Rudy’s Blog

I’m nearly done with my latest painting, “Turing and the Skugs.” I’m also going to include some photos from Yellowstone Park.

“Turing and the Skugs”, 40″ x 30″ inches, Oct 2010, Oil on canvas.” Click for larger version.

I made this painting because I’m gearing up for a novel involving the computer pioneer Alan Turing, the beatniks, some shape-shifting beings called skugs, and possibly some time-travel. Although it would be simpler to do the book without time travel, which what I’m more likely to do. Don’t want too many ingredients in the stew, after all.

I got the word “skug” from my non-identical twin granddaughters, aged three. When I visit my son’s house in Berkeley, I always like to open up his worm farm and study the action with the twins. We find a lot of slugs in there, and we marvel at them. The girls tend to say “skug” rather than “slug,” and I decided I liked the sound of this word so much that I’d use it for some odd beings in my novel.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this kind of thing—the alien ostrich-like beings called “Peng” in my novel Hylozoic take their name from a pet stuffed penguin, also named “Peng,” who’s greatly prized by my other granddaughter, in Madison, Wisconsin.

[Afterworld-like scene at Yellowstone.]

Anyway, for the purposes of The Turing Chronicles, I’m supposing that Turing has carried out some biochemical experiments leading to the creation of slug-like creatures called skugs.

In the painting, we see Turing outside a Rural Supply Hardware garage, with two skugs backing him up. Alan is encountering a handsome man who may well become Alan’s lover. Unless the skugs eat the guy.

As always you can get more information and buy originals at my Paintings site. Prints are available on Imagekind. And, looking ahead, I’ll be having a small show in the Borderlands Cafe in San Francisco in November, 2010, with originals and prints for sale.

I’m thinking that Turing’s skugs become hugely influential. (1) They’re used for prostheses. (2) They act as standalone programmable robots. (3) Some humans switch to skug bodies and enjoy the power of shapeshifting.

[Yellowstone steam pool]

Perhaps any two people who’d taken on skug form could then mate to bear a skug-child—a result which would pretty much eliminate any real distinction between homosexual and heterosexual couples. Not that you’d have to remain physically of one “gender” if you’re a skug—remember that you could shapeshift.

I’m supposing that some people (let’s call them “Skuggers”) become skugs—although there are some fundamentalist hold-outs, who are initially presented as bad, but who maybe are good. The Skuggers revere Turing for having brought skugs about, but the rebels wish he’d never lived.

If I were to do this with time travel, the Skuggers would be in the future. Without time travel, they could simply be an underground group in our present-day world, and we have a more straight-ahead story.

If I were to go with a time-travel scenario, we’d be talking about Futurians. Here, the main group of Futurians are happy Skuggers and they wouldn’t want to go back into the past and mess with Turing’s life. As they see it, everything has worked out well. But a group of the anti-skug Futurians are going back to try and change history and eliminate Turing from the past. Fearful of the outcome, some of the ruling Futurians have banded together as something like “time police commando squad.” But—as they all may eventually come to understand—they can’t actually change anything. I’m going to say that you can’t change the past.

Varicolored algae colonies thrive in different water temperatures around the hot springs of Yellowstone.

As Analog book-reviewer Don Sakers points out in a recent column, we really have two options with time-travel stories. Either the past can’t be changed and we have an invariant timeline or you think you can change the past, but in fact you’re changing the past of some alternate universe and there in fact zillions of these multiverse timelines.

I’d kind of forgotten about the more Golden Age invariant timeline notion, but when I recently reread Robert Heinlein’s Door Into Summer, I was reminded of it. In Door Into Summer, we have a guy going back and changing his past to make things work out the way that, in fact, he knows they really did—in some sense he’s duty-bound to to this. While in the past, he ponders, but steers clear of, paradoxical behavior—e.g. he refrains from slitting his past self’s throat. Heinlein has a nice half-page in the last chapter the character opines that in some sense we can’t create a paradox and that there is, after all, only the one timeline—I’ll copy out Heinlein’s rap for reference and post it here.

[Yellowstone Lake.]

“There’s a [higher reality] that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true. There is only one real world, with one past and one future. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end…” Just one…but big enough and complicated enough to include free will and time travel and everything else in its linkages and feedbacks and guard circuits. You’re allowed to do anything inside the rules…but you come back to your own door.

… I’m not worried about “paradoxes” or “causing anachronisms”—if a thirtieth-century engineer does smooth out the bugs [with time travel] and then sets up transfer stations and trade, it will be because [some unknowable forces] designed the universe that way. [We have] two eyes, two hands, a brain; anything we do with them can’t be a paradox. [There’s no need of] busybodies to “enforce” [antiparadox] laws; they enforce themselves. …

The control is a negative feedback type, with a built in “fail safe,” because the very existence of [some present situation] depends on [my not changing it in the past]; the apparent possibility that I might have [changed things] is one of the excluded “not possibles” of the basic circuit design.

I edited the Heinlein quote to remove any implicit assumption that a single divinity “designed” the universe. It’s perhaps simpler to regard the universe as a pattern that emerges from some kind of constraint system—like a warped soap film that finds the shape of a minimal surface spanning a curved loop of wire. Or, taking an analogy closer to Heinlein’s heart, think of the universe as a flow of current that arises in a circuit that came from who knows where.

Heading north from Pinedale with Isabel, we spent a night in the Grand Teton National Park.

For awhile I was riding in back with Isabel, and she poked me in the ribs. Just like old times. When our three kids were little, we sometimes called the back of the car the “pigs’ nest.”

What makes the Grand Tetons so impressive is that as seen from the park and the road they rise straight up from the flat valley carved by the Snake River. More commonly, big mountains have a scrim of foothills covering them.

We crossed paths with two elated men returning from nice three-day hike around one of the Tetons, the Cascade Canyon/Paintbrush Canyon loop, I’d like to do that some day if my legs hold up. But, actually, Isabel, as a native, tends to know of equally interesting but less travelled paths.

A moose was lolling around near one of the paths, and there must have been twenty photographers clustered there, many of them with tripods. The shutterbugs looked tense and disgruntled, maybe because the moose was standing up to strike a grand pose. Or maybe becauase they’d already taken their “big picture” and didn’t know what else do to.

I don’t quite get why someone would use a tripod for landscape photography. If nothing much is moving, you don’t really need to stabilize the camera. Maybe they want to use an extreme telephoto, in which the slightest jitter is going to be amplified. Or possibly they like to use long shutter speeds so as to damp down to tiny apertures and get deep depth of field. Or maybe they’re just gear-fetishists. A tripod really slows you down. I’ve learned to do a kind of Zen-moment shutter-squeeze thing so I can shoot a 1/60 or even 1/30 sec exposure fairly reliably. Also I keep an eye on the ISO setting, and dial that up if I want a faster shutter speed so I can get less tele-jiggle and more depth of field.

We looked in at a little chapel in the park, with a stained glass image of the Sacred Heart. Whose heart is that, exactly? The Virgin Mary’s? No, research shows it Jesus’s. It’s a good icon. When I’m tense and unhappy because I’m being a jerk, my heart feels that way, as if it has barbed wire around it. I try not to go there very often.

A few years ago, I blogged a picture from a chuch in Kecskemet, Hungary, they went one step further with the Sacred Heart image, and showed it with a knife sticking through it. More dramatic.

There was some nice morning light on the wood in the church. But really you’d be more inclined to think of God as being up in the mountains. The Grand Tetons. Which is French for the Big Breasts. Nearby is the Gros Ventre range. The Plump Belly mountains. I’m picturing some very lonely fur trappers…

Sylvia and I spent about a week in Pinedale, Wyoming, with our daughter Isabel . Isabel took us on what I came to call a “death march” every day…meaning that it was more exercise than we’re used to, particularly in the mile-high elevation of Pinedale. But I loved it.

We saw an osprey in his or her nest near Half Moon Lake. The big fish hawk rose up and circled, making skirling chirps.

My favorite hike near Pinedale leads to the so-called “Sacred Rim,” a cliff at an elevation of nearly two miles with a sheer drop of perhaps a mile. Sitting on the edge of the cliff, I began getting some serious worries about being unwillingly sucked down by the great volume of empty space, and I moved back.

Pinedale was having a lot of growth a few years ago, due to the boom in natural gas drilling. That’s died down a bit, leaving, for instance, this blank real-estate developer’s sign. It looks like installation art, an abstract painting.

There’s a guy right outside the city limits who keeps a large number of abandoned vehicles in his yard. I like this one thirties-style car of his.

One day we went canoeing at the deserted Willow Lake near Pinedale, and picnicked on a tiny spit of sand halfway down the lake.

As usual, I was happy to look at the gnarly shapes of roots, water, rocks, clouds, and trees. It opens up my head to be so continuously away from the clamor of civilization.

We got back in the canoe soon after we noticed that there were grizzly-bear footprints on the beach.

Coming into Wyoming, we spotted some UFOs in the sky over the Wind River Mountains.

One of our trip goals was Pinedale, in the northwest corner of the state, where our daughter Isabel lives with her husband.

One of the major landmarks in Pinedale is the giant fish mounted above the local supermarket/variety store.

Isabel has recently opened a physical storefront for her online business, Isabel Jewelry. Dig the special gnarly pine logs that they found for the porch. The place used to be a pub.

She has some cases of jewelry on display, and a work area in back. It was great to see her in her store, with a lot of unique new pieces. One of Isabel’s new rings is hammered to look like a piece of wood.

Isbael’s strange-looking dog Rivers keeps her company at work. It’s possible that he was brought by the UFOs.

The commercial ebook version of The Ware Tetralogy is now available for purchase. This version will soon be for sale on other sites well.

The Prime Books paperback is still available in stores and from online booksellers such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s Books, and others.

We drove through an Indian reservation into Idaho and headed east on the two-lane Route 20. By and large we managed to stay off the interstates throughout the trip. The little roads are mostly empty, and you can drive 75 mph pretty easily.

When I’m in these back-country regions, I often think it might be fun to live there. And I wonder about the concept of overpopulation. In a sense, there seems to be very much room still left in the U.S.

We ended up spending the night in Arco, Idaho, whose claim to fame is that at one point they drew their electrical power from an early atomic reactor nearby. Our landlady was somewhat obsessively tidy, and the motel was shipshape. The diner next door served “broasted chicken,” which we eventually learned is a trademarked process of pressure-frying.

The next morning, rather than getting right back into speeding, we went down some back roads in search of a natural bridge near Arco. I love the emptiness of the little roads, the quiet, the utter lack of people. A refreshing change from my life in the SF Bay Area anthill.

I liked this big hillside a lot, it seemed like the flank of a huge, friendly animal.

Eventually we made it to Idaho Falls, which has a fairly cute old-town section. One of the restaurants had a window in the shape of a wagon wheel, which was totally cool, like an art installation, and note the square pattern of logs around the wagon wheel window.

Some of the stores were empty, drained by big boxes like Wal-Mart on the edges of the town. I wonder if Wal-Mart will ever go away. Perhaps at some point, computerized marketing will give small retailers the same price breaks as the big boxes get. And perhaps people will lose their taste for big box shopping.

At the edge of town was an Idaho-shaped clock, something you don’t see every day.

Our daughter Isabel had alerted us to be on the look-out for potato barns, and soon they cropped up. They’re largely underground, the way potatoes like it, with a peaked roof that’s covered in dirt for insulation and to keep the light out.

We stopped by the Craters of the Moon National Monument, which is this immense lava flow. The reason there’s a level region across the bottom of Idaho with Route 20 in it is that, over the millennia, a series of volcanoes flattened it out.

Looking at the lava wasn’t as much fun as driving through the gold and green fields with the piney mountains.

Harvesters at work. I love the agricultural geometry of the scattered bales.

And so onwards towards Wyoming.

Sylvia and I just got back from nearly three weeks on the road, and I’ve got a lot of pictures to share.

The first place we stopped was in Stateline, California, by the Nevada border at Lake Tahoe. For some reason hotels and motels all give you three or four pillows apiece. All of them are dusty and sneezy. This place we stayed was really cheap, the Royal Valhalla, right on the beach by the Nevada border. Valhalla is the palace of Odin, King of the Gods.

I saw an interesting piece of rubber on the beach. Trash as archeological artifact. For the first part of the trip I was reading the new book Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Despite my reflexive authorial envy of the guy’s success, I really liked the book. For the first few days of the trip, it was a nice steady treat to go back to. He has a nice line about some two-year olds and “their innocence of how hilarious they were.”

The dialogue in Freedom is very good. One of the main characters, Patty, is talking to her son Joey, who’s just heard about the Kabbalah from his aunt, but isn’t sure what it is. Patty sarcastically tells him:

“It’s very Important and Mystical—I think Madonna’s into it, which tells you pretty much all you need to know right there.”

“Madonna’s Jewish?”

“Yah, Joey, hence her name.”

We stopped for a break in Carson City and looked at the statehouse. They have this great painted border along the tops of the hallway walls, extolling all the various minerals that Nevadans have mined.

And a display of Nevadan artifacts, including an antler chair. Funny that Carson City, way over on the west edge, is the capital of the state. But, really, there’s very little in the middle of Nevada. I always like driving on the deserted highways like Route 50 and Route 6 that cross the state.

We came across a giant sand dune by Route 50, called Sand Mountain, so pulled over to check it out. Wonderfully quiet and hot. One or two tiny four-wheel ATV vehicles on it like botflies on a dead cow.

A little further on, we came to a Shoe Tree, that is, a tree bedecked with more than a thousand pairs of shoes. Evidently those in the know drive out here to the ass-end of nowhere and fling their less-desirable pairs of shoes into the tree. It’s a little like the Monarch butterfly trees in Santa Cruz, the branches draped with “life.”

We turned left at the perhaps-too-rural Austin, Nevada, and headed up to Battle Mountain, Nevada, to get a “safe” freeway motel for the night.

A half-mile from the freeway, Battle Mountain is rife with abandoned buildings, and below the railroad tracks it grows alarmingly seamy, like the Blue Velvet movie—at least in my mind.

Back by the freeway, outside our sterile Day’s Inn motel window, giant truck rigs rested as their drivers slept.