Good news: the first half of my novel Hylozoic is done, and so, by extension, my projected trilogy is half done as well: Postsingular, Hylozoic, Transfinite.

Bad news: I’m quite vague about what happens in the second half.

I do have what looks like an outline for the second half of Hylozoic, but it’s largely gauze and mist. So I’ll be redoing the outline for a few days now.

And, while I’m in planning mode, it would be great to get more ideas about that third novel, Transfinite.

Today I rode up onto St. Joseph’s Hill in Los Gatos with my trusty Pilot P-700 black fine gel pen and with my outline printed on a few pages of paper folded in four in my back pocket—my favorite form of portable word processing set-up. I marked it up. My handwriting has gotten so free (elderly?) that later I often need to use a magnifying glass to figure out what I wrote.

I need a name for the transfinite beings such as the magic harp. I was calling them “infinites,” though “transfinites” would be better. “Gods” has too much baggage. Maybe “snakes” or “snaaakes,” with the iterated “a” suggesting their (extreme) length. Oh, I know, how about “immortals.” Yeah, that seems to work, at least for now.

Some tough questions:

Q: What is a rune? What is a runemaster?

A: A rune is like a magic spell that directly affects matter. In Hylozoic at present I describe a rune is combination of a telepathic contact, a telekinetic push, and a higher-dimensional flip. And when you lay a rune on something you are “casting” it. And if you can cast runes, you’re a runemaster.

I’ve described three kinds of runes.

* The summoning rune, which linked Jayjay via a subdimensional wormhole to a mind in a distant galaxy.

* The ioneer runes which convert the information in a distant alien’s body into a behavior in a group of Earthly atoms, causing the atoms to emit matter waves that produce a matter-hologram copy of the alien.

* The atomic reset rune which clears the ioneer runes out of the enslaved atoms.

For story purposes, I have it set up so that only Jayjay, of all the people on Earth, can cast runes. He has a dream where the magic harp makes him a runemaster.

Perhaps a rune has something to do with higher infinities. A self-referential loop. But why can only Jayjay cast runes? He’s not really the smartest guy in the world. Maybe it has to do with his (so far latent) painting talent?

Q: When and where is the magic harp located when Jayjay sees her in his dream?.

A: I’d like to just say the harp is dreaming too, and this appearance emerges from the massed moments of her whole life. Except for an immortal like the magic harp, this visionary state is not like dreaming, its like the normal state, and the part where they are embedded in our world is more like the dream.

Q: Why did magic harp make Jayjay a runemaster?

A: Perhaps the magic harp is a future version of my character Thuy Nguyen. Maybe in Transfinite, Thuy goes through an apotheosis and becomes an immortal, in particular, she becomes the magic harp. And then goes back to do what she needs to do. And that’s the end of the trilogy; the snake of history bites its own tail.

Q: Why does the magic harp forget the Lost Chord on her journey from the present-day Lobrane to the Fifteenth Century of the Hibrane?

A: The magic harp is a higher mind that lives in every moment of her Earthly manifestation, yes. But this mind is subject to time flow constraints when embedded in the physical world. If I raise my consciousness to be conscious of my entire lifeworm at each instant of my life, it’s still true that today I don’t know what I’ll do tomorrow. Even though I will in another sense feel the “same” tomorrow, like the same lifeworm.

Q: Where do the immortals live?

A: I will call it Walhalla for now, echoing the Valhalla of Wagnerian myth. I don’t want Walhalla to be pie in the sky, or infinite dimensional Hilbert space. I’d like it to be our actual world, regarded in a different way. We are in Walhalla all the time.

So I’m saying the immortals are physically in our world, but they make the most of what’s available and manage to have infinite minds.

It’s possible that a infinite immortal mind is connected to more than one finite body. In this case, the bodies are like pearls upon an endless golden strand. Two people might separately have infinite souls, and then choose to combine the souls into one; the single soul living in two bodies. A cosmic marriage.

In principle all the silps in an alef-null-sized universe could be bodies of one and the same infinite mind.

Q: Can I see Walhalla?

A: When you dream you are in Walhalla. Time sequence constraints can break down here; you can dream the past and the future. There’s not a problem with a yes-and-no temporal paradox because when you wake up and all quantum states are collapsed, then you aren’t sure what happened in the dream, or you don’t really believe it.

Q: How is our universe infinite?

A: I can think of three senses:

(a) Upward infinity. Infinite spatial extent, with infinitely many stars, and infinitely many degrees of higher level structures, that is, ultra-k-clusters of galaxies for every number k.

(b) Downward infinity. Infinitely divisible matter. The Planck barrier is simply an illusion. By renormalizing, we can in fact flip our view of things, and see the “big” stuff as being below the Planck scale and us as being the “small” stuff. A flip-flop. The endlessly many ultra-k-clusters below the Planck scale would then represent lower and lower levels of matter.

(c) Infinite dimensionality. There may be endlessly many dimensions.

Q: How big is the infinity of our universe?

A: In the previous answer I was coy about the range of k and the meaning of “infinity”. But if I say our physical world is infinite, which level of infinity do I mean? As a set theorist I know of lots of options. Here are four that come to mind:

(i) Alef-null, the smallest infinite number, the cardinality of the set of natural numbers.

(ii) c, the power of the continuum, that is, the cardinality of the set of real numbers. Note that the size of c is at least as big as alef-one, which is the first infinity after alef-null. So far as we know, c may be very high up in the alef hierarchy, indeed it could even be as big as Ω. But some present-day set theorists like Hugh Woodin feel c is alef-two. As I recall, in White Light, I espoused this belief, which was also advocated by Kurt Gödel.

(iii) Ω, the class of all ordinals, which Georg Cantor calls Absolute Infinity.

(iv) The size ηΩ of the Absolute Continuum, where I use the terminology of Felix Hausdorff . This would be at least as big as Ω. I discuss the Absolute Continuum in my book, Mind Tools, it is a class of points in which you can find another point between any two sets of points. An Absolute Continuum is a proper class which contains embedded into it every possible set-sized order type. It’s moot whether or not you can well-order the Absolute Continuum as a whole, so it’s not necessarily true that it can be mapped one-to-one onto Ω.

Q: So which infinity is the size of our space?

A: A cautious idea is to settle for alef-null stars, alef-null levels, alef-null divisibility, and alef-null dimensions. In this case, however, the infinite overminds are not really transfinite; they have size alef-null. If they like, they can arrange themselves into countable transfinite order types such as ω + ω and get a weak kind of transfinitism, but even so, it would be questionable in this case whether I could justify calling the third novel Transfinite as I would like to.

Or I can rush to the higher extremes and say that I’m after Absolute Infinity, or Ω; after all, this is SF, why hold back. In White Light, my character went out to Ω.

Perhaps this time around I’ll require even more. I’d like the higher infinities to be immanent, embedded in our immediate surroundings, in my finger tips. And I can do this by saying that our physical space is Absolutely Continuous, at least in the small, that is, in terms of divisibility.

Given that I would prefer a symmetry between large and small, this also entails that the physical world is Absolutely Infinite, and that it extends past alef-null, alef-one, and so on, star upon star. A principle of plenitude is in operation here.

The following issue comes up in this case. If I say our space is a proper class, then I have to wonder if the immortals proper classes or merely transfinite sets? I suppose I’d have them be merely transfinite sets, so that they, like us, still have higher levels to aspire to. Alef-null’s ceiling is alef-two’s floor…

And we could then have a higher Divine which is a proper class. This would lie over and above the transfinite immortals; akin to Meister Eckhart’s Godhead beyond God.

Q: How do the two branes of Postsingular fit in?

A: I have set it up so that reality has two (and only two) parallel branes: the Lobrane and the Hibrane. Perhaps the immortals are transfinite minds based upon the Lobrane, and the less pleasant subbies are minds based upon the Hibrane. Each brane can be an Absolute Continuum.

The paired branes are the underlying dyad that drives creation. Yin and yang.

[Window view reflected in dining table.]

On the literary front, I’ve been pushing forward on my somewhat cyberpunk SF novel-in-progress Hylozoic , a sequel to Postsingular, which will be out in October. My first draft of Hylozoic is nearly half done; and once I finish writing the current Chapter Four (working title “Coma Nurse”), I get to jump my characters back in time to hang out with Heironymus Bosch.

Today I thought I’d paste in a passage that I wrote this week. The situation is as follows:

Jayjay and Thuy are newlyweds in a world where everyone has teleporation and telepathy and every object is conscious. Jayjay has unwittingly become a runemaster, able to reprogram the quantum computations around him. A distant planetary god called Panpenga has taken control of Jayjay via subdimensional telepathy, and she’s using Jayjay to “cast runes,” thereby reprogramming large volumes of Earth’s atoms into “Peng ranches.” In a Peng ranch, the atoms work in concert to generate matter wave holograms of ugly big birds called Peng—hailing from the planet of Pangpenga. It’s a new way of doing an alien invasion. (Ah, the joys of non-mundane SF!)

Panpenga wanted Jayjay to put in thousands of Peng ranches, all across Earth, but he balked. So Panpenga threw Jayjay into a coma, and now a pair of traitorous human realtors called Chick and Duckie are acompanying Jayjay and Thuy on a development road trip. Thuy is cooperating, as she fears Panpenga will kill Jayjay. For support, she’s brought her old girlfriend Kittie along.

To kick off the trip, the Peng-employed realtors head for Killeville, Virginia! Who’d be likelier to support a dehumanizing alien invasion than a fundamentalist church!

[Window at the DeYoung Museum, looking wonderfully interesting after viewing a somewhat dull show of photos by Hiroshi Sugimoto. I like the reflections of the fluorescent tubes.]

[Begin Hylozoic Excerpt.]

Before setting out, Thuy teeked a wheelchair for Jayjay. And then she, Kittie, Jayjay, Chick and Duckie hopped to the parking lot of the Candler Road Church in Killeville, Virginia, leaving the Peng behind.

It was a hot hazy Sunday morning; the lot was full. Odd as it seemed, many people down South still drove their SUVs, albeit retrofitted ones with solar cells and electric motors.

“I could really get some car-art gigs here,” said Kittie, looking around. “I could paint a Good Ole Jesus gutting an eight-point deer. And the Rapture, with Christians flying away and sinners screaming in fire-cracks. And the repentant Mary Magdalene in Mother Mary’s tender, womanly embrace.”

[Monhegan island painting by Rockwell Kent.]

Jayjay tossed his head back like an epileptic having a fit; his mouth flew open in a moan as showers of goose bumps marched across his skin. His wheelchair braced itself against the strain.

“Here we go again,” said Thuy with a sigh.

“What is it?” asked Chick, alarmed.

“He’s channeling Panpenga,” said Thuy. “He’s making Killeville into a Peng ranch.”

“Here,” suggested Duckie, offering Thuy a lace-trimmed hankie. “Hold Jayjay’s tongue so he doesn’t bite it.”

“He’ll be okay,” said Thuy. “Act like it’s not a big deal. I don’t want everyone staring at us.”

But a pair of Candler Road parishioners were already approaching: a rough complexioned young woman with a ponytail, and a loose-eyed youth in a tan cotton suit.

“Hi!” said the woman, lacing her hands behind her back and pushing out her breasts. “We’re Steve and Julie. Are you here for the eleven a. m. program? Donnie III does a powerful healing near the end.”

“Might could do this fella some good,” said her partner, Steve, hunkering down to peer under the wheelchair. Thuy flashed that the guy was an in-house security agent checking for weapons. He could have just teeped under there instead of bending over, but the fundamentalist Christians didn’t really approve of using their new mental powers.

[Peaceful Berkeley.]

“We’re glad we’re in time,” said Chick. “We came all this way to soak up a sermon.”

“Not from around here?” said the ponytailed Julie. The skin on her cheeks was raw from scrubbing. “Are you from—from West Virginia?”

“Further than that,” said Kittie. “I’m a godless artist from gay CA.”

“I don’t think that’s funny,” said the man in the tan suit. Thuy noticed that he was clutching a zipped-up leather bible. The bible silp teeped Thuy that it was a pistol case.

Meanwhile Jayjay had stopped moaning. The local gnarl had been successfully repurposed; Thuy could see the change in the clouds and in the motions of the trees. It was just a matter of time until—

“Oh!” cried Julie. “Look, Steve, look!”

Strolling across the parking lot towards the church were a hog-fat older man in clerical vestments, an old woman with a sprayed bubble hair-do, and a rangy younger man in vestments as well. They were slightly larger than life size; their complexions were preternaturally clear and smooth. Panpenga had gotten Jayjay to mold these new tulpas into the forms of the deceased first family of the Candler Road church.

“Dr. Macon!” exclaimed Duckie. “With his wife Bonnie and their son, Donnie Macon, Jr.” Duckie had done her research. And now everything was going according to plan. “I thought—I thought they’d all passed on to their reward,” she added disingenuously.

“A miracle,” breathed Julie.

“Maybe so,” said Steve, nervously running the zipper on his case open and closed.

Thuy and her party joined the crowd following the three Peng into the Candler Road church. It was a cavernous indoor stadium, with Donnie Macon, III, standing upon a central dais before a robed choir. Donnie, III, was a lean, slit-eyed fellow, and he didn’t look too happy to see his resurrected forbears come swanning in.

Although Dr. Macon must have weighed well over three hundred pounds, he levitated, moving his body across the cavernous hall as nimbly as a character in a videogame. Fiercely grinning, he alighted upon the stage beside Donnie, III. His wife Bonnie and his son Donnie, Jr., flew to join him.

“We are blessed!” roared the Peng disguised as Dr. Macon. “We are blessed to revisit our home!” The beige-carpeted arena rang with wild applause.

[Detail of my favorite statue in the DeYoung Museum.]

Thuy, Kittie, Chick and Duckie were standing just inside the entrance, clustered around Jayjay in his wheelchair. Jayjay began humming again, enabling Dr. Macon to turn a bible into a loaf of Wonder bread and a pitcher of water into grape-flavored sports drink. And then he sent a bouquet of plastic roses flying from his fingertips to alight upon Jayjay’s lap.

“The Lord has called me from my rest to introduce the Sleeping Savior,” bayed Dr. Macon. “Bring him up here so the folks can see him, Sister Thuy.”

Wearing a stiff, embarrassed grin, Thuy wheeled Jayjay up a ramp onto the stage. It was weird to be in the midst of an all-white crowd—like being inside a bag of marshmallows.

“The Savior has manifested Himself in the body of this ordinary, sinful Latino man,” exclaimed Dr. Macon. “He’s been a kiqqie, a rebel, an addict, a sensualist. He’s married to a formerly bisexual Vietnamese intellectual. The Almighty works in mysterious ways. He is bringing us into the End Times. You will know salvation soon. Gabriel’s trump will burst through the filmy sky. But until that glorious call, you must help the Sleeping Savior fulfill his mission.”

“These three are alien invaders!” interrupted the choirmaster; a charismatic woman with flowing red hair. “They’re disguised Peng! The bird things we’ve been seeing in the news!”

“You’d do better to call us angels,” said Donnie, Jr. He was leaner and more charismatic than his father. A huge cheer went up when he spoke. He’d been a popular pastor before his death in a drunken car crash several years before. He leveled a minatory finger at the protesting woman.

A moan arose from Jayjay, and the woman’s clothes were wreathed in fire. She rolled on the ground, screaming and trying to staunch the flames. Jayjay moaned again and she was doused in a gush of water.

“Do you still doubt us, Sister Vivian?” said Dr. Donnie’s wife Bonnie, stepping forward to help the disheveled, but unharmed, redhead to her feet.

“Praise Donnie,” croaked the choirmaster. “Praise the Sleeping Savior.”

“The Peng ranches are sacred zones,” said old Bonnie. “The Peng free us of fussy over-complication. Peng ranch people are more willing to open their stony hearts to the sweet honey of divine love. Peng ranch people don’t intellectualize over every piss-ant little thing.” Despite her human disguise, there remained something alien and bird-like in the darting motions of her head.

“You shouldn’t swear in the sanctuary,” reproved Donnie, III.

“Who are you to tell your grandmother what to do?” thundered Dr. Macon, wilting Donnie, III.

[A rhea modeling as a Peng. I see the Peng on rhea legs with kiwi bodies and ibis beaks. Though maybe that’s gilding the lily. Maybe just looking like rheas is fine. I’ve compared them to their ratite cousins: the ostrich, the cassowary, the kiwi, and emu. And our own South American rheas are, IMHO, the most gloriously odd-looking of the bunch. (Note however that the cassowary is the world’s most dangerous bird! They’re savage kickers.) Here’s a cool video of a family of rheas feeding on a crop in Brazil.]

“I enjoin this congregation to champion our Sleeping Savior,” intoned Donnie, Jr., holding up his hands. “I warn you, some will set stones in His pathway. Some will seek to do Him grievous bodily harm. You are His sheep, you are called to see your Shepherd into His pasture.”

“It’s not only the godless ones you’ll have to watch for,” added Dr. Macon. “Yea, verily, a race of evil devilfish will descend from our skies to threaten the Sleeping Savior. And they shall be known as the Hrull. Seek ye to exterminate them.” He paused, flashing another of his appalling smiles. “Lead us in a hymn, Sister Vivian: ”˜Onward Christian Soldiers!’”

As the congregation raised their voices in muscular song, Thuy took the opportunity to trundle Jayjay down the aisle to rejoin Kittie, Chick, and Duckie.

“Let’s bail,” said Thuy. “These people creep me out.”

[End Hylozoic Excerpt.]

The main thing going on around here is that my son Rudy and his wife Penny have new twins! We’ve been visiting with them a lot. It’s wonderful to be with newborn babies. And two! When I hold them, they’re like little suns beaming good vibes into my chest, loosening the rusty hinges of my heart. I love how intent they are on what they do: sleeping and nursing. And I love the sweet, sincere crying: “La! La! La!” Their way of reaching out into the world. God bless them. Welcome, dear twins!

In 2004, Geoff Ryman and his Clarion West SF Writing Workshop students proposed a “Mundane SF Manifesto.” It’s no longer online, but the Wikipedia Mundane SFentry gives part of the manifesto, as well as some links to further discussion. The main current info source is the Mundane SF blog.

A rude person might imagine one of the Clarion students’ thought processes to be as follows: “I’ve always wanted to write like Henry James or John Updike or Jane Austen — don’t you just adore Jane Austen? But, frankly, it’s so hard to break into mainstream writing that I figured I’d try a genre first. And then I thought, why not be a science fiction writer! Only, then, when I start looking at sci fi a little bit, I find out that a lot of it is written by nutty loners, and it’s full of science and crazy ideas, and it’s not like Jane Austen or John Updike at all. So I’m thinking, why not get rid of all the weird icky science and write stories about people’s emotions and about the kinds of problems you read about in the newspaper?”

[Doin’ a Lindee on Mamma Mundane.]

I started brooding over Mundane SF again this week because Geoff has reprinted the manifesto in the latest edition of the (print only) New York Review of Science Fiction along with a thoughtful essay based on a talk he gave at the Boréal SF con in Montreal this April.

[What, no dinosaurs?]

The basic idea of Mundane SF is to avoid the more unrealistic of the classic SF tropes—or power chords, as I like to call them. Geoff feels that faster than light travel, human-alien encounters, time travel, alternate universes, and telepathy are absolutely impossible. He feels that if we draw on these unlikely power chords, we are feeding people wish-fulfillment pap.

[No more second-hand God!]

Like me, the Mundanes would like to see SF as real literature. They feel that real literature mustn’t use fundamentally false scenarios. By the way, Ryman has very good lit chops, he has a cool modernistic novel 253 online—it’s in the form of a subway car full of people!

[Sketch-on wormhole conduit.]

Mundane SF is to be about picturing possible futures, drawing on such sober-sided Sunday magazine think-piece topics as “Disaster, innovation, climate change, virtual reality, understanding of our DNA, and biocomputers that evolve.”

[Why let the Pig’s media propaganda condition your practice of Art?]

I have so many objections!

I don’t think SF is necessarily about predicting possible futures. I’ve always felt that SF is more like surrealism. The idea is to shock people into awareness. Show them how odd the world is. Whether or not you draw on realistic tropes is irrelevant. But my personal practice is to allow really strange kinds of things to happen. This said, I do always to try and make the science internally consistent. Part of the fun of SF is making up explanations for your effects.

[A crystal-magic BS filter.]

Let it be said that futurism and SF are quite different endeavors. A rude person might say that futurism is about feeding inspirational received truths to businessmen and telling them it will help them make more money. SF is about unruly artistic visions.

Writing responsibly about socially important issues can be timid and boring. The thing is, science really does change a lot over time. Compare what we’re doing now to what we were doing in the year 1000. A Mundane SF writer of year 1000 might want us to write only about alchemy, the black plague, and the papacy.

[Laundering my manuscripts.]

Not that Mundane SF really has to be stuffy. Come to think of it, my early cyberpunk novel Software was thoroughly mundane—everything in it could well happen—and it was pretty lively. Maybe that’s why I don’t see Software showing up on any lists of Mundane SF. Can serious literature be dirty and funny? Of course!

[Mundane writers are big winners!]

Despite my sniping, I do understand, for instance, Charlie Stross’s relish in accepting the Mundane strictures and writing a Mundane SF novel. Why not. It’s a form, like a sonnet or one-square-meter canvas. And, of course, clever Mundanes like Geoff Ryman know this. A manifesto needn’t be a universal strait-jacket. But maybe some forms are self-defeating. Like a novel that doesn’t use the letter E. Or a piano piece that doesn’t use the black keys. Or a painting with no red or yellow.

[Evidence of alien contacts mounts!]

Personally I’ve been growing less constrained from novel to novel—I keep trying to get further out into space. I was mundanely stuck on the Moon for a long time! I think it’s an interesting intellectual game to find valid scientific ways around the specific strictures suggested by Mundane SF.

[See the saucer?]

I agree that careless writers sometimes create logically inconsistent stories when using things like faster than light travel. But that doesn’t mean nobody should write about FTL at all.

Yes, FTL travel is hard. But I know of at least four ways to travel very rapidly. (a) The traditional way is to do down into the subdimensions and take shortcuts. And, no, you don’t have to do this via wormholes. Nor do you need to travel in large steel cylinders. Science finds new things.

[Sta-Hi Mooney teleports to the Crab Nebula.]

(b) A simple method that I’ve discussed in Freeware and in Saucer Wisdom is to send your personality as a zipped up information file and have it unzipped at your destination. This doesn’t go faster than light, but it goes at the speed of light, and seems to the traveler to take no time at all. Charles Stross used a weaker form of this in Accelerando, where people’s codes are packed into a ship the size of a soft drink can that travels at near-light speed. But, yes, when you get back home, a lot of time has elapsed.

[Scientist David Deutsch can prove any damn thing you want is possible.]

(c) Teleportation, based on quantum indeterminacy. There’s a finite (small) chance that I’m on planet Pengö near the Great Attractor as well as here. It’s not hard to imagine that coming improvements of quantum computation will make it possible to amplify the indeterminacy and collapse it so that I do the trip.

[A nicely broken-in yuncher can be found on the ceiling in this tenderloin crash pad.]

(d) The yunching technique described in my Frek and the Elixir (cf. also the Bloater Drive in Harry Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero). You wind some of your strings to get really big, then step across the galaxy, then shrink back down.

[What, no alien bar scene?]

As for aliens, perhaps they come via one of these rapid travel methods. But perhaps they are already here. Living in the subdimensions. What are the subdimensions? A power chord from the 1930s. Whatever is going on below the Planck length. We have no idea. Why not assume it might be interesting? Maybe aliens are those flashes you see out of the corner of your eye sometime. Maybe they’re aethereal protozoa in the atmosphere.

[Definitive proof that psi powers are real!]

When trying to justify telepathy—don’t forget that only a tiny fraction of our universe’s mass is the familiar visible matter. Most of it is dark energy and dark matter. As Nick Herbert has remarked—maybe some of that dark stuff is consciousness.

[Nevada is an alternate universe.]

Alternate universes are quite popular in modern physics. Something is going on in all those extra dimensions. Why not other worlds? Looked at in a certain quantum-mechanical way, each conscious being lives in a different parallel universe. Why should we settle for consensus reality?

[John Shirley among the Cro-Mags.]

Implausible as time travel is, it may be the SF power chord most commonly used by non-SF writers. If even the almighty “literary” writers get to use time-travel, can’t we lowly SF writers use it too? I’ve always wanted to write a time travel book and get it right. Surely this can be done. Rather than throwing up my hands, I prefer to continue searching for ways to be less and less Mundane.