Falling from grace is sometimes a blessing. In my case the trek into consciousness began when I gave up the real world and entered the world of dreams. Externalising my dreams is what my life is about, but it took me some time to begin doing this.
When I left school in 1967 the hippies ruled and things were OK for a while but after a few years I entered commercial life and worked as a fashionista for 20 years.
By then I had progressed to making polyester dresses for old ladies which was not always profitable. And to add to it was the responsibility of providing employment for a staff of 150 people. My life was not my own.
The ’90’s saw the fall of apartheid and with it the bounds of reality broke completely as South Africa entered a new era. I was proud. At that time I dropped out of commerce completely and began writing a science fiction book called “The Return of the White Lady”, which deals with our responsibility towards the ‘elders’ of humanity. In case you hadn't noticed, the Bushmen, or SAN, peoples of Southern Africa, are slowly being crushed into non-existence, like aboriginal people across the world, and I wanted to honor them.
Some time after finishing the first book in the planned trilogy, I got my first big financial break. The DOT.com bubble was busy inflating, and due to my internet savvy I got gainfully employed playing DOOM and QUAKE for an internet games community hosted by M-Web, one of South Africa's biggest ISP's (internet service provider).
Toward the end of the millennium digital film making became possible and I began to experiment with this new medium. I was hands on and remain so.
Looking back from my vantage point in the 21st Century I can see that what I dreamed was not possible at the time, but technology has now given us bandwidth and compression far better than anything anyone had ever envisaged. Wasn’t it Bill Gates himself who said that 16 megabytes of RAM would be enough?
And this is how Cognition Factor became possible.
Me?
I currently live in an old three story Victorian home with my wife Carla, two of my four kids, and a dog called irony. I am working on two books and a follow up to Cognition Factor called ‘The making of a cyberpunk’.
August 9th 2009
