I was happy for a few days last week about a new outline for my novel-in-progress, Turing & Burroughs , and I posted about the outline in, “Reading in SF. New Outline. Ripping Vinyl.” But now that I’m down to actually implementing it, it’s clear that the outline has a big hole in the middle. Not enough plot. So I’m re-doing it again, on the side, while I continue work on the new chapter.

[A great African mask in the African collection upstairs at the DeYoung museum.]

I think I will need something like what I was calling “dreamskugs” after all, that is, some incorporeal beings who one see from the corners of one’s eyes. But that isn’t the right name for them, for any talk about dreamskugs blends with and muddies the biocomputational skugs that Alan Turing discovered/invented/enabled. The spirit-things need their own name. So I’ll call them gazaks for now. An onomatopoeic word mimicking, say, Alan’s anxious grinding of his teeth and or retching at their initial appearance. “Gaaak!”

[“Turing and the Skugs”. More info on my paintings site. I can’t get enough of this painting! Pretty soon I might try and paint some gazaks too.]

I see the gazaks as elemental spirits, elves, discarnate ghosts, or perhaps minds as software images embodied in nature’s flows. Their interaction with us might as well be what potentiated the appearance of Turing’s skugs. The gazaks “saw” Turing on the verge of providing a biocomputational interface to link the two worlds, and they helped him make it happen. And then, near the end of the book, the gazaks soul-suck a lot of people off into their world, which may or may not be a pleasant place.

I’ve always felt that it’s okay to keep revising my plot outline as I go along. This dovetails with a lesson I’ve learned at a deep level over the years, to wit: “The World is Unpredictable.” I in fact have a very short essay with this title in this year’s edition of superagent and tummler John Brockman’s “World Question Center, 2011”, you can see me here about halfway down page two. Brockman got about a hundred and sixty people to answer the question, “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”

Unpredictability not only to the world at large, but to your personal life, as I describe in my 2004 blog post, “Free Will.” That is, even if the world is in some scientific sense deterministic, we cannot in practice to predict what we’ll be doing tomorrow. I wrote about this at some length in my tome on computation and the mind, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul,,

[Escaped tulpa from my novel “Jim and the Flims,” recently spotted in Los Gatos.]

But my point in today’s post is that unpredictability is being very much an aspect of how one dynamically works with the outline of a novel in progress. Quoting from my short how-to book, “A Writer’s Toolkit,” as revised in 2009.

When you’re writing a novel you’re working at the most extreme limit of your capabilities. What you’re doing is beyond logic, so far out at the limits of what you can do that there’s no hope of your having a short and manageable simulation of the process by which to figure out what you’re doing, it’s computationally irreducible. When you get into this zone, out on the very surface of your brain, you become sensitive to the tiniest chaotic emanations of the world outside. At times it feels as if the world, feeling your sensitivity, gladly dances back. Dosie-do. Keep your eyes peeled.

[Aardvark mask, also in the DeYoung.]

I’ve known this for quite a few years, but I’m always learning it at deeper levels. Here’s a quote from my “A Transrealist Manifesto” of 1983:

The Transrealist artist cannot predict the finished form of his or her work. The Transrealist novel grows organically, like life itself. The author can only choose characters and setting, introduce this or that particular fantastic element, and aim for certain key scenes. Ideally, a Transrealist novel is written in obscurity, and without an outline. If the author knows precisely how his or her book will develop, then the reader will divine this. A predictable book is of no interest. Nevertheless, the book must be coherent. Granted, life does not often make sense. But people will not read a book which has no plot. And a book with no readers is not a fully effective work of art. A successful novel of any sort should drag the reader through it. How is it possible to write such a book without an outline? The analogy is to the drawing of a maze. In drawing a maze, one has a start (characters and setting) and certain goals (key scenes). A good maze forces the tracer past all the goals in a coherent way. When you draw a maze, you start out with a certain path, but leave a lot a gaps where other paths can hook back in. In writing a coherent Transrealist novel, you include a number of unexplained happenings throughout the text. Things that you don’t know the reason for. Later you bend strands of the ramifying narrative back to hook into these nodes. If no node is available for a given strand-loop, you go back and write a node in (cf. erasing a piece of wall in the maze). Although reading is linear, writing is not.

[Cranes in the Amsterdam zoo.]

Finally, here’s some more about the unpredictability of plot from “Seek the Gnarl,” my Guest of Honor address at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in 2005. A variant of this talk appeared in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and I also have this excerpt in the how-to book that I mentioned above, “A Writer’s Toolkit.

With respect to plot structures, I see a spectrum of complexity. At the low end of complexity, we have standardized plots, at the high end, we have no plot at all, and in between we have the gnarly somewhat unpredictable plots. These can be found in two kinds of ways. I tend to use what I call the transreal approach of by fitting reality into a classic monomythic kind of plot structure and using some standard (say) science-fictional tropes. In the less flashy, but perhaps even more complex realistic mode, you try and mimic the actual world very precisely, working hard to avoid overlaying received ideas and cliches. In some ways, truth really is stranger than fiction. And so I view transreal fiction as a bit less computationally complex due to its position at the nexus of reality, fantasy, and the trellis of a classic plot structure such as the monomyth.

Complexity	Literary Style	Characteristics	Techniques
Predictable	Genre	A plot very obviously modeled to a traditional pattern.	Monomyth
Medium gnarl	Transrealism	Traditional story pattern enriched by realism. Observation acts on the fictional tropes to create unpredictable situations.	Realism + monomyth + power chords
High gnarl	Realism	A plot modeled directly on reality, with the odd and somewhat senseless twists that actually occur.	Observation, journals
Random	Surreal	Completely arbitrary events occur. (Tricky, as the subconscious isn’t all that random.)	Dreams, whims, external input.

Yum! The muse wants to help you.

My novel The Hollow Earth is now available as an ebook in Kindle format, with other formats to come.

I made up a new cover for the book, based on a painting of mine. The text is drawn from the excellent Monkeybrain Books edition of 2006, which had a great cover by John Picacio. The book has sold well, but some paperbacks are still available. You can also find links for that on my new page for The Hollow Earth .

I had some fun figuring out how to make an ebook edition I can read on my iPhone (using the free Kindle app). Lots of crashing through the web’s thickets.

Why an ebook release?

This weekend I was talking to my friend Rick Kleffel about my motivation for getting my books all online as e-books. And I had the insight that I do this to make my work more lasting. It requires steady vigilance and effort to keep one’s books in print. Only a tiny fraction of books remain in print for more than a year or two after the author’s death.

If your book is online, you’ve got a much better shot at reading readers twenty or a hundred years from now. If your online book is into the ebook stream, then publishers can continue distributing it and porting it to new platforms and file formats across the world for many years to come. Like Peter Bruegel’s “The Beekeepers,” shown above. And here is Mason Algiers Reynolds’s sketch of the Hollow Earth, allegedly discovered in the UC Berkeley library.

In an earlier post, “Writing the Hollow Earth,” I describe how I came to write the novel. And Mike Perschon has posted a 2009 interview with me about The Hollow Earth on his blog, Steampunk Scholar.

Enjoy! And leave your comments below.

So, cool, I got a passing mention in the Sunday New York Times Magazine today in an article by Rob Walker, “Cyberspace When You’re Dead,” about various kinds of digital immortality.

[The illos in today’s post, for reasons which will become clear, are my photos used to illustrate a story by Mac Tonnies, “One Hundred Years” which appeared in issue #3 of my online zine, Flurb. Some of the photos are from other stories in the same issue #3. By the way, I’d love to know the name of the artist who painted the wonderful street mural shown above.]

As regular readers will know, I’ve written about themes of software immortality in several contexts. To start with, the four novels in my Ware Tetralogy deal with the notion of copying someone’s mind to another platform. The collection is available in print, as a commercial ebook, and as a free CC ebook.

I coined the word “lifebox” in a short story, “Soft Death,” which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in September, 1986. I used it to mean a digital or online simulacrum of a person. I go into considerable detail about the lifebox in my novel, Saucer Wisdom, in my non-fiction book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, and in my 2009 article “Lifebox Immortality” which I co-authored with Leon Marvell. This article has also appeared in a recent issue of h+ magazine.

In a nutshell, my idea is this: to create a virtual self, all I need to do is to (1) Place a very large amount of text online in the form of articles, books, and blog posts, (2) Provide a search box for accessing this data base, and (3) Provide a nice user interface.

I made a first crude stab at this a month ago, with my Rudy’s Lifebox page. This page lets you Google-search my rather large www.rudyrucker.com site.

The “test subject zero” discussed in today’s Times magazine article is Mac Tonnies, who died this year. I was one of Mac’s numerous online friends—you can find the exact extent of this by typing “Mac Tonnies” into the Search box on the Rudy’s Lifebox page mentioned above. Most of the hits are to posts which have comments by Mac at the bottom. And, as mentioned in the caption to first illo on today’s post, I published one of Mac’s stories in my webzine.

As the Times article discusses, some friends of Mac’s have kept his Posthuman Blues blog alive as a kind of lifebox. Note the slightly ominous final post, although Mac liked these kinds of images, so really they aren’t all that ominous in the context of his blog.

The Times article is a harbinger of a trend I’ve been predicting for some time: there’s going to be a small industry based on people building digital memory-shrines for themselves. The Nokia phone company had an early entry into this sweepstakes with their Lifeblog package, but that’s gone now, so far as I know. More recently, I noticed that Hallmark Cards is getting into “memory-keeping products.” And everyone’s heard of Microsoft’s Gordon Bell and his MyLifeBits project.

Some of the links in the Times article are for companies like Entrustet that serve as digital repositories for your “lifebox” data such as online photos or collections of your writings. At this point, some of these services are primarily about cloud-based data-storage, with an immortality spin. These services are expensive, though, and often involve a monthly fee—which you’re likely to stop paying a few years before you die. If you’re interested in pursuing a lifebox plan of your own, here’s a 2016 overview by a group called Cloudwards, comparing the various cloud-based storage services such as Carbonite.

Another company, Deathswitch, will send post-mortem messages to people from you! How do they know when to send the messages? When you stop answering their emails and/or, presumably, when paying the bills they send you. It’s easy to imagine some tragicomic scenarios here—a guy writes angry “Aren’t you sorry now” messages, forgets about it, lets the account lapse. Actually, the idea for the company is grounded on a short-short story “A Brief History of Death Switches” by the company founder David Eagleman.

Back to digital immortality. One way to create a lifebox is, like Gordon Bell, just to save everything you type and photograph everything you see. Another way is to become a writer and to craft a memoir. People in search of shortcuts will turn to companies who purport to help them. A couple of links from entrants into this sweepstakes: LifeNaut and Virtual Eternity. This exercise quickly turns kind of creepy, veering into the Uncanny Valley.

Clearly what’s needed is some solid shareware to layer onto something resembling Google Search. I wrote a little about this in my post on “Chatbots,” and in the comments on the post.

Actually, as the years go by, this whole enterprise of digital immortality seems less important to me than it used to. By now I’m kind of okay with passing away. And, with or without high tech, I’ll be leaving some printed books behind and, even closer to my heart, my children and grandchildren. That oldschool wetware immortality…