I did three paintings for my novel, Turing & Burroughs, “Turing and the Skugs,” “A Skugger’s Point of View,” and “V-Bomb Blast, ” which I finished today. You’ll find it at the bottom of this post. As always, more info on my Paintings Page

Note that Turing & Burroughs treats a timely theme, as 2012 is the centennial of the man’s birth, and has been dubbed the Alan Turing Year, with a number of conferences and events planned for that year.

For those of you who just tuned in, Alan Turing was one of the primary inventors of today’s computers. He is believed to have died wretchedly in 1954, a suicide persecuted by the British authorities for his homosexuality. Turing & Burroughs proposes that Turing’s supposed death was a cover-up, and that the man himself escaped to the open city of Tangier.

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

For the purposes of Turing & Burroughs, I’m supposing that Turing has carried out some biochemical experiments leading to the creation of slug-like creatures called skugs. In “Turing and the Skugs,” we see Turing encountering a handsome man who may well become Alan’s lover. In my novel he’s rather promiscuous.

In Tangier, Turing meets the Beat writer William Burroughs and they become lovers. Turing invents a parasitic biocomputational organism called a skug. Both he and Burroughs welcome skugs into their bodies, thereby becoming skuggers. Skuggers enjoy both telepathy and shapeshifting, that is, a protean ability change their bodies’ forms.

“A Skugger’s Point of View”, 40″ x 30″ inches, January, 2011, Oil on canvas.” Click for larger version.

In “A Skugger’s Point of View,” I wanted to render an extreme first-person point of view in which we see the dim zone around a person’s actual visual field. Turing has become a mutant known as a “skugger,” and he has the ability to stretch his limbs like the cartoon character Plastic Man. He is traveling across the West with two friends, a man and a woman.

Turing’s cohort is being attacked by police, one of whom bears a flame-thrower. Turing is responding by sticking his fingers into their heads, perhaps to kill them, or perhaps to convert them into skuggers as well. We can see Turing’s arms extending from the bottom edge of his visual field. Even though it’s not quite logical, I painted in his eyes as well because they make the composition better..

Turing and Burroughs have been busy spreading the skugger infestation to the people around them. My novel takes on aspects of a Fifties invasion story such as The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. The difference is that Turing & Burroughs is told from the point of view of the mutants themselves, and the alienated mutants are a positive force. Society at large becomes consumed by a hysterical hatred of the skuggers, and the authorities seek to exterminate them.

The subtextual kicker is that this mirrors what happened culturally as the 1950s segued into the 1960s. Outcasts such as Beats, artists, radicals and homosexuals began to gain more control, sparking reactionary efforts to suppress them.

“V-Bomb Blast”, 40″ x 30″ inches, July, 2011, Oil on canvas.” Click for larger version.

Of course no Fifties-style SF novel is complete without a nuclear weapon. At the climax of Turing & Burroughs, Turing and Burroughs are in Los Alamos, New Mexico, working to block the detonation of a V-bomb, which will emit rays to annihilate the skuggers wholesale.

Sacrificing his own life, Turing crawls inside the weapon before ignition. Upon the V-bomb’s detonation, he uses his higher powers to alter its radiation—preserving the lives of his fellow skuggers while removing their parasitic skugs. And in an afterword, Burroughs explains what happened.

The “V-Bomb Blast” painting doesn’t exactly depict what I’m talking about. But reading from right to left, you can view it as three stages of the V-bomb—on the right, someone (who I happened to paint as a woman) is inside the V-bomb, about to pull the detonation cord. In the middle is a semi-happy face nuclear explosion. Oddly enough, the V-bomb fireball shrinks instead of expanding.

And on the left, we see the explosion slipping through a rent in the fabric of reality. “Turing died that we may live.”

My autobiography, Nested Scrolls, is out in a limited edition from PS Press in England. They’re selling hardbacks and a signed collector’s edition.

I just got my copies yesterday which was, synchronistically, the day I finished the first draft of the next book in the pipeline, Turing & Burroughs.

Note that PS used one of my paintings, “Surfin Tiki” for the cover, and my painting “Jellyfish Lake” for the endpapers. They put together a very nice looking book. The Tor edition will look more or less the same on the inside, although it will have a different cover and no colored endpapers.

Starting on December 6, 2011, Nested Scrolls will also be available in hardcover and ebook editions from Tor Books. I see it already listed byAmazon, Barnes&Noble, Borders, and the site for Independent Booksellers.

[By the way, we’re not so fond of Amazon in California as we used to be, now that they want to fund a ballot initiative to block our state from collecting sales tax from them…and now that they’ve stopped paying “finder’s fees” to the so-called associates (such as bloggers) in California who link to their site.]

But never mind such mundane considerations. The mothership of Nested Scrolls is launched. Odd than anyone might ever have mistaken it for a hat!

To fill out today’s post, I’m printing some excerpts from my Notes for Nested Scrolls document. You can read this whole document for free online as a PDF, see the link off my Nested Scrolls page.

By the way, when I started writing these notes, I still wasn’t quite sure if I was working on an autobiographical memoir…or on a transreal novel.

July 11, 2008.

Who would really want to read a memoir by me, after all? It’s not like I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people who have read the existing autobio note online.

There should be some riddle whose answer I’m seeking by writing the memoir—or the memoir-like novel. What is reality? What’s the point of my life? How can I be happy? What did I learn by writing thirty books? What’s the missing book that I need to write? How is it possible to write at all? Can I create a completely pure work of literary art? What has it been like to be alive? What was the point?

July 12, 2008.

Looking around Borders Books today, I was thinking about what kinds of memoirs get published. David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs have a whole thing going with rueful tales of personal dysfunction. Back in the 1930s, Robert Benchley, James Thurber and Dorothy Parker were doing something similar.

Another angle is to present yourself as the Witness to History—for me, this might be the Silicon Valley thing or the cyberpunk thing, though people aren’t responding much to the Silicon Valley idea when I suggest it. It’s like people are sick of Silicon Valley. Maybe if I could clearly cast the memoir as evocations of a bygone era—which certainly it would be. In this context, I think of the Vanished Wild West.

The point of writing a memoir would be to entertain myself, and to gain a bit more self-knowledge. To have some fun. In certain lights, doing a memoir seems easier than grinding away on another novel. But maybe not.

Mainly I want to write, and I don’t care all that much what it is that I’m writing.

July 17-26, 2008.

Back to the current obsession—why bother writing an autobio? What would I get out of it? Self-knowledge. Bragging pleasure. Self-guidance. Publicity.

It’s mattering less and less to me if I actually do write a memoir. There’s such a powerful “why bother” haze surrounding any plan for a memoir.

It might really be more productive to write another novel. Or maybe just a couple of stories first. At the very least, I’m writing in this Notes document.

I’m writing almost at random in these notes. Which could be a good thing. I’ve heard it said that writers are at their best when they have no idea what they’re doing.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

I feel like this is getting nowhere. But you never know.

July 26, 2008.

Today’s title for the book is Nested Scrolls, a phrase I like because it describes the chaotic, self-organizing, artificially alive Belousov-Zhabotinsky simulations that I love. And “scroll” is good, as it refers to a document or even a sacred text, and if the scrolls are “nested” that’s fractal and self-referential and heavy.

I could even get literal with the title, and have the book in the form of a memoir that an aging man is trying to write, and he begins finding extra stuff in the document. Maybe he can somehow zoom in—it’s an electronic document—and he sees stuff that he doesn’t remember writing. And he goes into time-travel flashbacks. And maybe some characters from the past show up. Nested Scrolls.

July 9, 2011

I’ve been working full-bore on Turing & Burroughs for a little over a year now.  As of yesterday, my novel file is finally longer than my Notes file! 81,621 words in the Novel file versus 80,750 words in the Notes. A turning point. Although the Notes could yet pull ahead again.

I’m on the train, going up to San Francisco for a night today, seeing John Shirley read tonight, and reading at Borderlands tomorrow. Will bring the laptop and keep the fire going. I’ll sleep at my son’s house in Berkeley, even though he and the family won’t be there tonight.

July 10, 2011.

In the morning, alone in Rudy Jr.’s house, I did some work on the novel and essentially finished it.

First I had a false-start idea for Chap 17: V-bomb. But I realized that wouldn’t work. Too complicated. So I made it simpler. It’s all about simplification near the end.

I wrote the V-bomb chapter right through to the ending. Hooray! I’m almost done. I just have to add Chap 18: “Last Words,” supposedly by William Burroughs. I was really happy at this point. I walked to the BART stop and a homeless guy looked at me and said, “You the happiest man I see today!” And he was right, I was grinning, aglow, joyful.

One more thought I had later that day: For Alan to effectively modulate the V-rays, and to not hamper the explosion, he should dematerialize into matter-waves right before the explosion.

In the afternoon, I was hanging out on Valencia Street in SF with my artist friend Paul Mavrides, telling him about the plot of my novel, and about the last scene I’d just written and about my recently conceived tweak. Paul was laughing in a friendly way. “So that’s the perfect way for you to distribute your ideas from now on. Dematerialize into matter waves and modulate the V-rays.”

July 11, 2011.

Okay, tonight I wrote “Last Words,” the last little chapter of The Turng Chronicles. I was sitting in my California-Craftsman-style La-Z-Boy recliner armchair in the living-room with Sylvia reading on the couch. The book’s first draft is done. Calloo, Callay!

July 12, 2011.

On the morning of July 12, I lay out on my yoga mat in the back yard and marked up the last two chapters two times, retyped them twice, then went over the final chapter onscreen one more time. And fixed a last To Do item. I think it really is done now, although of course I’ll reprint the final chapter one or more times.

And then I’ll have to do the whole book printout and the full revision thing. But for now it’s good enough to mail to an editor. Over 85,000 words, as planned. I wrote nearly 4,000 words in three days. Yeah, baby.

Finis coronat opus.