Today Safia, one of our diving partners from Palau, emailed me some underwater pictures of Jellyfish Lake. Thanks, Safia!

I knew at the time that Jellyfish Lake was great SF material, but am only now figuring out exactly how to work jellyfish into my novel-in-progress, Mathematicians in Love.

My characters will tunnel through to a higher universe called La Hampa. La Hampa resembles Micronesia, but some of the islands will float in the air. That is, you’ll see the thousands of small muffin islands like you see off Palau, but some will be floating above sea level, up in the sky like clouds, and other islands are wholly submerged in the seemingly bottomless sea. We’ll also like to have little suns of all sizes, so there’s no determinate scale at all. Seas, islands, air bubbles, suns, endlessly nested above and below.

Our universe is but one sheet of many, which are stacked in a so-called hyperverse. The dimension in which our universes evolve matches the time dimension of La Hampa, called hampatime. The successive universes in the hyperverse are in some sense better and better, like successive drafts of a novel. So our universe is a single spactime sheet in a series of alternate universes which, taken together, make up a hyperverse. [I referenced the hyperverse idea earlier in the blog in terms of an answer to the EDGE annual question, although at that time I hadn't yet started using the word “hyperverse.”]

Each hyperverse is coupled to a single La Hampan organism called a nataraja (from dancer king, which is used in India as synonym for dancing many-armed Shiva). The natarajas resemble jellyfish.

As hampatime elapses, a nataraja jellyfish is beating its invisible spacetime veils, flexing them to make them lovelier. And as the veils get more beautiful, as their hyperverse evolves, the nataraja begins to glow. And at some point it begins to resemble a sun. And that’s when the cosmic novel is done!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 28th, 2005 at 9:31 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.