I’ve been taking a lot of photos with my new Canon 5D. For awhile my blog may resemble a photo blog even more than usual. To fill in the cracks today, I’ll post some links that people recently sent me.
Emil Rojas sends a link to YouTube video of huge flocks of starlings in Otmoor, England. Just the kind of emergent gnarl I like to see.
In my weighty tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, I was writing about flocking and to celebrate the phenomenon, I quoted some lines from John Updike’s poem, “The Great Scarf of Birds,” describing a flock of starlings lifting off from a golf course:
And as
I watched, one bird,
prompted by accident or will to lead,
ceased resting; and, lifting in a casual billow,
the flock ascended as a lady’s scarf,
transparent, of gray, might be twitched
by one corner, drawn upward and then,
decided against, negligently tossed toward a chair:
the southward cloud withdrew into the air.
Bruce Sterling sent me a link to a simulation of butterfly wings.
John Roche and Bob Reary both sent me links to article about computer-eating ants in Houston, reminiscent of the story “Hormiga Canyon” I wrote with Bruce.
Greg Parker links to his a photo of the Rosette nebula.
Gamma sends news of a Frank Zappa conference in Paris this July.
Nathaniel Hellerstein sends a link to a list of SF cliches. The underlying inspiration for the list is, I think, a desire to systematically list essentially all possible SF tropes and power chords. I myself did something similar in my essay, “What Do SF Writers Want?”
But object to the jaded, snarky, know-it-all tone of the SF Cliches list. I mean, why is every possible idea or archetype to be dismissed as a cliche? Life is a cliche, from beginning to end, and great SF isn’t necessarily about brand new ideas and plot structures. It’s more about language, characterization, and eyeball kicks. If I took the implicit injunctions of the SF Cliches list seriously, it would inhibit me from writing at all.
I rather suspect that working on such a list can become an excuse for not trying to write fiction. It’s as if an aspiring painter were to say, “Hell, I’m not gonna use red, yellow, oragne, green, blue or violet! Those have been done to death. And forget about black and white!” Oh, wait, that’s already happened…
Paul Di Filippo sends a link to an io9 post about colorful nudibranchs, a.k.a. sea snails. I have a nudibranch character named Unger in Mathematicians in Love. He was inspired by a guy I went to grad school in math with at Rutgers.
My son Rudy Rucker, Jr., posted a page of increasingly absurd “cute animal in a bucket illustrating the theme of Thank God It’s Friday,” images on Monkeybrains.net.
Rebecca Sandford-Smith noticed a Wired article that seems to echo the scene in my novel Software where the robots grind up Cobb Anderson’s brain to extract his personality software.
Coop has been Flickr-documenting his insanely comprehensive collection of plastic Japanese figurines.
And my jeweler daughter Isabel Rucker sent a link to an incredible video “Muto” created by Buenos Aires artists as stop-motion photos of repeated overpaintings of wall-graffiti.
On the publishing front, my other daughter’s Georgia Rucker Design is turning two of my paintings into covers for my novels The Sex Sphere and Spacetime Donuts , which will be released in e-book and print-on-demand form by E-Reads later this summer. I used PhotoShop to stretch out the middle of my Spacetime Donuts paintings so as better to fit into a narrowish band wrapping from front to back cover.