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Click covers for info. Copyright (C) Rudy Rucker 2021.
I’m heading off to be the instructor for the final week of the Clarion West science-fiction writing workshop in Seattle.
To get ready, I reworked and expanded the “Writer’s Toolkit” document that I use when I talk about writing.
I’ll be doing a reading at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, July 28, 2009, at the University of Washington Book Store in Seattle. More info here.
I’m about two-thirds done with an Escher-inspired painting that I’m calling “Topology of the Afterlife.” I probably won’t get around to finishing it until mid-August.
I mentioned my motivations for this painting in a post the other day. In a nutshell, the painting has to do with my ideas about the afterworld, Flimsy, that appears in my novel-in-progress, Jim and the Flims. I see Flimsy as being tiny, down at the lowest level of space scale. I think of it as being what Leibniz calls a monad.
Now, it wouldn’t make sense for tiny Flimsy only to be in one particular location, so I’ll assume that it’s an ubiquitous monad. That is, Flimsy is inside every particle of matter and space.
You might say that the copies are in synch, like mirror-balls. But it would be more accurate not to say that the Flimsy monads are different views of one and the same thing. The One that underlies everything.
Here’s the win with this approach: if Flimsy is to be found within every particle of the universe, then Flimsy can serve as a stargate.
Like, I shrink down into Flimsy, and then ooze out of it onto the surface of planet Bex in the Whirlpool Nebula!
Now another issue comes up. If Flimsy is going to be housing the souls of aliens from throughout our universe, then I need for the place to be very large, perhaps even infinitely big—even though it’s smaller than an electron.
I can do this by using a space-warp trick: the center of the Flimsy-ball is negatively curved space that spikes out, with an unattainable center that is literally at infinity. God’s Eye.
Putting it differently, you might say that you can’t reach the center of Flimsy because you keep shrinking as you get closer and closer to it.
I first used this idea in 1979 when I was writing my novel White Light. I wanted to describe a terrace outside the infinite Hilbert’s Hotel, a terrace which has alef-null tables (that is, as many tables as there are natural numbers.)
After an indefinite interval of time I woke up with a start. I was covered with sweat, confused. The light outdoors hadn’t changed. The phone was ringing and I picked it up.
It was the clerk’s smooth voice. “Professor Hilbert is having tea on the terrace with some of his colleagues. Perhaps you’d care to join them. Table number 6,270,891.”
I thanked him and hung up. The terrace was reached by passing through the lobby. From outside, the terrace had looked fairly standard, with about fifty tables around the circumference. But now that I was on it I could see that everything shrank as it approached the middle…so that there were actually alef-null rings of tables around the terrace’s center.
Already about ten rows in, the tables looked like dollhouse furniture, and the gesticulating diners like wind-up toys. To find Hilbert I’d have to go in better than a hundred thousand rows. Fortunately there was a clear path in, so I could run.
[A melancholy picture of now-deserted Virgin Record Store at Powell and Market St. in San Francisco. A mirror across the empty room reflects me looking in through a plate-glass window. As chance would have it, White Light was orginally published by Virgin Books, a short-lived offshoot of the record company.]
The space distortion affected me without my feeling it. When I got to the dollhouse tables, I was doll-sized and they looked perfectly normal to me. I sped towards the center, staring at the strange creatures I passed.
… Each table had a little card with a number on it, and when I got into the six millions I slowed down a little. There were so many creatures. The endless repetition of individual lives began to depress me…the insignificance of each of us was overwhelming. My vision began to blur and all the bodies on the terrace seemed to congeal into one hideous beast. I lost my footing and slipped, knocking a waiter off his foot.
… Before long I spotted three men sitting at a table, two in suits and one in shirtsleeves. With a sudden shock I realized I was looking at Georg Cantor, David Hilbert and Albert Einstein. There was an empty place at their table. I hurried over, introduced myself and asked if I could join them.
I’d already been thinking along these lines, being inspired by the classic Zeno Bisection paradox, which notes that the infinite sum of a half plus a quarter plus an eighth plus a sixteenth and so on…equals one. But I’m pretty sure that I originally got the 2D version from Escher, I already had a book of his images by then.
Indeed Smaller and Smaller I, a wood engraving of 1956, Escher represents this type of “infinite terrace” by a tessellated square in which the inner tiles grow smaller and smaller as they near the center.
Copyright M. C. Escher. Visit the Escher gallery and shop for more info.
Discussing this piece in the wonderful old book, The Magic Mirror of M. C. Escher, his friend and editor Bruno Ernst writes:
“Escher took things to fanatical lengths and, using a magnifying glass, cut out little figures of less than half a millimeter. For the center of the wood engraving Smaller and Smaller I he purposely used an extra block of end-grain wood so that he could work in finer detail.”
I love it when artists or authors are fanatical about their craft.
I should also mention that Escher was also interested in the “opposite” way of fitting infinity into a finite region: drawing a disk in which things shrink as they get nearer to the circumference. This appears in Circle Limit III, a woodcut from 1959.
Copyright M. C. Escher. Visit the Escher gallery and shop for more info.
Escher’s inspiration for this pattern seems to have been a mathematical diagram of Poincaré’s model of hyperbolic geometry.
[Illustration from D. Hilbert and S. Cohn-Vossen, Geometry and the Imagination]
Although in many ways more beautiful than the shrink-towards-the-center model of the Hilbert’s Hotel terrace, this hyperbolic model isn’t suitable for Jim and the Flims—because I want my explorers to be coming into Flimsy through a bounding wall of living water. And if there’s an endless regress piled up at the edge, then it’s very hard to come in though that. If there’s in an infinite expanse towards the middle, that leaves open the possiblity of many adventures.
July 1, 2009.
[ The following is the final installment from my perhaps-too-lengthy notes on a recent trip to Scandinavia.]
I’m sitting on a stoop in sunny Ã…lesund near a canal. The buildings in this neighborhood are in Scandinavian takes on the Art Nouveau style, more commonly called Jugendstil here. The style happened to be in fashion in 1904, when the town burnt to the ground and was rebuilt over just a few years.
Nothing much on the agenda for our final two days—just wander around this pretty town. My credit card has stopped working—I guess the bankers are suspicious about the run of charges emanating from Denmark and Norway. But I don’t feel like phoning up the Empire’s bureaucracy to (maybe) straighten this out. Meanwhile my bank card is still able to extract kroner from the ATMs—which they call mini-banks here.
I’m in a bakery—I just had the best piece of pastry in years, a dry mille-feuille puff croissant wrapped around almond paste. To intensify the sensation, I pushed the whole second half into my mouth at once, then fell choking to the floor, knocking over my table and my chair—just kidding about that last part.
[Art Nouveau cover for a book by Norwegian polar explorer Amundsen.]
A baby in a carriage beside me is topped by the mound of a cotton-covered feather-bed comforter. All of the beds here have these fat comforters and no top-sheets or blankets. Given the unusual heat during our stay—70 or even 80 Fahrenheit—we’re hot at night, steaming in the midnight sun. Last night I saw the sunrise at 2 a.m. They have posters around town that mention the latitude—I think it’s 62 degrees.
Quite a few of the Norwegian women have platinum blonde hair, fine and nearly white—I’m not sure I’ve ever seen women with this as their natural hair color. Some of the Norwegian blondes are punks with cropped hair, pigtails and tattoos. Others, more traditional, wear their forelocks in braids that they wrap around their brows in an old-school braid-crown. The Norwegian babies are tender and so fair.
We were just in the library for some free email on their machines. It’s fun going into the public buildings of a town.
We walked around the shopping streets—with lovely Art Nouveau facades—but the insides of the buildings have been merged and hollowed out to hold an—aaack— mall that’s very nearly isomorphic to the Valley Fair mall in San Jose, only with H & M as their anchor store instead of Macy’s. But, ah, they do have that celestial bakery at the outer edge. I notice another pastry now—a cake with whipped cream reddened by cherries—they call it bloot cake, for “blood cake.”
We tour the Jugendstil Sentrum (Art Nouveau Center), and see an interesting slide show about Baltic and Scandinavia versions of this international style—it was big in Finland as a means to express a romantic nationalism directed against Russian dominance. I bet something like Art Nouveau will be big again, when advanced tech and new materials make possible a return to custom craftsmanship. The museum spoke of this one Jugendstil room as a work of “total art,” in which every detail is designed to act as a voice in the ecstatic chorus of the whole.
Looming over the town is one of those fat cruise starships that we saw before, The Jewel of the Sea, filled with alien invaders of a sort, that is, my fellow countrymen. This morning they tied up at a wharf a block from our hotel.
“I’m not one of them,” said the bespectacled, well-heeled alien, his face suspiciously tan and un-Norwegian. “My wife and I came here on public transport from Alpha Centauri, just like you natives do.”
“Oorck!” cried the rabble of pale street urchins surrounding the intruder. “Oorck, Oorck!” The first stone struck the alien square upon the forehead. He tottered and fell…
I bought a souvenir Norwegian wool cap, absurdly overpriced, but one of a kind (I’d like to think). It has tassels on it.
Tomorrow we go home, we already scoped out the spot where the airport busses leave. It’s a little sad to see the vacation end. I would have liked to visit Stockholm as well—but my legs and body are cumulatively fatigued after two and a half weeks of touring, also it feels like time to halt the gushing outflow of cash.
It’s been great. Takk for alt.
[ The following is the second-to-last installment from my notes on a recent trip to Scandinavia.]
June 30, 2009.
We took a regular bus from Fjaerland to Hellesylt, and then a ferry from Hellesylt to Geiranger. I was anxious about catching the bus, but it was on time to the second, and very comfortable inside. Great views as we labored over the ridges separating one fjord from the next. In many stretched the road was what we’d call one-lane, although it had traffic in both directions. The busses and cars would pull over for each other at times.
The cruise from Hellesylt to Geiranger really takes the prize. We saw dozens of really big cataracts—any one of which would be a major sight back in the continental US—and here they’re lined up on both sides of the fjord, writhing down the tree-studded cliffs that are several thousand feet high.
Abandoned farms perch on some of the nearly vertical meadows—what kind of maniac build his farm in a place like that?
Sore hip or not, I managed to hike to the top of a thousand foot bluff this morning. It felt like being back in Zermatt. I saw lots of ferns and rushing streams. The trees are mostly aspens. Some bell-collared sheep were in the thickets, peering suspiciously at me. And at the top, goats lolled with gratifying recklessness at the very edge of a towering drop. On the way back, I walked along the edge of a field, quite lovely with a barn and a cliff in the background.
The exercise made me happy, and I started singing a song that I heard on the Mickey Mouse Club show forty years ago, a song about Donald Duck’s global fame. The song, as I recall it, was presented in what may well have been a Norwegian accent. “Kvak kvak kvak, Donald Duck, watch him do his stuff. Kvak kvak kvak, Donald Duck, now he’s had enough.” I videoed myself performing this number.
Now I’m limp and tired from the hike. Waiting on the dock for a lighter for the large Hurtigruten ship, which we plan to board for a five hour ride up the length of this fjord to the city of Ã…lesund.
[Those tiny dots by the top railing are people!]
People are pouring off the lighters from a repellently gargantuan cruise ship called “The Jewel of the Sea,” truly the size of a starship—then flocking directly to a waiting line of tour buses. From the outside, it looks as if going on a cruise tour means doing everything in a crowd, with lots of standing in line. But it’s easier, I’m sure, than freelancing the trip, and for some people just the right thing.
I may go on a cruise myself one of these days, especially when I’m older and less mobile. Today in any case we’re riding a more reasonably-sized Hurtigruten mothership to Ã…lesund.
Great excitement riding the lighter to the Hurtigruten ship. A hatch in the big ship’s hull opens for us at water level, and we enter via a gang plank. It’s so spaceship-like, just like Han Solo landing in a hatch of the giant ship in Star Wars. One deck up was a desk like at a hotel, the “Resepsjon.” Now we’re in the panoramic view lounge on Deck 8, very comfortable, and this particular cruise ship isn’t looking so bad from the inside.
As we approach the mouth of the fjord, the view opens up to resemble the coastline of, say, Maine or Vancouver, with low islands and peninsulas on every side. But vaster, mistier, and calmer than anything I’ve seen before. The Happy Isles, the Blessed Lands of the far north.