Rudy’s Blog

For the last three weeks I’ve been hung up revising my new novel and two of my old ones, but I hope soon to get back to thinking about a new novel.

The other day I was looking at the Tor.com SF website, scanning through an interesting and well-written post by Jo Walton, “The Singularity Problem and Non-Problem,” [I also scanned through the many comments on the post] and I picked up the idea that some SF readers (and writers) are unhappy with the notion that SF’s content should change over the years.

Walton herself speaks fondly of “the kind of SF that I like best, the kind with aliens and spaceships and planets and more tech than we have but not unimaginable incomprehensible tech…” And some of the commenters take this a bit further, even questioning whether true artificial intelligence is even possible.

Change is of course something that happens to any living art form—think of painting or popular music or literary novels or even TV sit-coms. Yes, it’s sad to see Golden Ages slip away, but it’s sadder still to keep doing the same thing. Inevitably the old material goes stale and the fire goes away. I’m not saying it’s become impossible to write fresh novels about aliens and spaceships and planets. But maybe it’s become a task as difficult and quixotic as writing a fresh doo-wop song.

But why not a new kind of song? And why not a new kind of SF novel? This is, after all, the twenty-first century.

If you think about it, it’s quite unreasonable to regard, say, the physics and sociology of classic space opera as “rules” about science-fictional futures. These are all things that writers made up in, like, the 1930s, and which later writers polished and refined. The “rules” have no Higher Truth and they’re unlikely to apply to any actual future. They’re only stories that people made up for fun, and there’s absolutely no reason why we can’t keep changing the rules.

I’m certainly not a whole-hog, card-carrying Singulatarian—as I discussed in a pair of blog posts in March, 2008, I don’t see virtual reality as ever eclipsing our ambient quantum-computing “real” reality. This said, I do strongly feel that, down the line, intelligence will be ubiquitous—that’s the main theme of my novels Postsingular and Hylozoic.

What’s interesting to me is not the beating or eating of dead horses, but rather the search for genuinely new science-fictional scenarios. For me, SF is the fun-loving hipster sister of Big Science. SF finds the vibby spots first. Sometimes the spots are gone in the morning, but sometimes there’s time for Big Science to trundle in the Measuring Machines and Theory Generators and capitalize on what we fey writer types have unearthed.

Here’s a more or less random list of some themes that I currently find appealing. Feel free to post comments with your own suggestions for (underused) SF themes!

Magic Doors

I’ve always liked the idea of magic doors to other worlds, also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges. I wrote about them in The Sex Sphere, for instance, and I thought about them again this summer in Dick Termes’s studio. I like that idea, I like to think of a character with spheres/doors swarming around him or her like fireflies. Like old memories. As it happens, Dick just sent me an email encouraging me to think of his spherical paintings in this way:

“To be living in a world where these spheres float in. Spheres like my work where you can see from outside what is really an inside view. With some effort you can enter these spheres and get on the inside which takes you to those real worlds. Some are real worlds some could be subconscious worlds etc. So, you could go from one world to the next by finding these spheres to enter. You would be able to look at the outside of the inside scene before entering…”

Dreams and Memories

We’ve seen plenty of virtual reality tales in which people mistake an illusion for a reality. But I think there’s still some interesting things to be done with ordinary dreams. Waking up inside them? Finding out that they’re really happening in a higher dimension?

In the mental front, we might also consider viewing memories as in some sense real. Maybe memory is a form of time-travel, and you really can flip back into the past or, more oddly, bring people from your past into your present.

The Afterworld

I’ve always thought there should be more SF that speculates about what happens to people after they die. This can shade into fantasy, of course, but giving it an SF slant would be interesting. Certainly it’s nice to speculate that there’s some kind of underworld…rather than nothing.

Quantum Computational Viruses

The current trend is to view any bit of matter as carrying out a so-called quantum computation. These computations can be as rich and complex as anything in our brains or in our PCs. One angle, which I explored a bit in Postsingular and Hylozoic, is that ordinary objects could “wake up.” Another angle worth pursuing is that something like a computer virus might infect matter, perhaps changing the laws of physics to make our world more congenial to some other kinds of beings.

New Senses

How about some new senses—other than, say, telepathy or radio-wave-sensitivity? Things we might notice more acutely: viscosity, temperature, pressure, electrical charge, neutrinos, Higgs bosons, sterile neutrinos, quarks, “ghosts.”

The Holographic Universe

Some physicists say that our 4D space is a kind of illusion built up from a two-dimensional pattern…somewhere. Is it maybe a comic strip? Let’s go meet the artist!

Why?

Why are we here? What’s it all for? What’s the meaning of life? Why does anything exist at all? Why is there something instead of nothing? Surely SF can come up with an answer.

The Subdimensions

For too long we’ve let the quantum mechanics tell us that there’s nothing smaller than the Planck length. Let’s view this tiny size scale as a membrane, a frontier, but not a wall. We can in fact go below it…into the land of the subdimensions. Possibly the subdimensional world is a kind of mirror version of ours. Certainly aliens can visit us from there…no need for all those star ships. Just focus on a speck of dust.

An Infinite Flat Earth

What if Earth were an endless flat plane, and you could walk (or fly your electric glider) forever in a straight line and never come back to where you started? The cockroach zone! The kingdom of the two-headed men! One night there’ll be a rumble and, wow, our little planet will have unrolled, ready for you to start out on the ultimate On the Road adventure.

So now I’m rereading the scanned manuscript for my 1981 novel of hyperdimensional nuclear terrorism, The Sex Sphere , getting it ready for a planned E-Reads edition in electronic book and the print-on-demand formats this fall. As with Spacetime Donuts, also coming out from E-reads this fall, I did a cover painting for it, and my graphic-designer daughter Georgia Rucker turned it into a cover.

I think The Sex Sphere is really one of my better books, even though it wasn’t that widely read when it came out. I’m not finding all that many things that need correcting. I had a nice, loose style then, and a lot of freedom; if you were writing paperback SF originals for Ace Books in the early 80s, it didn’t seem like there was much of a filter. Like clear channel border radio.

I’ve been painting a little again. I touched up my Collaborators picture of two authors (possibly me and Bruce Sterling) working on a story together. I relate to the apoplectic scribe on the left.

And I’m working on a new one called Alien Picnic. It’s a view across Silicon Valley that I’ve painted before, but this time I thought it would be cute to have a couple of giant eyeballs on an outing. I still want to add some houses on the hillsides, put some food on the picnic cloth, and layer on more texture.

I met my friend Emilio at the coffee shop the other day. He’s a programmer who gets lots of consulting gigs. He’s currently using C# for some kind of threaded voice-recognition app. We were talking about how programming takes a very high capacity for handling pain.

And, as usual, I’m hanging around in my back yard taking pictures of little things like this red fleece shirt drying. This sight made me think of William Carlos Williams’ 1923 poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The new site Tor.com is working. The site incorporates an awesome online electronic zine with new SF stories. The first batch includes stories by Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, John Scalzi, and Wesley Allsbrook!

They’re going to be running a new story of mine this fall, too, “Jack and the Aktuals, or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory” — I blogged a little about this story when I was working on it in November, 2007.

I finished the final round of revisions on Hylozoic this week, and my editor, David Hartwell, approved them.

As it happens, the novel has an alien character named Lovva, who takes on the shape of a small harp. Earlier this year, the harpist Cheryl Ann Fulton lent me a small harp for inspiration while I was writing about Lovva. Today I took the harp back to Cheryl in Berkeley.

Here’s a passage from Hylozoic where Lovva transforms herself into a harp, watched by my hero Jayjay, in the attic of Hieronymus Bosch’s house.

The shapeshifting alien pressed her arms together and stretched them out to make the crosspiece. Her belly flattened; her head retreated into her neck. Her legs swung up and fused to make a fluted front column. Her toes connected with her fingers.

Buds formed along the median of her chest and belly, sending luminous tendrils up to the crosspiece, forming the strings. Her green skin glittered and turned gold. And now the painting on the soundbox began taking shape. Jayjay got in on this, guiding the harp as she transformed her skin into layers of oil paint.

When she was done, two pale lovers stood nude in a meadow that seethed with black lizards and tiny birds. Beside them was a pale blue demon fingering a tiny, gold harp that was shaped just like Lovva. The lizards wore little hats, flying fish drifted in the sky, the trunks of the trees had ears, and hints of moisture glistened on the lovers’ thighs.

“See the little harp the demon in the picture holds?” said Bosch, bending close to Lovva’s sound board. “The little harp should bear a painting that’s a copy of my painting on this big harp.”

“Only think the changes,” chimed the harp. “And Ill make my skin into the proper colors.”

Soon Lovva’s soundbox bore an image of a demon with a harp, but now the demon’s harp bore an image of a smaller demon with a harp, and this tiny harp bore a yet-smaller picture of a hellish harpist, and so on—iterating down to levels that the naked eye could barely see. By way of capping the series, Bosch set a tiny triangle of ivory white at the vanishing point. The eye of God.

I’ve been busy doing some minor revisions on the manuscript for Spacetime Donuts , getting it ready for a planned E-Reads edition in electronic book and the print-on-demand formats this fall. I couldn’t resist cleaning up the manuscript a little. After all, I’m a writer, and revising novels is what I do.

I made a painting for the cover, and my daughter Georgia Rucker turned it into a great cover design.

Although I do have a few new photos to show you, I haven’t been doing much writing, other than working on the Spacetime Donuts revision, so for today I’ll just paste in a more or less random excerpt from the text.

Suddenly they were through the electrons’ domain and the bare nucleus blazed ahead of them, perhaps half the size of the scale-ship. It was growing rapidly as they drifted towards it. A deep rumbling filled their tensegrity sphere, and the smell of sulfur and burnt earth filled their nostrils. Vernor was not surprised…if the quantum mechanical probability field could act directly on the memory structure of his brain to produce visual images, there was no reason it couldn’t produce the sounds and smells as well. Intellectually he was hardly surprised…but on the gut level he was as scared as he’d ever been.

The nucleus was a dusky red interspersed with patches of black and threads of glowing white. Its shape, although roughly spherical, was irregular and constantly changing. There was no doubt whatsoever in Vernor’s mind that it knew they were there, and was waiting for them to get close enough for it to make its move. He was repelled at the thought of being sucked into the heart of the fantastically dense entity ahead of them. But surely the Virtual Field would protect them?

A terrible idea struck Vernor. Although the Virtual Field would prevent the nucleus from physically touching them, the spherical symmetry of the VFG field might produce a lens effect…a lens magnifying and focusing the fantastically powerful nuclear strong forces upon the interior of the scale-ship. Of course the VFG field was acting as a lens, otherwise the intensity of the quantum probability field would have been too weak to affect their brains…“Mick!” Vernor screamed. “We’ve got to stop!” He fumbled for the controls with thumb-fingered hands.

“Stay cool,” Mick said reaching over Vernor’s shoulder to turn down the power control. They stopped shrinking, and the nucleus stopped growing. It seemed to be hovering fifty yards from them, a balefully glowing eye as large as the scale-ship. There was some kind of tension growing in the back of Vernor’s mind…

Suddenly Vernor’s hand shot out and turned the VFG field up to full. The impulse to turn the power up had come from his brain…but what had put it there? The nucleus filled his mind as he clung to the controls, fending off Turner’s efforts to turn the field back down.

The laboring VFG cones whined shrilly, and in seconds the scale-ship was a twentieth the size of the huge atomic nucleus looming ahead. The rumbling and the stench grew more intense, and suddenly a chain of sparks shot out from the nucleus and enveloped the scale-ship, inside and out.

Back in May, 2008, I was posting about the so-called Cyclic Universe theory, and about three SF stories I was writing on this theme.

My first cyclic universe story, “Message Found in a Gravity Wave,” is in the current issue of Nature Physics, and you can read it online.

Working with Bruce Sterling, I recently co-authored a second story on this theme, “Colliding Branes.” We’ve sold it to Asimov’s SF Magazine; I’ll let you know when it comes out. And I’m currently co-authoring a third story involving these ideas with Paul Di Filippo, under the working title “To See Infinity Bare.”

Every day I mess around with my writing a little—journal, novel notes, stories, blog. Or maybe I paint. Writing keeps me going. It helps me wake up, helps me center.

As regular readers of my blog know, one thing I’m working on these days is outline notes for a transreal novel with the current title Nested Scrolls. It’s about a writer who’s trying to get it together in a world teeming with aliens. My life in a nutshell.

I enjoy my complex, layered, recursive, misleading ways of coping with reality and processing information. My mind is like an anthill, carting each twig of experience into this or that midden heap. If I can think of myself as a character in a transreal novel, then my life becomes more bearable, more mythic, less raw. Also it’s a good way of amusing myself: a way to put reality in quotes, a way to handle life with pot-holders.

I’ve also been busily taking photos of, basically, nothing. Just things around my yard or house, or sights in the streets of Berkeley. Only rarely do I manage to shoot a somewhat journalistic picture of people, as in the playground scene above. I’ve always wished I could do that more, but I’m too shy to do it a lot. Instead I pick out color and light patterns or narrative nodes of meaning. Like the gutter reflected in the shiny veneer below.

The scanned and OCR-ed versions of Spacetime Donuts and The Sex Sphere arrived last week, and now I’m proofing them for the planned E-Reads editions (they’ll be available in both the electronic book and the print-on-demand formats). The scans are very clean. Optical-character-recognition tech has really improved.

Content-wise, I’m not planning to undertake any major editing. I mean—I started writing Spacetime Donuts in, like, 1976. That was thirty-two years ago, back when Nelson Rockefeller roamed the earth and the Rolling Stones were youth gods. Obviously, I wouldn’t write these books exactly the same way anymore. But other than that, I hope to let them be. Like time capsules.

This said, I am finding a few little things that I want to tweak, such as grammar glitches or using the same word too often in a paragraph. Call it art-historical restoration. And then there’s the dodgy matter of my questionable taste. I’ve always had this impulse to try and be outrageous, and back then I was fairly punk about it, not that I knew that use of the word “punk” in 1976. But I’m thinking I might sand down a couple of rougher spots…I’ll decide about this after I’ve read the whole book through.

It’s odd, reading this blast from the past. At the start, Spacetime Donuts feels like some half-finished, experimental spacetime hopper lifting off—I definitely hear clunks and rattles. I was still learning to write, after all. But then it settles in for a smooth cruise through the subdimensions. And, yay, the budding cyberpunk characters bring down the government!

Stay tuned.