Here’s my secone post about Armadillocon. See my much longer Armadillocon 1 post for more matrial, and for my Austin photos.
Here’s a one-click link to the audio for today’s post. By the way, I’ve just now found a terrific free online Adobe Enhance Speech tool that totally cleans up your crappy cell-phone-lying-on-a-table recordings. I used it on the Armadillocon 1 audio as well. Who says the world isn’t getting better?
I think today’s material is drawn from an opening panel where we talked about the bitrh of cyberpunk.
I have a big backlog of non-Austin photos, and I’m loading about 25 of them into today’s post. Locations include Venice, Fort Bragg CA, Los Gatos CA, and Madison. Do they dovetail with with the text? Well, as I like to say: a fundamental principle of Surrealism is that everything fits with everything. It’s all one pattern in Hilbert space.
Some of my recent paintings appear in today’s post. I’ve sold about 110 of them over the years, and would love to sell more — both for reassurance, and to pay for materials. Check out the Rudy’s Paintings page.
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
A move that a lot of non-SF authors use is something I call transrealism. I’ve been transreal for over forety years — see my 1983 “A Transrealist Manifesto.” 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, and hang out with him a bit. At one point the universe smiled on us, and we twp were invited over to Tim Leary’s house talk about a weird science series that Tim wanted to host. What a day! (No, it was never produced.)
Fourth of July in Sf. “Illegal” fireworks in the Mission
Talking to me about writing, Robert once remarked that there are three problems for a writer: how to write, how to finish something, and how to write about yourself. Transrealism is way of writing about yourself. It might be called autofictino, but the idea here is that you put in some science-fictional or “speculative” ideas to amp it up.
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 my real life. It’s flat-out synchronicity, and it’s real. Less cryptically, I might say that the transreal SF events in my characters’ lives are symbolic of my real life, and there is an ongoing transfer back and forth.
As an example, if you write about telepathy, you are, in a way, writing about the deep need for somebody to understand what the fuck you’re talking about. And as you write this, you get better at understanding those around you.
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 arbitrary system system of grunts and squeals, as Jorge Luis Bores once put it. How is that people menteally 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, people can “read” them and know your thoughts? Or you daub colored mud on a cloth and they “see” your mental visions? It’s so amazing that that all this works. Never forget how strange the real world is.
With daughter Georgia in Madison WI
Moving into SF, we look for ways to make the transreal connection stronger. For instance, can we expand 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 thought waves? We’d just lie around, nodding at each other like stoners. “Ya, mon, I dig where you’re at.” But, more seriously, how might an SF version of telepathy work? In reality there can be, even when sober, a sense that it’s possible. And if you’re a SF writer, you say, okay, I’m going to image how it might be.
View from plane. Miles hibh Love the shadows of the clouds. What chaos theorists call “Poincare sections.”
My standard move for telepathy in my later novels is to use a biotech object that I call an uvvy. “Uvvy” is pronounced as in “lovey-dovey.” A cozy, friendly-sounding word. It’s like a small banana slug. Actually a little smaller than a banana slug, and slightly alive, but, you know, not too live;y. You put one on the nape of your neck. They come in different colors, and with individualized patterns.
Young Rudy observes that view and dreams of being a Beatnik Science Fiction Writer.
You put the uvvy on the nape your neck, and it picks up on your brainwaves. It doesn’t put tendrils into you. You do not ever want to put tendrils into your brain. And above all, you don’t ever want to put a chip or a biotech device inside your body. If are at all familiar with tech, you know, you know about upgrades.
Barb and Rudy at the fun and funky dance club Poor House Bistro in good ole gets-no-respect San Jose CA.
You don’t want a chip inside your head because after awhie it’s going to say: “Well, you have version 2.31, and that build has a critical problem. Come into the lab, and we’ll fix you up with version 3.17. Upgrades are fee. In the future, you’ll want to check in with us every six months or so. And othehrwise we’ll contact you. Thank you for being our partner.”
Whale City Bakery in Davenport CA. I love this old man.
You don’t want the upgrade procedures. And you don’t want tendrils.
But can the neck-riding uvvy pick up your bain waves well enough? Electromagnetic signals can be faint and fuzzy. Well, we have our hopes pinned on quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics like this magic Genie that SF writers and start-ups like to invoke.
Wetlands at Point Reyes park. I adore these kinds of “lop lop” curves. I got that word from Max Ernst’s writing.
We do have quantum computation starting to work now, and it’s advancing ratjer drastically jow. But the quantum effect that might help more with telepathy might be quantum entangement, which is something different. Entanglemen has to do with the notion of separated physical systems might be locked in harmony. Perfect for long-range signalling, right? I used it in: Postsingualr, Million Mile Roadtrip, Juicy Ghosts, Sqinks.
Not that I really know what I’m talking about. I do knonw some science, but really I’m just an SF writer.
The simplistic notion about quantum entanglement is that you get deeply in sync with someone. And then when you think this thing here, the thought might also over t here. In the other person’s head.
As I mentioned before, we do sometimes get flashes of this. When you’re with somebody you know very well. Like a lover, or an old friend, or a family member. Could be that you’re just reading their micro expressions or picking up their pheromones. But sometimes you really do get this vibe of knowing where they’re at.
“Maze” With cartoon flies looking for something icky in the basement.
It’s worth noting that the mind-meld type of contact seems more likely to happen when you’re physically face to face with a person. Online Zoom hookups feel way flatter. But of course this might be from the lo-fidelity of our remote video tech. But there’s a sense that you’re more likely to enjoy a full quantum-entanglement with somenoe who’s physically present.
The contack couple possibly be enhanced by the fact that you’ve just been eating or drinking the same things. I think it was John Updike who remarked that if you live with someone for sevaral years, you are eventually made of more or less the same batches of molecules. And, who knows, that might have something to do with quantum entanglement.
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 very 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 simple fact that certain long, floating molecules from one person are fitting into certain cellular receptors in the other person’s nose.
“I like how you smell.”
Never forget that we are not just lifebox data patterns of neuronal connections that can be stored in the cloud. We are physical bodies, with all that entails.
You meet someone, and date’s pheromones fit into your receptor sites and you’re all, OH yeah.
And maybe it’s not just a matter of drifting molecules. Maybe there’s this quantum field aura that glows from your brain. A field of muli-dimensional Hlbert space wave-funcntion energies, as I like to say. Some very complicated phenomenon which we don’t even begin to understand.
Keep mind, after all, that we’ve only been doing science for, like, two hunderd years. A small span against the million or so years that higher forms of life on Earth have existed!
One of my first photos with my new Pixel 11. Un-fucking-believable.
So, yes, we’re far from being able to to manipulate or measure our brain waves, whether electromagnetic or quantum mechanical. But we know they’re there. So sure, telepathy can happen.
As an example of drastically rapidly we’re advancing, just think of cell phones. If out of the blue you had seen a few of them in 1890, you might already have said we had telepathy.
Like, you’re standing on a hill, holding a little box, and somebody on the other side of the country is holding a little box, and you’re talking to them? And you’d be like, how can this be? This is telepathy!
Painter that I am, I individualize my phone cases. It cuts my chances of losing my phone on any given day from about 10% to 3%.
I remember when cellular phones were first coming, and I had this feeling they’re too complicated, and I was at the airport and I aw a very average guy in a business suie holding his phone to his head, like a kid with a toy, and I’m, like, “I can use one of these, too! It’s not that hard.”
Bull kelp at Fort Bragg. I ;ove 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 hitting the sand on the beat. No reason. 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 some day they’ll make, a movie out of out of their 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 for all of us in 60 years, or maybe sooner. It’d be easy to take a novel and turn it into a feature-length movie. With really good rendering thaat’s completely realistic if you like. And the plot can either tweaked by the AI, or not…you an adjust this. That is, your novel becomes like sheet of music that is being played.
At a Fort Bragg club.
And of course if that’s the only way you can get your movie made, poeople might cluck and say, oh, he’s a self-producer. Or maybe not. Maybe the craft of making the conversion will be a thing. Like engineering prompts.
It’ll be really interesting when any book in the world can be a movie. An SF concept to explore.
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. Where the world snake bites it’s tail.