I’m back to thinking about a novel called Jim and the Flims. I see two races—the somewhat ethereal flims and our race, which they call, let us say fatsies. And the worlds are Flimsy and Fatland.

How do they fit together topologically? I think we’ll suppose that they share the same time axis. How about the space?

The obvious idea is to use parallel branes like in Postsingular. But, just to change things a bit, one might suppose that the two branes are like the two sides of a sheet of paper, or the two sides of a wooden board.

An related alternative would be some notion of inside-out. If we simply wrap the sheet of paper into a sphere, we get a balloon with a picture on the outside and a picture on the inside. But maybe somehow there is a “balloon” for each atom. You go from one world to the other by turning each of your atoms inside out.

For the moment let’s stick with the sheet with two sides—or, more accurately, a hypersheet bounded by a pair of three-dimensional hyperplanes: Flimsy and Fatland. How do you get from one to the other?

I suppose you tunnel through. If we do this abruptly, then it’s a matter of making a right-angle turn into the fourth dimension, drilling through the bulk, and then making another right turn to get back into the other universe. But I’d like to see a more gradual transition, something more along the lines of Sheckley’s “The Altar” , which I posted about last week.

I suppose there could be a sloping tunnel that leads through the bulk, and when you ease into it, you can see the source universe in certain directions and the target universe in the other directions. The tunnel might be quite short—more like a doorway or a portal—so that you don’t have a lengthy zone of darkness in between the worlds. I used a portal of this kind in Mathematicians in Love.

In order to require the back-and-forth thither-and-yon bumbling of the “Altar” approach, we might suppose that our space is rucked up and folded over, so that the tunnel’s mouth can only be reached by going along a certain path. I think of a process like scraping away paint—you go back and forth past a certain alleyway, and each time you pass, the alley looks a little different, and finally it leads to Flimsy.

We might suppose that my character Weena came through this tunnel, but that she can’t find her way back from our side. My character Jim finds the way for Weena, aided by his dog Arf—he hits on the Sheckleyesque spinor path between worlds

Alternately, I might consider there being a whole range of ways to travel between Fatsy (our world) and Flimsy (Weena’s world). I’ll display some options in a bulleted list:

• The method of moving along an odd path in fashion of Sheckley’s “The Altar.” For some possibly relevant science, See the Plate Trick entry on Wikipedia, and the one on Orientation Entanglement.



• Pushing through a rubbery mirror as in Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.
• Drawing a door on a wall and then opening it. This is pretty common, I think it’s in, for instance, the movie Pan’s Labyrinth.
• Walking though a magic door that’s hidden in a kind of closet, like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Or through a tunnel in a dungeon. This tunnel/portal/door method is the one I’m most likely to use.



• Meditating on a certain pattern, like in my novel Postsingular. This is similar to chanting a spell, in that it involves getting a certain pattern going in your mind.
• I see a visual of someone literally turning inside out via a 4D rotation. The two worlds are related like the outside leather and the inside silk of a glove. You turn inside out—ugh—and then you snap over to the other side.



• Eating something—like a magic potion, a drug, or matter from the other world.
• Clasping a magic amulet, possibly made from alternate world stuff.

Note that these travel methods might apply to different kinds of models as well.

I’m thinking that I feel a little bored with the two brane model. I’ve used it before. I’d like something spookier, something more fantasy-like. Today I’m leaning towards the notion that the other world in some sense overlays our existing world. The two worlds aren’t separate hyperplanes or different locations, they’re in the same place. The Land O’ Faerie is one and the same as our mundane world, if only we have the eyes to see it.

In fantasy novels this kind of thing is simply left unexplained. “The horns of Elfland, faintly blowing…” But, as is my habit, I grope for a scientific model. Suppose that the two overlaid worlds are in some sense at an angle to each other—that is, Flimsy (or the Land O’ Faerie) is made of matter particles whose quantum spins are rotated by, let us say, 13.711 degrees. And normally these rotated particles don’t interact with ours. They might, come to think of it, be dark matter! In effect, we blinkered mundanes see through polarized sunglasses—which filter out the views of the wondrous.

We might also suppose that some cosmic clock is turning, bringing Faerie into full overlap with Main Street. The dark matter spires are gonna be shimmering into view. And already, as harbingers, certain nimble humans and flims can twist and untwist themselves to dart from world to world. Sometimes a half-transformed Flimsy creature will bump against you in the dark—I think of some pony-sized dogs that I call yuels. You don’t see anything, but you feel the brush of a yuel’s hot flank, and you smell his rancid, meaty breath.

And in the night, the barking of the seals shades into the unearthly baying of the yuels. Rapid footsteps sound on Jim’s porch…

My novel Postsingular is out in paperback now. You may have read the free online version, but now you can own a hard copy of the book for only about twelve bucks!

And the new paperback edition of The Sex Sphere is in print! (Although the cover image on the Amazon site is screwed up, the actual printed book has a cover as shown here in this post.)

“Punk-rock SF! Nuclear terrorists, a political kidnapping, and a giant woman from the fourth dimension. Say goodbye to the old world. This literary tour de force explores the landscape of the higher dimensions with the humor and vigor of an underground cartoon. At the same time, it manages to be a heartfelt and realistic depiction of a contemporary marriage.”

And a new paperback edition of Spacetime Donuts is for sale as well! (Here again, the cover image on the Amazon site looks wrong, but the actual printed book has a cover as shown here in this post.)

“The birth of cyberpunk! A seeweed-smoking rebel becomes an incredible shrinking man. Under the bottom is the top—and the power to smash the Machine. After humanity becomes inextricably linked to the computers, a heroic couple makes a scale-ship journey beneath the smallest particles and through the largest cosmic structures, seeking a perfect world.”

Finally, “Colliding Branes,” a new story by Bruce Sterling and me, is in the February, 2009, issue of Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine. You can read the first part of this exciting tale on the Asimov’s site.

So the UFO brought me home from NYC and Louisville. I’m downtown at the Los Gatos Coffee Roaster. I’s so full in here today that I’m forced to take a table next to three people slinging buzzwords about teaching English online: “Metrics, outcomes, leverage, challenges, solutions, interactions, diagnostics, issues, gabble gabble gabble…”

It’s a gray rainy day, kind of cozy. Nice to be in California again. It’s so much warmer here.

On the plane I was reading a book I borrowed from my brother Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter, written by the Englishman W. D. M Bell around 1923, and republished in 1989 by the Safari Press. The book has marvelous accounts of safaris through unknown lands, and of encounters with tribes who’ve never seen Europeans before. It’s fun to read about the excitement of geographical exploration, even if it is more than a little unsettling how many elephants Bell kills (for the ivory).

The safari personnel includes a “chronicler,” a native who composes an epic poem about the journey. Every evening, around the campfire, he recites the poem thus far—and adds a new verse. I like that.

Before I left on my trip, I was working on starting a novel with working title Jim and the Flims. And I was stuck, unsure of where to go next. And now I’ve been gone so long that the whole idea of what I thought I was writing has pretty much left my head. Which is good, as now I can get a fresh start.

Today I’m leaning towards something more like a fantasy than like science fiction. And I might not bother with UFOs after all.

In the last two novels, Postsingular and Hylozoic, I pushed the science perhaps further than ever before. For my new novel, I’d like to try something different—both to make the task feel fresh and exciting, and perhaps also to attract a broader readership. So, as I say, I’m thinking of something a bit more like a fantasy, although more like The Twilight Zone or like Borges than like Tolkein.

I like the notion of a “universe next door” scenario. The universe next door isn’t reached via an SF-style higher-dimensional hop to a separate brane, but rather by walking around the streets of one’s home town in an odd way, turning unexpected corners, cutting down heretofore unexplored alleys, and slowly the buildings take on an odd cast, and you see some unusual animals—not exactly dogs—around the corners.

By the way, I get this mode of transfer from a Robert Sheckley story—”The Altar,” 1953, which appears in his epochal collection, Untouched By Human Hands , of 1954. In “The Altar,” the protagonist, Mr. Slater, is led into an alternate world by a stranger named Elor. They walk around and around the streets of Mr. Slater’s little suburban town, and somehow he ends up as the sacrificial offering at temple in the alternate world. Here’s how Sheckley writes the transition:

They walked down Oak Street, toward the center of town. Then, just as they reached the first stores, Elor turned. He led Mr. Slater two blocks over and a block down, and then retraced a block. After that he headed back toward the railroad station.

It was getting quite dark.

“Isn’t there a simpler way?” Mr. Slater asked.

“Oh, no,” Elor said. “This is the most direct. If you knew the roundabout way I came the first time—“

They walked on, backtracking blocks, circling, recrossing streets they had already passed, going back and forth over the town Mr. Slater knew so well.

But as it grew darker, and as they approached familiar streets from unfamiliar directions, Mr. Slater became just a trifle confused. He knew where he was, of course, but the constant circling had thrown him off…

Mr. Slater tried to place what street they were on without looking at the sign post, and then they made another unexpected turn. He had just made up his mind that they were backtracking on Walnut Lane, when he found that he couldn’t remember the next cross street. As they passed the corner he looked at the sign.

It read: Left Orifice.

Mr. Slater couldn’t remember any street in North Ambrose called Left Orifice.

Sheckley is a spring of inspiration that never runs dry. I just found an interesting Sheckley page that has links to a number of his essays and stories online.

I still mourn that the King is dead…

I watched the Inauguration in downtown Louisville, on a big screen in the Kentucky Arts Center. I felt extremely excited. History taking place. It felt like being in some huge, rich novel. The transfer of power. TV images of the big bible being carried down from the Capitol’s attic, the heavy book waking from its slumber and beginning to twitch. The sea of people, their will not to be denied. Cheney in his wheelchair, unmasked as an evil, fraudulent insect from the subdimensions.

It was nice to be part of the large, interracial crowd in this Louisville theater. The woman next to me said she was as proud of Obama as if he were her own son. I said it was going to be nice to have a smart president. We shook hands on that.

A few blocks away some carpenters were demonstrating against an unjust employer. The struggle never ends. But now perhaps the government is on the side of the little guys.

I took another walk in the woods this afternoon, looking at the ice, the rocks, and the trees, with my brother’s dog Ziggy my companion.

Hallelujah! We’ve got our country back!