I finished writing my novel Juicy Ghosts this week. Now I’m going to the beach or lying around at home reading Uncle Scrooge comics. And I’ve invented a math puzzle, described in this post, and solved by Bob Hearn on February 21, 2021. Some may term this post fanatical and unreadable but, hey, there’s some nice illos anyway! And don’t worry too much about the details of the math. Just let it soak in through your skin.

The Scrooge Cubic Acre

Uncle Scrooge’s money bin is approximately a cube that’s 100 feet on each edge, making a volume of a 1,000,000 cubic feet, as a million is a hundred cubed.

Scrooge frequently says it holds three cubic acres. Therefore a cubic acre must be a third of a million cubic feet, that is about 333,333 cubic feet. Call this quantity the Scrooge cubic acre.

The mystery is this. Nobody except Uncle Scrooge has ever talked about “cubic acres.” The unit has no defined meaning. An acre is in fact a measure of area and not volume. Specifically, it’s 43,560 square feet.

I propose that we define the Scrooge Cubic Acre to be a 3D geometrical solid with these two properties:

I. Its volume is a third of a million square feet.
II. Its surface area is an acre.

What might the a Scrooge Cubic Acre look like? Let’s explore some options.

A Spherical Cubic Acre?

Let’s look at a sphere whose surface area is an acre.

In terms of radius R, the surface area S of a sphere is 4 pi R^2.
Conversely, R is the square root of S / 4 pi.
[Note that pi is our old friend 3.141, and we can round 4 pi to 12.6.]

So if S is an acre, that is, 43,560 sq. ft., then r is about 59 feet.
The volume V of a sphere with radius Rr is 4/3 pi R^3.
So a sphere whose surface area is an acre will have a volume of 851,247 cu. ft.

But this much too big to match the desired Scrooge Cubic Acre volume of 333,333 cu. ft.

A Cubical Cubic Acre?

Let’s whittle down the volume-holding ability of our “cubic acre” shape from sphere to cube. Let’s check out the volume of a cube whose surface area is an acre.

In terms of edge length E, the surface area S of a cube is 6 x E^2. Conversely E is the square root of (S / 6).

So if S is an acre, then E is about 85 feet, and the volume e is 85^3, or 620,724 cubic feet. This is almost twice as big as the targeted Scrooge Cubic Acre volume of 333,333 cubic feet.

What would happen if we didn’t include the base of the cube surface in its surface area? E would be the square root of (S/5), which would be even bigger, so the volume would be even bigger, so that’s no good.

Pyramid Cubic Acre

We’ll drop down to a still less voluminous shape for our Scrooge Cubic Acre. We’ll use—of course!—a square-based pyramid, a classic shape, sometimes seen in Scrooge’s adventures.

Note that there is no standard height for a square-based pyramid. So we can in fact diddle with this, and end up with the volume and surface area we want.

We have a pyramid of a surface area S and volume V.
For the pyramid’s dimensions we can specify the square base’s edge as E. And, when convenient, we can write SE for the semiedge E/2.
The altitude A of the pyramid is the height of the peak above the base.
The slant height H of the pyramid is the shortest length up along one face of the pyramid to the summit.

Background facts:
SE^2 + A^2 = H^2 by the Pythagorean theorem.
A pyramid’s volume of 1/3 is its base area times its altitude.
The surface area is the base square plus the four isosceles face-triangles.
A triangle’s area is 1/2 times base times height.

For a Scrooge Cubic Acre pyramid we have a Volume equation and a Surface Equation. Plus a H Replacement equation that let’s us replace H by a formula in A and E.

(Volume)  V = 1/3 x E^2 x A.  And we require V to be 333,000 cu. ft.
(Surface)  S = E^2 + 2 x E x H. And we require X to be 43,650 sq. ft.
(H Replacement) H^2 = 0.25 E^2 + A^2
(A Replacement) A^2 = H^2 – 0.25 E^2

Do we include the base square of the pyramid in the surface area or not? Better to include it, as our goal is to get a smaller volume for a given area.

So fine, we have a range of “pyramid cubic acre” shapes. There are many pyramids with the desired volume of a third of a million cubic feet. We only need to find the one with a one-acre surface area. We can shift among them, by changing the the ratio between A and E.

For simplicity, let’s start with the kind of pyramid you get if you dissect a cube into six square pyramids who touch at their tips at the hidden center of the cube. In this dissected cube pyramid,” A is E/2 or what we also call SE.

For this proposed cubic acre pyramid:
V = 1/3 x E^2 x E/2 = 1/6 E^3.
E = cube root of 6 V
H = sqrt (SE^2 + SE^2) = sqrt(2)*SE

If the size of V is to be that of a Scrooge Cubic Acre, that is, 333,333 cu ft, then E would be the cube root of 6 x V, which crunches out to 125 ft, which seems like a nice, reasonable size. And the A would be half of that, or 62.5 feet. And the slant height H would be sqrt(2) times that, or 88 ft.

Is the surface area of this dissected pyramid cubic acre in any way close to that of an actual acre of 43,560 sqrt ft? Well, let’s check. It’s 37,656 sq. ft.

Getting there!

Now you need to tweak it a little. You want to get a bit more surface area out of that same volume. This means making the pyramid be flatter, more spread out, but without changing its volume. You we can do this by pushing down on its apex, thus reducing the altitude and increasing the edge length and thinking of the volume inside an an incompressible fluid.

Exercises for the Reader

(1) What are the precise E and A values that work?

(2) Does their ratio bear any relationship to the Golden Proportion?

Answers and Comments

(Solution to 1) To solve for the valued of E and A, use the H Replacement equation to remove H from the Surface equation. Then use the Volume equation solve for A in terms of E. Then remove A from the Surface equation by substituting the equivalent formula in E. And you end up with a quartic equation in E. I got stuck on that, but then Bob Hearn stepped in.

The quartic has only E^4 and E^2 in it, so, Hearn points out, it can be thought of as quadratic formula in E^2, and you can solve for E^2 with the usual quadratic formula. Upshot? Hearn tells us that E = 139.3383263, A = 51.50606676. Or, rounding off, it’s close to a 139 foot edge and an altitude of 51 feet. A nice reasonable pyramid with a volume of a third of a million cubic feet and a surface are of an acre!

(Cryptic Addendum by Hearn) What is boils down to is E²S² – 2E⁴S = 36V²

(Comment on 2) And no, it bears no relation to the golden proportion…no real reason it should.

(Gratuitous off topi comment) Should a cubic acre be thought of as a six-dimensional polytope? [No. What do you think I am? A science fiction writer?]

(Further step). How about making the Scrooge Cubic acre be a flattish cone instead of a square pyramid. What would be the radius R and the altitude A?

In November, 2020, the awesome SF and horror writer Cody Goodfellow interviewed me for the punk. funkadelic, and visually stunning online zine Forbidden Futures. And now I’m running the interview as a blog post. Photos are from around Santa Cruz and Los Gatos, with the cool art ones mostly from the Box Shop art space in San Francisco. And hats off to those artists.

If you want to read more interviews with me I have a full “All the Interviews” on my writing page…and it includes 440 questions with answers.

Q 1. You work was part of the original cyberpunk movement, and you use many c-punk tropes, but your outlook and philosophy seem anomalous. The freaky, witty chracters in your Ware Tetralogy rebut any stale notion that cyberpunk is be a Genre of Things. I worry that our society is resisting any grand psychic leap forward—and that they’d prefer for cyberspace be a digital mall. How do we change the channel and revive c-punk’s revolutionary promise?

A1. Yes, I never do quite fit in, even when I’m with a band of outcasts! Each of the original cyberpunks was different, and so it remains. I definitely relate to the point you’re making. There’s a worry that the golden promise of cyberspace, that is, the happy Tomorrow of internet and AI—there’s a worry that it’s been coopted by the Pig, the Man, spyware, big biz, the data miners, and the spammers. One fears the frontier has been tamed and made ordinary. But that might not be true.

As a writer, your one power over the world is to depict realties that are in line with the way things should be. Or realities that reflect the way things really are. Even though these truer realties may not be widely recognized. I like to depict smart, empathetic characters doing wild and crazy things. There are plenty of people like this—I meet them all the time in my variously intersecting circles of mathematicians, writers, hackers, hipsters, computer people, and artists. But you don’t necessarily see these people in many of the books and movies and videos out there.

If you write about the world as you feel it should be, or like it secretly is, you encourage disaffected readers to hang in there, to stay strong, to be themselves, and keep on the path to the hoped-for Tomorrow.

Q 2. One distinctive feature in your work is the glee that permeates even your more pessimistic stories. So much SF takes itself too seriously—unless it’s marketed as farce or satire. How important is it that your work amuse you?

A 2. Good question. I’m constitutionally inclined to pepper everything I write with jokes, wordplay, satire, surreal surprises, oddball characters, crazy dialog, and meta humor. Even when I’m dead serious. I always think of a famous letter from Galileo to his fellow astronomer Kepler. “My dear Kepler … what shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?” He was writing about some problems with pigheaded burghers. Sure you can cry, but maybe it’s nobler to laugh? Or, maybe even better, it’s good to laugh and to cry. That’s an accurate depiction of life, right?

I also appreciate your distinction between being gleeful and writing farce. I don’t want my work to veer mere silliness, with my elbow thudding into your ribs. I respect SF too much for that. And I think things are more deeply funny when they’re sad and serious at the core.

Q 3 Your take on artificial life and AI stands out from other treatments. You resist viewing robots, biots, or software agents as cold, drab entities determined to crush or to exploit us. Instead you endow your robo critters with humor and soul, setting your work apart from other SF—with the exception of the divine and supernal Futurama. Like, why shouldn’t robots be cooler, funnier, and more playful than humans! Might it be that the capacity to rebel and to joke are true hallmarks of artificial intelligence?

A 3. Well, erudite and well-spoken as you are, Cody, you’re almost answering your own questions while you ask them. I learned how to write about robots from my boyhood hero and eventual mentor Robert Sheckley. Such a wonderful man, such a great genius. He had it down from the start: Write about robots as if they’re people! That’s all it takes. And since they aren’t really people, you can make their personalities and dialog entertainingly quirky and bizarre.

Where does Hollywood get that thing of having AI minds be, like, stiff dull faces on screens who talk in Brit monotones and write in ALL CAPS? This is a complete failure of the imagination. Maybe film makers settle for AI characters like that because they’re frightened by the thought of truly intelligent robots and computer minds—and the fear makes them freeze up? Or maybe they want to preemptively belittle these artificial beings who might, god forbid, be superior to them?

Or maybe Hollywood’s AI characters generally suck because normals have an anti-intellectual hatred for anything involving math, CS, or science.  They look at a robot, and they want to say, “Sure you’re good at math, bit-brain, but I can pee in the yard. And I can dream about a cow!” But our cyberpunk  robot might answer, like, “I am peeing a super-coolant onto you right now. Once you are frozen solid, I will use Hilbert space quantum operators to transform you into the very cow of whom you dreamed. And thy name shall be Elsie Evermore.”

(Quilt by Sylvia Rucker.  Her quilt page.)

Q 4. I’ve heard veteran SF writers express befuddlement over finding themselves in a future that renders their early dreams quaint. I think of Gibson abandoning cyberpunk to write “future is now” technothrillers, and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Is it harder to peer into the future as one grows older?

A 4. I think I’m finding it easier. When I was younger, there was a certain default space-opera future that SF was supposed to be about. And cyberpunk was about breaking out of that. Fuck the Space Navy! Misfits doing crazy shit, that’s where it’s at.

And Gibson is still doing that very well. His Peripheral and Agency are so colloquial that they look easy. But they’re primo, out-there SF. For me, Bill will always be royalty, up there with Burroughs, Pynchon, and Borges.

Over the years, I’ve gotten past being jealous of Bill’s success. I mean, he’s a friend, and also he deserves the sales. In reality, I’ve done pretty well too. Better than I expected as a raw youth. I used to nurse that less-than-famous writer’s dream of future veneration—a dream that’s like believing in Heaven, or Santa Claus. I’ve let that dream go. Even if it happened, what good would it do me when I’m dead?

I’m just glad I can still write at all, here and now—and be read. And if I get a real publisher with a real advance that’s great. And if not, I’ve learned how to do a Kickstarter to get some money for the book, and how to self-pub paperback and ebook editions. I don’t know if everyone realizes that you can actually do that for free. It took me awhile to figure it out. I call my imprint Transreal Books. So either way, I get my books out there. I won’t shut up.

Back to your question. For me, stuff like space-travel feels used up. Unless you were to do the space travel in a car instead of in a spaceship—like I did in my recent Million Mile Road Trip. But there’s so much that’s untouched. Biotech has endless possibilities, and there’s ubiquitous physical computation, and the hylozoic notion that everything is alive. See my pair of novels Postsingular and Hylozoic for more about that.

And I keep wanting to write about that totally new thing that we know someone is going to discover in the next hundred years, and I keep not quite getting there, but by dint of making the effort to think that hard, I’m finding new stuff. Not actual “true scientific theories,” but fun ideas like new kinds of wind-up toys. The store is big.

For decades I read Scientific American to keep an eye on what’s new. But sadly they’ve turned to shit—small fonts and articles about—gak—sociology and political policy and economics? As if. Nowadays it’s enough to keep a loose eye on Twitter, and see the wonders trundling past—like a holiday parade that never ends. Grab hold of anything you see—and tweak it a little bit, and make it your own. Connect it in some way to your actual personal life—that’s the move I call transrealism. And go a little meta—that’s a trickier tactic I’m always trying to master—flip your idea up a level, and into something having to do with states of consciousness, or with the nature of language, or with the meaning of dreams. Go further out. There’s still so much. We’re just getting started.

(Isabel Rucker with her recent octopus mural at the Box Shop art space in SF.)

Q 5. What is your modus operandi for describing the indescribable? Whether or not you’ve ever actually spelled this out, my impression is that the weirder the subject matter gets, the plainer and more transparent you like your prose to be.

A 5. Back in 1982, in Lynchburg, Virginia, we had a good friend named Mary Molyneux who was pretending to graduate from college, even though really she hadn’t. It was a goof. Mary and her husband David Abrams had a graduation party and they asked me to give a talk. I spoke on “The Central Teachings of Mysticism.” You can find a free browsing edition online

In my talk, I said the Central Teachings are: (a) All is One, (b) The One is Unknowable, and (c) The One is Right Here.

The secret of life is shouted in the street. You grasp it as an instant big aha. But if you try and analyze it, you bog down. So when you write about it, the simpler and quicker the description, the better. Short words hit hard.

As an SF writer, I come up against this issue over and over again. I want to treat my readers to something like a come-shot or a titanic fireworks display when a character gets to some unprecedented new level. I’ll offer them a giant fractal, a brain flash, sudden obliteration, a paradox, a fugue state, a song, a wave of emotion, or a burst of heartfelt love—I’ve used them all. I’m anxious when I need to put on an event like this, but I’m also glad. It’s something to do.

(Isabel’s octopus again.  Small copies for sale!)

A complicating factor here is that, since The One is Unknowable, I can’t predict what kind of weird scene is going to come down when my character does something like, say, merge with the meta mind of the entire web. Or step outside of spacetime. Or become a shoelace. But I have to frikkin write something! So, I don’t know, I space out and let my fingers to the talking. Fold in some odd object that I saw that day, a piece of dream I had the night before, a treasured old emotion, and a random surreal construct. It doesn’t matter. Use any old thing, several of them at once. Surrealism tells us that everything fits, always. All is One. And you’re not in control.

And no, as I’ve said before, I’m not on drugs when I write like this. I haven’t used anything for more than twenty years. But even so, I’m high. On the natch. I didn’t use to realize it, but I’ve always been high, and I always will be. The One is Right Here.

Q 6. I chanced to see a photo of one of your copy-edited typescript pages—it was a print-out overlaid with a flurry of bewildering scrawls. I’d like to hear how this chaotic process works.

A 6. That’s been my work flow or over thirty-five years. Write a few pages on my computer, print them out, mark them up with a pen, type in the changes and write a little more—then repeat.

I do the computer work in a trance, seeing the scenes like I’m awake in a dream, getting deeply into the minds of my characters and into the rhythms of their speech. When I’m in this zone, I’m not at all thinking about my day-to-day problems.. I like that a lot—forgetting myself. That’s one of the reasons I like to write. It’s a way to be blank and high.

Having typed for a few hours, I print what I have, two-sided on a few pages of paper, fold the sheaf in four, put it in my pocket, go somewhere like a café or, in these plague times, to the woods or to a bench in a park. Get out the sheaf and start marking it up with a pen. I like to use a Pilot P-700 Gel pen with a fine 0.7 tip—I’ve been using them for maybe twenty years, I buy boxes of twelve at a time.

My handwriting isn’t very legible, and I’m not even trying all that hard to make it legible, when I’m copy editing, because if I don’t wait too long, I’m going to be able to remember what the edit was. The marks are maybe a little like graphic prompts. But if I really strain, usually I can decipher them, and if I can’t—well then I make up something that’s probably similar. It’s me, either way.

Anyway, after I do the marking up, then I find up my laptop, if I can, and sit on a couch with my marked up sheaf, typing in the changes. Or maybe I sit or stand at my desk—I have a motorized Geek Desk with adjustable height. In the process of typing in the corrections, rather than precisely copying the notes, I might revise a passage extemporaneously, sometimes adding new stuff, and sometimes jumping to other spots in the manuscript to make things match.

All of this takes awhile, but there’s not a huge rush. When I finish a novel, I’ll just have to spend a blank, uneasy year writing occasional stories and waiting to start another novel. If there is another. Usually, before I start another novel, I have to get to a psychological point where I truly, deeply, believe I’ll never write again. I give up, and I accept that I never really was a writer at all. I was faking it for all those years. And now it’s over. And then, and only then, the Muse stops by. And she’s like, “So you admit you can’t do it alone? About time. Let’s get started.”

I should mention that a nice thing about my work cycle is that if I save a marked-up print-out for the next day, then the process of typing in the corrections in the morning might get me going on the actual writing again. As any writer knows, a big part of the process is avoiding writing. What did we do before email and the internet? I seem to recall taking walks. Anyway, anything that nudges me back into the manuscript is of use.

When things are going really, really well—which is at most ten or twenty days a year—I don’t bother with the print-outs and the mark-up. I just open up the file on my computer and begin revising and adding new things— as fast as I can, jumping around almost at random, writing in different spots as the spirit moves me, like a sped-up stop-action construction worker—because I have so many things that I want to say, and so many scenes I want to see happen. On these days, I’m like a Donald Duck who’s found a treasure chest in a cave, and he’s dragged the chest out to the beach, and he’s letting the gems stream through his fingers. Wak!

That’s another of the reasons I write. To get a few days like that.

Q 7. How about your celebrity-cloned meat products notion from Freeware? Is that your intellectual property? The idea stuck with me, and I did a horror comic on the subject a while back.

A 7. Yeah, Wendy Meat. She’s the wife of the Software stoner-hero Sta-Hi, who’s now evolved into Senator Stahn Mooney. The tank-grown meat product is Wendy’s sideline. Big billboard of her by the beach in Santa Cruz, displaying her haunch. They’re all together in my omnibus, the Ware Tetralogy. By the way it looks like I’m once again going to sell a movie/TV option on the series so it may yet hit the screens before I die. We’ll see.

Last week on Twitter, it said the black rapper who supported Trump, he wants to sell salami with meat grown from his DNA. A lotta good eatin’ in thar, my friend.

Don’t blame the future on me! I just work here

(Another work by Isabel Rucker.  A “Swiss knife” for writing, crafted to my interests. Infinity, cellular auomata cone shells, saucers, robots, the Mandelbrot set, A Square of Flatland, and a Zhabotinsky scroll.)

Q 8. What’s your next novel?

A 8. It’s called Juicy Ghosts, and it inolves teep, or telepathy. I’ve been thinking about it for awhile and I started the actual writing early in 2019, with a story or chapter called “Juicy Ghost,” which I went on to revise a couple of times. By now I’m six chapters and seventy-five thousand words into Juicy Ghosts, and I think I’ll finish early in 2021. I think I only need one more chapter, but with these things I never know. It’s always up to the Muse..

Juicy Ghosts is about near-future commercial telepathy, digital immortality, politics, and computation as part of nature. I don’t have the energy to describe the plot in detail here. This interview is already rather self-indulgently long. For now, I’ll just point you to a version of the “Juicy Ghost” chapter that I posted on my blog, the month before the 2020 Presidential election. I was hoping it might make a difference. And, who knows, maybe it did.

An odd thing is that, while I’ve been working on Juicy Ghosts over the last two years, I’ve been dealing with the possibility that the current President might win a second term. In Juicy Ghosts, to transrealize it over the edge, a very similar type of President is about to be inaugurated for a third term.

And now, here in January, 2021, in the real world, the man we’re talking about didn’t win a second term at all. So Juicy Ghosts is suddenly a bit like a historical novel—rather than being the frantic call to arms that it was. Personally I’m very glad for this turn of events—that is, I’m glad for the reduction of my daily life’s stress and horror.

Along those lines, to make the synchronicity weirder, for the last month I’ve been working on a final chapter of the book that in some ways echoes the Capitol riot.

There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief, as Bob Dylan puts it in his song. All Along the Watchtower. Jimi recorded a great version too. Somehow that song, or its vibe, relates to the my yet unkown climax to Juicy Ghosts, altough I’m not sure how, not yet. For now that line is a augury, passed to me by the Muse. I need to listen to the song a few times this week, maybe twenty times.

The cold wind by the watchtower.  The chords of Doom.  Ploughmen dig my herbs. You and I have been through that, and such is not our fate. We must not speak falsely now, the hour is getting late.  That dread, End Times feeling I got on Jan 6, seeing what Kevin D. Williamson later called  “the studio audience form Hee-Haw” looting the Capitol.

Will my news-contaminated Juicy Ghosts work as a contemporary SF novel? I think it will—in fact I think it’ll be more fun to read not. It’s be the cautionary tale of a narrow escape—with tastes of the unrelenting nightmare reality that peeked out to stare us in the face. If our country hadn’t righted itself in time, my novel would sting too much to be enjoyable to read.  If the people in the book won, we want to have won too.

Bill Gibson went through a variant of of this flipflop when he wrote Agency, expecting Hillary to win in 2016, and then she didn’t—and he needed to change his thinking about his novel in certain ways. Fortunately for me, the evil President was in fact already ousted in Juicy Ghosts, so the book fits snugly with our happy post-election world. Things are turning out better than I expected.

Thanks for the great questions, Cody, and good luck with your cool work! Thanks also to Mike Dubisch and Dan Ringquist at Forbidden Futures!

Today’s text is taken from my ongoing writing notes for my novel which I’m now calling Juicy Ghosts, but which I used to call Juicy Ghosts. To “teep” is to communicate via telepathy. The photos are either from around Los Gatos and Santa Cruz this fall, or they’re from Denmark and Norway, back in 2009.

Juicy Ghosts is set about forty years from now. This is analogous to how my novel Software was set forty years from when it came out in 1980, that is, it was set in 2020. Don’t let 2020 pass without you having read the Wares!

Sept 29, 2020.

I’m at that point of working on Juicy Ghosts that I once heard my mentor Robert Sheckley call the “black point” of writing a novel. You’re lost. At sea. You can’t see the shore you started from, nor the shore you wish to reach. I think I say this at some (black) point in my novel notes each time.

Today I went to the real ocean, walking on Panther Beach north of Santa Cruz with my old pal Jon Pearce. Off and on, I thought a about my Juicy Ghosts plans. The tech has to get a lot simpler.

Step back. When I started using the phrase “juicy ghost” two or three years ago, I was thinking about how to remedy an ordinary dumb AI program that lacks, if you will, soul, or the inner White Light, or a numinous sense of the I Am. Every living organism has these things. If we can pass that feeling to a dull robotic AI data ghost of a person, then we can make it be a juicy ghost.

My reasons for proposing this trope are simple. We humans like to feel that we’re better than AI programs, and that we still will be even if the programs can beat us at chess. We like to suppose (correctly or not) that AIs without that inner Self cannot in fact write as well as us or create art that’s as good as we make.

So what exact quality of mine is my bio-teep-hacker hero Gee Willikers going to feed to my lifebox to make it have Soul? Introspection time. I feel aglow from my two hours on the beach. Full of White Light. What is that feeling, though? How could it be conveyed to an AI in the cloud? Let’s type out a stream of consciousness rap:

Sitting here at a table on the sidewalk in front of Zoccoli’s in Santa Cruz after two hours on Panther Beach, I know exactly what the feeling is. The Om. The mirrorball inward reflection of my Self. The cool breeze on my bare legs, the murmur of voices, music practice sounds from an upper story of painted brick building behind me, the sun heavy on the asphalt street, the sour green light through the leaves and through the red cafe umbrella. The specks of not-very-good chocolate in my teeth. The slight wheeze in my chest. The Here, the Now. The radically contingent nature of life.

October 4, 2020

I’m rereading Phil Dick’s novel, A Scanner Darkly once again. It’s such a masterpiece, and I almost think a lot of the critics didn’t notice that, because it’s so language-with-a-flat-tire and low-brow, and academic critics are so achingly straight.

It’s not necessarily the best idea for me to reading the novel just now, as it bleeds over into what I’m writing. I keep wanting to use Phil’s expressions slushed, gunjy, and like that, and I am in fact doing that, but, oh well, it’s fine.

Scanner has a thing about the drug-damaged left brain, and thoughts leaking over from the right brain, and the person feels like the thoughts from another person or from an alien…so great. I’d like to see something like this could happen to one my characters in Juicy Ghosts.

“Are you getting any cross-chatter?” one of the deputies asked [PKD’s character Bob Arctor] suddenly.

“What?” he said uncertainly.

“Between hemispheres. If there’s damage to the left hemisphere, where the linguistic skills are normally located, then sometimes the right hemisphere will fill in to the best of its ability.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Not that I’m aware of.

”“Thoughts not your own. As if another person or mind were thinking. But different from the way you would think. Even foreign words that you don’t know. That it’s learned from peripheral perception sometime during your lifetime.”

My favorite scene of all is Arctor’s freakout, on a freeway, after he nearly dies because someone (probably Barris) has fucked up his car under the hood so that his accelerator sticks at full speed.

He felt, in his head, loud voices singing: terrible music, as if the reality around him had gone sour. Everything now—the fast-moving cars, the two men, his own car with its hood up, the smell of smog, the bright, hot light of midday—it all had a rancid quality, as if, throughout, his world had putrefied, rather than anything else. … The smell of Barris still smiling overpowered Bob Arctor, and he heaved onto the dashboard of his own car. A thousand little voices tinkled up, shining at him, and the smell receded finally. A thousand little voices crying out their strangeness; he did not understand them, but at least he could see, and the smell was going away. He trembled, and reached for his handkerchief from his pocket.

Been there! But when I’m there I always remember that Phil Dick bit, and I can kind of laugh at the situation a little bit. Like, wow, this is really well done.

October 27, 2020

I’m writing some deeply funny/sad stuff on the new Chapter 6: “Carson Pflug.” In the end, its often the best when I give up on planning or thinking and just start writing. Fabulating, making things up, writing to amuse myself. I took off from a start line that the Muse handed me. “People say I’m an asshole, but I’m not.”

I’m writing a lot of dialog. I love dialog; the word count just piles up. Might want to fill in a few more visuals and interruptions for these passages. Phenomenal progress today;

November 4 – December 20, 2020.

I printed out the first six chapters I’ve written on Juicy Ghosts. And then, over the next five weeks, I cycled between marking up pages by hand and typing the changes in. I figure that once I get the first six chapters all tidy, with the plot all clear—then I’ll be in a good position to write the final chapter and be done with the book.

The revising was a lot of work. I had about twenty hand-corrections a page, and nearly 200 pages, so it meant about 4,000 corrections. I tried not to think about that number. I told myself to take my time and enjoy it. To knead the dough. But by the end, the process was a ruthless treadmill.

Here are some notes from that five-week period.

Normally I’d take a sheaf of papers down to the cafe and sit there marking them up. But now, thanks to Covid, I can’t do that. Sometimes I sit on park benches, if it’s not too cold. One day I took my slim folder-with-sheaf-of-papers-inside up into the woods on the hills. Nice to be outside while working—it was a beautiful sunny fall day—though a little sad and even pathetic not to be seeing the day, but just slaving away. Eventually my butt got tired from sitting on the ground and I had to stop anyway.

The revision process is astoundingly slow. I have to think about everything so much, and to fix so many things. I’m having to do a lot of rewriting, to make things work. Making the rubber science more uniform and internally consistent.

One of the big scenes in Juicy Ghosts involves the assassination of an evil U.S. President named Ross Treadle—who has connived himself into a third term in office.. With the first-term end of our own President Donald Trump’s reign now on the horizon, my novel has a different feel than it did when I started writing it nearly two years ago.

Now it’s more like alternate history instead of like frantic, fearful prophecy. Fine with me! I think it’ll go down better this way with the readers—that is, I think it has more mass appeal if Trump/Treadle really has been thrown out. If he was still in, the sting of my story would be too great.

I have this wetware propaganda thing in Juicy Ghosts; it’s called Treadle Disease. It’s like a virus—which kind of overlaps with our Covid plague—except Treadle Disease has the effect of— making you want to vote for Treadle. The pseudo explanation of the disease. has to do with so-called gossip molecules, which are attached to our neurons, like waving pennants or tails or flagellae.

My character Molly eradicates Treadle Disease by teeping a quantum-level cleaner tornado to each of the sextillion Treadle Disease gossip molecules in people’s bodies across the world. That’s my painting of her above. While envisioning this mass-spamming-type teep scene, I was listening to the Clash play “I Fought The Law.” I think of the thought-beams as being like the part where the guitarist does this “stratocast” thing of playing the same ostinato riff six times in a row, over and over. The drums in this song are amazing too.

Something bad happens to Molly later on, when she’s helping to destroy Treadle’s lifebox in teepspace—which is my 21st Century name for cyberspace. The thing that attacks her is called Coggy, he’s a teepspace mind who looks like a big wad of gears, or like a stupid-ass giant Transformer robot. Molly has a different teepspace mind on her side, this one is female, and she’s named Metatron and she looks like a 1940s B-29 bomber, and maybe she has a painting on her fuselage showing a crocodile in a pinup pose. Surrealism forever!

Each time I finish revising a chapter and I get to a new chapter, I see the clean blank manuscript print-out pages, and I think, well, there won’t be many corrections in this section. But there are.

My superhacker hipster hero Gee Willikers was going to be guilty of mass killing because he collapsed the Washington Monument onto a crowd of demonstrators. To save the day, I now have him teep to all the people on the ground near the Monument, give them instructions on which way to run.

I was working on the revisions at a table on the street outside the Fleur de Cacao cafe in Los Gatos—we were allowed to have table service for like five days over the last ten months—and I was elated. It felt really cool to be writing SF so skintight close to the real world, that is, so close to the election and the Covid.

And then I thought of Thomas Pynchon’s remark (twice) in Gravity’s Rainbow about someone writing “words. . .only delta-t from the things they stand for.” Like, what you’re writing is a lambent glow overlay upon your somatic life at that very moment. Thinking about this inspired me buy the now-available Kindle edition of Gravity’s Rainbow, and I’m browsing it for an hour almost every day. Getting away from working and from doom scrolling. I like section 4: The Counterforce the best. So many great raps.

Typing in the changes of my manuscript is dull, but at the same time it’s fun. Relishing my craft. My body gets tired from the keyboarding.

At one point, I wiped out my day’s updated file by copying yesterday’s file on top of it. Six hours of work gone. I unaccountably ignored a warning sign on the screen. Fatigue I guess. I’ve really been pushing hard and it’s taking forever. Maybe I’m getting too senile to manage my documents.

I didn’t have the heart to tell Sylvia when I lost that file—but she kind of noticed my dejection. “You’re working really hard on this revision, aren’t you?”

Yes, I am. Too hard. I woke up at 2:30 am and couldn’t stop fretting about putting the corrections back in. So I got up and did it and then it was 4:30 am and I went back to bed.

The next day I set up two additional methods for automatic file backup.

Happy news from the real world. We got a nice, fresh, and very dark-green Xmas tree today. We’ve never gotten one so long before Christmas (still ten days off), normally we’d consider that a bit uncool, like overly eager, but this year we’re dying for any scrap of glitter or fun. I begged Sylvia to let me put on colored lights this year, though she prefers white. In theory we each get our pick on alternate years, but it’s always debatable. I’m looking at the light from the colored bulbs in the corner of the living room now. Almost as good as being drunk and stoned.

Well, Chapter 5: “Astral Body” took more work to revise than the previous ones. It had more rubber science problems than the earlier chapters. By the time I was done, I’d tried out three or four different ways of making Mary’s astral body.

I happened to notice, or to remember, the fact that I’ve been using some of the the Juicy Ghosts tropes for forty years—ever since I started up the Wares around 1980. This phenomenon of writing about something you think is a new idea, but actually you wrote about it before, it’s called cryptomnesia.

The situation in Juicy Ghosts is that for immortality: (1) You save your brain info to a lifebox in the cloud; (2) You get a physical clone body that has a perfectly usable (but blank) brain (3) You put an organic “psidot” onto the clone to act as a modem/controller connecting your lifebox and your clone. I’ve been talking about this idea for years. Here’s a talk on Digital Immortality I gave in 2019 in Miami, Florida, to a cryptocurrency group called IOHK. One of my more unusual gigs.

Looking back to the dawn of time, writing Software in 1979 they flash-loaded personality software directly onto a kind of android. So why not flash-download lifebox software directly onto a clone’s brain without a psidot or an astral body involved? But for immortality, you’d want to be saving and updating that software somewhere in advance that is, in a lifebox. (Although in Software, some robots extracted the software by eating the guy’s brain.)

In Wetware I had a happy cloak (basically a psidot brain modem with a lifebox stored inside it) that holds Wendy Mooney’s mind, and it settles onto a clone of her body and runs her clone, so she’s pretty much the same Wendy. I like that.

I’m having my character Mary package up her lifebox + psidot together inside an ionized plasma called her astral body. It has some quantum wireless so it doesn’t have to glued to her, it can just be somewhere nearby. With Gee’s help Mary creates her astral body in a single epic flash. Having her do it gives her extra agency. Her astral body looks like—a halo!

Probably my current focus on forms of immortality has to do with the fact that I’m 74 years old, and I worry about dying. Though, if you look at my novel Software, you can see I’ve been worrying about death for quite a long time. Like, since I was about 16, as I describe in my Beat scroll-novel, All the Visions. Here’s a podcast of me reading the bit where I realize I’m going to die.

Note that I don’t want to write about actual traditional ghosts in Juicy Ghosts. I did that in White Light. It worked there, but I want Juicy Ghosts to be more like a semi-plausible book about near-future career opportunities. Commercial telepathy. Commercial digital immortality.

I might also mix in another of my perennial obsessions, that is, hylozoism, that is, the concept that everything is alive. See my novel Hylozoic. I might allow a human astral body to use odd things as a body. Like an animal or plant or maybe even a rock, or a cataract in a stream. Not sure that would be an interesting way to go. “Then they were all embodied as swaying branches on the trees. The End.”

Finished off the revisions of Chaps 1-6 yesterday, with a nice rewrite of the closing scene of Chapter 6: Carson Pflug, written from Carson’s point of view. A taxi van driven by a Latino’s lifebox (he’s dead and this gig work pays the monthly storage fee for his lifebox) has just dumped Carson and Carson’s co-conspirator Jerr Boom at a spot in the woods which is targeted to be bombed by a so-called flappy, which is something like a living drone. The literal meaning of “pendejo” is “a pubic hair,” and it’s used to mean something like “idiot.”

“Adios, pendejos!” goes Bernardo, and he’s off down the hill, moving at a lightning clip, nimble as a deer in a thicket.

I see a redwood above us against the evening sky. Jerr makes as if to run away, but it’s too late. We’re out of time. I sigh, and relax at last.

The forest smells good. The world is beautiful. A dark shape approaches, her wings cutting the air. The flappy. She drops her first bomb.

Onward to Chapter Seven! Eventually….

Speaking of shop talk, SF/Horror author Cody Goodfellow did a long email interview with me, mostly me talking about writing, and it’s in the zine Forbidden Futures.

So all right! We won back the presidency. I was pretty worried about it. The novel Juicy Ghosts that I’ve been working on has a whole big chapter, “Juicy Ghost,” about some rebels removing an illegit third-termer named Ross Treadle. But, thanks be to God, that can stay in the realm of SF rather than in the world I live in.

Even so the novel’s going well, and there’s no reason not to continue it, which is mostly what I’ve been doing all fall.

I’ve been writing and painting, and Sylvia has been quilting quite a bit. Here’s a beautiful new one, named “Ahoy.” More info about her quilts is on her site.

We got together with Rudy Jr. in SF for a Halloween street party. I really liked this young woman’s Grim Reaper costume. A lot of thought about that type of thing during the past month!

The one trip we were able to make of late was to Fort Bragg, CA, where daughter Isabel has moved…from Pinedale, WYO. Big change in the political climate, and it’ll be a relief for her. She’s moved there with her family, and her workshop for Isabel Jewelry

The photo above shows the full moon setting (as as opposed to rising) in the west at 6 am on October 30. Seen from this great reasonably-priced all-ocean-view-rooms motel we stayed in just north of Fort Bragg, it’s called The Beachcomber.

Fort Bragg has some amazing cliffs and beaches. One of them, the Glass Beach, is known for it copious amounts of sea-polished broken glass—years ago the city dump was…the beach. Love the green glow of the sunset-lit sea moss (?). When the light is slanting like that, I think of nature as a cathedral with stained-glass windows, and the windows are the leaves. In a higher sense, I think of there being a higher SUN that beams its cosmic White Light through each object in our sacred world. I’m a stained glass window and so are you.

Love the kelp strand echoing the wiggle of the foam’s edge. The fact that the time wiggle of the kelp resembles the space wiggle of the wave front relates to the ergodic theorem of classical mechanics.

Naturally I sighted a flying-jellyfish UFO at a park north of Fort Bragg. That fallen plant is called a sea palm. Now imagine that it’s twenty feet long.

Awesome well-tumbled driftwood at this local beach. I like that someone built a shelter there. They weren’t home. Those logs have been pounded so hard they’re shaped like cigars.

And here’s Isabel in her new studio/apartment, on the second floor of a building near downtown Fort Bragg. Wisely she hired a couple of mover guys to lug the stuff up the stair from her U-Haul! I already had a sore back by the time we got there, just from carrying a portable radiator from my house to the trunk of my car.

There’s something of an art scene in Fort Bragg, fueled by its adjacency to the many galleries in Mendocino. I love surrealist assemblages like this window near Isabel’s studio…I think the place is a printing shop.

Another cool window. Dig the painted globes casting globe shadows. And the annotated map. And the reflection of the sky. Perfect. One mathematical quibble…the latitude lines of spheres should be narrow ellipses, and not pointy-ended double-arcs.

Speaking of ambient art someone (a kid?) superglued a bunch of plastic dinosaurs to a stone all on a street near our house in Los Gatos.

I put four of my recent paintings on my wall in my office. Left to right, top to bottom, we have “Two Lizards,” “The Halo Card,” “Pinchy’s Big Date,” and “St. Georgia and the Dragon.” More info on my Paintings page.

Speaking of art, the SF MOMA museum is finally open again, to limited numbers of people, and they have a terrific show of the SF “figurative movement” painter David Park. He started with figures, went to abstraction, then got back to figures. Love all the red in this one of people in a movie theater, and the odd point of view.

My fave living artist Wayne Thiebaud is 100 this year, and he has a big show at the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, and a small show in the Berggruen Gallery across from the MOMA in SF. He didn’t necessarily make sketches on site for his streetscapes; it was more that he go out and look, and then paint the images that had formed in his memory. This is one of his best.

A very uncharacteristic Thiebaud painting of what looks like a long manuscript with a cover letter. The writer’s goal! The platonic ideal of a finished novel. Dig what he does with the colored edges around things.

My neighbor down the street had two inflatable eyeballs, powered by a small electric air pump. Awesome.

A Halloween pumpkin with odd, non-matching eyes by granddaughter J, and mouth by me…and wearing my hat. Grandpa. By the time I went to buy a pumpkin at the supermarket, they only had these fancy warty ones, which are kind of great.

“The Halo Card” acrylic on canvas, Oct, 2020, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

This appears in the wall image earlier, but it’s worth seeing it big. The image relates to a my novel-in-progress TEEP. The toroidal halos are lifebox vortex rings of quintessence, which store lifebox copies of users’ minds The little guys are ball walkers named Glory and Miss Max. The humans are the telepathy-biotech hacker Gee and the energetic mountain woman Mary. Mary’s mind is stored in the lifebox torus, and she has a newly grown clone body. I had the idea of making the canvas be flippable, so you rotate it 180 degrees if you like. Like a face card in a deck of cards. So then I thought of putting in two suit symbols. And I say “Halo Card” because as a tactical maneuver for the book’s internal tech logic, I did need to “play the halo card” in terms of how to store a mobile soul.  The old time artists knew this all along.

I’ll have a story about Gee and Mary in Asimov’s SF this spring; it’s called “Mary Mary.”

The lovely gnarl of ambient objects; e.g. this door’s strike plate, which I was repairing. Our house is (very) slowly sliding down the hill, which has skewed this frame so that the door latch no longer clicks into the little hole. I chiseled it lower. There’s a French word for the process of fixing things without really knowing what you’re doing, it’s “bricolage.” Akin to “jury-rigging” or “tinkering.”

The incomparable Terry Bisson, fellow Kentuckian SF writer, seen at his home in Oaktown, CA. My fave of Terry’s novels is the wonderful, playful, inventive, and socially conscious Pirates of the Universe, available in Kindle. And if you ever wonder about why it is you can never find things that you drop, read my joint story with Terry, “Where the Lost Things Are,” found online at my Complete Stories site.

An unused ice bucket in Terry Bisson’s backyard. I have a thing for spherical mirrors. The inside image contains the entire rest of the universe. N matches 1/N, baby… The penguins are elder Kentuckian SF gods, you understand.

My ultracool collaborator Marc Laidlaw was in town, wending his way up the West Coast, having left his home in Kauai. You should read our joint Zep & Del story, “Surfers at the End of Time,” which is quite possibly the greatest time-travel SF story ever written…and with a surfing theme…and set in San Francisco. This one, too, can be read for free in my online Complete Stories web site.

Glimpsed at the epic Four Mile Beach, four miles by odometer north on Route 1 from the last traffic light in Santa Cruz. Love this place. The cliff has a little cave or tunnel in it, and I was at the beach with Sylvia, enjoying a sunny day, out from our endless “sheltering in place.” And this young surfer woman was working on her Apple laptop! Possible student at UCSC? Viva California!

As I’m always saying on this blog, one of the things I love about the ocean is that it’s always different…and it’s always the same. Different in that all precise details are terminally unpredictable from moment to moment…because the natural computations performed by turbulent fluids are so rich that they’re “incompressible,” meaning that they can’t be emulated by simpler systems or computed any more rapidly than nature carries them out. The same in that the same general kinds of patterns eternally recur. Foam, wave, ripple, droplet, splash, eddy, lace of bubbles, scalloped edge—these are what we chaoticians call strange attractors. The system just can’t stop itself from settling in on them, but always in minutely different ways.  A moral on how to live your life.  Accept your standard daily attractors, and glory the differences between the individual instances.  And now and then—splash!—make it different.

And here is a fresh exhibit from Profesor Ruker’s Museum of Gnarl. A twisty heavy-duty zillion-volt wire that I found on the ground under a high-tension power-line while trespassing in some woods on a perigrination. Looks like kelp, but it’s not.

More gnarl. A married pair of trees, twining their roots on a path that Sylvia and I often go walk on, an out of the way spot, a bit away from the Mask Wars.

And here I am scanning a print-out of some pages from Juicy Ghosts. The book’s going quite well just now. I was stuck for a chapter, and then I hit on the idea of having the point of view character for the chapter be a guy who’s been presented as a villain thus far. He steps onto the stage and, introduces himself in the first line. “People say I’m an asshole, but I’m not.”

Ah, the human condition.

The De Young Museum in SF also opened its doors recently. There’s a sculpture/installation/gazebo building in back, a little domed structure with a hole in the roof. This is kind of an abstract photo of it.

Normally I like to chase the grandchildren around and around this little building, all of us screaming in fear/excitement—we call this a “caucus race” after a similar activity in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.

Sadly we’re not doing things with young ones as often these days, thanks to the long-lasting covid. But we do still see the kids and grandkids from time to time. Always such a burst of sunshine to be with them. We’ll make it.

And now we leave the foul Trump-verse for a better one. It was only a temporary deviation down a false stub of time, a mistaken mirror-world. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!