The Glide Project
The Glide project spirals around a central theme of the mutual evolution of language, game, and consciousness, describing and modeling one possibility for an evolutionary writing system, Glide. |
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The Glide Website contains descriptions of the language, and interactive playspaces for exploring Glide language.
Technical requirements n
monitor display
set to thousands or millions of colors n monitor resolution set to 1024 x 768 n speakers turned on The Language and the Novel Twined like the double spiral
of the
As the plot unfolded, it became evident that the Glide language was intricately involved at every level of the story, and was, in a sense, both generating the story, a driving force in the evolution of both events and characters, and, itself, a character in the story. The novel, The Maze Game, re-tells a linguistic tale of origin, thus: The 27 glyphs of the Glide
language emerged from the bottom muck of a vast lily pond. The pollen of the giant blue water
lilies distilled into a powerful entheogen, the
Wine of the Lilies. The pollen was harvested by small-bodied people who could
scoop and glide from lily pad to lily pad smoothly and swiftly enough to
avoid being tipped into the water, tangled in the roots, and consumed by the
omnivorous lily. The Glides, breathing the raw pollen, cross-pollinated the
lily as they harvested. The lily, in appreciation of their efforts, gave them
a language, Glide, first as an extension of the gestures of harvesting and
pollination, later in written form. |
The Maze Game Author: Diana Reed Slattery Science Fiction/Fantasy Trade paperback Publication Date: February 8, 2003 Price: $10.95 Size: 5.5Ó X 8.5Ó 512 pages Publisher: Deep Listening Publications ISBN: 1889471100 Available from Deep Listening Publications To order: Phone: (845) 339-6858 Fax: (845) 338-5986
email: pof@deeplistening.org or
from Amazon.com Synopsis The
Maze Game tells the story of a cult of mortal Death Dancers who, for 2000
years, have kept the immortal Lifers riveted to a game of combat in a maze
leading inevitably to the spectacle of the Dance of Death. The maze itself is
made of the signs of a language, Glide, revealed to the Dancers by the
hallucinogenic Blue Lily. Now, the survival of the game itself is threatened.
Dancemaster Wallenda and
the four young Dancers of the Millennium Class battle Joreen,
the drug lord plotting to regain control of the game. Wallenda
is forced by Joreen to reveal the dark secrets of
the maze gameÕs origin, at the risk of destroying his studentsÕ commitment to
Dance. But the greatest force
undermining the game is love. As they train for and compete in the Millennium
Games, each Dancer confronts the shifting faces of love and idealism, and
comes to terms with the multiple meanings of the maze game, the Glide
language, and the Dance of Death. Excerpt from Prologue to The Maze Game ÒThe
future arrives, but often just a bit later than expected. Y2K passed with no more than a few
blips in the shopping system. You
let out your breath, let down your guard. Then, a mere 75 years into the third
millennium, you nearly succeeded in extinguishing yourselves at the moment of
triumph in the war against DeathÉ.Ó Download Prologue and
Chapter OneÉ Praise for The Maze Game ÒThis
book is like a recurring dreamÑhaunting, prophetic, a wish fulfilled. Diana
SlatteryÕs investigations of the future approach the limits of what canÕt be
said. She is a true visionary and The Maze GameÑinfused with love, grace,
crazy wisdom and humorÑis the work of a life time.Ó ÑLewis
Warsh, Editor, United Artists ÒThe
Maze Game is a remarkable achievement, envisioning a society in which
elaborate rituals have evolved around a visual language that can gestured but not spoken. Working at the crossroads of
electronic and print literature, Diana Slattery breaks new ground in thinking
about the multiple sensory modalities through which experience can be
transformed into narrative. A Ômust-readÕ for anyone interested in science fiction, electronic
literature, and the future of narrative.Ó ÑKatherine
Hayles, Author, How We Became Post-Human "To
say that Diana Reed Slattery's novel is required reading seems so inadequate
-- inadequate because this book is necessary in the same way that breathing
is. The Maze Game is as essential as air. It will, along with its companion Glide Collabyrinth, revolutionize the play and practice of
fiction." --Carolyn
Guertin, Curator, ÒImagine
being a goldfish swimming in your bowl, and suddenly five finger ends appear
beneath the surface of your universe. They waggle simultaneously. In that
instant, your goldfish brain sparks with the revelation that your world is a
world of appearances beneath the surface of a higher order, a projection of
some more intelligent dimension or deus ex machina. There
is a class of wonderful fictions that puts us in the goldfish bowl. In this
genre, the higher dimension is a cosmic game with formal rules and moves that
are beyond the ken of the characters who play them
out. Robert CooverÕs The Universal Baseball
Association, Inc., J. Henry WaughÕs Prop, NabokovÕs ADA, Italo Calvino, Raymond Roussel,
Umberto EcoÕs FoucaultÕs Pendulum, PynchonÕs
GravityÕs Rainbow, Primo LeviÕs The Periodic Table. They are
all ambitious, all meticulous, all boundary shattering, all inspired, all
epistemologically potent. All implicitly comment on the metaphysical order of
things and on the nature of authorship itself. Diana SlatteryÕs The Maze Game
joins the class, and may even catapult to its head. It is both passionate and constrained
and, like all the rest, a wonderfully peculiar work of genius.Ó ÑDavid
Porush, Author The Soft Machine:
Cybernetic Fictions and creator of Gameworld,
the AI narrative platform. |