Rudy’s Blog

I’m a little behind on the journal aspect of my blog. This month I was busy finishing issue #13 of Flurb, and then converting the issue into ebook format. But before that, my wife and I were out in NYC for a week. So today I want to blog some of that.

Actually, before New York, I need to post this picture of the hippo at the San Francisco zoo. Hippos are among my very favorite animals. The comely bulk, their smoothness, their nimble lightness on their feet, and the fact that they’re said to be quite vicious and dangerous if encountered in the wild.

One of the things I did in NY was to do an interview and give a reading from Nested Scrolls at a gallery in Soho. This was organized by Jim Freund in connection with his New York Review of Science Fiction reading series and his Hour of the Wolf radio show — here’s a link to a stream of the show online, though I’m not sure how long the link will keep working. I start up about five minutes into the stream, and the show contains both my interview and my reading.

(Thoth in the Met)

Streams aren’t a convenient medium for listening on-the-go. The picture above shows me on the left fruitlessly trying to extract an mp3 of my interview from Jim Freund, partially seen on the right. He eluded the flail of Thoth! No matter. What I finally did was to capture the stream with Audacity on my computer, and then edited the interview out of the Hour of the Wolf show. And a very good interview, too. Jim’s good at this. I added it to my Feedburner collection of podcasts, click on the button below. (And I put a hint about capturing streams in the comments section down at the end of today’s blog post.)

(Note that Feedburner only shows my most recent podcasts. For older audio files, see my archive on Gigadial, which runs back to 2005.)

Speaking of my Podcasts, let me jump away from NYC and up to the present for a moment. Today I was up at the Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco and I did a panel with Terry Bisson and John Shirley. Our theme was “Anarchism and Science Fiction,” and I got a good recording of the hour-long panel. We had a nice big audience—anarchist kids in their twenties or thirties, very shaggy and bright-eyed. Not a typical SF crowd at all—actually I don’t think they were in fact SF readers. But fun to talk to. You can click on the Feedburner button above to access both the Freund interview podcast and the “Anarchism and SF” panel podcast.

Okay, back to New York. We lucked into a great room in the Intercontinental near Times Square. The window even opened, a little bit, and I could peer down at wonderfully tiny Manhattanites with their early morning shadows.

The white ways of the night.

There was this burger place downstairs, the Shake Shack, at Eighth Ave and 44th St, I became mildly obsessed with the name, saying it over and over. Always a line there, every hour of the day. There’s another Shake Shack in Madison Square near the Flatiron Building—where I always go to visit Tor Books, where I was doing most of my publishing from from 1999 – 2011. An autumnal feeling at Tor this time, who knows how many more times I’ll go there.

Publishing is in such a fierce state of change. Authors are like the dinosaurs after that big meteor crashed into the Gulf of Mexico a zillion years ago. We’re trying to turn into birds as fast as we can. This object above is an Espresso Book Machine which I saw in this really great Soho bookstore, McNally Jackson Books. You can print off a print-on-demand book on the spot there, even one of your own if you want.

Print-on-demand is already fading, though, it was a weird stilt-legged trilobite of the Cambrian explosion. Ebooks are where it’s at now, where “now” might last five years. Publishing is very chaotic just now, I’ve never seen it like this. It’s like the carriage business the year after Henry Ford starting selling the Model A.

I’m glad I’m learning how to make ebooks. I’ve got my Transreal Books page working pretty well, with my Collected Stories on it, and my Collected Essays coming online soon. I made an ebook Flurb of issue #13 as well, and next fall if I can work things out with my authors and the technology, I may put together a Completely Flurb: E Flurbus Unum ebook omnibus that’s about a hundred megabytes in size. Go frikkin’ wild with this sh*t.

Anyway, back to NYC. Always so great to be in Central Park, the classic contrast between the skyscrapers and the old trees and grassy swards with humans at rest and play. Very New Yorker cover.

My wife and I have been to NYC so many times over the years, it’s kind of a constant in this changing world, the frail honks (Love the minatory traffic signs: DON’T HONK (what part of that don’t you understand??)), the siren wails, the rumble and jostle, the shuffle of feet, the smells, the windows at Bonwit’s, the rhythms of the subways, the ballet at the Joyce, the ubiquity of the New Yorkers, curt but not unkind.

I always smile when I see the perennial Army Recruitment Center in Times Square. It’s been there as long as I can remember, maybe forty years. I always imagine a group of guys on a wild spree in the Big Apple and then, late at night or in dawn’s early light, one of them reels into the Recruitment Center like a disoriented lobster who’s crookedly tail-snapping his way into a trap.

Later that day…“So this is Fort Dix!”

We happened upon the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, and I posed for a photo on it—I actually did this once already, in 2005, and the reason I like to do this is that I’m thereby emulating my boyhood hero and my first actual writing mentor, Martin Gardner, who wrote a wonderful column for Scientific American for many years.

Dear Martin. He lent me about twenty rare books on the fourth dimension in 1982 when I was writing my nonfiction book, The Fourth Dimension. And now he’s dead.

Beautiful tree-shadows on the wall of the Met. And our bodies are shadows of our souls. How many dimensions?

March 27, 2012.

Yeah, baby. With much programming and sweat, I’ve turned Flurb #13 into an ebook that can be read on any ereading device—Kindles, iPhones, Androids, NOOKs, Windows laptops, iPads, whatever.

Mobi (for Kindle) and Epub (for the others) now available for free download at

http://www.flurb.net/ebook/

Go for it!

March 23, 2012

Issue #13 of Flurb is out, with astonishing tales by thirteen writers: Albrecht, Ashby, Cha, Deitch, Garcia, Garrison, Hayes, Highsmith, Rucker, Quaglia, Salinas, Watson, What, Worrad!

This brings us into the sixth year of Flurb since the first issue, with 164 stories published in all.

Go to www.flurb.net and be among the first of the fifty thousand or more people who’ll be checking out our new issue over the coming months!

Enjoy the gnarl, dear readers, it’s good for you.

And when you take a break, come back here and post something encouraging in the comments section below. Our intrepid authors need and deserve your support.

I’m still hanging out in Gotham. Love the roar and bustle. Had a nice reading with Brendan Byrne. Eventually a tape should appear on the Hour of the Wolf radio show, I’ll let you know when it’s streamable.

Tor Books is about to produce a trade paperback edition of my autobio, Nested Scrolls. I’d like to clean up any remaining typos in this book, so if you’ve found some, please let me know over the next week or two—you can simply post the typo as a comment here or email me.

My Complete Stories ebook is selling some copies, thanks for that! (Only $4.95 for a mammoth tome.) I’m glad to have found the self-published ebook alternative to the Kafka castle of traditional publishing. Toothless Inuit on an ice-floe or…rat leaving a sinking ship?

I’ll be publishing issue #13 of my webzine Flurb at the end of this month, I have 13 good new stories edited and ready to go, all I need at this point is a few days of production work.

But meanwhile, as mentioned, post any Nested Scrolls typos you find or email me about them.

My son Rudy and I both did presentations at the Dorkbot San Francisco meeting. Dorkbot has groups in cities around the world. Their motto: “People Doing Strange Things With Electricity.”

The Dorkbot people managed to to a live streaming video of the show, and the stream is preserved online at ustream.

Rudy the younger started his routine about 30 minutes into the stream, and I came at the end. Rudy younger was talking about his punk-ethic wireless company, www.monkeybrains.net. They’ve put maybe a thousand small parabolic antennas up around the Mission district and beyond, using a surplus Jordanian military infrared laser for their long-haul connection. He unbolted his giant laser from its building-top mount and brought it in to point at the audience, you can see it here. People were flinching. Since it’s infrared, nobody was sure if it was on. A gig per second of unseeable data.

[Photo by Karen Marcelo.]

I taped and made a podcast of my part of show. I was reading a chapter called “Jane and Me” from my novel-in-progress, which has the working title The Big Aha. It’s about the advent of some serious biotech in Louisville, Kentucky, and it’s kind of darkly funny.

(Note that Feedburner only shows my most recent podcasts. For older audio files, see my archive on Gigadial, which runs back to 2005.)

You can click on the icon above to access the podcast via my Feedburner podcast station.

The space where we had the event was like a ground-level loft, totally full of Bay Area hipsters. The residents of the space had built these weird benches up on the walls. It felt like a Russian Revolutionary meeting of kulaks. Planning our digital revolution. None of the speakers really mentioned politics, though. At this point all that goes without saying. Internally, we’ve already seceded.

The Dorkbot SF organizer has been Karen Marcelo, a key scene-jammer who describes herself as a “bandwidth waster.” I snapped a picture of Karen with the Mondo-era SF superfreak V. Vale, famed for his RE/Search publications. I was reminiscing with Vale about the shock value of his 1989 Modern Primitives which was the first place where many of us saw photos of people with incredibly gnarly piercings and tattoos. Who can forget Sailor Sid’s highly decorated penis? Of course now the modern primatives are baristas in your local café, but Vale led them out of the darkness.

The other speakers besides the two Rudys were the post-art artist Mike Estee, who talked about his cardboard robots, and the post-science scientist Liam Holt who helped build a Syneseizure device that converts images into vibrations in speakers held against your face by a bondage mask. Somehow all the talks fit together.

An epic evening!

At this point in my career and in the history of publishing, it seems reasonable for me to abandon—at least for some of my titles—printed books and commercial publishers. So I’ve started my own Transreal Books. I see at least three kinds of advantages to this move.

(1) I’m freed from commercial constraints to the formatting of my books—in particular an ebook can be very long, as in my Complete Stories ebook, or it can include color images, as in my projected Better Worlds ebook. And I’ll be able to sell my books at a reasonable price.

(2) I can repeatedly revise a book without having to go through the complex process required for new print editions. For instance, as time goes by, I can keep adding more stories to Complete Stories.

(3) By becoming a publisher, I have the final say over what books I put out—and I receive a larger share of the royalties.

I’ve been seriously crunching the HTML and EPUB formats for a week or two—I’ll say more about all that nutsy-and-boltsy stuff in some other post. But for today, here are the current and planned releases from Transreal Books!

Complete Stories
Buy as Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Noble NOOK.

Collected together in one mammoth volume: all of Rudy Rucker’s science-fiction stories, a trove of gnarl and wonder. This, the first edition, includes stories from 1976 through 2011. As well as a volume’s worth of fifteen new stories, Complete Stories includes all the tales from The 57th Franz Kafka, Transreal, Gnarl!, and Mad Professor. As well as Rucker’s solo stories, we have collaborations with Bruce Sterling, Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, John Shirley, Terry Bisson, and Eileen Gunn.

The Hollow Earth
Buy as Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Noble NOOK.

Hollow Earth is a classic work of American steampunk. In 1836, Mason Algiers Reynolds leaves his family’s Virginia farm with his father’s slave, a dog named Arf, and a mule named Dammit. Branded a murderer, he finds sanctuary with his hero, frustrated genius Edgar Allan Poe, and together they embark on an extraordinary expedition to the South Pole, and the entrance to the Hollow Earth. It is there, at the center of the world, where strange physics, strange people, and stranger creatures abound, that their bizarre adventures truly begin. 1st print edition Avon Books, 1990. 2nd print edition Monkeybrain Books, 2006. Transreal Books ebook version of 2nd edition, 2012.

And what’s ahead? Here are some of the titles I’m planning:

Complete Essays
Better Worlds (paintings)
All the Visions. (early memoir)
Infinity and the Mind
The Fourth Dimension
Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension
Mind Tools
Journals 1990 – 2011

Yeah, baby. Free at last.

I spent the last few of days working on a philosophical essay for a collection of articles about Stephen Wolfram’s 2002 book, A New Kind of Science. I’m a friend of Wolfram’s and a big fan of his work. For much more about Wolfram’s book and its reception, you can see my long 2003 review of it for the monthly magazine of the Mathematical Association of America.

But today I don’t want to get into all that, I want to talk about my new essay, which is called “An Incompleteness Theorem for the Natural World.” I’m very happy with the argument I presented there. The argument isn’t really all that complicated—but I’ve been looking for it for about thirty years! I won’t print the whole essay here, but I will print the introductory section to give you an idea of what I’m getting at. A lot of it is based on material in my book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, but just this week I saw how to present it in a much clearer light.

So here we go, the intro to my essay, “An Incompleteness Theorem for the Natural World.”

The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz is perhaps best known for the fierce controversy that arose between him and Sir Isaac Newton over the invention of calculus. The S-like integral sign that we use to this day is in fact a notation invented by Leibniz.

When Leibniz was a youth of nineteen, he wrote a paper called “De Arte Combinatorica”, in which he tried to formulate a universal algebra for reasoning, in the hope that human thought might some day be reducible to mathematical calculations, with symbols or characters standing for thoughts.

But to return to the expression of thoughts by means of characters, I thus think that controversies can never be resolved, nor sectarian disputes be silenced, unless we renounce complicated chains of reasoning in favor of simple calculations, and vague terms of uncertain meaning in favor of determinate characters.

In other words, it must be brought about that every fallacy becomes nothing other than a calculating error, and every sophism expressed in this new type of notation becomes in fact nothing other than a grammatical or linguistic error, easily proved to be such by the very laws of this philosophical grammar.

Once this has been achieved, when controversies arise, there will be no more need for a disputation between two philosophers than there would be between two accountants. It would be enough for them to pick up their pens and sit at their abacuses, and say to each other (perhaps having summoned a mutual friend): “Let us calculate.”

Let’s refer to this notion as Leibniz’s dream — the dream of finding a logical system to decide all of the things that people might ever disagree about. Could the dream ever work?

Even if the dream were theoretically possible (which it isn’t), as a practical matter it wouldn’t work anyway. If a universal algebra for reasoning had come into existence, would, for instance, Leibniz have been able to avoid his big arguments with Newton? Not likely. People don’t actually care all that much about logic, not even Leibniz. We just pretend to like logic when it happens to be on our side — otherwise we very often abandon logic and turn to emotional appeals.

This said, there’s a powerful attraction to Leibniz’s dream. People like the idea of finding an ultimate set of rules to decide everything. Physicists, for instance, dream of a Theory of Everything. At a less exalted level, newspapers and TV are filled with miracle diets — simple rules for regulating your weight as easily as turning a knob on a radio. On the ethical front, each religion has its own compact set of central teachings. And books meant to help their readers lead happier lives offer a simple list of rules to follow.

But, as I hinted above, achieving Leibniz’s dream is logically impossible.

In order to truly refute Leibniz’s dream, we need to find a precise way to formulate it. As it happens, formal versions of Leibniz’s dream were first developed early in the Twentieth century.

An early milestone occurred in 1910, when the philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published their monumental Principia Mathematica, intended to provide a formal logical system that could account for all of mathematics. And, as we’ll be discussing below, hand in hand with the notion of a formal system came an exact description of what is meant by a logical proof.

There were some problems with the Russell-Whitehead system, but by 1920, the mathematician David Hilbert was confident enough to propose what came to be known as Hilbert’s program.

(1) We will discover a complete formal system, capable of deciding all the questions of mathematics.

(2) We will prove that this system is free of any possible contradiction.

As Hilbert put it, “The conviction of the solvability of every mathematical problem is a powerful incentive to the worker. We hear within us the perpetual call: There is the problem. Seek its solution. You can find it by pure reason, for in mathematics there is no ignorabimus.”

For a decade, scientists could dream that Hilbert’s program might come true. And meanwhile mathematics and much of physics were being recast as formal systems. Scientific theories could now be viewed as deterministic processes for determining the truth of theorems. Leibniz’s dream was nearly at hand!

But, then, in 1931, the logician Kurt Gödel proved his celebrated Incompleteness Theorem.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. If F is a consistent formal system as powerful as arithmetic, then there are infinitely many sentences which are undecidable for F.

This means there can never be formal system of mathematics of the kind sought by Hilbert’s program. Every formal system F about mathematics is incomplete in the sense that there are sentences G such that F fails to prove G or ~G, where ~G is the negation of G.

Gödel’s sentences G take the form of statements that certain algebraic formulas have no solutions in the natural numbers. Normally these sentences include at least one very large numerical parameter that in some sense codes up the entire theory F. Wolfram has suggested that there might be some much simpler undecidable Gödelian sentences that involve very simple algebraic formulae.

Philosophers of science have wondered if there is something like an Incompleteness Theorem for theories about the natural world. One somewhat awkward approach might be to argue that if the natural world happens to be infinite, then we can in some sense represent the system of natural numbers as a list of objects within the world and then go on to claim that the usual undecidable Gödel statements about arithmetic are also statements about the natural world.

But, as I discuss in my 1982 book, Infinity and the Mind, this isn’t a satisfying approach. If we wanted to have number theory be a subset of a theory W about the physical world, we’d need for W to single out an infinite set of objects to play the role of the numbers, and W would also need to define relations the correspond to numerical addition and multiplication.

What we really want is a proof—or at least a plausibility argument—for a Natural Incompleteness Theorem that asserts the existence of undecidable sentences that are about natural physical processes—as opposed to being about the natural numbers in disguise.

Wolfram’s analysis of computation in his A New Kind of Science opens a path. The first step is to accept the idea that natural processes can be thought of as computations. And the second step is to argue for some form of Wolfram’s Principle of Computational Equivalence.

Wolfram’s Principle of Computational Equivalence (PCE): Almost all processes that are not obviously simple can be viewed as computations of equivalent sophistication.

In my essay I show that, starting from Wolfram’s two steps, we can prove a Natural Incompleteness Theorem. My method will be to make use of Alan Turing’s 1936 work on what he called unsolvable halting problems. And rather than using the full strength of Wolfram’s somewhat controversial Principle of Computational Equivalence, I’ll base my argument on a weaker assumption, which I call the Halting Problem Hypothesis. And we end up with the following Natural Incompleteness Theorem.

Natural Incompleteness Theorem. For most naturally occurring complex processes and for any correct formal system for science, there will be sentences about the process which are undecidable by the given formal system.

This is, I believe, a clean statement of new result—and may be of real importance to the philosophy of science. Although Wolfram has pointed out some specific examples of undecidable statements about natural processes, he didn’t mange to state the general Natural Incompleteness Theorem.

But now we have a Natural Incompleteness Theorem telling us that every possible complex natural process is going to have undecidable sentences associated with it! Undecidability is everywhere, and all of our theories about nature must remain incomplete.

I’m very stoked.