toeken's art has graced not only the cover of Penumbric but also many other fine magazines, and he's also done book covers, like that of Halldark Holidays. He's a friendly yet mysterious figure, and we wanted to know more. What else does he do? What are his influences? Inquiring minds want to know ...

However, toeken's own inquiring mind wanted to know more as well, and a condition of our interview was that he also get to interview me—that the curtain be pulled back and the managing editor be subject to the same sort of questioning. Sigh. So you get a bonus, dear reader: two interviews for the price of one!

Let us leap right into the tennis match, if you will, of our discussion ...

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Jeff Georgeson: You’ve studied EU literature and teaching. Did you go into teaching in the end?

toeken: I came out of University with a joint degree, in English and in Modern European Literature and Culture, and I realized afterwards I'd pretty much sabotaged myself when it came to trying to find work with that kind of qualification. It would have been great for research-based work. After a few years of lying to get work (basically omitting chunks of my cv), I needed to pay the rent and was getting to a crisis point with my fiance at the time, I took a job as a Librarian in a local school and went back to night school to retake my maths (I am f**king awful at maths even now) so I could take the following year taking my teaching degree. I wound up teaching English and Drama for about seven years before deciding to up sticks and sod off to Spain.

JG: What did you do when you moved to Spain (and why there)?

TOE: I had family there who were renovating an old cortijo. Met a local guy there who wanted to sell rural real estate, so while I was helping my brother out with the building work during the day, I studied html at night and set up a website for this guy. This guy turned out to be a real slippery character. Quite a greedy piece of work. That whole enterprise fell apart and I wound up eventually doing labouring, bar work, helping build houses and swimming pools before eventually taking on art commissions.

I see you graduated with a writing degree initially; what was it about that particular discipline that appealed to you?

JG: I’d been writing short stories for years before finally deciding that going to uni would be useful; after all, why would I need a degree to be a writer? But then, ultimately, it was helpful insofar as I made writerly friends and had both those and professors who would critique my work. It also provided a framework that required a certain amount of writing, and I became very good at proofreading, which became part of my actual “career” after uni (along with serial entrepreneurism lol).

I think all the scifi and fantasy I’d read as a child, along with creating all kinds of worlds and stories in my D&D campaigns, lead me to be interested in writing generally. I’ve never managed to make it “the” thing I do, though ... I was originally going to be an astrophysicist, then an AI programmer (which I have done). But somehow writing stories about it all ended up being more immediately interesting to me. Now, of course, I’m trying to do all these things.

TOE: What kind of science fiction and fantasy literature did you read as a child? Were there particular authors you gravitated more towards than others?

JG: I remember being attracted to Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series, Asimov's Foundation trilogy, Herbert's Dune series. I also remember Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber very fondly. I was very influenced by Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood; that is one of my favourite books ever.

I think the last reference I saw said you were currently living in Spain, but you’ve been to university in the UK and, I suspect, travelled other places as well. Do you do a lot of travelling?

TOE: I was born in the UK but I spent chunks of my childhood all over the place, most notably, for me, Tahoe in the US. That particular “chunk” of time there had a profound impact. That hasn't changed, the shifting around; on average I'll shuffle about every eighteen months or so. I travel light. What was that quote by Palahniuk? “The things you own wind up owning you?” They pretty much anchor you, for better or worse.

JG: What was the impact of Tahoe and that “chunk” of time on you?

TOE: As a kid relocating from the UK into that kind of environment it felt like I was visiting another planet. An extraordinary experience. A cherished one.

Can you talk a little about your background and current career in programming? And is there a link between the two areas you're currently engaged in pursuing?

JG: I started some very simple programming back in early secondary school—remembering that at the time schools were still teaching FORTRAN and PASCAL, and the Apple II Plus was the most advanced personal computer. When I took breaks from programming, I’d look out the window and gaze at the dinosaurs grazing out in the Mesozoic fields lol ...

From then on I was interested in both programming and writing stories (this was about the same time that I started playing D&D), especially interactive stories. There was no internet, so a friend and I tried to start an RPG play-by-mail company. Needless to say, that was even slower than a 56K modem would eventually be, and it failed. So I had my first failed company in secondary school. (Another problem was its name—“Dimensions in Fantasy”—which prompted a phone call from the police department to my mother, who had to explain that the company wasn’t what they thought it was lol ...)

For whatever reason, I ended up being in a pseudo-theatre-ish troupe after high school and then focused on writing rather than programming for many years. (I wish I’d continued to work on combining RPGs and programming ... maybe I’d have come up with one of the first online games. But, no.)

Around the time I finished my first round of uni and got a degree in writing, I started doing web and application design, which at the time one could just get certified by Microsoft and be well-credentialed. So I started two businesses in parallel: proofreading and programming. And I’ve been doing both ever since, in various permutations.

I guess the current link between the two is in publishing Penumbric and thinking/writing about the ethics of artificial intelligence, while trying to figure out in which direction to take my AI/games company Quantum Tiger Games. I develop “strong” AI systems that mimic human personalities, behavior, and memory. But is that right? Even in a game?

TOE: The AI systems that you develop to mimic human attributes—are they honed specifically to test or inform? Is there an element of “trap-feeling” to this?

JG: Both, really. In the sense that they're supposed to have proper human personalities (as measured using OCEAN), I’ve had to put them in all kinds of situations and test that the results are within a sort of proper “human” response—whatever that is lol. I used existing results from various human OCEAN test samples and compared these to the ways in which my AI characters developed over time. However, once I had done the testing, the characters created going forward could be used to inform us how people might react in certain situations, and could possibly be used in certain therapy situations (if one were using role-playing or RPGs as therapeutic tools, which I wrote a paper on as an undergrad).

I suppose all such AI development fits that “trap feeling” you ask about, for it would be difficult to so thoroughly test the AI characters’ reactions that one would know for sure the engine mimicked human reactions and development, especially given we don’t know real-world human personality development as well as all that. So you’d be using the systems in more experiments or in games or other situations without fully knowing whether it matches human personalities exactly (but again, can you ever know that, given our limited knowledge of humans themselves?).

When did you start “doing” art?

TOE: Been messing around with crayons and pencils for as long as I can recall. I fell in love with comic books early on, copying Kirby, Byrne and Simonson. It kind of shroomed from there.

JG: How did it “shroom”?

TOE: It shroomed into storyboarding super 8 films that I made with my family and friends, then model-making ... but always painting, drawing. I was kicked out of art college after three months (it wasn’t for me) but I did get to mess around in a darkroom for a few weeks during that time, which was fantastic.

How much time do you get to devote to writing outside of programming and publishing?

JG: Not enough; sometimes I magically construe some of my aches and pains (like my teeth, currently, still, for months) to the lack of writing. It’s not as though there isn’t literally time in the day I could spend on writing, but just that I’m not mentally “there” once I’ve done Penumbric-related stuff, proofreading, programming work, etc.

I managed to write one story last year, but then had a slew of ideas, so I think my brain is ready to write something, once I get round to it.

TOE: Can we expect any new fiction from yourself anytime soon?

JG: [laughs] I hope so. I need more discipline or mental space or both. However, I read so much excellent work as an editor, I’m not sure I’ll be confident enough to send out my own works without going over and over things.

Are you able to be a full-time artist?

TOE: I am, for periods of time; I get restless doing that one thing, being in one place.

JG: So do you do other types of work at various times, and then come back to art? Or is the change in scenery the bigger change?

TOE: Yeah, I’ll do plastering, roof fixes, swimming pool maintenance. Labouring's great—it’s like a day at the gym and you get paid for it, heh-heh.

Your magazine Penumbric has an extraordinary ethos and scope. How do you go about selecting pieces to publish? Is it driven by personal taste, modified by relevance, governed by commerce/audience appeal, etc?

JG: I don’t even think about commercial appeal—I don’t want to go down that road. The site doesn’t have advertising, we don’t sell advertising. I realize I’m unlikely to ever make any money that way, but I yearn for the days when you could look around on the Net and not be bombarded with pop-up ads, or try to read websites that look like a postage stamp’s worth of content nestled in amongst the specially tailored ads for Whatever You Just Looked At.

I look for work that is inclusive, that talks about the issues we face today and tomorrow (climate change, racism, voter suppression, equality, and more), but not every piece has to do that, and the story or poem or artwork needs to be good in and of itself. Ultimately, I guess it does get driven by personal taste, since I make the ultimate decisions, but I try to be open to being moved in new directions. I find it a compliment, actually, that you see it has having such an extraordinary scope. I feel like that means I’m succeeding in getting beyond my own limitations.

How do you choose your subject matter?

TOE: I get a few private commissions outside of the book and magazine work I’m lucky to get; stuff like murals, tattoos, ads for local events and Klimt homages. The rest of the stuff I do that’s not specifically tailored for another party comes from experimenting with materials, smashing up tiles, melting wax, dipping twigs in bleach and syrup and making marks on linen, sandpaper, singeing paper, canvas, bedsheets to get inspiration going. It’s f***ing fun. If you keep your wits about you, you'll get an “accident,” some “thing” you can work from that way almost every time. That “messing around” will then inform and shape other work later on. Hopefully for the better.

JG: Can you give me an example of this?

TOE: If you have the time to experiment with different materials when you’re putting work together and some of those experiments work—like painting on glass, bleaching a finished acrylic painting on a wooden panel, blowtorch glue on canvas or ceramic tiles, soak linen in vinegar and photograph it using the oldest mobile phone came you’ve got, then print that, scan it again and then paint or draw images on top of that—you can sometimes arrive at something odd or disconcerting. It’s a kind of rehearsed controlled accident a lot of the time that you can revisit. It’s play.

You’ve recently published the first compendium round up for Penumbric and it has an extraordinary lineup of talent involved ... what kind of audience are you hoping to attract now? What are your plans/aspirations/hopes for the project going forward, and do you have any other irons picking up a glow in the publishing fire?

JG: I hope that Penumbric continues to be a draw for such incredible talent (including yourself!), and I’m happy to try to help that talent reach as wide an audience as possible. I’m open to whatever directions, whatever ebbs and flows in the current come my way. I want the audience to continue to grow, I want the submissions to continue to flow in. I want to continue to learn new things, I guess; that’s ultimately what I’m best at, what I enjoy most, is being a student. Both the submissions I receive and the interviews I’m lucky enough to do are big parts of that. If I can apply what I’m learning to Penumbric and my other projects, I’ll be happy.

I hope to write more of my own work, and I want to re-edit a book of short stories I put out several years ago so that it’s more relevant to the now, rather than to the “20 years ago when I was an undergrad and thought I was all that and a bag of chips.” I want to publish some work on AI and the ethics thereof. And it would be nice to actually put out some of the videogames I've been creating, which of course requires finishing them.

TOE: Speaking of videogames, Mr G; I imagine you have quite a few favorites, are there any that have stood the test of time for you, that you still play?

JG: There are! I still love some of the Final Fantasy games, especially VIII and X—FFVIII was the first game I played after a long break from video games, and I did so because it was just so beautiful, with such an amazing story. Those two games vie for tops in my estimation. Lately I've been playing some of the Persona games, in particular 4 and 5, which I just started. They're really interesting and allow you to take so many different arcs through the overall storyline (I played Persona 4, like, four times); however, I do have some issues with the gameplay in terms of representation and choice.

What does the future hold for your work?

TOE: There are four main “pans” I've got bubbling on the stove right now and three of them involve illustrating comic books written by Phil Emery—dystopian science fiction Razor's Edge, a dark fantasy tale, Kormaleon, and a satirical alt~horror thing called Vampyre Noir. This guy has got an extraordinarily fecund imagination and a sly wit, and it’d be great if one of these projects found a home. The other “pan” has a graphic novel of my own simmering away. In the oven—if I may stretch the metaphor to snapping point—I’ve got some stuff slow-baking with a few publishers, most notably Muddy Paw Press and Bag of Bones Press. Now, in the microwave over here ... ah, f**k it, just kidding!

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toeken can be found on Twitter at @toeken6, and his works in many, many places. You can see his artwork at atoekeneffort.weebly.com.

Jeff Georgeson can be found hunkering down behind a computer screen working on Penumbric, or hunkering down behind a computer screen working on AI. There are no current pictures of him out in the wild, except for unverified blurry images that really could be anything.