I should mention that on Saturday night, Feb 27, I'll join the LitPunk reading at the MakeOut room in the Mission in SF, in a show running 7:30-9:30...I'll only be reading for about five minutes, but the whole lineup looks good. LitPunk info link.
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I would like to have some very different kind of technology in this alternate world Flimsy that I’m writing about, or something that’s not even like technology at all. Various kinds of—empowerment. In other words, the flims (that is, the residents of Flimsy) are empowered by something other than the kinds of machines that we have, or they’re using machines in a different kind of way.

Making this fresh is a demanding problem, as I’ve written about alternately-empowered worlds before, and I don’t want to repeat myself. I’ll list a series of empowerments that I’ve used: junkpile, biotech, nanomachines, transmutation, vaaring, matter holograms, and psi powers. And then I’ll talk about a new approach that I’ll call zickzack, or hyperdimensional origami

A constraint is that I want to keep the jivas on the scene, which are things like flying jellyfish, possibly alien beings, possible spirits, whatever works. And I’d like to keep the vibe of the flims as being like sprites, elves and goblins, even if they have to be, like, DMT elves living in an intense urban fantasy.

[Unused cover design for Freestyle zine #3, 1989.]

Junkpile. A old-school SF future scenario posits a kind of ultimate New Jersey, crowded with tech junk, but without any truly paradigm-shattering changes. I think of Max Headroom, cyberpunk, Bladerunner, like that. I kind of had this approach in my first novel Spacetime Donuts, and in Software.

Biotech. On the Earth of 3003 in Frek and the Elixir, people use biotech instead of machines. They have, like, house trees and knife plants and transporter beetles—every little object you’d want is grown by some kind of plant and any task can be done by a specialized animal. And I briefly mentioned this scenario in Saucer Wisdom as well. I first read about the notion in some forgotten SF novel or story when I was in high school—I specifically remember reading about a seed for a house, and plant that grew knives.

Nanomachines. We can imagine docile nanomachines that build whatever we want, like the “utility fog” sometimes discussed, or like smart sand. I did something in Frek and the Elixira little like this, with tiny living polyps building a house like a reef—but here we’re talking about molecular-sized machines. I did have nanomachines in Postsingular—first the nants, and then the orphids—although in those books the nanomachines weren’t actually building stuff. And I don’t really want to have these nant-like things in Flimsy because then right away we have to worry about them coming over and eating our world, which is a problem I already used for a plot in Postsingular.

Transmutation. This variation of direct matter control appears in Realware, , and was sketched in Saucer Wisdom as well. Here people have devices called allas which can create any object they want by transmuting input atoms into the desired output atoms (using quark-flipping), and by then arranging the atoms into the target object. It’s like programming matter.

Vaaring. In Frek and the Elixir, they travel to a planet called Unipusk, where some of the locals are “kenny-crafters” who can “vaar.” Vaaring is like transmutation, but more far-fetched. Vaar is used in two related senses. The first type of vaaring is the process of turning invisible dark matter (kenner) into a visible substance. The second type of vaaring is the process of forming the kenner-derived matter into some specific shape or device—these objects are called kennies. Functionally, vaaring is pretty much like using a magic wand, as is transmutation.

Matter holograms. In Hylozoic, the Peng alter the quantum computations of matter so that the atoms send out matter waves that interact to form objects called tulpas. To some extent you could do without tech if you could make tulpas at will—it’s a bit like transmutation or vaaring, although the resulting tulpas don’t have the stability of a kenny or an alla-made object.

Psi powers. The humans in Hylozoic use teleportation to get around, telepathy to communicate, and they assemble some things by teleporting objects. They can also teep into objects (which have rudimentary minds) and encourage the objects to behave in certain ways. This cuts down on their need for tech devices.

Hyperdimensional Origami. Suppose that the jivas use a type of dimensional mastery to make things for the flims. In a buzzword sense, I explain the gimmick as hyperdimensional origami. Regions of space fold and alter to become tunnels, houses, whatever. It’s not psi, it’s not nanotech, it’s not matter holograms, it’s not vaaring or transmutation—but it’s almost as good as having any of those. I still need to work out a few details though!

Okay, so I want to start thinking about “hyperdimensional origami,” but I need a shorter name for this empowerment.

Flip, twist, twizzle, tweak, zickzack…I like zickzack. Like an onomatopoeic sound indicating something changing very fast, like in a fairy tale. I see zickzack as a verb, adjective, or as different kinds of noun.

“The jiva zickzacked the space beside my feet, creating a shimmery flight of stairs.” “I entered a zickzack door.” “What’s this I’m wearing? It’s a zickzack.” “The jivas have the power of zickzack.”

And, yeah, the jivas do the zickzacking. This in the SF tradition of giving people access to some incomprehensible alien devices owned by alien allies—or alien masters. Normal human tech has withered away in Flimsy, or maybe it never even emerged, if we suppose that the jivas have been around for a really long time.

I made a Hylozoic website for my forthcoming novel today—it’ll be out at the start of June, but you can pre-order copies now from the Hylozoic site if you want to (which is a good thing for me, as it sends a signal to Tor that people want to read the book.)

A more compelling reason to visit the Hylozic site at this point is that it contains a link for my “Writing Notes for Hylozoic,” which is a whopping 4.3 Meg PDF file, containing a 385 page single-spaced (but nicely formatted) document with the working notes for the book. I have numerous images in the document, as well and internal and external hyperlinks. It’s really a book in itself, about 190,000 words long…which is over twice the length of the actual novel.

I recently got this preliminary image of the Hylozoic cover from Tor. It’s quite beautiful. For a second I didn’t realize that those blue things are images of a manta ray, but, yeah, there they are, the Hrull, not exactly as I’d depict them myself, but nice to see.

They might still drop the “Sequel to Postsingular” line from the Hylozoic cover, as that kind of phrase could be off-putting for a reader who hasn’t read Postsingular. And, I would argue, one could perfectly well read Hylozoic on its own, or before Postsingular.

I was initially surprised that the font of the Hylozoic book title was so small, but, looking back, I see that the title was even smaller on the Postsingular cover. In any case, I’m proud that my name is printed large, which indicates that my “brand” has become a good selling point. And thank god for good old Bill Gibson’s solid-gold blurb. And for the Tor art department. These are some of the best covers I’ve ever had.

Farewell, Postsingular and Hylozoic. I liked this world a lot, maybe I’ll be back some day.

But right now, having finished the initial version of my memoir, Nested Scrolls, I’m busy with my next SF novel, Jim and the Flims…

Well, actually, I’m not working on Jim and the Flims this week, instead I’m rooting around in my basement organizing my literary archive. It’s been a cockroach-in-his-nest kind of activity for these rainy winter days.

It’s weird looking at the three bookshelves of my old writing notes, journals, and book drafts. A life’s work, a vine twining around time’s tree. I’ve been lucky.

Conceivably I could sell the archive. As I understand it, the way this works is that you get someone to pay you a substantial sum for your archive, and then they donate it to a university library and they thereby do a public service and get a tax break. Of course, I might get a better deal if I was dead.

Oddly, enough, if the writer him or herself donates the archive while alive, he or she can’t take a tax break—Congress passed this law in fury after Nixon got a $19 million tax deduction for donating his papers to the Yorba Linda Nixon Library! Good old Nixon…

It rained about five inches last week—what we call a storm in California. I love to see water do its thing. So much beauty, all there for free, gone in a moment.

I have a couple of new links today. My young friend Brendan Byrne has started an ezine called The Orphan with a couple of his pals. It’s a zine for fragmentary stories or articles that are somehow fated never to see formal publication. I contributed a piece called “Catalog Notes for the Secession,” involving some catalog copy that an artist asked me to write for him…and then changed his mind about using.

My other link is to an interview with me on a website called Self-Publishing Review. I did self-publish my art book Better Worlds last month. And with POD (print on demand) and ebooks coming on stronger all the time, you really have to wonder what publishing really means anymore.

You can read my interview at that site, but I will quote one riff here that I thought was funny. I wrote this in the context of me discussing why you’d bother to use a publisher at all if, at some future time, all a publisher was going to do was to produce POD and ebook versions of your work—as opposed to distributing paper copies in bulk. Even though you can do this yourself, a publisher can still provide an advance and a modicum of promotion.

Re: promotion, for mid-list writers like me, promotional media advertising isn’t really a factor. My publishers mention each of my novels in a multi-book ad in the SF trade zine Locus, and that’s about it. But they do send out review copies. Of course a self-publisher can send out ebook review copies for no cost—but this is really a mass spam ad. And reviewers are, of necessity, adept at ignoring spam. Having a commercial publisher lends credibility. That is, if my book comes out under the aegis of a familiar publisher, people feel assured that the work is of professional quality—as opposed to being the maunderings of a senile madman.

Would that work as a memoir title? The Maunderings of a Senile Madman. No, no, that wouldn’t be a wise move.

Something I didn’t explicitly say in my interview, by the way, is that blogging is, in and of itself, already a form of self-publishing. Maybe we’re going to slowly let go of the notion that to “publish” something is to have it pass through the hands of an office in a skyscraper in a big city. Maybe publishing doesn’t really have an unbreakable connection with commerce. Maybe it’s like rain, your words and images pelting down on the world, sending out their little circles and fading away.

Oh, one other thing I forgot to mention in my interview is that it costs nothing, that is $0, to make your book available in POD on Lulu…they make their money by taking a small cut of each POD copy they sell. For $100, Lulu will get you an official book barcode and have the book listed on Amazon…but I think you can actually to this yourself for less. The point is: self-publishers no longer need to hand over thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to predatory vanity presses…even though there are POD publishers who still try to follow the old vanity press model of selling their authors multiple “editing, distribution, and promotion” packages.

I finished my lastest painting, Four Mile Beach. Painting number 50! I was out there en plein air on the last day before the storm moved in. The waves came out well—I did that part in under an hour, right there on the beach. I reworked the cliffs and rocks at home. I like this picture a lot. Sometimes the easy ones are the best. Click here to see a larger version of this painting.

It’s been raining hard all day, very unusual here. I like the waxing and waning of the drops sweeping across the roof. Think of all the vibrations in all the drops…

I don’t have much to say today. Suffice it to say that I’m still grappling with the shape of my novel, Jim and the Flims. And I did another layer on some parts of my new painting, Four Mile Beach. I might finish it in a couple of days.

For me, writing is very much a matter of groping. Exploring possible paths through the story universe to find one that’s both surprising and with a kind of inevitable story-like feel. This is a flight of stairs in an apartment building on Telegraph Hill, where we were this weekend. There’s a clock on the wall at the very top of the stairs in this picture, but my obnoxious camera battery died before I could reshoot and get the exposure right.

I like this scene, it’s an example to me of how certain physical situations have the feel of concrete symbols: a hemmed-in flight of stairs with a clock at the top. Life in a nutshell. Bridges are like that too.

An equliateral triangle on a cop flasher. Not an archetype, just a shape.

In Berkeley I often walk past a dilapidated motel-like home for seniors on Shattuck Avenue. These vents against the dramatic sky are again archetypal. The vents connect the individual souls within to the higher Gnarl above.

Friday we had dinner at the home of my fellow Kentuckian and SF writer, Terry Bisson. Terry was going on about how photography is the lowest art form — because he thinks it’s easy to do (hah!) — and this reminded me to take some pictures. Dig this ant-decorated napkin beside a plate of Valentine’s cookies. Relatively easy to shoot, yes, if you’ve practiced using your camea for a considerable time, but to see the picture there to be plucked, ah, there’s the tricky part.

The Bisson’s granddaughter had a cool paper toy that she’d gotten as a favor at a birthday party. We all played with it. I thought of the cases of plaster models of curved surfaces that the old-school European mathematics departments have on display—relics from the days before the chips ate our brains.

I’ve pretty much photographed all the bric-a-brac in my own house, but Terry’s house had new stuff to shoot. I like the orange/yellow color on their walls. Maybe I cold put some weird gods and goddesses walking around in the land of Flimsy in my new novel. When I’m as uncertain as I currently am about my story, I’m wide open to influences from stuff that I see. Inhaling metric tons of sensation, with my sensitive baleen filtering out the twitching krill.

Terry’s wife Judy is a quilter, she has stacks and stacks of them. Here’s one in progress. Lovely stuff.

Bisson himself! My pal.

I also saw my artist friend Paul Mavrides and his friend Mimi Heft this weekend. That’s Mavrides on the left.

And I got together with my old college friend Greg Gibson as well, but I didn’t get any pictures of him. Greg was in San Francisco for the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, representing his company Ten Pound Island Books. It’s kind of scary how old we’re getting. But the books are older. Some very cool stuff on display, this great underground river of images and words, forgotten but not gone.