{"id":2384,"date":"2010-06-25T07:33:19","date_gmt":"2010-06-25T15:33:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=2384"},"modified":"2010-06-25T07:33:19","modified_gmt":"2010-06-25T15:33:19","slug":"what-universe-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/25\/what-universe-next\/","title":{"rendered":"What Universe Next?"},"content":{"rendered":"

[In the last three days, people have downloaded fourteen thousand copies of my new CC-licensed edition of The Ware Tetralogy<\/em>. Go get yours<\/a>!]<\/code><\/p>\n

This week I went to visit my old pal Kevin Kelly at his house near Pacifica, a foggy town on the coast just south of SF. We took a long walk along the ocean, talking things over. (Some of the photos today are from Pacifica, a few are from my drive on Rt. 1 down the coast, like at Pigeon Point, and some are from San Francisco and Berkeley.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Kevin was one of the first friends that I made when I moved to California in 1986. He was at the first Artificial Life Conference in Los Alamos, he edited the Whole Earth Review <\/em>in Sausalito, he helped organize the legendary Cyberthon Virtual Reality festival in San Francisco, and he helped found Wired <\/em>magazine. He still has a Whole-Earth-like website called Cool Tools, he created an amazing photo book called Asia Grace<\/em>, and he\u2019s ramping up to promote his nonfiction opus, What Technology Wants<\/em>. You can find links for all these things, and more, on his concisely named website www.kk.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That last paragraph sounds kind of like an old-school Whole Earth <\/em>blurb\/review, doesn\u2019t it? \u201cThis is fun, weird, crunchy, and it\u2019s good for you!\u201d\u009d The prose is infectious. It was great to see Kevin again.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

While we were walking, Kevin kept coming back to a series of questions that seemed to be on his mind: \u201cWhat kind of universe would you create if you were a god? Would it have evolution? Good and evil? Would the inhabitants worship you? Would they be immortal? How would you get information about its progress?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I had a little trouble answering the question\u2014generally, I\u2019m more coherent when I can think things over and write down my answers, or excavate them from past things that I\u2019ve written. The idea of designing universes can, of course, be taken science-fictionally. Now and then some physicists remark that they might someday be able to exploit some kind of subdimensional bosonic fluctuation in order to create a little \u201cpocket universe\u201d\u009d that looks small but which contains multitude.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There do seem to black-hole-has-no-hair kinds of physical reasons why you might not be able to see inside your newly-make pocket universe. But SF writers don\u2019t worry about stuff like that. You just set up a telepathic ribbon-theoretic link with one of the minds in the new universe. Or maybe you, like, incarnate <\/em>yourself down into it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m still circling around the question here, which is what I did in my conversation with Kevin. The reason has to do with my current location in my work cycle. The way I write an SF novel is to imagine a fresh universe that I’d like to inhabit, and then I go into it for about a year, in a waking dream, writing down what I see.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Restating the same thing: For me writing is a little like dreaming while I’m awake. That is, I see the scene in my mind’s eye before I write it. Sometimes I’ll nurse an image of a place or a situation for quite some time before I write about it, in fact I sometimes write a book simply to be able to mentally visit certain locales that I’ve dreamed up. I pretty much can’t write a novel unless I have an image of a fabulous place where I want to go. By writing about these scenes, I make them more real to myself.<\/p>\n

My novels are usually about some quirky out-of-the-mainstream individual who finds his way into a completely different world. My hero has adventures in this wonderland and eventually makes it back to Earth. A couple of books back, I realized that, at a transreal level, this plot synopsis describes me\u00ac working on a novel.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Right now I’m between novels, and at this point, I have no idea what my next one will be about. I don\u2019t know how to get out of here once again. So I was uncomfortable with Kevin\u2019s question.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wish I had a wish,\u201d\u009d as Andy Warhol once said.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There\u2019s so many nice universes that I\u2019ve already written novels about. Worlds with, variously, four dimensions, actual infinities, predictable futures, telepathy, levitation, races of intelligent robots, cosmic-ray-riding aliens, galactic civilizations, creatures inside the Sun, creatures inside the hollow earth. Where do I want to go next? I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As the time between novels stretches out, I usually begin worrying I’ll never write another, worrying I’ll never think of another world of heart’s desire to explore. At some point the pressure grows so great that I settle on something and get started again. But each time I’m also thinking that maybe this time I won’t go back in and that maybe I’m done with writing novels. At times that seems like a pleasant thought, other times not.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It wouldn\u2019t be out of the question to go back and write a sequel, I suppose. I\u2019d always meant to do a sequel to Frek and the Elixir<\/a><\/em>, with its aliens from the galactic core, and the year 3000 Earth with its funky biotech. There were still a lot of loose ends at the end of that book. Maybe I\u2019ll see if I could get a contract for a Frek 2<\/em>. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Or, maybe I\u2019ll still think of some completely new world of heart\u2019s desire. <\/p>\n

But just for now I\u2019ll be writing a few short stories. Little generation starships instead of complete worlds. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[In the last three days, people have downloaded fourteen thousand copies of my new CC-licensed edition of The Ware Tetralogy. Go get yours!] This week I went to visit my old pal Kevin Kelly at his house near Pacifica, a foggy town on the coast just south of SF. We took a long walk along […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2384"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2387,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2384\/revisions\/2387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}