Click covers for info. Copyright (C) Rudy Rucker 2021.


Notes for Hylozoic

I finally sold one of my paintings online last week, “Stun City,” to a nice guy, Michael K., in Germany. If you too want to own an original by me (or a print), check the newly marked down prices. My basement is getting full…

I just finished going over the copy-edits on my novel Hylozoic, which will appear in hardback from Tor Books in, I believe, June, 2008. It’s a sequel to my novel Postsingular, although it’s independent enough to be read on its own.

Today I posted a version of my Notes for Hylozoic, which is a 3 Meg PDF file with lots of hyperlinks, some links are internal links into the notes document itself, some links go into my blog or into the Web at large. There’s a number of illustrations. The notes are 196,000 words long, compared to the 91,000 word length of the actual novel. Maybe I’m starting to think too much…

What is hylozoism?

“Hylozoism (from the Greek hyle, matter, and zoe, life) is the doctrine that all matter is intrinsically alive. Under hylozoism, every object is claimed to have some degree or sense of life.”
— David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West.

This being election season, I want to drop in a quote from Hylozoic about systems of government.

With the world gone hylozoic, the whole idea of governments based upon human power elites was seeming increasingly dumb.

The dinosaur era of oligarchic rule had reached an end. The few rulers who didn’t have the sense to abdicate were forcibly evicted, or worse.

Via a rapid series of teep referendums, nation after nation adopted new constitutions. No more Presidents, no more Senates, no more Parliaments. From now on, countries would rule themselves via realtime public consensus.

Something subtler than the blunt instrument of majority rule came into sway. Laws became dynamically tuned compromises, continually adapting to social change. The post-digital body politic was as homeostatic and self-healing as the body of a living animal. It was odd to think that for so many millennia, people had lived in societies that were like crude, awkward machines.

On a totally different theme, let me mention that my pal Paul DiFilippo has published a short novel, Cosmocopia , illustrated by a jigsaw puzzle created by comix god Jim Woodring! Here’s purchase info, and a video of Paul reading from the work at Fantagraphics Bookstore in Seattle last week:

Write on…

Comments are closed.


Rudy's Blog is powered by WordPress