As I mentioned in my post on “Starting Jim and the Flim,” I’m thinking of writing another SF novel that includes some UFO elements.

My blogger friend Mac Tonnies responded with a couple of links to posts relating to SF UFO novels. The first is a piece, “UFOs and Science Fiction” discussing the relative scarcity of UFOs in contemporary SF novels.

I do remember reading some SF UFO tales as a boy, that is, about fifty years ago, although at that time, the subtext of the stories was the American fear of Communism and Soviet attack. More recently, Ian Watson’s Miracle Visitors, John Shirley’s Silicon Embrace, and my own Saucer Wisdom are among the very few modern SF UFO novels.

In order to have something to discuss, I think we should distinguish between, on the one hand, SF UFO novels and, on the other hand, alien invasion novels along the lines of, say, Greg Bear or Larry Niven. I think, for instance, Neal Stephenson’s recent Anathem, is more of an alien invasion novel, although it’s close to being an SF UFO novel as well.

How to characterize the sought-for genre of the SF UFO novel? I’d say the essence of an SF UFO novel is point (a) below. Points (b) through (f) all follow from (a).

(a) The novel includes flying saucer alien encounters similar to those described in lowbrow tabloid newspapers, but is neither ignorantly credulous nor mockingly parodistic.
(b) The aliens use a fuzzy technology that might amount to psychic powers. The saucers, in other words, aren’t machines.
(c) The aliens are surreptitiously observing or infiltrating Earth rather than overtly invading—at least for now.
(d) We have some creepy human/alien sex acts.
(e) The aliens aren’t necessarily evil, they may be bringing enlightenment and transcendence.
(f) The aliens might be from somewhere other than a distant planet, that is, they might come from small size scales, from a parallel world, or might be made of some impalpable substance like dark matter.

Part of the game in writing an SF UFO novel is making up scientific reasons why the tabloid-level UFO phenomenon could in fact relate to something real—although certainly it’s fair to mention in mind that many of the people who encounter aliens are stoned or mentally ill.

Coming back to Mac Tonnies again, in his 2005 post, “Alien Visitation: A Global Quantum Event?” Mac discusses the notion that the aliens might in some sense require a human’s presence in order to manifest themselves.

Thus, the fact that there are never any unobserved UFOs could indicate not that the UFOs are human hallucinations, but rather that a human presence supplies a kind of bridge or beacon that allows the aliens to project some visible form into our reality. Note that you can use this move without having to get into the mysto steam of quantum mechanics which is, I feel, a vein that’s been somewhat overworked.

The tone and intention are also essential in distinguishing an SF UFO novel.

One the one hand, if the book is serious, exhortatory, or paranoid, then you’re not getting the SF part. You’re writing a kind of True Believer recruitment tract running a kind of scam, and those motives get in the way of novelistic art. This said, it should be possible to write a great SF UFO novel that does in fact have that intense, paranoid tone—in some ways Phil Dick’s exemplary Valis is this kind of book.

On the other hand, if the author goes for every joke in sight, you end up with something more like the Hitchhiker’s Guide novels by Douglas Adams. This kind of work has its own appeal and its own audience—but it’s not what I’m thinking about when I talk about my vision of an SF UFO novel. I want something a little heavier, a little deeper.

Not that an SF UFO novel has to be sober-sided and portentious. My personal inclination is to leaven my books with a certain amount of satire and dark humor—and John Shirley and Ian Watson do this too. For instance, the aliens in Shirley’s Silicon Embrace are heavy smokers. And the main character in my Saucer Wisdom really is a true-believing UFO nut—who just happens to be right.

The world really is stranger than we as yet understand. Tying our dreams of cosmic exploration to government-made machines is like expecting to ride a sailing ship or a hot air balloon to Mount Olympus. The door might be closer than you think. Rabid knows.

On December 23, 2008, during the big family Christmas reunion at our house, I had a few spare minutes and managed to write a kind of start for my next novel, with working title Jim and the Flim. I pasted together some bits that I liked from some SF warm-up raps that I wrote this summer while I was still getting ready to write my memoir—see, for instance, my blog posts, “Cow Liver Goddess Satori,” and “Novels as Memoirs.”)

I put the material into the past tense and changed the parts that were first person to third person, though I may yet flip back to first person. And now I’m smoothing the material and revising it, and thinking about how to complicate it into a novel. I can feel a little pulse, it’s coming to life.

The main character Jim Oster lives with a woman, Weena Wesson, whom he believes to be an otherworldly being called a flim. The flim mind is embedded in a body that she’s grown from a cow liver. Jim and Weena are seedy older people living in Santa Cruz. I’m looking for a Dickian tone this time out, with the tech pretty simple and some what-is-reality elements.

I’d like the reader to believe, initially, that Jim Oster is mistaken in his belief that Weena is an alien flim inside a cow liver. But I think by the end of the first or the second chapter we learn that he’s not nuts—for if he were, we wouldn’t have much of an SF novel, would we?

Why is Weena living in a tweaked cow liver? Well, mainly I’m goofing off the traditional notion of UFO cattle mutilations. But I want a science reason to explain it. Suppose that the flims can’t physically come here unless they’re in one of those spacetime regions where our mundane world and the Flimland happen to overlap. When the worlds are separate, a flim can nevertheless project their personality information into a piece of mundane host matter. And for some mumble-mumble science reason, a cow liver is very suitable. If carried out fully and for a long period of time, the flim’s astral projection kills the flim’s original body. Weena makes this sacrifice as she has an important mission in the mundane world.

What is the mission? This has to do with my theory about where the flims are from. Note that I’m not interested in having the flims come from distant stars or planets, that whole concept feels hackneyed and boring. I want them to come from right here, like nature spirits.

A standard way of explaining otherworldly beings is to suppose that they live on a universe parallel to ours, and they are able to reach over into our world or even hop back and forth. Like from the astral plane. But I want a sense of the flims being essentially embedded in our world—like elves or ghosts. So I want a more intimate connection than a some parallel world, something more integrate than alternate sheet of spacetime that’s stuck to ours like a protective plastic sheet stuck to the viewscreen of a new digital camera. If there’s any fixed, uniform distance between the two hyperplanes of reality, the worlds are separate, even if the distance is a mere Planck length.

So I’ll suppose that, yes, flims live in a parallel spacetime, but that their astral plane and our mundane plane are in fact precisely the same in many spacetime regions. I think of an astral veneer that’s irregularly delaminating from a mundane tabletop. At certain places and times, the world of the flims is identical with our quotidien reality, in other spots their reality sheet bulges up. I suppose that the bulge pattern is, like any other naturally occurring shape, a chaotic fractal.

If we go with the delaminated sheets model, we can have the traditional fantasy notion of there being certain times and lands where “the elves are real.” Locales where Flimland and our mundane world are one and the same. And the action of my book has to do with a Return Of The Magic. We’re about to pass into an era when the flims are fully visible to us all the time, and the astral and the mundane worlds are one.

Do the flims welcome the impending unification? I think not, no more so than will the conservative elements of our own society. Let’s suppose that the elvish flims are green and Earth-nurturing. They won’t relish being merged into a world full of real estate developers, gross polluters, and shopping malls. Weena’s mission is to try and reform humanity a little before the worlds merge. And it may be that Jim’s mission is to teach the flims to love us.

I looked up some pictures of the sun the other day. The Royal Swedish Academy’s Institute for Solar Physics made some nice photos with the Swedish Solar Telescope in 2002. That’s a sunspot in the middle, and those tube-like lines flowing into it are called spicules, or solar flux tubes. (I’ve long hypothesized that these spicules are in some sense alive.)

The sun-hungry scientists at the Institute for Solar Physics also made a four megabyte QuickTime video version of this picture, which is only a couple of seconds long, it’s 76 frames, covering a time duration of half an hour on the Sun. And you can find some more sunspot pix and videos at this Göttingen site.

I always like to think about making journeys into the sun. There’s been some books along these lines, but none of them is quite what I want. I’d like to be able to go inside the sun and merge into the scene and not be thinking “too hot.”

In my novel Frek and the Elixir, I did write about my character Frek making a trip to the inside of a star. It’s almost what I want, but I’d like to write another piece about this. In Frek, he’s wearing a special spacesuit made of “tweet,” with a “Sun Protection Factor ten-to-the-thirtieth power. Oinkment to shield your pigment.” He dives in with some friends.

The excess of light spilled over into Frek’s ears, nose, and sense of touch. Though his eyes were functioning, they were overloaded to the point of showing ragged checkerboards of feedback. His suit was using his other sense organs to process the overflow. It was almost like being a blind person, modeling reality from sound, smell and touch.

The sound of the sun was as the warm hubbub of human voices in a crowded room, with the buzz and throb of great machineries in chambers far below. The touch of the sun was like the bubbles and currents in the foamy white spot at the base of a waterfall. Tickling taps danced along the shell of Frek’s suit; little swirls plucked at his limbs. The smell of the sun was like a garden on a hot summer day, with vagrant breezes bringing a pleasant palette of scents. Frek could pick out roses, bean-blossoms, an anyfruit tree and the vinegary smell of a turmite mound.

[And then, to leave the star, they ride a solar flare.] It was incredible, a Nantucket sleigh ride through rough seas of sound, a romp up the blossom-scented stairway to heaven, a barefoot scamper across a million-note chrome xylophone.

I got a macro lens for Xmas. This picture here is of my cup of tea. I’d never noticed the cracks in the glaze before. And, see, there’s a path into the sun right along the lip of the liquid.

I won’t be blogging over the next week. Here, to tide us over, are fifteen Christmas-related memories from my memoir, Nested Scrolls.

1. When I was a boy in Louisville, on Christmas Eve, we’d go to church and there’d be a Christmas pageant.

One year I was Joseph, and I had to spend twenty minutes in a robe staring into the Holy Cradle, which was a cardboard box with a light bulb in it. I passed the time by mentally estimating the volume of the Hi-C cans that had once filled the box, and comparing this volume to my estimated volume of the box.

The best part of the pageant was when three of the men at church would play the Three Kings and walk up the aisle singing verses of “We Three Kings.” At first I wouldn’t be able recognize them in their robes and makeup, and then I’d realize I knew them, and it was exciting to see them transformed.

Afterwards we’d go outside and the sky would be black with twinkling stars, the air thin and cold, and Christmas almost here.

On Christmas mornings, Mom would arrange a fan of books around the base of the tree for Embry and me. Some of the books were science fiction. Embry plowed through any and all the books—he was an omnivorous, inexhaustible reader. But it was I who cherished and pondered the SF.

2. One Christmas, my friend Niles and I both got large Erector Set kits, red metal boxes filled with struts, little nuts and bolts, wheels, and a real engine that you could plug into the wall. The kits came with instruction pamphlets filled with detailed drawings of things you might construct. After some preliminary projects, both of us set to work on the largest item in the book: a Parachute Ride, which was something like a merry-go-round, but with dangling seats.

We had endless consultations over the details—which weren’t all that clear in the pictures. Eventually I managed to build a Parachute Ride just like the one in the picture, but Niles wasn’t quite so patient as me, nor so inclined to follow detailed instructions, and his looked a little—different, not that it didn’t work just as well. I was intrigued by the evidence that you could in fact ignore instructions and still get something to work.

3. I spent a year at a boarding school in the Black Forest of Germany when I was thirteen. The school was run by some Quaker-like religious sect. For some reason, the biggest holiday of thier year seemed to be the First of Advent. This was the one day of the year when good food was served in our dorm. And in preparation for the First of Advent, each of the boarders had to make a little work of art to be displayed in the common rooms. The most popular projects to make were stellated polyhedra—I myself made a humble four-sided tetrahedral pyramid with a narrow pyramidal star-point glued onto each face, but the older boys made exceedingly intricate models, networks of a hundred or more squares, triangles, pentagons and so on, with a specially folded slender point growing out from each of the polygons.

My mother came over for a visit at Christmas, bringing me a number of the plastic airplane model-kits I liked, also an algebra textbook. I’d been concerned that I was missing out on my first year of algebra—back home, they started algebra in the eighth grade, and I’d been looking forward to it for several years, even though I didn’t exactly know what algebra was.

4. In the ninth grade, I attended such a small private school that they put me on the varsity football team. We played a full season against teams fielded by other private schools, and we lost every one of our games. I especially liked the away games, where we’d drive in a caravan of cars, sometimes quite a distance, down rainy two-lane Kentucky and Indiana roads, with stops at roadside restaurants for wonderful greasy dinners, and lots of manly joking and story-telling at our table.

Right before Christmas vacation, we had a sports banquet, and we all got letter sweaters. Coach Kleier made a speech in which he said there was one person here who exemplified his idea of courage: Rudy Rucker! Pop was proud and thrilled, he talked about this event for years. He said I was so small that when I stood up from my chair to get my letter, my height barely changed.

5. When I was home for Christmas vacation with my parents in the senior year of college, my brother was finally back from the army, and looking to stir up some trouble.

“I guess you’ll be needing one of these pretty soon, huh, Rudy?” said Embry, pointing at a full-page ad for diamond rings. Naturally he said this in front of my mother.

Mom started vibrating with joy and approval. She and Pop were crazy about Sylvia. The next thing I knew, I’d gone to the bank to withdraw my leftover construction-work money, and had driven with Mom to Galt Jewelers in DC to pick out an engagement ring. And while I was at it, I wrote Sylvia’s father, asking for permission to marry her. Sylvia told him to say yes. He appreciated this old-school approach, and made a point of getting the best possible stationery available to write me back.

6. Our parents were thrilled to have a granddaughter, and we all visited each other a zillion times, even flying Georgia over to Geneva for her first Christmas. Sylvia and I went out to play in the snow while her parents watched the baby.

“But you are still children, too!” exclaimed her father when we came in from the snow. “How can you have children?” I was twenty-three.

7. In Virginia, at age sixty, my father had a heart attack. In order to replace his clogged coronary arteries, his surgeon turned to bypass surgery.

This operation was still quite new. They opened up his whole chest, leaving a vertical scar at least a foot long. The drugs and the trauma had a bad effect on Pop. He became disoriented—once on the phone he was telling me that he could see American troops burning Vietnamese huts from his hospital room window, although, near the end of this conversation he said knew it was a hallucination. I can only imagine how freaky and unpleasant his dreams must have been.

He had to go back to the hospital a couple more times until his condition stabilized. I remember once, at Christmas time, we were visiting my parents with the three kids, and I snuck newborn Isabel into the hospital under my coat to cheer Pop up. Coming upon Pop happily cradling the baby, the night nurse smiled and said, “Congratulations.”

8. Mom, Pop and Sylvia’s parents were all at our house in 1977 for what was to be our last Christmas in Geneseo, New York.

It was a classic holiday—Georgia got a Barbie Townhouse that she’d been longing for, Rudy got a Lionel electric train on a loop of track, and Isabel had a nice red fire-engine that she could pedal. Sylvia’s father got us a new TV, and when I shorted it out by spilling a scotch and soda in through the vent on top, I took it back to the giant discount store it had come from, and they gave me a new one. Sylvia was in a sewing group with the manager’s wife, which helped.

We took the grandparents out to go sledding with the kiddies one afternoon, but that wasn’t a big success, as the temperature was fifteen below zero. The breeze coming up from the valley felt like the air from a freezer, like the fumes from dry ice.

In spite of the tensions, Christmas was cozy. I loved the pleasant physicality of lying on the rug like a dogfather in his den, with the kids crawling on me, poking and wrestling. Sylvia was great at assembling presents for us all, wrapping them up like works of art, writing cute labels, arranging them under the tree. By now a number of ornaments had migrated from our parents’ houses to ours. Little Rudy and I squeezed under the tree, staring up at the wooden figurines and the colored lights. Mom was endlessly considerate with the children. She’d relax in their presence, forgetting her worries, reading books to them, handing them toys, smiling and nodding.

9. My Lynchburg neighbor, R. G., liked mowing his lawn and trimming his hedges, but he didn’t have a hedge-trimmer. One day he convinced me to help him tidy up the top of his hedges by helping to hold his lawnmower up in the air and lower it onto the sprouts. We each holding two wheels, standing on either side of the hedge. After a couple of minutes, it became evident to me that this was a really bad idea, and we quit.

For as long as we lived there, R.G.’s wife never could learn how to spell my first name. Every year her Christmas card was addressed to “Rundy Rucker,” which delighted the kids.

10. Sometimes the children liked to give me a taste of my own rebelliousness. Like when some carolers came by our house one Christmas in Lynchburg, and I called them to come see, they crawled to the door on all fours, barking, making faces, and peering out at the carolers as if they had no idea what was going on. The more I scolded them, the harder they barked and laughed.

11. The holidays and vacations rolled by. Sylvia’s parents would come to us for Christmas, and we’d visit them in the summers. Mom or Pop would visit for holidays, too, but never at the same time. Sometimes we’d have Thanksgiving at Embry’s farm, the jolly kids sitting at their own little table.

A family’s parade of days, with Sylvia and I leading our troupe of three little pigs. It seemed like it would never end, but now, looking back, it didn’t last nearly long enough.

12. Sylvia’s parents came over for our first California Christmas, and her father, Arpad, gave me the money to buy a used surfboard and a wetsuit from a local surf shop.

“This was Chang’s board,” said the proprietor, eyeing the battered but attractively priced board I’d selected. “He…” The guy’s voice trailed off. I never did find out what happened to Chang.

13. I gave a special Christmas talk and demo at the IBM research lab in San Jose. I jacked my cellular automata card into one of their IBM PCs and connected it to this monster projector that they had. Nobody else had computer projectors back then, so it was incredibly exciting for me to see my images get so big. I wanted to take off my clothes and let the sparkling little squares of the CA graphics slide across my bare skin.

The guys loved my realtime animated images, and when I was done I got more applause than I’d heard since being on a panel with star writer Larry Niven at a science fiction convention. But then some execs took me into a conference room and started asking me, “What are CAs good for?”

14. In search of a big third act for my novel, Saucer Wisdom, I flew to Spearfish, North Dakota, to meet up with an artist friend of mine who lives there. His name is Dick Termes, and he paints primarily on spheres. He says that right after Christmas is the best time for gathering “canvases” to paint on, he picks up lawn-scale ball ornaments on sale at K-Mart, covers them in gesso and paints on these marvelous six-point perspective scenes. What’s six-point perspective? Well, you can look it up—Termes has a video explaining it on the Web.

15. In Fiji, Sylvia and I snorkeled a lot too. Over and over, looking ahead, we’d barely notice things disappearing—zip!—into hidey-holes. Eventually, with much patience, we were able to see that the little phantoms were bright-colored, fringed cones—like tiny, spiral feather-dusters. A local told us these were the feeding organs of creatures called Christmas tree worms. They lived in the coral, and they grew themselves hinged trapdoors like thumbnails to cover their holes.

I thought again of my old idea of there being forms of life that move so fast that we never quite see them. Why not? Only a few centuries ago, we were unaware of the creatures that are too small for the naked eye to see.

Merry Christmas, and a happy 2009!