Sad news this week, 76-year-old writer Robert Sheckley is in a Ukranian hospital — he was there for a science fiction convention.

Get well, Sheck-man!

I recently downloaded the free Google desktop search engine, which is in some ways close to the Lifebox interface I’m always talking about. That is, I can search through all the aging files on my machine and find, e.g. every mention of Sheckley. Kind of like racking my brain. But the results pop up pretty fast in a nice Google-search-style window, each reference clickable and in context. I don’t have the energy to make up a brand-new econium for my beloved Sheckley just now, but here, in place of that, are some of the bits that came up in my Desktop Search for the Master's name.

===============

In my story, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the word “geezel” is an homage to the master Robert Sheckley, who once used it to stand for a kind of alien food; and “lesnerize” is from a story where he uses it to mean “sneeze.”

“Faraway Eyes,” “The Man Who Ate Himself,” “Inertia,” and Master of Space and Time all involve characters called Joe Fletcher and Harry Gerber. These are a very traditional SF pair of characters, whose roots go back to Robert Sheckley’s AAA Ace stories, to Henry Kuttner and beyond.

“The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge” has an odd history. After writing it, I sent it to Robert Sheckley, who was then the fiction editor at Omni. He called back to say he was going to buy it, provided I made a small change to the ending. I was overjoyed, as Omni was at that time the top-paying SF market. My wife and I were about to go to New York for a conference anyway, so we arranged to meet Sheckley, which was great fun. Sheckley suggested the Hamlet quote for the head of the story. My wife and I had dinner with him and his then wife, Jay Rothbel. The waiter behaved like an out-of-control Sheckley robot and Sheckley and I almost got run down crossing the street. It was all perfect. But then I didn’t hear anything from Sheckley for quite some time.

When I next talked to him, he told me that his boss at Omni had told him not to use “The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge.” Also Sheckley told me that he was being eased out of the Omni job. So in the end I never did sell a story to Omni.

In my story, “Soft Death,” The character-name “Leckesh” is a near-anagram of Sheckley. For me, the most important SF writer of all is Robert Sheckley. Somewhere Nabokov describes a certain childhood book as being the one that bumped something and set the heavy ball rolling down the corridor of years. For me, that book of books was Sheckley’s Untouched by Human Hands. I first read it in the Spring of 1961, when I was in the hospital recovering from having my ruptured spleen removed.

Around the time I was writing “Soft Death,” about 1985, Sheckley and Jay Rothbel showed up at our Lynchburg house in a camper van and lived in our driveway for a few days, their electric cord plugged into our socket, and their plumbing system connected to our hose. I could hardly believe my good fortune. It was like having ET land his ship in your yard.

An exciting literary feature of moving to California in 1986 was that I got to see my hero Robert Sheckley again. This time he was visiting his writer/comedian friend Marty Olson in Venice Beach. Olson had dreamed up the idea that Tim Leary would start hosting a PBS series about various futuristic things. Sheckley and I were to be the writers. Olson paid my plane-fare to LA, where he and “the Sheck-man” (as Olson called him) picked me up. It was a wonderful goof, hanging out with them, and then driving over to Tim’s house in Beverly Hills. Tim was up for the meeting, with pencils and pads of papers; he was a nice old guy, and a freedom-fighter from way back. We were all in full agreement about everything, but the hitch was that we never found a sponsor.

===============

I haven’t been blogging as much lately as I’ve been busy pushing my novel forward, writing an alien contact scene.

I’m starting to worry that I repeat some of my gimmicks book to book. Well, Bruegel always drew devils and angels the same, too. Maybe at this point I’m more, like, rearranging things at a higher level.

Anther thing I’ve been busy with is in making long skinny bitmaps that might be usable as borders in my forthcoming The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul (Sell it, Ru.) The map shown up above is a variation of the so-called 1D BigNabe Heat rule, run on a 64-cell wide world with wrap at the edges, seeded with a hump, and using a striped color palette. Space is horizontal, and time runs down the page. I made this with CAPOW, which you can get from the Lifebox/Seashell/Soul downloads page.

The shapes look kind of like a dog-pile of faces to me, reminiscent of the great eyeball-kicks borders you used to see on Mad or Weirdo covers.

This image is intended as a border for the chapter on “Society”, thus the aptness of the totem-pole dog-pile quality of it.

In Mathematicians in Love I’m working on a scene were my characters surf through a tunnel to a parallel sheet of space.

I first thought about how to do this in Chapter Eight of my 1984 book, The Fourth Dimension. The traditional way for connecting two parallel sheets of space is to imagine a hump that bulges out from one space and merges into the other space as shown in the figure below, which was drawn from one of my sketches by David Povilaitis. This kind of connection is traditionally known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge or a wormhole.

In this scene, by the way, we see the traditional Edwin Abbott Flatland hero A Square about to sneak off into the parallel world of Globland with a married Flatlander woman Una, whom he hopes to seduce. Note that “A” is not an abbreviation, it’s his full first name. (The science writer Ian Stewart recently published an interesting Annotated Flatland as well.)

Although we often think of Flatland as being a two-dimensional world like a table-top, we can also imagine, with Charles Howard Hinton and Kee Dewdney, a 2D world that’s turned upon its edge — like a cross-sectional slice of our planet.

By the way, I once edited a collection of Hinton’s writings called Speculations on the Fourth Dimension which is now out of print, but available used, or (in part) online.

In the Hinton/Dewdney-style 2D world we have a notion of up/down matching the familiar one. In my 2002 novel Spaceland I used this kind of image.

In this picture we see a couple of Flatlanders at a hot-dog stand. They’re drawn with some internal detail instead of just as, like, lines and squares with eyes. Those bumps on the roof are Flatland writing.

Now we get to the new image for today.

This is a three-in-one picture:

(1) A Square on a surfboard in a 2D world, riding a wave towards the shore.

(2) A couple of sketches of an Einstein-Rosen bridge between two parallel universes, and in one of them I’ve drawn in water and air for the two worlds. The water sloshes right through the tunnel.

(3) A Square surfs into one end of an Einstein-Rosen bridge and comes out the other end — now facing away from the shore.

Before drawing this picture I hadn’t realized that the passage through the hypertunnel would turn my surfers away from the shore. That’s why I love math and logic. You set up the system, turn the crank, and, if you’re lucky, you learn something new. It’s like logic is a complicated feeler that we use to reach out and touch invisible part of the mental world. As Kurt Gödel once told me, “The a priori is very powerful.”

Today we went to Elena’s funeral at the Mount Madonna Center. It was a Vedic ceremony, very nice, very profound. When my time comes, I hope that, like Elena, I’m buried somewhere far from the sound of cars.

I was struck by a sculpture of the holy word Om or Aum on the grounds. I asked about it and was told that that the three parts of the symbol stand for three sounds, that is, the big part like a 3 is the A; the wavy part on the right is the U, and the bowl with the sphere on the top is the M. Aum is, like, the sound that started up the whole universe. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Aum.

AAAAUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

We went on a couple of walks over the weekend, one was Sanborn Park off Black Road near Saratoga, the other was in the Wilder Ranch Open Space above Four Mile Beach on Route One near Santa Cruz.

Green mossy gnarl.

The fabled banana slug. Note the tiny black eye-dot in the eyestalk.

“Hi, I’ve traveled here from La Hampa to help you.”

I got into this idea that you could take a series of pictures where the frame is horizontally divided into two.

The bumps on the lip of a waterfall obey a gnarly class-four cellular automaton rule.

There’s always something uplifting about a cloud sitting on the crest of an upsloping hill.

On the Wilder hike I came across a really big lizard. I was so close to him that he froze, and I had time to get several pictures of him. Love those scales, love the colors.

Who says dinosaurs are extinct?

You see a lot of this particular kind of beetle on the hills by the ocean in Cruz. Very sleek.

I took along the most recent couple of pages of my Mathematicians in Love manscript.

One more Gaian ambassador appeared, a tiny snake sunning herself.

Back to the Union cafe in Cruz, got a blurred photo of hippie dreads.