Out in the woods with Sylvia yesterday. Today’s text is another metanovel description, lifted from my current draft of Postsingular

{Start novel excerpt.}

The excitable Herb Stingray had created The Alice Fan, an unreadable metanovel wherein every possible action path of his middle-aged heroine Alice was to be traced. Waking up with a man, a woman, or nobody in bed beside her, Alice hopped out of the right or left side of her bed, or perhaps she crawled over the head or the foot. She put on her slippers or threw them out the window, if she had a window.

In some forkings she jumped out the window herself, but in most she went to take a shower. In the shower she sang or washed or had sex with her partner. And when she emerged, she found a maple table or silver salver by her bed bearing a breakfast of lox, lobster, steel-cut oats, or a single boiled ostrich egg. In some forkings, Alice had no time to eat, as her house was on fire, or menaced by an earthquake or a giant ant.

Now in practice no human author would have had the time and energy to create so richly ramified a document as The Alice Fan, but Herb Stingray had his beezies helping him by autonomously roughing in sketches of ever-more action paths. As the mood struck him, Stingray would and add voice-over descriptions to the paths; he had a flair for making anything at all sound interesting.

But, densely tufted as the branchings were, Stingray had only managed to fully polish Alice’s action fan for the first two and a half seconds of her day. Random assassins, meteorites, a stroke, the spontaneous combustion of Alice’s pillow — so many things were possible. Stingray had recently set the work aside, declaring it to be finished. As his next project he’d begun an inversely forked work called April March, lifting both his title and concept from the celestial pages of Jorge Luis Borges.

Stingray’s plan for April March was to start with a scene on a particular day and to document plausible variants of what happened on the days before. To make the work more tractable than The Alice Fan, Stingray was austerely limiting his branching factor to one fork per day. The initial scene, set on April 1, would present an ambiguous conversation between a man and a woman at an airport, followed by two versions of March 31, four versions of March 30, eight versions of March 29 and so on. Stingray planned to march as far as March 24, making a thousand and twenty-three scenes in all, linked together into five hundred and twelve plausible action paths which would constitute, so Herb claimed, an all but exhaustive compendium of every possible kind of detective story.

{End of novel excerpt}

I was interviewed for a podcast by Science and Society last week.

Put on your calender: John Shirley and I will be reading at 7 pm, Tuesday, April 18 as

“Dread Lords of Cyberpunk”

This event is part of “SF in SF,” a monthly Series of Science Fiction Readings and Discussions at New College of California in San Francisco curated by Adam Cornford and Terry Bisson New College Valencia Theater, 777 Valencia St., San Francisco ($4 at the door, free to New College community).

Oh, one more link, dread lord of VR Jaron Lanier wrote an interesting review of my book The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. One story I should have mentioned in my book is that Jaron once told me was that the reason he got into developing hardware and software for virtual reality was because he wanted to have a really good and functional air guitar.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 9th, 2006 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.