Rudy’s Blog

Whew! I'm done with Issue #1 of my new webzine, Flurb at www.flurb.net.

I just put in late-arriving contributions. A funny, strange short story by Michael Blumlein, an astounding postsingularity novelette by Cory Doctorow, and a fine piece of Disneyesque surrealism by Kris Saknussem.

We also have a fantasy-SF hybrid by Di Filippo and me, a Lovecraftian horror tale by Marc Laidlaw, a haunting fractal fantasy by Richard Kadrey, a shockingly un-PC meditation on terrorism by John Shirley, and a Zen-pure dirty story Terry Bisson.

For now I'm going to suggest using the comment section of today's entry as the official spot for posting comments on Flurb #1. So…

Post Flurb Comments Here! Note that you cannot include a full, clickable web address in a comment.

At the con, I got some links. Here’s a ”Poulpe Pulps” site devoted to pulp magazine covers featuring cephalapods.

Cory Doctorow mentioned some of his stories that are online, including his two collaborations with Charles Stross, ”Jury Service,” and ”Appeals Court”. The boys plan a third so they can put them together into a fix-up novel called maybe Rapture of the Nerds

Cory was on a panel about blogging. Good remarks: blogging isn’t necessarily a waste of time for a writer as it often happens that the things in your blog serve as research for your book. In my case, I sometimes even get useful feedback from my blog readers about which ideas seem to work, in this respect blogging becomes like beta testing. And of course there’s the self-promotional aspect of it. A final thought is that a writer never really knows which of his or her work is going to be valued in the future. Maybe your scrappy, throw-away blog writings are what the Futurians will like the best. The blog has a certain breezy and telegraphic style stemming from the fact that it’s done as rapidly as possible and with very few revisions.

Shout out: I met some younger writers, Daryl Gregory, Andy Tisbert, Jack Mangan, Cody Goodfellow, and Chris Roberson.

[A fan with a funny T-shirt he designed.]

I was on a language panel with Harry Harrison, and he made an interesting suggestion, that is, if you’re writing about a planet and need lots of consistenly alien-sounding names, get, like, a Turkish dictionary and use words from there. And for the next planet use a Romanian dictionary, like that.

There’s a good-paying new SF market, Jim Baen’s Universe, although to read it you need to pay and subscribe. Jim Baen just died last month. He was my very first SF editor, for White Light at Ace, and then Susan Allison took over from him. He’ll be missed.

Books I want to read next. David Marusek, Counting Heads, and Geoff Ryman, Air. Ryman also has a strange novel online, 253, so named because There are seven carriages on a Bakerloo Line train, each with 36 seats. A train in which every passenger has a seat will carry 252 people. With the driver, that makes 253. The novel has 253 pages, with 253 words on each page. And on the web you read it by clicking on the indivdual passengers in an onscreen map. The passenger descriptions have links to each other. Wild.

Hey, my Tor Books editor, David Hartwell, won the Hugo for best editor! Way to go, Dave! You deserve it. See pix on Kathryn Cramer's blog.

So I was in Anaheim for the science fiction World Convention. Anaheim is so 21st Century, insanely large buildings, everything so clean. A land of giant machines. You half-expect the buildings to slide around on rails. It’s reassuring after all to have an SF movie star for our governor. People just live in Southern California as if it’s their lives. Always a surprise when you visit somewhere and it's actual people there.

The con was celebrating an anniversary of Star Trek as well. This display of vintage Trek uniforms looks just like a display I saw in the Prada store in SoHo a few years ago. Prada IS Star Trek. The con exhibit room was giant, cold, a little alienating. Made me miss my back yard, like it was on another time or planet.

A number of the guys were wearing skirts. SF fans are a strange lot of people. They like cons as they’re then unfettered by ordinary life. I have a theory that the fans have huge sexual orgies, that they get it on much more than the pros do. A mound of them naked on top of a Star Trek figure, like the South African “erdmaennnchen” or “meerkats” who live in great heaps.

Periodically I went outside to get some sunshine and air. Generally the fans and pros (that is writers and editors) at a con don’t mix all that much. I get a little depressed and worried at cons. Is this really my audience? Well, actually most of them don’t in fact read my books. But indeed I do have some readers at the con.

We pros make appearances on panels and sign books and “get to know the fans” a bit, but mainly I for one am eager to talk to other writers. It’s just a lonely job, so it’s good to share stories. The exhibitors are another subspecies; this guy, Fred Barton, makes and sells copies of famous robots, although he didn’t make the Jessica Rabbit, who’s from Disney.

This is Gigantor. I love that name. Does Disney sell “anatomically correct” versions of Jessica Rabbit? It’s the 50th anniversary of Disneyland, right next door to the hotel. Walt’s ghosts hovers above the scene, palpable. His frozen body somewhere nearby. Strange place.

I got the feeling a lot of the fans were lonely people, these ones doing things in groups were the happy ones. Fireworks every night over the park, visible from the better rooms in the hotel. It was relaxing, when the con got to be too much, to go outside and see normal people who were in the hotel just to see Disneyland, excitedly getting on the shuttle bus.

A high point of the con is the Masquerade, when people appear in home made costumes. This crew was cute, they were illustrating characters from some TV cartoon show.

And this guy was I think a character called Hell Boy. They’d go on stage in the arena and then pose behind the scenes where a crowd of bloggy paparazzes like me waited.

These women were hot. They dressed this way every day. That’s Barbarella on the right, and the woman on the left is modeling a character from Mars Attacks.

Zombie Schoolboy with a pen in his head. Rode in the elevator with him and his friends, all very cheerful. I met some younger writers who liked my work, that felt good. And a few had already heard of FLURB. It was good, but basically I’m glad to be home, back to writing for imaginary readers.

I should mention that a few stars were in attendance as well. I’m used to meeting SF writers, what got me excited was meeting no less a figure than Craig of Craig’s List. He and I talked about Walt a bit. It felt almost like being in Rome, talking about the Pope.

I’m going down to LA, well, to Anaheim, for the The 64th World Science Fiction Convention, a.k.a. the (L.A. Con IV Worldcon). I’ll be arriving Thursday evening and leaving Saturday evening. While I’m there, I’m doing two panels, an autograph session and a reading. Here’s my schedule. Hope to see some of you guys there.

[Today's first four photos are from Elko, Nevada. A place actually called "Dancing and Diddling"? Almost too good to be true. Not to mention Telescope Lanes. Why don't we all live in Elko?]

Item 1: Fri 8/25 4:00 PM, 60-90 minutes. Title: ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE FUTURE. Participants: Steven Barnes(M), David Nordley, Rudy Rucker, Lisa Snellings-Clark. Precis: What will it be like for us, as people, to live in the future?

Item 2: Fri 8/25 5:30 PM, 60-90 minutes. Title: CREATING LANGUAGE. Participants: Lorien Gray(M), Harry Harrison, Rudy Rucker, Lawrence Schoen, Vernor Vinge. Precis: How does a writer create a realistic, usable language for aliens and future people?

Item 3: Sat 8/26 12 Noon, 60 minutes. Title: AUTOGRAPHING: RUDY RUCKER

Item 4: Sat 8/26 2:00 PM, 60 minutes. Title: READING: RUDY RUCKER

[Jackrabbit is one of a large warren on a gravel road leading from Route 93 to Contact, Nevadey, which a 100% extraterrestrial town just south of the Idaho border.]

Just for the hell of it, I’ve started a webzine of astonishing tales.

Flurb at www.flurb.net.

Issue # 1 has new stories by Rudy Rucker & Paul Di Filippo, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, and John Shirley, with possibly a couple more to come.

Check it out!

I had a dream where I went to the future and met a guy who wants to be an SF writer. He describes a story idea: a guy writes an SF story that turns out to be about an actual person in the future. And in the dream, I’m kind of dizzy, sorting that out. Am I the guy in his story? Or is he the guy in my story?

Tourists waiting to see Old Faithful go off. We ate hamburgers in Great Falls, Montana. I hadn’t had a burger in maybe seven years. I felt like I was taking some unknown drug. Fearful of the coming effects.

Mostly Yellowstone was crowded, but the first night we were there at 8 PM and had the geysers to ourselves. Fellini-esque, another world.

Scenes like you see in the old school landscape paintings. Lower Yosemite Falls.

Sweet abandoned Montana farms.

The pulsing bifurcating waterfall above Avalanche Lake resembles the graph of the logistic map. If a cascade was intelligent, would it move the rocks around more?

Note that with lazy eight, as planned for Postsingular all these objects and processes can “see.” If water was intelligent, would floods be worse? Would leaves wave more extravagantly? Smart fires might be harder to control, more prone to leaping across a gap to the next dry branch. But fire lacks effectors, no? A tree has slow effectors in its growth. And possibly it can vasodilate to affect the flexibility of its branches. But fire I think is passive.

The parks and the West in general are full of motorcyclists.

At Yellowstone outside a park grocery I overhear a careworn, weathered biker talking to a woman just off her shift. Such a hard life this man must have had, he looks almost like a bum. She’s Roxanne, he’s Wild Bill, “though you might better call me Mild Bill.” He pulls a two inch cigar stub out of his layers of clothes and chews it ready to light up. “Didn’t mean to scare you off. Just kidding.” He gets on his bike and circles around the parking lot before leaving, wobbly and alone.

We visit some boiling mud pots at Yellowstone. Plorp. The bubbles throw of small gobbets of hot mud, the gobbet occasionally forming a tiny bubble of its own. The gobbet could be our universe. Yes, this is how the world arose.

We listened to the Allman Brothers song “Ramblin’ Man” a lot. I love the part at the end when the one guitarist repeats the same little ostinato figure ten twenty thirty times — he can’t stop — and the other guitarist plays a single long note soaring out of that, rising up, dying down.

I’ve never used the name “Robert” in a book. The micro-orgainisms in geyser run-off distribute themselves by temperature. The high-hot-loving guys plate up iron on themselves and get red. The medium-hot-loving guys have chlorplasts and are green.

Driving down a 13 mile dirt road to a campground in Lewis and Clark forest. Car covered with dust. Two hand prints emerged on the side. “The Miracle of the Hands.” An angel pushed on the car to keep us from going over the edge.

Hiking from Logan Pass toward Mount Reynolds in Glacier National Park. I was walking the spine of the Continental Divide. I look over at Mount Reynolds, this huge single rock. Such a mass of rock and quanta.

What is reality? I have a rush of ontological wonder sickness. Why does anything exist?

At a rare check-in at an open computer, I got a nice email from Seth Lloyd regarding my review of his book Programming the Universe. He said, “I understand that you're not fond of quantum mechanics; but hey, that's the way the world works!” Maybe he’s right. But now, staring at the mountain, overwhelmed by its brute physicality, I can’t quite remember the details of what Seth said in his book. This is the outcome of, huh, a random algorithm, huh? Hit don’t feel that way.

The ubiquity of the same forms: trees, dendrites, clouds, mountains, animals, my thoughts. All standard patterns that nature loves to grow.

I threw a raisin to a pika (a rodent like a marmot or ground-hog or squirrel) and it got the raisin and wanted to eat it, but was uneasy at still being fairly close to me, but wanted to bite into the delicious raisin right away, so, torn by the opposing drives, the pika let out this gorgeous shrill liquid squeek. I could listen to that sound all day.

We visited Hemingway’s grave in Ketchum, Idaho. It was in a small, ordinary graveyard by a busy road into town. Looking for it was a replay of looking for my father’s grave in Herndon, Virginia, in July. In both cases I asked a Mexican guy who was mowing the lawn, and he didn’t speak English. My father had a white beard and he liked it when people said he looked like Hemingway. I found Hemingway’s slab, seven feet long, flat on the ground between two pines. For some reason people leave coins on the slab. Idiots. I cleaned off the letters of his name, blowing away the pine needles, shoving aside the coins. I saw his ghost. He said a lot of people came there looking for him, too many, but he was gonna say hi to me since I’m a writer.

Hem was about the first writer I really “got” and admired, back in high school. I liked his conciseness, his haiku-like clarity. All the stuff about moral codes and being a man, that’s all pretty much rotted away, though. F*ck the code. You have adventures, is all. Life is a wonderful adventure. I do have a code, I guess. But it seems so teenage to formulate it.

On the other hand, Hemingway was in the war, he saw people getting killed, so give him some slack on that.

In Missoula, Montana, I read a review of Scanner Darkly in a local free paper, The Independent. Written by, like, a college kid. And he’s chiding the director Linklater for making a “Just say ‘No’” movie. He doesn’t realize that was Phil’s rap in the book as well. That drugs are bad for you. I remember people having that reaction when the book came out. Like, Phil is being a kill joy. But he earned his right to be anti-drug. He went all the way in, deeper than a partying college kid can imagine. And — Phil was so cool — he saw the experience as darkly comic the whole way. Like Hemingway and war. Drugs our version of war.

What would my own code be?

See the gnarl, know the divine, love those around you.

I rent a mountain bike to ride down Mount Baldy. Drop 4,000 feet in 10 miles of single-track trail. It’s harder than I expected, I can’t look away from the path for even a second, or I’m likely to run off the edge. It uses every iota of mountain-biking skill that I’ve gained in the last twenty years of riding my bicycle. The boy who rented me the bike said the ride would be “easy.” I wanted it to feel like skiing, the way biking sometimes does, and now and then it did, but the required focus of attention was much more than I’d expected.

Hemingway liked to ski. He didn’t know about mountain biking like this. Or about parasailing. Imagine coming back in fifty more years, all the further new sports that’ll have emerged.

To be continued…

Sylvia and I just got back from a 17 night 3,300 mile road trip around the Wild West.

We passed through California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, California.

We visited a bunch of national parks: Yosemite, Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Glacier. Here’s our friend Half Dome, seen from Olbers Point.

We went through Tioga Pass and stayed in a great state park campground called Big Bend near Mono Lake.

And then we took Route 6 across southern Nevada. What a great road. I realized that Interstates are ugly because they have to terraform the land across a strip of a couple of hundred yards, so you’re always in disturbed landscape. Plus trucks, gravel pits, and lots of railings, poles, signs. Those Empty Quarter two-lane roads are the best.

I’d always wondered about Tonopah because of the Little Feat song “Willing” with the verses: “I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah / I’ve driven every kind of rig that’s ever been made / Driven the back road so I wouldn’t get weighed. / Give me weed, whites, and wine / And show me a sign / And I’ll be willin’ / To be movin’.”

Tonopah is some kind of dead. Though I met a guy from there who claimed things are better just now because of gold going up and the mines kicking back into gear. Dig this on-site Picasso sculpture.

We spent a night in an old casino hotel in Ely. They pronounce it “Eely.” Another great road goes through Ely, Route 50, which is sometimes called the loneliest road in America, but take it from me, Route 6 is lonelier.

We visited some caves east of Ely. These stalactites look rather penile, I’d say.

I always think caves are gonna be more interesting than they are. Plants and clouds are so much more dynamic. Maybe if you could see a cave’s formations in fast forward.

Amazing, though, to see the dynamics are thes same in stone and water. A frozen waterfall.

We visited our daughter Isabel who lives with her boyfriend Gus in Pinedale, Wyoming. They’re getting married! We’re proud and happy.

I took a bike ride on a trail in Pinedale. The town is in the high desert, a bit south of Jackson, at an altitude of 7,000 feet or so. Very cold in the winter. Very pure air.

The soil doesn’t hold much moisture. The clouds are so crisp and whipped-creamy in the Wild West.

The bike trail went across the desert to a stream. It’s so quiet out there, so peaceful.

We went fishing one day in this beautiful lake by Pinedale. Didn’t catch anything, but had fun. I think in the 50s some people erroneously introduced an alien “lake trout” called the Mackinaw, and those guys eat all the native trout, and live at 150 feet deep. Next time I’ll use a deep fishing rig.

After Pinedale we headed into the Tetons, and actually went backpacking one night, which was new to Sylvia. She got to like camping on the trip.

To be continued…