Today Bruce Sterling sends me a picture by Warwick Goble of a woman holding up a jellyfish. A suitable symbol for augury at the start of this new year.

And John Brockman's webzine Edge has posted responses to the annual Edge question; the 2006 question being “What is Your Dangerous Idea?” I'm honored to appear among the assembled answerers, arguing that everything is conscious and that therefore death is in some measure inconsequential — perhaps causing some to ponder, “Who let that guy in?”

Audio files for some of our podcasts are gone, due to bit rot and unreliable hosts…
But you can look over the existing stash in the Rudy Rucker Podcasts Archive.

And…there’s always the videos on Rudy’s YouTube Channel! Not that these have anything to do with the missing podcasts. But they’re fun.

In 1982 I was the singer for a short-lived Lynchburg, Va, punk band called The Dead Pigs. We did some covers, and I wrote a couple of songs for the band. One of my songs was inspired by seeing an 1897 Jean-Paul Aube sculpture of Dante.

I ran across a copy of this sculpture in the Stanford Cantor Arts Center the other day. The thing about this work that caught my fancy is that there’s a head — perhaps that of a damned soul — attached to the Dante’s foot or ankle. Here’s the picture and some of the words to the song I wrote.

I’m a man who’s been crazy,

There’s a head stuck to my foot.

I kick and the room gets hazy,

There’s a head stuck to my foot.

I don’t know where to put it,

And it’s really gettin’ hard.

Nobody wants to touch me,

For the head is my body, the head is my body,

The head is my bodyguard.

And do your folks think you are a stranger?

Do your friends say you be too weird?

It’s hard to live with much danger, baby,

Year after year after year after year.

***

Speaking of Lynchburg, I have a new “Killeville” science-fiction story online in the possibly final issue of Eileen Gunn's way-hip Infinite Matrix webzine, with an illo by A Fluffy Bunny (shown above). The story is “The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club“; it's something I dreamed for years of writing, kind of blend of Phil Dick's “The Father Thing,” American Graffiti, the Book of Revelations, Linklater's Dazed and Confused, teen horror movies, door-to-door religious tract pamphleteers, my long-term concern over the evil of Pig Chefs, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, and memories of some men who played cards all day in the men's locker room of a Lynchburg country club.

I wrote the story in 2003, and it's very tight and clear and funny, but some might find it — disturbing. None of the usual magazines would run it. So it's nice to see it in print at last. To make this the sweeter, one of Robert Sheckley's very last stories is in the same issue of Infinite Matrix! Rude Boy says check it out.

And as you party tonight, keep in mind the closing lines of “The Men In The Back Room at the Country Club”:

…pay close attention to the fluid dynamics of coffee, juice and alcoholic beverages. Any undue rotation could be a sign of smeel.

The end is near.

Happy New Year!

Almost cleaned up from Xmas now. About two weeks ago I asked for some thoughts on “Life After The Singularity”. Here’s some choice thoughts from the comments, with my own remarks in square brackets. For illos today, I’ll put in some pictures I took recently. The first two I got while walking around the Cantor Art Center at Stanford with fellow SF writer Greg Benford yesterday. This first picture shows Greg with a Louis-Ernst Barrias sculpture entitled, “Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science.” Very harrumph fine piece of work.

Brian B. I'm assuming the orphids and beezies are neutral agents. [Yes. The orphids are neutral at a hardware level, and the beezies who emerge in the orphidnet aren’t going to care that much about us — although it may be that they want to affect people to create more or better orphids.]

[Rudy and Greg with a sculpture called “Dangerous Brain Bowl”, part of a “Fired at Davis” show at the Cantor Art Center.]

Steve H. How easy/hard would it be to hack orphids? [I think I’ll say this is impossible, at least for the story I’m currently working on. The orphids out there, autonomous, neutral, incorruptible, always on, like a force of nature.]

Would lack of privacy turn us all into blushing wallflowers or egomaniacs. [Good issue. An objective correlative for blogging.]

What kind of cursing-out could you give someone if you could accompany it with a Powerpoint show in 3D? [Yes, I see virtual Smiley faces and emoticons in 3D. Also models of rude things.]

[Photo of an African ancestor mask in the De Young Museum in SF.]

If I wanted to become President would I campaign to the humans or the beezies? [I think the beezies are neutral about our politics. But they might sell info to a party that helps their campaign. I’m seeing a deal between the beezies and some oilmen who control a supply of piezoplastic they want to use for shoon bodies.]

Would the orphids get mad if we brushed off our chairs before sitting down, or painted a surface they were stuck to? Would they stick to wet paint, or maple syrup? Could you get a picture of your colon anytime from the orphids you just ate? [I’m thinking of the orphids as lively enough to squirm out from under paint, and sticky enough that you can’t brush them off. I hadn’t thought about the ones you swallow. We might as well suppose that all of our body cavities are lined with orphids as well.]

[Also in the DeYoung.]

Still Steve H. With orphids in our ears we wouldn't need iPods. [Right. They’re like lice on our heads to give everyone broadband orphidnet hookup. I’d been thinking of them putting sounds in your head via nerve stim, but its nice to think of them making noise in the ear as well.]

How would Metallica keep everyone from downloading their album as they recorded it? [Good point. I guess intellectual property is tougher than ever. Of course watching someone record an album or write a book takes a lot longer than just getting the finished product. And there’s still something nice about the physical object.]

The Golden Man defense has attack points: “Get uphill and drop rocks on 'em. Put the precognition-defended people in positions where knowing doesn't help.” [Good point. But if you’re precognition is good enough, nobody’s ever gonna get you into a tight spot like that.]

Thomas Terashima. What exactly do the beezies want? [I’m thinking they will want physical bodies. I’m considering various kinds of bodies. In exchance for certain kinds of bodies, the beezies might actually “pay” people by giving them high-quality predictions.]

Currency will be replaced by virtual coupons for orphid swarm resources. [Great idea. That plugs right into my own line of thought.]

Marshall. I would like to start an oasis where electricity didn't work and you just breathed air. [Wouldn’t we all! The orphidnet is a kind of symbol for the invasive pervasive wireless world. Maybe the oasis guys can be ‘control naturals.’]

***

This is a faerie baby I happened to encounter in the Big Basin woods! She had with her a map of the spiral galaxy she comes from.