Here’s another tape of me talking at Armadillocon. I think this was in an opening panel where we talked about the bith of cyberpunk.
I have a big backlog of photos, some I’m loading a lot of them into this post. Venues include, of course, Austin TX, plus Fort Bragg CA, Los Gatos Creek, art show at Los Gatos Coffee Roasting, Madison WI, and lots of Rudy paintings. Do they fit? Fundamental principle of Surrealism: everything fits.
I keep an eye on the book reviews a little bit, and I noticed there are actually a lot of more people are writing science fiction than used to, and but they don’t call it science fiction anymore. You know, it’s like. It’s like you wouldn’t say you’re writing pornography. You’d say you’re writing erotic fiction or a sensual novel or a book of love say now.
Tattoo parlor in Fort Brtagg.
And you don’t say you’re writing science fiction. Instead you say you’re writing something futuristic or speculative, you know, or sttunningly imaginative. A lot of these books will recycle some science fiction idea. We SF writers have a certain number of tropes that are fairly well known among SF readers.
Chinchilla the tattoo parlor lady in For Bragg
But suppose somebody hasn’t been reading science fiction, and the first time they encounter an SF trope—let’s say somebody’s somebody’s mind is being transferred into the cloud. And the naïve reader will be, like, oh my god, this author this is such a genius. Yeah. Ahd certaihjly this fine literary author isn’t one of those scuzzy science fiction people.
Black’s Beach in Santa Cruz. Sillhouettes with mer-dog
Science fiction is a house with many mansions. We’ve got the TV science fiction. We’ve got the movie science fiction. We’ve the literary science fiction. All kinds. So, what’s a new form of SF? Simple move. Write science fiction that is not called science fiction.
Rudy painting “Dancers.” Photo by Dinah Cotton
Another move that a lot of non-SF authors use is something I call transrealism. I’ve been using it for a long time. Transrealism is the idea that you can write science fiction about your own life. It’s can be kind a beatnik thing, writing about yourelf, and you can goose it up with SF tropes. Transrealism. More and more popular.
One of my heroes as a teen was the SF writer Robert Sheckly. Later I was lucky enough to meet him in person, hang out with him a bit. At one point god smiled on me, and Robert and I were invited over to Tim Leary’s house talk about a weird science show that Tim wanted to host. What a day!
Fourth of July in Sf. “Illegal” fireworks in the Mission
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Talking to me about writng, Robert once remarked that there were three problems for a writer: how to write, how to finish something, and how to write about yourself. And transrealism is another way of writing about yourself. It might be called autofictino, but the idea here is that you put in some science-fictional or speculative, or visionary ideas.
Monterey cypresses in Point Reyes park
Something odd I’ve noticed in my own experience is that the stange events I stage for my transreal hero have a way of coming true I my real life. Less cryptically, I might say that transreal SF events in your characters’ lives are symbolic. If you write about telepathy, You’re in a way writing about the deep need for somebody to understand what you’re talking about.
Rudy and Barb in Venice
Speaking of telepahy—it’s so very odd that we can communicate at all. I mean, when you’re “talking,” you’re using an arbitray system system of grunts and squeals, as Jorge Luis Bores once remarked. How is that people meneally replicate your state of mind by listening to your grunts and squeals.
“Open the Door,” Barb in Point Reyes. Those rectangles are Belusov-Zhabotinsky cellylar automata, of course.
Of if you make scribbles, they can “read” that? Or you daub colored mud on a cloth and they “see” your mental vision? It’s amazing that that all this works.
With daughter Georgia in Madison WI
Moving into SF, we look for ways to make the transreal connection stronger. For instance, can we make our makeshift system of squeals, scribbles, and mub into a more effective form of telepathy?
My painting #292: Farm Twister. The three empty chairs are my parents and my wife.
What if we had some kind of silent waves? We’d just lie around, nodding at each other. “Ya, mon, I dig where you’re at.” But, seriously, how might an SF version of telepaty work? into it.” And there’s, you know, there’s a sometimes, you know, if you’re a SF writer, you say, okay, I’m going to objectify this.
View from plane. Miles hibh Love the shadows of the clouds. What chaos theorists call “Poincare sections.”
My standard move in my later novels is to use a biotech object that I call an uvvy. It’s like a small banana slug. You put one on the nape of your neck. Uvvy, pronounced as in lovey-dovey. A cozy, friendly sounding word. Actually a little smaller than a banana slug, and slightly alive, but, you know, not too livey.
Young Rudy observes that view and dreams of beeing a Beatnik Science Fiction Writer.
And you put it on the nape your neck and it picks up on your brainwaves. I soesn’t put tendrils into you. You do not any to put tendrils into your brain. And above all, you don’t ever want to put a chip or a biotech device inside your head. If you know anything at all about computers, you know, you know about upgrades. You don’t want a chip inside your head because they’re going to be, like:
“Well, you’ve got version 2.31, and that build sucks. It has a critical problem. Come into the lab, and we’ll fix you up with version 3.17. Upgrades are fee. And you’ll want to check in every six months or so. Thank you.”
Whale City Bakery in Davenport CA. I love that old man.
You don’t want that. And you don’t want tendrils. And elecromagnetic waves can be awfully faint. So there’s a lot of Hope pinned on quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics like this magic Genie that SF writers and start-up techs like to invoke.
Wetlands at Point Reyes park. I adore these kinds of “lop lop” (as Max Ernst called them) curves.
We do have quantum computation starting to work now, and it’s advancing fairly drastically these days. But the quantum effect that might help with telpathy could be quantum entnglement, which is something slightly different. Entanglemen has to do with the notion of separated physical systems being in harmony. I used it in: Postsingualr, Million Mile Roadtrip, Juicy Ghosts, Sqinks. Not that I know what I’m talking about.
The simplistic notion is that if you can get deeply into can get in sync with someone, then when you think this thing here, the thought might also happen. And we do sometimes get flashes of this. When you’re with somebody you know them very well. Could be that you’re just reading their micro expressions or picking up pheromones. But sometiems you’ll get this vibe of where your friend or love is at.
“Maze” (with flies and dead rat)
It’s worth noting tha this seems more likely to happen when you’re physically face to face with a person. Zoom seems to feel flatter. But of course this might be from the lo-fidelity of a Zoom connection, and not from any quantum field contact made when your companion is physically present.
My art show at Los Gatos Coffee Roasting. Reminder: you can buy my originals at Rudy’s Paintings page.
I do happen to think that pheromones are incredibly important. When you find somebody and you’re subconsciously deciding whether to fall in love with them or not, it’s could have to do with the siimple fact that certain long, floating molecules are fitting into certain cellular receptors.
And you’re all, OH yeah. And maybe it’s not just the molecules, maybe there’s this quantum field aura that glows from your brain. A field of multimensional Hlbert space wave-fucntion energies. A very complicated phenomenon which we don’t even begin to understand. Keep mind, after all, that we’ve only been doing science for two hunderd years. A small span against the million or so years that higher forms of Earth life have been around!
One of my first photos with my new Pixel 11. Unfuckingbelievable.
So, yes, we’re far from being able to to manipulate this or analyze it or measure our brain waves, but we know they’re there. So sure, telepthy could happen. As an example of a drastic advance, just think of a cell phone. If you had seen a few of them one out of the blue in like 1890, you might already have said it’s it’s telepathy.
Like, I’m standing on a hill, holding a little box somebody on another continent is holding a little box, and I’m talking to them? And you’re like, how can this be?
Artist that I am, I individualize my phone cases, moving my chances of losing on any given day from about 10% to 3%. And of course in this photo I’ve morphed into one of those greatly-feared-AI-bots.
I remember when cellular phones were first coming, and I had this feeling it’s too complicated, and I was at the airport and I veru average guy holding his phone up to his head, like a kide with a sardine can, and I’m, like, oh, I can use one of these, too. It’s not that hard.
Bull kelp at Fort Bragg. Love to whip the beach with these things. While singing Neal Young’s song, “Guess I won’t be goin’ to Woodstock for awhile.” With the whip on the beat. Don’t ask me why. It’s just fun.
So? I think we’re going to get real telepathy in in our real life, not so far away. And that’s going to make a difference. I mean, look how much smart phones have changed the world.
Very briefly, one other thing. I like how AI, can generate pictures and now videos. And here then, we’ve got the solution to a perennial problem. Every science fiction writer has the Hollywood dream that someday they’ll make, a movie out of out of your book, and everything’s going to be just rosy.
Look what the appearance of his movie Bladerunner did for Phil Dick! He died. But seriously, I would say that it’ll happen in 60 years, or maybe even not that far off. It’d be very easy to take a novel and turn it into a feature-length movie. With really good rendering, completely realistic if you like, and the plot either tweaked or not. Like the novel is a sheet of music being played.
Grandson Desmond graduates. The Great Wheel turns.
And if that’s the only way you can get your movie out, people might cluck and say, oh, he’s a self-producer. Like a self-publisher. Like me with my Transreal Books. But never mind that boring gripe.
It’ll be really interesting when any book in the world can be a movie. People really don’t read as much as they used to, right? But they’ll be “reading” via their custom AI-made movies. Filmifying. Sooner than you think.
Rudy’s always right.