I did a reading event with Michael Blumlein  for an SF in SF event in San Francisco on June 12, 2016.  I read my story “Knobby Giraffe,” about a woman rescuing her girlfriend from the dead, and Michael read an essay/memoir called “Unrestrained and Indiscreet,” which turned out to be about the fact that Michael is dying of cancer.  It was deep and profound.   I posted a podcast of my story. And I posted a podcast of Blumlein’s amazing performance as well.

Here’s the audience. The discontinuity is because Richard Kadrey and Pat Murphy were off to the side.  A good crowd. If you were there and want to find yourself, view the larger version. Many thanks to Jacob and Rina of Tachyon Press for keeping the SF in SF readings going, and to Terry Bisson for serving as the leathery emcee.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I’ve been talking about my novel Million Mile Road Trip for nearly two years. I finished the first draft this week. What you see above is a sketch for a scene that’s in the second to last chapter, entitled “Cosmic Beatdown: Part I.” The attack of the giant saucers. A classic, classic theme.

“Saucer Bagpipe” acrylic on canvas, June, 2016, 24” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

In the very last chapter, “Cosmic Beatdown: Part II,” my characters finish off a certain evil alien bagpipe named Groon. Who’s he? He’s a mountainous bagpipe that spews flying saucers, and who forces the saucers to act as leeches. But you don’t need to know that. As I’ve said before, I like to regard many of my paintings as being illustrations of unknown parables or proverbs. Like medieval illos of tales gone missing in the flow of time. Just from the image, we have no way of knowing of the horn is sucking or blowing. We also have to wonder about the outer, wider horn, what is it for? And why does that top saucer look more alert and disturbed than the others? And who are the three tiny people watching? No answers are really needed. The bagpipe and the flock of little saucers are enough.

I had a nice time working on this painting in my backyard “studio.”

Priliminary sketch of how to eliminate Groon. Click for a larger version of the drawing.

Here’s a quote from Million Mile Road Trip where the characters discuss how to kill Groon. The “Figures” mentioned in the text relate, somewhat, to the frames in the preliminary sketch above.

“A new era’s coming,” says Villy. “Scud’s talking about how we’ll kill Goon. He’s giving us an illustrated lecture.”

Scud is glad to have Zoe here. “For my pictures, I’ll draw two parallel universes that are 2D planes in 3D space,” he says. “But really it’s supposed to be one dimension higher. Two parallel universes that are 3D spaces in 4D hyperspace.”

“Hyperspace,” echoes Villy in the dumbest hick accent imaginable. “Haahpurspayce.”

“Saucerpeople” oil on canvas, Sept, 2015, 24” x 18”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

By the way, Maisie is a saucerperson, that is, she’s half flying saucer, so she has a rim or flap around her waist that Scud can draw on. The rim has a cuttlefish-skin-like ability to change colors.

Scud starts drawing on Maisie’s flap. “So we’ve got two universes that are like 2D planes. And in one universe we’ve got a really and truly flat cow, like a cut-out piece of paper. Also a flat bagpipe with a flat horn. And in the other universe we’ve got, well, let’s put a flat person with a flat eye. These creatures can’t normally travel from one universe into the other. They’re inside their home surfaces—you shouldn’t think of them as sliding around on top of the surfaces. They’re like inkblots in paper. And they just see what’s in their home world.”

“And now you want to show how they do sometimes go from one universe to the other,” says Maisie.

“Exactly, says Scud. “We travel from world to world by using unny tunnels. And I happen to know a lot about unny tunnels from reading popular science books about the fourth dimension.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” goes Villy.

“An unny tunnel is what we call a wormhole or an Einstein-Rosen bridge,” says Scud, drawing his second picture. “The idea is that you bulge down the space of one world, and bulge up the space of the other, and they meet and join together like soap films, and there’s a, like, throat connecting the two worlds. Unny tunnel.”

“The flat bagpipe and the flat cow fall through the hole in the middle of the hole?” says Villy.

“Precisely not,” says Scud. “Remember that these guys slide around inside the surfaces. Moving ink blots! What they’ll do is creep down the side of that wormhole I’ve drawn.”

“Which side?” asks Zoe. “The inside or the outside.”

“Riding the Flat Cow” acrylic and oil on canvas, April, 2016, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

[As I mentioned before, the novel has a character called the flat cow, or Yulia, although she’s not really flat, she’s just flattish, like partly squashed. Turns out she’s able to fly into the fourth dimension. But back to the quote from the text.]

“Wrong question!” cries Scud. “I’m telling you, they’re not really on one side or the other side of the surfaces. They’re like tattoos. They go all the way through. But! Our flat cow, she’s different. She has real thickness. She can peel free of the surface and fly around.,”

“And if you’re flying around in hyperspace outside the tunnel, what do you see?” asks Zoe.

“You’ll see a sphere that keeps bulging and warping and changing size while you move. Like this.” Scud runs his finger along Maisie’s rim, enjoying himself.

“And what does an unny tunnel look like to regular people in 3D space?” asks Villy.

“To us, the gate to the tunnel looks like a sphere with another world inside it,” says Scud.

“And what about when we’re inside the tunnel?” asks Villy. “Sliding down along the wall. What do we see then?”

“It’s effed up,” says Scud. “In one direction you see the back of your own head. And maybe you see a ball that has your old world inside it. And in the opposite direction you might see a ball holding the world you’re going to. We saw stuff like that when we hopped over here from Los Perros. But I don’t want to draw it. Too hard. Let’s show something easier.” His finger moves caressingly on Maisie’s rim. “Here’s a bagpipe going through the unny tunnel,” continues Scud. “That’s supposed to be Groon, right?”

“Kill Groon,” goes Maisie.

“I want to see the attack of the flat cow,” says Zoe.

“Yulia’s out there in hyperspace. Let’s suppose she has an agile person squeezed inside her flesh like a maggot. A heroic helper to pull the strings tight around the unny tunnel at either end.” Scud looks at Villy.

“Thus trapping the evil bagpipe in Nowheresville,” goes Zoe.

Some of my old friends have been leaving town lately. My neighbor Gunnar Vatvedt, 82, who’s been renting up the street from me for thirty years—his landlord decided to sell the house, and Gunnar’s outta here. I’ll miss him. He was a real character, very enlightened, but not via book-learning. With a great Norwegian accent.

My fellow Dark Lord of Cyberpunk, John Shirley, is moving up to the vicinity of Portland with his wife Micky. Here again, the Bay Area’s current real estate bubble and price inflation played a role. It’s been nice having John and Mickey around. You never know what John is going to say next, which is why it’s fun to talk to him. We had a farewell dinner at a tapas place in the Mission, with the oddly distorted artist Paul Mavrides and fellow cyberpunk Richard Kadrey there as well.

And here’s me, Sylvia and Micky. We were laughing about the Mondo 2000 party where we’d met Tim Leary around 1989. Tim asked Micky if she had some drugs. And then he asked Sylvia…where she had gone to high-school. Ow! Sylvia says that Tim asking her that proved that, just like me, he was, deep-down, kind of a preppie. Preps gone freak.

John and Micky left town via a teleport through this odd slab gate on the shores of Santa Cruz. The flat cow was busy that day.