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.

The new site Tor.com is working. The site incorporates an awesome online electronic zine with new SF stories. The first batch includes stories by Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, John Scalzi, and Wesley Allsbrook!

They’re going to be running a new story of mine this fall, too, “Jack and the Aktuals, or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory” — I blogged a little about this story when I was working on it in November, 2007.

I finished the final round of revisions on Hylozoic this week, and my editor, David Hartwell, approved them.

As it happens, the novel has an alien character named Lovva, who takes on the shape of a small harp. Earlier this year, the harpist Cheryl Ann Fulton lent me a small harp for inspiration while I was writing about Lovva. Today I took the harp back to Cheryl in Berkeley.

Here’s a passage from Hylozoic where Lovva transforms herself into a harp, watched by my hero Jayjay, in the attic of Hieronymus Bosch’s house.

The shapeshifting alien pressed her arms together and stretched them out to make the crosspiece. Her belly flattened; her head retreated into her neck. Her legs swung up and fused to make a fluted front column. Her toes connected with her fingers.

Buds formed along the median of her chest and belly, sending luminous tendrils up to the crosspiece, forming the strings. Her green skin glittered and turned gold. And now the painting on the soundbox began taking shape. Jayjay got in on this, guiding the harp as she transformed her skin into layers of oil paint.

When she was done, two pale lovers stood nude in a meadow that seethed with black lizards and tiny birds. Beside them was a pale blue demon fingering a tiny, gold harp that was shaped just like Lovva. The lizards wore little hats, flying fish drifted in the sky, the trunks of the trees had ears, and hints of moisture glistened on the lovers’ thighs.

“See the little harp the demon in the picture holds?” said Bosch, bending close to Lovva’s sound board. “The little harp should bear a painting that’s a copy of my painting on this big harp.”

“Only think the changes,” chimed the harp. “And Ill make my skin into the proper colors.”

Soon Lovva’s soundbox bore an image of a demon with a harp, but now the demon’s harp bore an image of a smaller demon with a harp, and this tiny harp bore a yet-smaller picture of a hellish harpist, and so on—iterating down to levels that the naked eye could barely see. By way of capping the series, Bosch set a tiny triangle of ivory white at the vanishing point. The eye of God.

I’ve been busy doing some minor revisions on the manuscript for Spacetime Donuts , getting it ready for a planned E-Reads edition in electronic book and the print-on-demand formats this fall. I couldn’t resist cleaning up the manuscript a little. After all, I’m a writer, and revising novels is what I do.

I made a painting for the cover, and my daughter Georgia Rucker turned it into a great cover design.

Although I do have a few new photos to show you, I haven’t been doing much writing, other than working on the Spacetime Donuts revision, so for today I’ll just paste in a more or less random excerpt from the text.

Suddenly they were through the electrons’ domain and the bare nucleus blazed ahead of them, perhaps half the size of the scale-ship. It was growing rapidly as they drifted towards it. A deep rumbling filled their tensegrity sphere, and the smell of sulfur and burnt earth filled their nostrils. Vernor was not surprised…if the quantum mechanical probability field could act directly on the memory structure of his brain to produce visual images, there was no reason it couldn’t produce the sounds and smells as well. Intellectually he was hardly surprised…but on the gut level he was as scared as he’d ever been.

The nucleus was a dusky red interspersed with patches of black and threads of glowing white. Its shape, although roughly spherical, was irregular and constantly changing. There was no doubt whatsoever in Vernor’s mind that it knew they were there, and was waiting for them to get close enough for it to make its move. He was repelled at the thought of being sucked into the heart of the fantastically dense entity ahead of them. But surely the Virtual Field would protect them?

A terrible idea struck Vernor. Although the Virtual Field would prevent the nucleus from physically touching them, the spherical symmetry of the VFG field might produce a lens effect…a lens magnifying and focusing the fantastically powerful nuclear strong forces upon the interior of the scale-ship. Of course the VFG field was acting as a lens, otherwise the intensity of the quantum probability field would have been too weak to affect their brains…“Mick!” Vernor screamed. “We’ve got to stop!” He fumbled for the controls with thumb-fingered hands.

“Stay cool,” Mick said reaching over Vernor’s shoulder to turn down the power control. They stopped shrinking, and the nucleus stopped growing. It seemed to be hovering fifty yards from them, a balefully glowing eye as large as the scale-ship. There was some kind of tension growing in the back of Vernor’s mind…

Suddenly Vernor’s hand shot out and turned the VFG field up to full. The impulse to turn the power up had come from his brain…but what had put it there? The nucleus filled his mind as he clung to the controls, fending off Turner’s efforts to turn the field back down.

The laboring VFG cones whined shrilly, and in seconds the scale-ship was a twentieth the size of the huge atomic nucleus looming ahead. The rumbling and the stench grew more intense, and suddenly a chain of sparks shot out from the nucleus and enveloped the scale-ship, inside and out.