Have you ever stared in a mirror for a few hours? Try it: Watch as your nose somehow shifts placement on your face, how your eyebrows lose symmetry, how quickly you fail to recognize yourself. Facial dysmorphia would come to anyone tasked with considering their own reflection for too long. It's a similar experience when you promote a book. For the past few weeks, I've been touring Canada and the U.S. promoting my latest book, Sucker Punch.

Google's business platform services just became a lot more conversational. Google Cloud announced yesterday a new AI-powered service product, Bot-in-a-Box, which is a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Business Messages feature designed to assist enterprises in initiating conversations with customers. GCP Business Messages is a conversational messaging service designed to enable organizations to connect with people to answer questions that come through Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, or their own business channels. Bot-in-a-Box uses natural-language understanding and Google's Dialogflow software to create chatbots that can understand and respond to customer questions without developers needing to write code. Using machine learning to understand a customer's request, Bot-in-a-Box features Custom Intents, which finds the information a customer needs without human intervention.

During a book tour stop in Portland, Oregon earlier this year, author Jeff VanderMeer (Borne, the Southern Reach Trilogy) met up with two speculative-fiction contemporaries: Omar El Akkad and Lidia Yuknavitch. Like VanderMeer, both had recently published dystopian-ish novels set against a backdrop of climate change. El Akkad's American War chronicles a fossil-fuel civil war in the U.S.; in Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan, a new Joan of Arc for a global-warming era battles fascist forces. Given the obvious real-world resonances of the three books (the admittedly more fantastical Borne tackles out-of-control capitalism via a futuristic desert city terrorized by a giant flying psychotic bear), VanderMeer organized a three-way conversation to examine what he calls their "parallel evolution"--as well as dicuss how to take on a troubling present reality in an meaningful and productive way. They feel like boundaries that mean less and less, attempts at containment or to say "this couldn't possibly happen to anyone reading this now."