I’ve signed up to give a keynote talk, at Arse Elektronika, a Viennese-funded avant-garde conference in San Francisco on themes of sex and science-fiction. The talk is still a few weeks off, but they want an abstract from me today, so I’m making up something now, just to post as a start.

“What is Sex?”

Each of us is here as a link in a chain of a zillion reproductive sex acts. The pleasures of partnership and the orgasm help make us obsessed with having sex, even if we don’t know or care about reproduction. We might think of sex as any path that leads to orgasm. Note here the difference between sex with a person and, say, sex via pornography. In sex with a person, you’re talking about emotion, the positions of your limbs, touch across large skin areas, tastes, scents and pheromones. In the “artificial sex” of pornography, you’re talking about visual images, perhaps enhanced by recorded sounds. Amazing how little we’re willing to settle for! How might artificial sex improve? I’ll sketch some science-fictional scenarios.

Bruce Sterling sent me a great link to a Wikipedia article about the word “greeble.” In graphics, a greeble is some essentially meaningless bit of detail added to break up a blank surface and add visual interest.

You can write programs to procedurally decorate any surface with greebles; it’s a process similar to fractalization, that is, you divide up the surface into square are triangles and randomly add a bump or a hollow here and there. If you like, you can do this recursively for several levels, that is, rather than adding a bump or a hollow to a square, you subdivide the square into yet smaller squares and greeble those tiny squares.

In 1993, I wrote a Wired article subtitled “Kit-bashing the Cosmic Matte,” about George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, then in some ratty small buildings in little North Bay town. And one of the things the engineers showed me that when they’d used physical models (rather than digital constructs) for the big spaceships in Star Wars. And they’d pepped up these things by covering the surfaces with bits taken from standard over-the-counter plastic model kits of, like battleships. They called the process “kit-bashing,” but I didn’t hear them say the word “greeble.”

In writing, something analogous is what I’ve always called the “eyeball kick”—I’m actually credited with this use of the phrase by no less an authority than “The Turkey City Lexicon: A Primer for SF Workshops.”

That perfect, telling detail that creates an instant visual image. The ideal of certain postmodern schools of SF is to achieve a “crammed prose” full of “eyeball kicks.” (Rudy Rucker)

The phrase was used earlier by superbeat Allen Ginsberg in the mid-1950s:

Ginsberg also made an intense study of haiku and the paintings of Paul Cézanne, from which he adapted a concept important to his work, which he called the “Eyeball Kick”. He noticed in viewing Cézanne’s paintings that when the eye moved from one color to a contrasting color, the eye would spasm, or ‘kick.’

“Eyeball kicks” are also associated with comic art, as in the work of Will Elder in the early Mad magazine—did editor Harvey Kurtzman popularize the phrase? Help me out if you know about this…

A comix store I visited in in Wellington, NZ, two years ago is even called Eyeball Kicks.

In conclusion, we have to ask…would sex even be possible without greebles?

My mind again turns inward now that I’m done revising Hylozoic and Spacetime Donuts and The Sex Sphere.

I had a little health scare two months ago, at the start of July, 2008. And already the concerns I had the wake of the crisis seem remote. I remember being flummoxed by the realization that the outer world will indeed continue after my eventual death. Looked at superficially, this seems trivial, but at the time it seemed very profound to me. I was realizing it a deep and existential level.

I think most of us have a kind of mental filter that prevents us from directly seeing death in normal times. The reality of potential non-existence only hits home when I’m in the vicinity of Death’s Door.

Another result of my experience was the feeling that I should write a memoir…while there’s time. So for several weeks I was writing swatches of memoir-like material, trying it on for size. And I like working on that stuff, it’s pleasant to reach back and massage my past.

But I like the memoir material even more when I mix in an SF rap now and then. That adds layers of meaning, and makes it funny or somehow more real. Like I was going on about this convalescent guy, Jim Oster, who lives with a woman, Anne Wowesse, who may or may not be an alien mind inside a 120 lb. culture of cow liver cells.

In the past, what I’ve often done is to take memoir-like material and ascribe that to a character in an SF novel: thus transrealism. But now I’m wondering if I could instead work in a hybrid format that’s more like a memoir with SF riffs, raps or storylets interspersed within it—functioning like illustrations. Don’t try to merge it.

The reason I’m considering this approach is that I don’t see longer memoir-type raps as fitting smoothly into a transreal novel, at least not into one of the short, fast-paced novels that I usually write. I tend to think that an SF-action reader isn’t going to want to plough through much background material about the characters.

So maybe I flip the emphasis. The foreground thing is the memoir, and the background thing is SF. In other words, I’m kind of envisioning a memory-dump memoir whose sections alternate with short-short SF stories that are in some way playing off the memories.

Obviously this may not be a highly commercial concept, but at this point in my career, I don’t mind taking a chance. The main thing is to start with something I find worthwhile and fun. And maybe later a commercial element emerges.

In terms of tightening up my Nested Scrolls, there’s the scenario where the character is writing a journal with memoir-like elements, and the journal excerpts alternate with scenes from the character’s ongoing life, and then the two action threads converge. Perhaps something from the journal is incanted into life, as if called up by a magic spell. Or perhaps the journal-work leads the character to some profound realization about the events taking place in his or her daily life.

(Added August 31, 2008).
In a comment today, Alex suggests that Nested Scrolls might incorporate the material in my as-yet-unfinished notes on how to write, A Writer’s Tookit.

I kind of like this idea. Some autobiographies do include practical information, for instance Dylan’s memoir has interesting stuff about how he composes, plays, and sings. Just in terms of “what I do all day,” it would be possible to include stuff about the craft of writing.

Another idea: alternate memoir chunks by a transreal extensions or reinterpretations of the events in that time period. I don’t think you’d necessarily want to go over the same material twice, it’d be better to could segue in and out of SF mode as you moved forward through time.

But maybe I’m talking about more than one book here. I’ll just have to see what emerges.

Before that, however, I have the pleasant task of finishing a new story with Paul Di Filippo. Maybe I’ve mentioned this before, our tale is another take on the theme of infinite multiple-brane universes…with the working title “To See Infinity Bare.”

[Note that I posted a revised and expanded version of this post as "New SF Futures II" in July, 2010.]

For the last three weeks I’ve been hung up revising my new novel and two of my old ones, but I hope soon to get back to thinking about a new novel.

The other day I was looking at the Tor.com SF website, scanning through an interesting and well-written post by Jo Walton, “The Singularity Problem and Non-Problem,” [I also scanned through the many comments on the post] and I picked up the idea that some SF readers (and writers) are unhappy with the notion that SF’s content should change over the years.

Walton herself speaks fondly of “the kind of SF that I like best, the kind with aliens and spaceships and planets and more tech than we have but not unimaginable incomprehensible tech…” And some of the commenters take this a bit further, even questioning whether true artificial intelligence is even possible.

Change is of course something that happens to any living art form—think of painting or popular music or literary novels or even TV sit-coms. Yes, it’s sad to see Golden Ages slip away, but it’s sadder still to keep doing the same thing. Inevitably the old material goes stale and the fire goes away. I’m not saying it’s become impossible to write fresh novels about aliens and spaceships and planets. But maybe it’s become a task as difficult and quixotic as writing a fresh doo-wop song.

But why not a new kind of song? And why not a new kind of SF novel? This is, after all, the twenty-first century.

If you think about it, it’s quite unreasonable to regard, say, the physics and sociology of classic space opera as “rules” about science-fictional futures. These are all things that writers made up in, like, the 1930s, and which later writers polished and refined. The “rules” have no Higher Truth and they’re unlikely to apply to any actual future. They’re only stories that people made up for fun, and there’s absolutely no reason why we can’t keep changing the rules.

I’m certainly not a whole-hog, card-carrying Singulatarian—as I discussed in a pair of blog posts in March, 2008, I don’t see virtual reality as ever eclipsing our ambient quantum-computing “real” reality. This said, I do strongly feel that, down the line, intelligence will be ubiquitous—that’s the main theme of my novels Postsingular and Hylozoic.

What’s interesting to me is not the beating or eating of dead horses, but rather the search for genuinely new science-fictional scenarios. For me, SF is the fun-loving hipster sister of Big Science. SF finds the vibby spots first. Sometimes the spots are gone in the morning, but sometimes there’s time for Big Science to trundle in the Measuring Machines and Theory Generators and capitalize on what we fey writer types have unearthed.

Here’s a more or less random list of some themes that I currently find appealing. Feel free to post comments with your own suggestions for (underused) SF themes!

Magic Doors

I’ve always liked the idea of magic doors to other worlds, also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges. I wrote about them in The Sex Sphere, for instance, and I thought about them again this summer in Dick Termes’s studio. I like that idea, I like to think of a character with spheres/doors swarming around him or her like fireflies. Like old memories. As it happens, Dick just sent me an email encouraging me to think of his spherical paintings in this way:

“To be living in a world where these spheres float in. Spheres like my work where you can see from outside what is really an inside view. With some effort you can enter these spheres and get on the inside which takes you to those real worlds. Some are real worlds some could be subconscious worlds etc. So, you could go from one world to the next by finding these spheres to enter. You would be able to look at the outside of the inside scene before entering…”

Dreams and Memories

We’ve seen plenty of virtual reality tales in which people mistake an illusion for a reality. But I think there’s still some interesting things to be done with ordinary dreams. Waking up inside them? Finding out that they’re really happening in a higher dimension?

In the mental front, we might also consider viewing memories as in some sense real. Maybe memory is a form of time-travel, and you really can flip back into the past or, more oddly, bring people from your past into your present.

The Afterworld

I’ve always thought there should be more SF that speculates about what happens to people after they die. This can shade into fantasy, of course, but giving it an SF slant would be interesting. Certainly it’s nice to speculate that there’s some kind of underworld…rather than nothing.

Quantum Computational Viruses

The current trend is to view any bit of matter as carrying out a so-called quantum computation. These computations can be as rich and complex as anything in our brains or in our PCs. One angle, which I explored a bit in Postsingular and Hylozoic, is that ordinary objects could “wake up.” Another angle worth pursuing is that something like a computer virus might infect matter, perhaps changing the laws of physics to make our world more congenial to some other kinds of beings.

New Senses

How about some new senses—other than, say, telepathy or radio-wave-sensitivity? Things we might notice more acutely: viscosity, temperature, pressure, electrical charge, neutrinos, Higgs bosons, sterile neutrinos, quarks, “ghosts.”

The Holographic Universe

Some physicists say that our 4D space is a kind of illusion built up from a two-dimensional pattern…somewhere. Is it maybe a comic strip? Let’s go meet the artist!

Why?

Why are we here? What’s it all for? What’s the meaning of life? Why does anything exist at all? Why is there something instead of nothing? Surely SF can come up with an answer.

The Subdimensions

For too long we’ve let the quantum mechanics tell us that there’s nothing smaller than the Planck length. Let’s view this tiny size scale as a membrane, a frontier, but not a wall. We can in fact go below it…into the land of the subdimensions. Possibly the subdimensional world is a kind of mirror version of ours. Certainly aliens can visit us from there…no need for all those star ships. Just focus on a speck of dust.

An Infinite Flat Earth

What if Earth were an endless flat plane, and you could walk (or fly your electric glider) forever in a straight line and never come back to where you started? The cockroach zone! The kingdom of the two-headed men! One night there’ll be a rumble and, wow, our little planet will have unrolled, ready for you to start out on the ultimate On the Road adventure.

So now I’m rereading the scanned manuscript for my 1981 novel of hyperdimensional nuclear terrorism, The Sex Sphere , getting it ready for a planned E-Reads edition in electronic book and the print-on-demand formats this fall. As with Spacetime Donuts, also coming out from E-reads this fall, I did a cover painting for it, and my graphic-designer daughter Georgia Rucker turned it into a cover.

I think The Sex Sphere is really one of my better books, even though it wasn’t that widely read when it came out. I’m not finding all that many things that need correcting. I had a nice, loose style then, and a lot of freedom; if you were writing paperback SF originals for Ace Books in the early 80s, it didn’t seem like there was much of a filter. Like clear channel border radio.

I’ve been painting a little again. I touched up my Collaborators picture of two authors (possibly me and Bruce Sterling) working on a story together. I relate to the apoplectic scribe on the left.

And I’m working on a new one called Alien Picnic. It’s a view across Silicon Valley that I’ve painted before, but this time I thought it would be cute to have a couple of giant eyeballs on an outing. I still want to add some houses on the hillsides, put some food on the picnic cloth, and layer on more texture.

I met my friend Emilio at the coffee shop the other day. He’s a programmer who gets lots of consulting gigs. He’s currently using C# for some kind of threaded voice-recognition app. We were talking about how programming takes a very high capacity for handling pain.

And, as usual, I’m hanging around in my back yard taking pictures of little things like this red fleece shirt drying. This sight made me think of William Carlos Williams’ 1923 poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.