference book I had for everything else), and I got lucky and the lab had requisitioned a Model 2, so the screen was nice and they'd gotten the full 640Kb RAM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_Convertible has all the details on that machine you could want.

I had one. Great little system. Built like a tank, and just as heavy.

Incredibly forward-thinking modular architecture. Keyboard, memory, drives, serial port, parallel port, even the screen could be replaced just by the turn of a lever or a push of a button.

Fantastic keyboard, even by today's laptops standards.

Ate batteries like M&Ms. I almost always kept it plugged in.

At the time, running it off the pair of 720k floppies was fine. I believe there was a hard drive option, but I never saw it.

Its biggest weakness was the screen. There were backlit and CRT options, which were better and you could just pop off and in.

The screen was grayscale CGA, but there was a TSR called SimCGA which would translate, so you could run EGA programs.

Yeah, when I say "nice" about the screen, it is all relative. Mine was nice compared to the original screen on the Model 1.

There are very few pieces of laptop/notebook hardware that I really enjoyed. The 5140 was one of them. I doubt I'd enjoy it now, but 40 years ago I found it just lovely.

That made me laugh when I read it, too.

Thanks for pointing this interview out. I've really enjoyed Mattie Lubchansky's comics. I first ran into her work on The Nib, which was as close to a successor to the zine World War 3 Illustrated as I've yet seen. I miss that site.

Only a single data point, but my father, who was Vietnam-era USMC in "special weapons," wore his wristwatches this way all his life. He never really said why other than that was what he learned in the Corps (he had never owned a watch prior to then). I always assumed it had some practical purpose in the field, but I'm not sure what that might have been.

This so accurately describes the last week of my life. Years of shrugs and "we will get to that when <moving goalpost>" when security concerns are brought up. Thankfully, we had done some of the work anyway and were teed up to do the rest quickly enough. Still sucked pretty hard.

Others have said it here, but I read this and thought, "Why not just prioritize spending time with them now, while they're still alive?"

I'm not convinced that the human condition would be improved by simulation of the deceased. I could be convinced that would be a project with unexpected consequences that aren't so good.

IIRC, that decision has been covered in one of the many documentaries covering Nuclear Waste Disposal Area 2 and the 9/13/1999 accident.

As a lifelong (congenital) anosmic, I often think about the practical consequences of lacking that sense. A whole therapeutic avenue cut off, if I'm thinking about this correctly, is a new one.