Today’s text is from my memoir-in-progress, Nested Scrolls, and many of the photos are from the Los Gatos Christmas parade.

For the years 1990-2001, my novel Software was under option to a series of film companies, ending up at Phoenix Pictures. Every year someone would renew the option, and I’d get a few thousand more bucks. It was an exciting run, with dozens of ups and downs, and I went to a bunch of Hollywood meetings.

I took Rudy Jr. down there with me one time, to see Scott Billups, who was for a time slated to direct the film. Scott kept telling us about a helicopter skiing trip he’d taken, going on and on about the “long lines of powder,” which seemed like a bad sign. He had a connection with Mike Medavoy, the studio head at Phoenix Pictures.

“Mike’s got a new wife, and she’s running him ragged,” Billups told us.

“Is she beautiful?” I asked.

“Whatever she didn’t have, Mike bought her,” said Billups.

Medavoy wasn’t liking the script that Billups’s writer had come up with, so Phoenix hired the screenwriters from Toy Story, and gave them strict instructions not to read my book, but to work only from the existing scripts—there were four prior scripts by now, one of them by my cyberpunk friend John Shirley.

The fifth script was horrible, and they kept getting worse—soon we were up to version eight. By now Billups was being edged out, but Medavoy stayed active. I went down for another meeting and everyone was really encouraging.

One of the assistant producers and I went to strip club after that meeting. Sylvia couldn’t believe it, me in a strip club with my producer.

“What a sleaze-bag that guy must be!”

Actually, if the truth be told, it was my idea to go see the strippers. It seemed like the right thing to do. And the club was right next to the airport.

The scripts kept getting worse—we were up to version ten before long. The film agent I was using then, Steve Freedman, told me that by now Phoenix had spent over a million dollars on test shots and discarded screenplays. I was alarmed that they’d thrown out so much money on such shit. But Steve said it was all good.

“The million dollars makes Medavoy pregnant. If he tries to back out, I say, ‘No, you’re pregnant, you’ve got to make the film.’”

I had one last meeting with Mike Medavoy. He finally wanted my advice on how to doctor the script. They flew me to LA first class, and a limo picked me up at the airport. Like so many people in LA, the driver was talking about the Business, and she was happy to hear I was going to a script meeting.

Outside the Phoenix building, I met Steve Freedman. He wasn’t a big-time agent by any means. I’d hired him more or less at random. He looked more feral and weasel-like than I’d remembered from our earlier meetings. He was wearing a Mexican wedding shirt with the tail hanging out. I was wearing black silk pants, black silk sport shirt, black silk jacket and wraparound black shades. Mr. Cyberpunk.

Steve had been somewhat manic during our recent phone conversations, so I warned him not to be throwing in extra story ideas of his own. He agreed readily, and claimed that at the end of the meeting he’d corner Medavoy and get us our final deal.

We cooled our heels in a side room for a half hour, chatting with an assistant producer. Medavoy was stuck in a meeting, running a little late.

“So who’s he meeting with?” I asked the assistant producer.

“Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

The Terminator! Right here! Arnold was starring in film called The Sixth Day that Phoenix was to release in a few months. Soon Arnold walked by with his body guard, coming out of his meeting. He was short, as the big stars always are. He glanced over, checking us out.

And now it was our turn with Mike Medavoy. It was him, me, Steve, and a couple of assistant producer guys. One of these two appeared to be wearing foundation makeup and lipstick. Or maybe he was made of plastic. My focus was on Medavoy. He was an Irish-looking guy, in preppy clothes.

He said he was worried about the project, and that he was embarrassed to have spent over a million dollars. He longed to hear a decent plot line, clearly broken into three acts.

I’d been preparing for this. By now I understood the Hollywood obsession with three acts. I began pitching my version, talking for five or ten minutes, but I went too slow.

Medavoy interrupted, weary and impatient. “Tell me the second act before I have to kill myself.”

Flop sweat. I rushed through the second act, but I only got in a few words about my third act before Medavoy cut me off.

“Hard to make all that work,” he said, dismissing my ideas.

And then he told how he envisioned the movie. A thriller. Lots of chase scenes. An epic battle for the spaceport, with American soldiers against robots. A general and a colonel for the lead characters.

“Big base on the Moon,” continued Medavoy. “It’s, I dunno, why not the Octagon?”

I was flabbergasted, horrified, uncomprehending. “Octagon?”

“Like the Pentagon where the military is. I was just there on a tour last week. They have two war rooms now. It’s great.”

I glanced over at Steve Freedman. He was grinning ear to ear with his head nodding Yes like a plaster dog with its head on a spring. He’d never actually seen Medavoy before. He was in paradise just sitting at this meeting. There was no way he was going to corner this studio head and tell him he was pregnant.

And then Medavoy’s underlings were hustling us out. Steve and I walked across the street and had lunch in the SONY cafeteria, a couple of Hollywood losers, cheering ourselves up with thick sandwiches and staircase wit. I started rapping about pumping up the third act with a flying robot mosquito loaded with a mind-virus to sting the President. I picked up the frilly toothpick from my sandwich and zoomed it around, menacing Steve with it, and he was laughing. He told me his father had been a Hollywood agent too.

The Software project was dead. A couple of months later, Phoenix Pictures sent the new Schwarzenegger movie, The Sixth Day, into the theaters.

This film carries strong echoes of my Ware books. The central idea in The Sixth Day is to record someone’s brain software and then to load that personality onto a tank-grown clone of that person.

These happen to be a pair of ideas that appeared, arguably for the very first time, in my novels Software and Wetware. It took me some years of thought and effort to come up with these twists. They hadn’t been obvious or “in the air.” But by now cyberpunk was old news, and my books had been kicking around the Phoenix offices for a decade.

The villain in The Sixth Day wears horn-rimmed glasses just like mine and is called “Drucker.” Might the film-makers have been driven by a Raskolnikov-like compulsion to confess their crime?

“Yes, I killed the old woman with an axe! Yes, I stole Dr. Rucker’s ideas!”

So did I sue? Well, Mom always said it’s tacky to sue. I’m a writer, not a lawyer. And, after all, I had picked up a fair amount of money from Hollywood by repeatedly rolling over those option agreements for ten years. Why bite a hand that might feed me again?

[For still more on this, see my earlier blog entry on Remembering Software in Hollywood.]

There’s a cute one-panel comic review of my novel Mathematicians in Love online today.

A programmer named Wiliam Rood has been emailing me about three- and four-dimensional Mandelbrot-set-like fractals. He has a mind-blowing, interactive demo on his page—the controls do work, but it takes a while to figure them out. Like using an alien iPhone that dropped out of a flying saucer.

I’ve been bugging Rood that he should be working with the Cubic Connectedness Map as described by Douady, Hubbard, Milnor, which is a different take on higher-dimensional fractals than one usually sees. If the images look like taffy, they’re using the Peitgen quaternion approach, which is, I think misguided. What I want to see is spherical warts on warts, as if the regular 2D Mandelbrot set were only a cross-sectional slice.

The cubic connectedness map lets you compute a 2D family of 2D cubic Mandelbrot sets Mk, where k ranges over the complext numbers. If you combined all of the Mk you’d have a 4D object, but first the thing ot look at is a 3D stack of them, like just vary one of the parameters inside k. You can stack to get a 3D object or animate to see a movie. I’d like to see the guy above opening his “mouth” and roaring.

You can also run a diagonalization of the Mk to get a single 2D set I modestly call the Rudy set. I put all of these cubic connectedness map fractals into the old Autodesk Chaos program, still available for free download (runs in a DOS window). And I explain the algorithms and the theory on my own alien-scribed tablet, which also has a link to Chaos program download.

I’ve also been looking at some great demos by Daniel Piker, click on the image agove to se a 4D rotation of a horse. He’s using some software packages called Processing and Rhino, and getting some nice four-dimensional rotation videos, quite unlike any I’ve seen before.

[I might mention that if you embed a vimeo clip on your web page, the page goes into a continous-download mode with the vimeo site, thereby slaving your page to the corporate masters—which is why I’m not embedding the video.]

That’s all for today. Qeep on Quackin.

More from my memoir-in-progress, Nested Scrolls.

One of the last things I did in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1986 was to join in a riverboat regatta. In 1775, two of my local ancestors, Anthony and Benjamin Rucker, had designed a flat-bottomed wooden boat that could be poled down the James River from Lynchburg to Richmond. They used it to ship hogsheads of tobacco from the local farms to Richmond. In numerous spots, the river becomes shallow rapids, so you have to slide your boat over the stretches of rocks—thus the sturdy, flat bottom. The Ruckers’ boats were called bateaus, and, with the help of their friend Thomas Jefferson, they patented the design.

In 1986, some people in Lynchburg had the idea of getting a bunch of crews to build their own bateaus, and to have a five day boat race down the river from Lynchburg to Richmond. (Since then, this has become an annual event.) My friend Henry Vaughan and I joined the rotating crew of the Spirit of Lynchburg for one day—camping out the night before in a pasture by the river.

It was nice out on the James. Henry and I wore kerchiefs against the sun, and I started calling him Otha, after a black guy named Otha Rucker whom I’d met in traffic school. The only hassle was that our so-called captain was a gung-ho jock who was seeing this event as a serious athletic competition, and kept exhorting us to pole like crazy, push through the wall of pain, put out a hundred and ten percent, bullsh*t like that.

Our home-made boat was so heavy and leaky that after the first hour, we were in last place, with the other boats out of sight far ahead. Maybe the preppy jock thought he was the captain—but, being a Rucker, I figured I was the Shadow Captain. I mocked and chaffed the tyrant, evoking merriment from the crew. At the end of the day, the jock wanted to slug me, but I slipped out of his reach amid my fellows.

Back in my Lynchburg office, three young artists from Richmond come to see me, as if sent by Eddie Poe to meet the Shadow Captain. They’d brought me some beautiful drawings of tesseracts unfolding, and of four-dimensional cubes. It was exhilarating to learn that, bit by bit, my ideas were getting out there.

[Drawing for the 2nd Edition of the Hollow Earth, see explanation.]

I began thinking about writing a historical SF novel involving one of my favorite notions from fringe science: the Hollow Earth. The idea is that our planet is in fact hollow like a tennis ball or like a fisherman’s float. A race of people live inside. But how do we get in there? Perhaps through holes in the ocean floor, or perhaps via an immense hole at the south pole.

My special inspiration was Edgar Allen Poe’s novel, The Journey of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which describes a sea voyage to the walls of ice around the Southern pole, with the implication that there is a huge opening to be found there, a great shaft leading into Mother Earth’s womb. Wanting this to be true, I reasoned that, even if Poe had erred about the hole being clearly visible, it might well be hidden beneath a sheet of accumulated snow and ice.

[See my paintings page for more info about my artwork.]

My old friend Gregory Gibson, in his capacity as antiquarian bookseller, sent me Wilkses’s The Narrative of the U. S. Exploring Expedition 1838-1842, Benjamin Morrell’s, A Narrative of Four Voyages to the South and North Seas, plus a fine twenty-volume edition of the collected works of Poe, who in fact used Morrell’s book himself.

I pored over these volumes, coming to identify with Eddie. He wrote of being possessed by an imp of the perverse, who impelled him to do deliberately alienating and antisocial things—which described my punk attitude to a tee.

While in Lynchburg, my expanding researches led me to the rare book room in the library of the University of Virginia, where I found writings about John Cleves Symmes, Jr., who began proselytizing his doctrine of the Hollow Earth in 1818.

Symmes lived in Newport, Kentucky, and he styled himself the Newton of the West. He was too busy lecturing—or too sly—to publish any books under his own name, but I found a nonfiction Symmes’ Theory of Concentric Spheres, and a novel, Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery, which are purportedly written by Symmes’ followers. My feeling is that, as the books speak so very highly of Symmes, he either wrote them himself or collaborated heavily.

[A classic drawing of the Hollow Earth, see this post for further H.E. info.]

In California, I started work on my novel, The Hollow Earth: The Narrative of Mason Algiers Reynolds of Virginia. The book eventually appeared in hardback and in two paperback editions, and in ebook.  There’s even a free “Creative Commons” ebook version online.

The novel is about a country boy who leaves his farm, travels down the James as a stowaway in a bateau, accompanied by his dog Arf and his childhood companion Otha, who’s now an escaped slave. They meet Edgar Allan Poe in Richmond, and they travel onward to Antarctica and to the Hollow Earth.

I wasn’t sure how to light up the inside of the Hollow Earth, a land which I called Htrae. If you put an Inner Sun in the center, then it seems like everything would fall up into the sun. One day when I was walking around San Francisco with Marc Laidlaw, I found the solution.

It was a new science toy called a plasma sphere, on display in a New Age shop. By now nearly everyone’s seen these one of these things—it’s a hollow glass ball with an electrode in the center. Branching lines of electrical discharge reach out from the electrode to the outer surface, and if you move your fingertips around on the sphere, the glow lines trail after them. That’s the way to light up the Hollow Earth! Have great aurora-like streamers of light reaching from the Central Anomaly to the inhabited inner surface of Htrae.

The writing went slowly. I find it hard to keep my novelistic momentum if I only have a spare hour here and there in which to write. The only extended patches of free time that I had were during the school vacations—especially in the summer—but often we’d want to take family trips then, taking road trips around California or flying to visit Sylvia’s father and brother in Geneva.

When my first August in California came to an end and the fall semester loomed, I thought of the early sailing ships trying to reach the fabled southern continent of Antarctica. Sometimes they’d overstay the brief polar summer, become iced in, and spend the dark, howling winter hunkered in their vessels, hunting seals for food.

[Go to my “Hollow Earth” page to see the paperback and ebook editions available .]

Repeatedly iced in by my teaching duties as I was, it took about three years to finish writing The Hollow Earth. When I was done, I used the hoaxing Poe-like expedient of pretending that The Hollow Earth was a manuscript that I’d found in that rare books room at the University of Virginia.

To this day, I get occasional emails from readers taken in by this. They wonder why I haven’t done anything to help mount an expedition to retrace Mason’s steps. One guy even assumed that since The Hollow Earth was just an old public-domain manuscript that I’d edited, it was okay to post a page-scan of my book on the web!

[Kids with Arf, canine hero of The Hollow Earth.]

My kids liked hearing me talk about the Hollow Earth. Once when we were on a cross-country skiing vacation at Lake Tahoe, I pointed out to Isabel the blueness of the light that seemed to emerge from the holes our ski-poled made in the snow.

“Proof that the Earth is hollow!” I told her.

“As if more proof were needed,” she responded cheerfully. “When will they see?”

Oh, one more thing. There was an article about my novel in the paper in San Jose, and a bum came by my office to tell me this news:

“The sun is cold and hollow. That light you see overhead is just the interaction of some special rays from the sun with our upper atmosphere. I used to be a very famous surfer, you know. Look.”

He pulled out a page torn from an encyclopedia with a grainy picture of someone on a wave.

“That’s me. Inside the Hollow Sun.”

More from my memoir-in-progress, Nested Scrolls.

In March of 1983, I got the Philip K. Dick award for Software. Sylvia and I flew up to New York City for the awards ceremony. Earlier that evening we had dinner with my editor Susan Allison, the editor David Hartwell, a writer friend of Phil’s called Ray Faraday Nelson, and the well-known writer Tom Disch—who was the one who’d initially proposed starting the award. Disch was a good guy, immensely hip and cultured.

Our whole party walked over to Times Square, where we saw Bladerunner, the brand-new movie based on Phil’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. On the way over, I talked to Ray Nelson—he was such an in-the-moment guy that later in the evening when he had to make a speech, he just went over the things we’d talked about.

[I finished a new painting this week, it’s called Caw! Crows don’t actually have yellow beaks, but I think they look right. Check out the worried, astounded expression in that poor little lizard’s eyes.]

I liked the Bladerunner movie a lot, particularly the first part, with the blimps bearing electronic billboards, and the cop smoking pot while he interviewed the android, and the dark futuristic city with the neon lights glinting off pavements slick with rain. The last part of the movie seemed too violent, and inappropriately so, given that Phil’s Androids novel had largely been about empathy and peace. But that’s Hollywood.

“Phil would have loved it,” Ray Nelson reassured me. Actually, I’ve always wondered if Phil’s worrying about the movie in progress was what drove him to his fatal stroke—remember that the old phrase for stroke was “apoplectic fit.” (In the past, I’ve blogged about how I imagine Phil as a person .)

[Note the squirrel on the clothesline!]

The award ceremony was in an artist’s loft, with the hallways covered in reflective silver paint. One of the first people I ran into was my artist friend Barry Feldman from college. Incredibly, he was wearing a suit, and he looked more like Chico Marx than ever. He seemed just a bit envious of me getting an award—although he was a great painter, working all day long in his studio, he wasn’t breaking into the gallery scene. On a sudden whim, I told Barry he could pose as me and enjoy the fame.

As I was such an outsider to the SF scene, nobody knew what I looked like, and the substitution worked for about half an hour. Barry stood by the store shaking hands and signing books, twinkling with delight. I stood across the room, drinking and hanging out with Sylvia, Eddie Marritz, his wife Hanna, and Gerard Vanderleun, who’d edited The Fourth Dimension at Houghton-Mifflin. In the end it all got sorted out, and I met the people I needed to meet—among them was Susan Protter, who’d end up being my literary agent for the years to come.

Finally I stood on the bar at one end of the room and delivered a short speech that I’d composed on the plane, thinking about the Garbage King, a guy whom I’d met at Lynchburg party and had imagined to be the ghost of Phil Dick.

“If I say that Phil Dick is not really dead, then this is what I mean: He was such a powerful writer that his works exercise a sort of hypnotic force. Many of us have been Phil Dick for brief flashes, and these flashes will continue as long as there are readers. … I’d like to think that, on some level, Phil and I are just different instances of the same Platonic form—call it the gonzo-philosopher-SF-writer form, if you like. … If it is at all possible for a spirit to return from the dead, I would imagine that Phil would be the one to do it. Let’s keep our eyes open tonight, he may show up.”

The next day we went to visit Barry and his wife at his studio. I’d lifted a bottle of liquor from the awards ceremony to give him. He looked a little embarrassed. It turned out he’d bagged three bottles himself. (I wrote some more about all this in an essay “Haunted by Phil Dick”, which appeared in my collection of essays, Seek!.)

[I changed my earlier painting “Owl Creek” and gave it a new name, “A Fork in Time.” The picture represents more clearly than before the notion of someone going through a moment in time where the universe forks and in one branch they live and in the other they die.]

On Easter Day, 1989, I’d receive my second Philip K. Dick award—my third dick, you might say. It was for Wetware, my sequel to Software, and the ceremony was at a smallish regional SF con in Tacoma, Washington. It wasn’t like the artists’ loft in New York at all. It was in a windowless hotel ballroom with a dinner of rubber ham and mashed potatoes.

By then I was working a day job, and I didn’t have time to write as much as before, which had put me into a depressed state of mind. Winning the award, I felt like some ruined Fitzgerald character lolling on a luxury liner in the rain—his inheritance has finally come through, but it’s too late. He’s a broken man.

In my acceptance speech, I talked about why I’d dedicated Wetware to Phil Dick with a quote from Camus, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” I see Sisyphus as the god of writers or, for that matter, artists in general. You labor for months and years, rolling your thoughts and emotions into a great ball, inching it up to the mountain top. You let it go and—wheee! It’s gone. Nobody notices. And then Sisyphus walks down the mountain to start again.

In my speech, I read a little more from Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus”:

“Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that as to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

As so often happens, nobody got what I was talking about. One of the fans invited me to come to his room and shoot up with ketamine, an offer which I declined. Outside the weather was pearly gray, with uniformed high-school marching bands practicing for something in the empty streets.

But never mind all that ancient gloom! It’s a new world now. Happy Thanksgiving!