Rudy’s Blog

[Art � 1982 by Pedro Bell / Splank Works]

In September, 1992, I was in emotional turmoil. I’d just lost my job as a programmer at Autodesk, and our last child was leaving the nest for college. I spent a night at the Mondo 2000 house in Berkeley and experienced some disturbing hallucinations (see the end of Chapter 8 of The Hacker and the Ants).

The next day, drag-assing along Telgraph Avenue, trying to get it together, I came across a used copy of George Clinton’s 1982 record Computer Games. George’s picture on the back seemed to speak to me. He knew where I was at. He’d been there from the beginning. Everything was gonna be okay. I got into the record, especially, “Atomic Dog”. What a great song. I’d never realized all along that Zappa and the Stones were imitating the George Clinton funk style, I didn't know what real funk was.

[Photo credit: Marcy Guiragossian, Marcy G. Photography]

Last night we went to see George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars at the Catalyst Club in Santa Cruz. It was so positive, such a great bouncy endless boogie. George like a shaman, like a happy tot, coaxing the maximum roar from the band (18 people strong at one point) and the crowd.

[Photo credit: Marcy Guiragossian, Marcy G. Photography]

A guy came out in a diaper and a floppy red hat made of maybe four yards of Chinese silk. He looked serious and craftsmanlike nonetheless. For a second I thought he was Bootsy Collins, but I don't think that's right, I don't think Bootsy is on this tour.

Quotes from GC and the show: “Yank my doodle, it’s a dandy.” “Harder than steel, still gettin’ harder.” “We tested positive for the P-Funk. I’ll pee in anybody’s cup. May they cup runneth over.” “We are all trying to straighten out a serious situation with faulty equipment.” (Last two quotes from the “Hiphop” entry in Mondo User's Guide, which I edited with Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius, Harper Perennial 1992).

I’m thinking I can use George as a model for Lama Jawobul in the Mirrorbrane, who has Ond Lutter imprisoned in maybe a Klein Bottle, and who’ll pass Higgs RAM to Thuy Nguyen to bring back to turn Earth into a conscious quantum computer without having to actually change anything, like, no grinding things up into nants.

Oh, I bought George's latest album at the show:

“How Late Do U Have 2BB4UR Absent?”

On stage, George said the answer to this question is

“4:21.”

I finished my “Surf Tiki” painting today, Sunday painter that I am. I started work on this about two weeks ago, when I was reading up on Easter Island.

I’m about two-thirds done with Postsingular now. The book will probably have four long chapters and a short fifth chapter, and I finished Chapter 3 last week. This week I was cleaning up the long Chapters 2 and 3; I may try and get them published as standalone novelettes. Revising took longer than I expected.

When I proof my writing, I get disturbed about how many errors I find, and anxious about whether I can blend everything into the plot. Like I’m standing at a dam I’ve built and I’m seeing thirty holes spurting water at me.

Sometimes it seems like no matter how many times I’ve proof a passage, it ends up all marked up again on each go-through. As if the process were divergent rather than convergent.

Of course one reason this all feels like less fun than usual is that I’ve had a viral flu, I start out the day feeling okay, but by the afternoon I’m in a bubble. Disease = dis + ease. But I'm getting better.

To break things up I’m doing some of the proof-reading outside. On Wednesday, May 25, in fact I went to Santa Cruz and proof-read on Four Mile Beach, which was nice.

To relax I was also reading a novel by Kris Saknussemm called Zanesville which is pretty cool, good word play, Boschian imagery, kind of reminds me of how I wrote when I was younger, it’s science fiction but got marketed as a literary novel of the “magic realism” bent. SF is the genre that dare not speak it’s name. Hell no I’m not a Communist. I’m a Magic Republican. [Note to the terminally literal-minded: I'm joking.]

Saknussemm’s website is good too, by the way, he has this funny III Ching thing that is oddly similar to the three precogs in Phil Dick's story “Majority Report”, though maybe the Sak-man hasn't studied the SF canon that closely as yet, though it bears minute attention, yes. Welcome, Kris, come on in, plenty more room for weird SF writers!

Anyway now I got all my changes keyboarded in, and I did the patches to make it all fit. Whew.

Funny how something that seems so hard to change can really just come down to altering three or four sentences. It’s there’s a feature of the story that looms very large in my mind, like an obelisk, and when I go to take it out, I realize the obelisk was just three pencil lines.

And now that I’ve fixed these chapters I can turn to worrying about the chapters to come, which is painful in a different way.

[This man is not a science fiction writer; he's a Magic Republican.]

Writing is so much work. Every part of writing a novel is hard. The planning, the sitting down and creating, the revising. I guess the most fun part is when it seems to pour out and I’m having a good day. When I’m doing that, I stop worrying for a while, I forget myself and I’m happy and proud and even exalted and amazed to see what’s coming down or going up.

More precisely, that fun part is “the narcotic moment of creative bliss.” I just heard John Malkovich deliver that phrase, playing the role of an artist/art prof in Art School Confidential. That’s very right on; the operative word is “narcotic,” it’s definitely something you get addicted to over the years. Really I go to all this trouble writing a novel day after day month after month because (bring the band down behind me boys…)

“I’m waitin’ for the man, twenty-six dollar in my hand. He’s never early, he’s always late. First thing you learn is you always gotta wait,” quoth Lou Reed. Waiting for God(ot). Waiting for the Muse to *** on my ***. Waiting for the narcotic moment of creative bliss.

We saw this family playing great bluegrass in Santa Cruz, they had an ad for “Play It By Ear” software, maybe the guy wrote it. Nodded out on the narcotic moment of creative bliss.

On Thursday I was supposed to attend the Future's Technology Horizons Spring Exchange sponsored by IFTF, the Institute for the Future.

But I’m paralyzed by a flu virus; I walk around in a bubble all day with no relief in sight. In this altered state, I’ve been listening to a lot of Frank Zappa. I’ve become obsessed with his “Helsinki Concert” as recorded on Disc 1 of You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore, Vol. 2, particularly the last four minutes of “Pygmy Twylyte,” I creep around listening to it on my iPod, and I hear the guitar solos in my head all the time.

Be that as it may, here’s the forecast I would have shared at the Spring Exchange, had I been able to go there. And, hey, virtually I’m there right now, doing this. The following passage by the way, forms the opening to my latest fiction piece, “Visions of the Metanovel,” to appear in my collection Mad Professor (Thunder’s Mouth Press, late 2006 or early 2007).

The Singularity was brought on by some nanomachines known as orphids. The orphids used quantum computing and propelled themselves with electrostatic fields.

The self-reproducing orphids doubled their numbers every few minutes at first, fortunately they’d been designed to level out at a sustainable population of some sextillion orphids upon Earth’s surface. This meant there were one or two orphids affixed to every square millimeter of every object on the planet. Something like fifty thousand orphids blanketed, say, any given chair or any particular person’s body. The orphids were like ubiquitous smart lice, not that you could directly feel them, for an individual orphid was little more than a knotty long-chain molecule.

Thanks to the power of quantum computing, an individual orphid was roughly as smart as a talking dog, possessing a good understanding of natural language and a large amount of extra memory. Each orphid knew at all times its precise position and velocity, indeed the name “orphid” was a pun on the early 21st century technology of RFID or “Radio Frequency Identification” chips. Rather than radio waves, orphids used quantum entanglement to network themselves into their world-spanning orphidnet.

The accommodating orphids set up a human-orphidnet interface via gentle electromagnetic fields that probed though the scalps of their hosts. Two big wins: by accessing the positional meshes of the orphids, people could now effectively see anything anywhere; and by accessing the orphids’ instantaneous velocities, people could hear the sounds at any location as well. Earth’s ongoing physical reality could be as readily linked and searched as the Internet.

Like eddies in a flowing steam, artificially intelligent agents emerged within the orphidnet. In an ongoing upward cascade, still higher-level agents emerged from swarms of the lower-level ones. By and large, the agents were human-friendly; people spoke of them as beezies.

By interfacing with beezies, a person could parcel out intellectual tasks and store vast amounts of information within the extra memory space that the orphids bore. Those who did this experienced a vast effective increase in intelligence. They called themselves kiqqies, short for kilo-IQ.

New and enhanced forms of art arose among the kiqqies, among these was the multimedia metanovel.

In considering the metanovel, think of how Northwest Native American art changed when the European traders introduced steel axes. Until then, the Native American totems had been hand-held items, carved of black stone. But once the tribes had axes, they set to work making totems from whole trees. Of course with the axe came alcohol and smallpox; the era of totem poles would prove to be pitifully short.

There were also some dangers associated with the orphidnet. The overarching highest-level-of-them-all agent at the apex of the virtual world was known as the Big Pig. The Big Pig was an outrageously rich and intricate virtual mind stuffed with beautiful insights woven into ideas that linked into unifying concepts that puzzle-pieced themselves into powerful systems that were in turn aspects of a cosmic metatheory — aha! Hooking into the billion-snouted billion-nippled Big Pig could make a kiqqie feel like a genius. The down side was that kiqqies were unable to remember or implement insights obtained from a Big Pig session. The more fortunate kiqqies were able to limit their Big Pig usage in the same way that earlier people might have limited their use of powerful psychoactive drugs.

If the Big Pig was like alcohol, the analogy to smallpox was the threat of runaway, planet-eating nanomachines called nants — but I won’t get into the nants here…

Last week I was talking about how great I felt, but then I got the flu, and I’ve been sluggish, in a bubble, leafy. Still writing anyway.

Last month, I was working on variations on the idea of a metanovel, that is, the idea of much-larger-data-base work of fiction that authors might write after a computational singularity brings vastly enhanced memory and crunch to us all. I posted a series of three or four Borgesian or Lemesque descriptions of imaginary metanovels on the blog — if you start at the indicated link and read down from there you’ll find them.

And I recall some reader commented that these seemed “irrelevant,” which annoyed me, but now as I revise my nearly completed Postsingular Chapter Three: “Thuy’s Metanovel,” I realize that those long descriptions do in fact stop the narrative dead, and I’m drastically compressing them. By way of mitigating this loss to society, I collaged the cuts into a Borgesian story called “Visions of the Metanovel” and I’ll drop that into my new collection of stories.

By the way I’m changing my story collection's title from Freestyle SF to Mad Professor. Wiser not to put SF in the title and Freestyle, well, that was 20 years ago, dude…

The main thing I’m working on this week is finishing Postsingular Chapter 3: “Thuy’s Metanovel”. Here’s today’s version of the last scene.

“Nanomachine goo!” gasped Jayjay, his echoing voice seeming to come from every side. “The Ark of the Nants was been booby-trapped! The stuff’s all over me! Oh, it tingles, it stings! Get back, Thuy! And don’t forget that —” Jayjay gurgled and fell silent. In the local orphidnet, Thuy could see that her lover was fully enveloped by the rippling nanoslime. He twitched, spasmed, and dropped motionless to the stone floor.

Thuy cowered at the far end of the cave, remembering the rainbow sheen on Grandmaster Green Flash’s skin — like the surface of a rancid slice of ham. Jayjay lay mute and still. Thuy hated herself for being afraid to approach him. Her heart skipped a terrible beat and seemed to explode. And in that instant of extreme grief and despair, she finished creating Wheenk

The pieces of the metanovel came together like a time-reversed nuclear explosion. Today’s adventures at the fab, her love for Jayjay, her worries about the nants, the Easter Island shepherd boy who’d given her a cone shell, her mother’s face the day Thuy had graduated from college, her father’s bare feet when he tended his tomato plants, the dance Thuy had done down the rainy street one night while exulting over her metanovel — everything fitting, everything in place, Wheenk as heavy and whole as a sphere of plutonium. Critical mass. Thuy pulsed the Wheenk database to the Big Pig, terrified that her Great Work might be lost. The Pig understood; kindly she posted Wheenk to the global orphidnet.

Pain had produced artistic transcendence.

And now, having completed Wheenk, Thuy finally remembered Chu’s Knot. There was one final twist and wrap she’d been unable to visualize, but now she had the knack; it was a bit like time Kittie had showed her how to knit a Mobius strip. The Knot was perfectly clear in Thuy’s mind, hanging there in three-dimensional glory, revolving at the touch of her will.

Meanwhile the Pig was tending to a cloud of orphids surrounding the nant farm. And a second cloud of orphids was attacking the vile goo that enveloped Jayjay’s inert form. Thuy hadn’t even thought about him for nearly a minute. She was such a terrible, self-centered person.

“I could go to the Mirrorbrane now,” Thuy told the Big Pig. “But what’s the use? I don’t want to live without Jayjay.”

A streamer of the goo pushed across the cave, reaching for Thuy. Nimbly she moved out of its reach.

“You don’t look quite ready to die,” said the Big Pig, sounding amused. “Anyway, Jayjay’s not dead. He’ll be fine once the orphids clean that junk off him. But I’m keeping him here to make sure you return. Go on with you now. I’m open to whatever you learn. But, remember, I don’t want to wait past tomorrow.”

Thuy focused on Chu’s Knot. Nothing happened. Remembering how Ond and Jil had done it, she let go of her internal voice and interrupted her eternal writerly narration of her personal life story. She saw the spaces between her thoughts. She saw the spaces between the worlds.

She was off.

I was up at Lucasfilm in the Presidio in San Francisco on Thursday, May 18, 2006, to give a talk on “Gnarly Computation.” Right outside the front door, they have a nice fountain with Yoda on top. I’ve always had mixed feelings about Yoda. I guess mainly I love him. He reminds me of D. T. Suzuki, the Zen sage.

The building is all decked out in California Craftsman style, very impressive. Mine host Darth Vader was there to greet me.

Lucasfilm is an umbrella organization which owns Industrial Light and Magic(IL+M), a special effects group, plus LucasArts, a game company. Adn of course Lucasfilm handles George's projects like Star Wars and Indiana Jones. The Industrial Light and Magic office used to be in San Rafael, and they had it hidden in a complex of buildings with the entrance door marked as “Kerner Optical.” The reason was that now and then demented fans showed up looking for Yoda and Darth. I think once one of them even got run over by a car. “Hey, I though that was a hover car, so I could lie down under it!” So it seemed better to have the company incognito. You can find them easily now, but they do have good security, and Yoda's right outside on the fountain anyway, so no prob.

I was up at the old IL+M in 1993, to write a Jurassic Park inspired article for Wired magazine. I think the model shop is still in San Rafael; it’s all electronic down at the Presidio now. This funky thing was wrapped in rubber and used as a dinosaur!

There’s a bunch of old models kicking around the building; this one’s from Ghost Busters. In a way, it’s sad that they don’t make so many physical models anymore.

I gave my talk in a big auditorium. A good crowd showed up, maybe fifty or sixty people.

Tina Mills, the Manager of Image Archives at Lucasfilm took some nice pictures of me.

Click on the icon above to get to a podcast of the talk on Feedburner, and here is a PDF of the slides of my PowerPoint. It’s quite similar to the talk I gave at Fresno State a few weeks back, though the questions at the end are different, and during the talk I have some remarks on using these ideas for game and effects design.

After the talk, I went and had lunch with Kate Shaw who organizes the talks there, also John Olmstead, the IL+M engineer who had the idea of inviting me, and Brian Baird, an engineer in LucasArts working on some cool projects like self-modifying games that generate their own action scenarios.

John told me they'd been rendering water for the new Poseidon movie, and they'd needed to use all 5,000 processors on the grounds at once, and even those were lagging. Water is hard. Nature is way ahead of the beige boxes.

This is Brian and John with the Golden Gate bridge visible out the cafeteria window. By the way, I heard that LucasArts wants to double their size, so if you’re looking for a job in the game industry, this seems like a good place to check out.

Tina took a nice picture of me outside. I just got some new glasses last week.

After I was done, I walked around the grounds a little. Here’s a statue of Eadweard Muybridge, the guy who took those zoopraxiscope multiple frame pictures of people moving around. (Have you noticed that, more and more often, the best link for a topic is in the Wikipedia? Way to go Wikkers.) That’s the Palace of Fine Arts / Exploratorium in the background. When he was born, his name was Edward, but he adopted the Eadweard spelling just for kicks. I used that name in Frek and the Elixir.

I said farewell to R2D2 and C-3PO and went home. Oh, I should mention that I saw some nice demos up in the LucasArts labs. They're making, like, wood or marble out of virtual particles, so every time you smash up a crate it smashes differently. They had a really cool looking giant rubber Star Wars plant from some obscure planet I forget. This engineer kept hurling virtual R2D2's at the plant and it shook so sexy and gnarly and chaotic. Seek the Gnarl!

I feel excited about my Tor novel in progress Postsingular, and about the stories I’ve been writing with Paul DiFilippo, Terry Bisson, and Marc Laidlaw. I’m working at white heat. I’m happy when I wake up and there’s no plans or appointments, and I know I’m free to write all day.

I love to lie on my camping mat in the backyard going over my latest printouts of chapter, outline, and/or story, marking them up. And then I go inside and edit in the changes on my computer. I print that out, make a sandwich and eat at the table in the back yard, reading over the latest. Maybe later I take the printouts and the laptop the coffee shop. Everything at my own pace.

The other day I got such a big hunk done on Postsingular Chapter 3: “Thuy’s Metanovel,” that it’s been like a big teetering stack of plates to carry on my head as I repeatedly revise it. Lots of changes are propagating back into the earlier material as well, roots growing backwards in time from these new seeds, reverse causation is perfectly routine when you’re growing a novel.

I’m hoping today to tear off another big raw chunk of flesh from the muse, or, put differently, quarry a great rough slab of Parmenidean marble.

I was thinking yesterday, writing on my camping mat, that it was one of the happiest times I’ve ever had. It’s sunny and peaceful this week, no rain, no noisy construction projects on the block, the grass lovely and still a springy green. I’m healthy, calm, and the writing’s going so well. I’m lucky, and even if I lose it all today, I had yesterday. Thank you, God/Cosmos.

I know from experience that my state of mind won’t necessarily stay good. When I work at high intensity, I sometimes go over the edge and get frantic and uptight. When that happens I think of a harpsichord or piano where someone’s tightened the strings too much and the frame is creaking and about to snap. Highly strung indeed. Or maybe today I won’t be able to get it together to write at all, days like that, nothing is be quite right, the grass too wet to lie on, too much noise outside, the chair uncomfortable, the so-wonderful-yesterday material somehow tedious-today, you never know what the day’s emotional weather will bring. And posting a bragging entry like this probably a good way to bring on bad juju…

One thing that’s made this chapter particularly fun and heavy for me is that the character Thuy is a novelist writing about her own life (though I call her a “metanovelist”), so in some sense I’m writing about the process of writing this particular chapter, although I think I’m doing it in a sufficiently funky and tricky way that it’s neither self-aggrandizing nor lifelessly schematic — those being the Scylla and Charybdis risks of dabbling with metafictional self-reference. Stylistically, I’m doing risky things I don’t often dare try, like including Borgesian storylets, present-tense video sequences, and ranting Dada/surreal prose-poetry. (Cautionary note: My agent Susan Protter says it's a danger sign when an author thinks their work is going really well, she says it means the material is getting out of control. Hopefully I can keep it readable and together. Devo: “When a problem comes along: We must whip it!”)

I’m also excited about how deep into the SF I’m getting, and how cutting-edge the book feels, (partly because I'm following the trail that Charles Stross blazed in Accelerando). I feel like I’m way out on the edge, outdoing myself. Postsingular indeed. This week I went to a dinner for the guests at a “Singularity Summit,” at Stanford and felt kind of lofty towards some of the shopworn ideas the Summit was kicking around. I mean this stuff isn’t a casual discussion topic for me, it’s my professional work, all day long every day, and has been so for decades. This said, I had fascinating conversations with Cory Doctorow and Douglas Hofstadter. Doug has a very intriguing-sounding new book listed for July, 2006, but in fact delayed till maybe Febraury, 2007, I Am A Strange Loop.

The indefatigable Ray Kurzweil helped fund the Singularity Summit as part of his stunningly well-orchestrated promotional campaign for his much-cited The Singularity Is Near — which I personally find shallow, tendentious and unreadable, although what you're hearing could just be my envy over his big sales compared to my contemporaneous Lifebox tome and, full disclosure, I haven’t actually read much of his book, I just skim it and can never find even a whole page that I can plow through, I find it indigestible as a sand sandwich, even though the topics treated are close to my heart.

One of the main burdens of Kurzweil’s arguments in his earlier book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough To Live Forever is said to be that if you stretch out your life long enough with vitamins you can survive until when, “real soon now” as the AI people always say, you can (a) put INJECTABLE OR SNORTABLE NANOMACHINES into your bod and they’ll repair you for another lifetime’s worth of years, or(b) you’ll be able to extract your software (via helpful brain-eating robots?) and upload it to the GLOBAL COMPUTER or maybe (c) copy your mental software onto a ROBOT BODY. I feel like I’ve heard this somewhere before … ah yes, it was in Software, a “crazy” novel I wrote in 1980. And you can find my more detailed discussion of the idea in my The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul,, “Section 4.6: The Mind Recipe,” get the book or check p. 274 of the online Lifebox sample.

Kurzweil seems all sincere about these topics, evincing an excessive or even pathological fear of death, it’s like cryonics all over again. My advice to Ray: “Dude — sounds like you forgot to take acid in the 1970s. You never got the word that All Is One and that Death Doesn’t Matter. But it’s not too late! Drop a tab now, see God and be mellow for the rest of your life … without having to snarf down those two hundred nasty-tasting vitamin pills a day! My bet is that you’ll live longer if you let go of your fear.”

Actually, having indulged my venom in these somewhat sour three last paragraphs, it occurs to me that maybe I'm the one who needs to let go — of my envy and my resentments. There's enough room for all of us, Rudy. You don't have to be the only author. And you've gotten plenty of rewards. And there's always fresh breaks to surf.

Reset. Trying now to get back to those good vibes I came into this entry with. As I’m working as a side-project on a surfing SF story with Marc Laidlaw, I'm thinking of surfing analogies to writing. Now that I’m blessedly retired from my day job, I’m like a guy who does nothing but surf every day. I feel that my skill is rising because of the constant practice. I’m out there in it all the time. I live in a tent on the beach. Maybe I’ll drop dead tomorrow. So what? I’ve lived. And I was lucky. I got to be a writer.

Oh, one last thing, my short story “Chu and the Nants” is in the June, 2006, issue of Asimov's SF, and they've actually put part of the Chu story online for now. As it happens, this story also serves as the opener of the first chapter of Postsingular, so if you check it out, you'll have an idea of what I'm actually writing about these days — that is, when I am writing, as opposed to avoiding writing by working on my blog…