{"id":2702,"date":"2010-10-30T19:22:37","date_gmt":"2010-10-31T03:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=2702"},"modified":"2010-10-30T19:32:26","modified_gmt":"2010-10-31T03:32:26","slug":"high-concept-shapeshifting-with-skugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/30\/high-concept-shapeshifting-with-skugs\/","title":{"rendered":"High Concept: Shapeshifting With Skugs"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m working on my Turing novel these days. Lately I\u2019ve been looking at this recent oil painting of mine, Nude Nabs UFO<\/em>, that hangs on my office wall. I did a lot of layers on it, and the colors are very rich. Writing can be like that too. You keep adding layers and extra bits until it has this nice patina. That\u2019s more along the lines of what literary novelists do\u2014as opposed to frantically rushing on to new special effects and wild surprises, as I\u2019m sometimes prone to do. You can click on the image below to see a larger version.<\/p>\n


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\n<\/a><\/p>\n

So what\u2019s going on in this chapter anyway? Well, Alan Turing has shapeshifted himself into the form of William Burroughs, is booked onto the Phos <\/em>tramp steamer from Gibraltar to Miami.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a sinister and slimy guy named Neddy Strunk on the ship, and as the Phos <\/em>nears Miami, Neddy has a confrontation with Alan into his custody. Somehow Neddy knows that Turing has become a shapeshifter, and he wants something from Alan, but Alan loses it and violently throws Strunk over the ship\u2019s railing before listening any more. Looking down into the Bahamian waters, Alan sees Neddy\u2019s body as a glowing white form that follows the ship for a bit and then dives into the depths like a dolphin. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I think Strunk is in fact a shapeshifter like Alan\u2014a human who has become what I\u2019m calling a skug. It may even be that Strunk and the skugified Pratt from my Flurb <\/em>story, \u201cThe Skug<\/a>,\u201d\u009d are one and the same, thanks to potency of skug flesh. I might suppose that a chunk of Pratt followed Alan from Tangier to Gibraltar\u2014the thing eats some local in Gibraltar and mutates into the unpleasant Neddy Strunk.<\/p>\n

So what does Strunk want from Alan? He wants a wetware upgrade. The skug that Alan used when dissolving Pratt wasn\u2019t fully optimized like the skug that Alan used when merging himself with William Burroughs. The Strunk-skug grew from a scrap of Pratt, and doesn\u2019t have such good functionality.<\/p>\n

Why doesn\u2019t Alan welcome the Strunk-skug? I think it\u2019s mainly that he doesn\u2019t quite understand what Strunk is, and fights with him and throws him overboard before Strunk\u2019s skuggy nature comes clear as he glows and swims away. At a deeper level, Alan\u2019s repulsion is like that of Dr. Jekyll repelled by the deeds of Mr. Hyde, like the Baron von Frankenstein repelled by his monster, or like an author repelled by his id.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Looking ahead along the story arc, I really would like to know what these mysterious agents and skugs are up to. And what will Turing\u2019s goal be? I know from experience that the task in and of itself doesn\u2019t have to be all that important or recondite\u2014we\u2019re really just talking about a Maguffin. But the reader likes to have a fixed goal in mind.<\/p>\n

Backing off for a moment from my thoughts about a goal, I want to think about the \u201chigh concept\u201d\u009d method of structuring a plot. You make one simple but drastic change in the world that percolates out with many interesting effects. What I\u2019d like to do in Turing & Burroughs <\/em>is to use shapeshifting via skugs <\/em>as my high concept.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Shapeshifting is a fairly rich metaphor: Universal computation. Transgendering. Artistic creation. Personal growth. Psychosis. And the skugs who potentiate the shapeshifting have the connotation of creativity out of control. The beatniks.<\/p>\n

Generally a skug will be integrated with a person and simply be giving them higher powers. Perhaps from time to time a skug can in some sense go rogue and behave like a subhuman\u2014this would represent a kind of curdling in the shapeshifter gift. Some people lose control and become wholly chaotic, devolving into rogue skugs.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Doing some research in my bookcases, I came across a really cool shapeshifter in the form of the character Plastic Man in the Jack Cole comics of the 1940s and early 1950s. In 1999, Art Spiegelman wrote a wonderful New Yorker article \u201cForms Stretched to Their Limits<\/a>,\u201d\u009d about Jack Cole. And later Chip Kidd added Cole\u2019s strips and illustrations to the article to make a lovely book, Jack Cole and Plastic Man <\/a><\/em>(Chronicle Books, 2001). I may first heard of Plasticman [sic] in Thomas Pynchon\u2019s Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/em>\u2014see this cool reference page for that<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Summing up today\u2019s notion of my plot, it\u2019s about a guy who invents a method for turning himself into a shapeshifter or, more concisely, a skug. He does shapeshifting for fun, and now and then for commercial gain or for sexual pleasure. He might become a woman, a dog, a big bird. He is able to communicate this skugly power to others, and the shapeshifting spreads. Pretty much everyone at the Six Gallery reading of Ginsberg\u2019s \u201cHowl\u201d\u009d was a skug. And what orgies they had in those times!<\/p>\n

In a nutshell, or, rather, in a tweet, I see my Turing and the skugs story as follows. \u201cBeing creative = shapeshifter = skug infection. Art = communicable disease.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Back to story-arc. How does the scientist-created-mutation-story end? I see two models that I\u2019ll call Retraction <\/em>and Repression<\/em>. In either model, the scientist dies nobly fighting at the end, or perhaps he flips into some unknown new dimension of reality.<\/p>\n

(Retraction<\/em>) The scientist decides it was a mistake and, with great labor, manages to roll back the infestation. In the Retraction story line, the skugs get so freaky that Turing himself realizes they were a mistake, and he labors to undo them.<\/p>\n

(Repression<\/em>) The government or some more free-form group akin to a lynch mob battles to wipe out the mutants. In the Repression story line, the right-wing segments of the government crack down on the skugs.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My knee-jerk reaction is to go for the Repression model, because that\u2019s closer to how I see our actual society operating. But really the Retraction model offers more dramatic possibilities. We begin with a Repression model, and Turing is defending the skugs from exploitation by the military and making skugness a tool of the intelligentsia. But then the skugs go too far. One might think here of psychedelic drugs\u2014initially they were hailed as tools of psychic liberation, but over time we came to see the drugs burning out some people. We could dial up this notion with the skugs\u2014at some point the skugs could start doing much <\/em>more harm than good. And then Turing might, albeit reluctantly, join in the crackdown against skugs.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Maybe he Pied Pipers them into a nuclear blast\u2014which would be a very classic 1950s-SF kind of ending. Having grown up in the 1950s, I\u2019ve always had this moth-like desire to step into the core of an exploding H-bomb\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m working on my Turing novel these days. Lately I\u2019ve been looking at this recent oil painting of mine, Nude Nabs UFO, that hangs on my office wall. I did a lot of layers on it, and the colors are very rich. Writing can be like that too. You keep adding layers and extra bits […]<\/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-2702","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\/2702","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=2702"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2708,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2702\/revisions\/2708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}