I’m presently working on a novel called The Big Aha in which I might have my characters be involved in a religion based on the experience of telepathy. The telepathy is brought on by a (SFictional) biophysics maneuver that I’m calling quantum wetware.

The idea of having a religion based on an actual physical phenomenon is intriguing. One model for this kind of sociocultural phenomenon would be the quasi-religious attitude of the first acidheads in the late 1960s. But in my novel want the movement to emerge from something other than drugs.

Over the years, I’ve thought of two religions whose birth I could be involved with. The first is The Church of the Fourth Dimension, an idea invented by the famed and beloved science writer Martin Gardner in one of his columns. Maybe I’ll blog about that another time.

The religion I want to post about today is what I might call Xiantific Mysticism. “Xiantific” has a nice sound to it—the rebellious leading X, the conflation with Christian=Xian, and the pronunciation Xiantific=Scientific. I called this “religion” Scientific Mysticism in my novel Master of Space and Time. It relates to my essay, “The Central Teachings of Myticism,” which I posted about a few days ago.

Here’s a passage from Master of Space and Time, featuring an encounter between my characters Joe Fletcher and Alwin Bitter. Alwin Bitter is actually a carry-over character from my earlier novel The Sex Sphere. And he’s a member of the Church of Scientific Mysticism.

Sunday morning we went to church, the First Church of Scientific Mysticism. The religion, vaguely Christian, had grown out of the mystical teachings of Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel, the two great Princeton sages. My wife Nancy and I didn’t attend regularly, but today it seemed like the thing to do. According to the evening news, a giant lizard like Godzilla had briefly appeared on the Jersey Turnpike.

The sun was out, and the two of us had a nice time walking over to church with our daughter Serena.

The church building was a remodeled bank, a massive granite building with big pillars and heavy bronze lamps. Inside, there were pews and a raised pulpit. In place of an altar was a large hologram of Albert Einstein. Einstein smiled kindly, occasionally blinking his eyes. Nancy and Serena and I took a pew halfway up the left side. The organist was playing a Bach prelude. I gave Nancy’s hand a squeeze. She squeezed back.

Today’s service was special. The minister, an elderly physicist named Alwin Bitter, was celebrating the installation of a new assistant, a woman named — Sondra Tupperware. I jumped when I heard her name, remembering that my friend Harry Gerber had mentioned her yesterday. Was this another of his fantasies become real? Yet Ms. Tupperware looked solid enough: a skinny woman with red glasses-frames and a Springer spaniel’s kinky brown hair.

Old Bitter was wearing a tuxedo with a thin pink necktie. The dark suit set off his halo of white hair to advantage. He passed out some bread and wine, and then he gave a sermon called “The Central Teachings of Mysticism.”

His teachings, as best I recall, were three in number: (1) All is One; (2) The One is Unknowable; and (3) The One is Right Here. Bitter delivered his truths with a light touch, and the congregation laughed a lot — happy, surprised laughter.

Nancy and I lingered after the service, chatting with some of the church members we knew. I was waiting for a chance to ask Alwin Bitter for some advice.

Finally everyone was gone except for Bitter and Sondra Tupperware. The party in honor of her installation was going to be later that afternoon.

“Is Tupperware your real name?” asked Nancy.

Sondra laughed and nodded her head. Her eyes were big and round behind the red glasses. “My parents were hippies. They changed the family name to Tupperware to get out from under some legal trouble. Dad was a close friend of Alwin’s.”

“That’s right,” said Bitter. “Sondra’s like a niece to me. Did you enjoy the sermon?”

“It was great,” I said. “Though I’d expected more science.”

“What’s your field?” asked Bitter.

“Well, I studied mathematics, but now I’m mainly in computers. I had my own business for a while. Fletcher & Company.”

“You’re Joe Fletcher?” exclaimed Sondra. “I know a friend of yours.”

“Harry Gerber, right? That’s what I wanted to ask Dr. Bitter about. Harry’s trying to build something that will turn him into God.”

Bitter looked doubtful. I kept talking. “I know it sounds crazy, but I’m really serious. Didn’t you hear about the giant lizard yesterday?”

“On the Jersey Turnpike,” said my wife Nancy loyally. “It was on the news.”

“Yes, but I don’t quite see — ”

“Harry made the lizard happen. The thing he built — it’s called a blunzer — is going to give him control over space and time, even the past. The weird thing is that it isn’t really even Harry doing things. The blunzer is just using us to make things happen. It sent Harry to tell me to tell Harry to get me to — ”

Bitter was looking at his watch. “If you have a specific question, Mr. Fletcher, I’d be happy to answer it. Otherwise … ”

What was my question?

“My question. Okay, it’s this: What if a person becomes the same as the One? What if a person can control all of reality? What should he ask for? What changes should he make?”

Bitter stared at me in silence for almost a full minute. I seemed finally to have engaged his imagination. “You’re probably wondering why that question should boggle my mind,” he said at last. “I wish I could answer it. You ask me to suppose that some person becomes like God. Very well. Now we are wondering about God’s motives. Why is the universe the way it is? Could it be any different? What does God have in mind when He makes the world?” Bitter paused and rubbed his eyes. “Can the One really be said to have a mind at all? To have a mind — this means to want something. To have plans. But wants and plans are partial and relative. The One is absolute. As long as wishes and needs are present, an individual falls short of the final union.” Bitter patted my shoulder and gave me a kind look. “With all this said, I urge you to remember that individual existence is in fact identical with the very act of falling short of the final union. Treasure your humanity, it’s all you have.”

“But — ”

Bitter raised his hand for silence. “A related point: There is no one you. An individual is a bundle of conflicting desires, a society in microcosm. Even if some limited individual were seemingly to take control of our universe, the world would remain as confusing as ever. If I were to create a world, for instance, I doubt if it would be any different from the one in which we find ourselves.” Bitter took my hand and shook it. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get home for Sunday dinner. Big family reunion today. My wife Sybil’s out at the airport picking up our oldest daughter. She’s been visiting her grandparents in Germany.”

Bitter shook hands with the others and took off, leaving the four of us on the church steps.

“What’d he say?” I asked Sondra.

Sondra shook her head quizzically. Her long, frizzed hair flew out to the sides. “The bottom line is that he wants to have lunch with his family. But tell me more about Harry’s blunzer.”

This week I read a free Creative Commons licensed version of a novel on my Kindle. And that set me to thinking that I should do a CC release of Turing & Burroughs. In the past, I’ve done this for some of my other books—Postsingular and The Ware Tetralogy. My experience is that, in today’s odd post-crash potlatch iterary economy, doing a CC doesn’t seem to hurt my sales.

So I posted some free CC versions of the new book, see the link on the Turing & Burroughs page. Dig in and snarf ’em up, but don’t let that stop you from buying the book! Keep in mind that Transreal Books does have a nice paperback edition of the novel as well as commercial Kindle, NOOK, EPUB and MOBI editions. At present the paperbacks are only on Amazon, but in a month or so they should be on the other book sites and even in some physical bookstores. In time for Xmas.

By the way, Turing & Burroughs got a great review by Autodesk founder and computer maniac John Walker.

Anyway, the catalyzing book that I was reading in a CC edition this week was Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross’s long-awaited Rapture of the Nerds . It’s great fun, very clever and postsingular. The cloud of simulated minds living in outer-space dust is a real place now, an accepted SF trope. The novel resets the bar of what one expects from an SF novel—indeed, for an SF writer, it’s a bit daunting to read. And, rather than being a straight-on geek-fest, the book gains transreal richness by getting into the main character’s issues with his/her parents. (Gender is mutable in the postsinglar world.)

The style of Rapture of the Nerds is at times very beautiful. Just at random, here’s a sentence from Rapture of the Nerds that I really loved—I’ve always been fond of odd lists crafted in the manner of Jorge-Luis Borges.

Out the window, where there should be iron gray Welsh sky and the crashing sea, there is, instead, a horizon-spanning skybox hung with ornament-sized pieces of reality, hung in serried ranks: trees, houses, buildings, people, livestock, CO2, rare earths, bad ideas, literary criticism, children’s books, food additives, tumbleweeds, blips, microorganisms, lamentable fashion, copy editors’ marks, pulsars, flint axes, cave drawings, mind-numbingly complex mathematical proofs, van art, mountains, molehills, uplifted ant colonies.

Yeah, baby!

I’m so glad to have Stross and Doctorow around. They keep the game interesting.

Moving on, I also want to discuss some ideas about telepathy and the possible shock thereof.

Some of the characters in Turing & Burroughs have telepathy with each other, and they don’t find it that disturbing. And in Rapture of Nurbs, the characters handle greatly expanded states of consciousness fairly easily as well. But I’m thinking that, in my next novel, The Big Aha, I think telepathy will be treated as something that’s more disorienting, at least initially, than we SF writers usually admit.

My ideas along these lines relate to something I was pondering this past weekend at the Phil Dick Fest. I have a long-standing peeve about consensus history—our rulers’ “history” is all about politicians, fat cats, nobles, and wars. But the consensus history you learn in school is only one path through the superspace of human thought, one threaded traversal of the mindscape.

In reality, each of us has our unique version of history. And so does a grain of sand or a bird or a table leg (getting into my Hylozoic trip of every object in the world having a mind). And if you were sufficiently telepathic, thanks to, let’s say, quantum wetware, you’d get an awareness of all the life stories and the whole block of the mindscape.

And this effect would be a big aha—or at least he start of one.

How will the big aha feel? You might, at least initially, be incapacitated, or you might find some way to deal. I’m thinking about this in terms of writing an SF novel. And I do know that the merging with all minds thing has been done. So I’d like to find a fresh angle. I’ll list some of the possible effects of the telepathy-big-aha on the visionary, all of which have been used, but some of which seem more amenable to being used again.

Odd-ball twist: the visionary becomes a chimera with body parts from other beings. Would be good to mix some of this in, it’s good to have a funky, meaty objective correlative for the fanciful abstract mind state. Maybe my character oey Moon undergoes this when he has a fit of telepathy fueled higher consciousness. Would be a tasty scene.

A “roving I” montage where you flip through different points of view. Recently I read this as the “Transplant” sequence in Robert Sheckley’s Immortality Incorporated, and I think I did something like this in Frek and the Elixir. But I’m not sure this can be made interesting again. It’s dull and stale if you just start cataloging a sequence of random bizarre points of view. At the very least you’d want a metastory thread connecting the points of view.

A mystical white light blank-out—this is coma thing.

Slightly less incapacitating: an omniscient mind-lift to a god-like and synoptic Hilbert Space viewpoint. I did some of this with my “Big Pig” scenes in Hylozoic.

A hive mind synergy where you’re working with the minds around you. People hate the idea of hive minds, of course. Un-American! (Of course any society really is a hive mind.)

But instead of a hive mind we talk about a network of hubs where each of us is reaching out and assimilating the other viewpoints while still holding our own.

I like the network image best for a telepathy-big-aha story. I was getting into this frame of mind sitting in a field up on a hill near my house at dusk the other day. Imagining I was “in” the trees around me, in the rocks, in the deer wandering around (a small herd lives up there). Although I was reaching out into the other mind flows. I was still an integrative center. As if the other minds were webpages I was browsing on multiple screen, while I’m still being me in my Aeron office chair as it were.

Keep in mind that any scene involving exalted telepathic states can quickly founder on the reader’s impatient question: “So what?” The whole interest of a character is that they embody a specific point of view. It’s important to keep the individuality even if my character is teeping a lot of stuff around him.

I’m also thinking that, after the telepathy-big-aha, I’ll have to move on to a stronger marvel. Giant ants? Branching time? Transdimensional aliens? A cloud of nants? Another run at hylozoism, where every natural object gets a mind? Or something unheard of.

I’ll keep pushing on it, and see where the Muse takes me.

Meanwhile, check out Turing & Burroughs!

I visited the Writers Center in Gloucester, Mass, for a week. My wife Sylvia was along as well. We were lodged in the modest former home of the late Vincent Ferrini, a friend of Charles Olson’s and a beloved Gloucester poet in his own right. His film-maker nephew Henry Ferrini raised the funds to set up the Writers Center, and my old writer/bookman pal Greg Gibson is on the board.

[Photo by Sylvia Rucker. Note visiting writer recumbent on bed with laptop.]

I gave a lecture on “Transrealism and Beatnik SF” on Wednesday, Aug 29, 2012. We had a reception before my reading—which was held in our lodging. A small crowd, maybe fifteen people. The talk went fine, with good Q&A at the end. I wrote up some notes for the talk in advance, and the next day I posted the audio recording I made during the talk By posting the audio on Rudy Rucker Podcasts I reach a few more listeners, like maybe fifty more.

With me living in the cottage at the Writers Center for the week, a few people asked me if I was doing some writing here. As if this stay might be a unique opportunity for me. But of course I write a lot at home—for me, writing is the norm, not the exception. And, as I had my wife along, we were treating it more as a vacation, going out to see Rocky Neck or kayaking or riding on the “pinky” schooner Ardelle or taking the train up to Boston for the day.

But I did worry that I was missing an opportunity to delve deep into my craft. In the past I’ve occasionally dreamed of such a “writers’ colony” opportunity. Walking around the waterfront or sitting in my cottage’s back yard in Gloucester, I managed to jot some ideas onto my folded-in-four pocket-scrap of paper. And then later I typed the scribbles into my writing journal. And I took some nice photos reflecting my fleeting thoughts, like what Alfred Stieglitz called “Equivalents.”

To begin with, I wrote up an outline of my “Transrealism and Beatnik SF” talk in advance. And I did some work on my notes for my next novel, The Big Aha, although these days it’s slow going. Like what is this novel supposed to be about? Also in Gloucester I wrote up some ideas for a story about aliens trapping humans in things that work somewhat like lobster pots. It was great to talk to Greg Gibson about writing—we’ve been writers together for almost fifty years.

I visited anothr writer friend, Paul Di Filippo, in Boston one day. I talked about the lobster pot story with Paul. We were laughing about this disgusting phrase that was stuck in my mind, “bean-hole beans.” It’s in fact a kind of recipe or preparation method, but it sounds so nasty. I have this Tourette streak, where some days I just keep saying a phrase over and over. Bean-hole beans. Possibly this fits into the lobster story. People caught in a bar that’s really a trap and they’re forced down the bean-hole.

So, okay, I didn’t score any wild, ecstatic, six-pages-of-text-at-one-go sessions at the Writers Center. Ideally the text is fiction, but even notes are a rush, if that’s all I can get.

I definitely crave “the narcotic moment of creative bliss,” as the John Malkovich character puts it in the film, Art School Confidential. Soon come. Petition the Muse for long enough and she comes.

Being a visiting writer was a nice exercise, even if I felt a bit like a charlatan. That’s part of the process, too—getting to the point where I feel like I’ve been faking it all these years, and I’ll never write again unless I bear down and do it now.

And now it’s now. I flew out of Gloucester to visit my brother in Louisville, Kentucky, for a few days. I’m sitting on his country porch with my laptop. The afternoon rain is pouring onto the pastel green fields. I want thunder in the low, gray sky. I want the fierce cracks and lightning stutters in the night.

And meanwhile, telling all this to myself, my fingers are flying. So, yeah, I’m writing. Making a landing-strip for the Muse.

Hype and Anti-Hype

I’ve been lost in a fog of hype for months now—what with promoting my Nested Scrolls autobio this winter, putting out Flurb #13 and converting it into an ebook, and recently spending all my time getting my Transreal Books line going.

Not to mention tweeting and blogging. And layering on link tags all over the place.

[Terry Bisson]

I even put out some hype for someone other than myself this week, a book review of Terry Bisson’s great alternate history memoir, Any Day Now. The review is in this interesting new online literary journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books—meant to be a kind of left-coast mirror of the august New York Review of Books.

On the subject of hype, I’ve heard media figures say that they get into trouble when they start believing their own hype. I mean I’ve heard rappers say that, anyway. What is the nature of the danger, exactly?

Maybe, if I believe the hype, I don’t feel a need to even try to write, as I think I’m already so great. Maybe, if I believe my hype, then I’m not willing to put in the work it takes to write because I’m too “important” for the thousand-miles-on-foot slog of writing a novel.

Or maybe, if I believe the hype, I do still want to write, but I become blocked—because nothing I actually do write lives up to the hype? That is, maybe if I believe the hype, when I try and get to work, I freak out over the very real disparity between the contingent and mortal quality of what I actually do write vis-a-vis the much higher quality that my hype ascribes to my oeuvre.

Or, yet again, maybe I am still able to write but, believing the hype, I get lazy and begin neglecting the necessary but painful work of outlining, revision, scientific theorizing, and pre-visualization—this happens to older writers sometimes.

Or perhaps, if I believe my hype, I lose my sense of humor and become pompous and self-referential. “Fatuous,” to use an apt word that I’ve heard Bruce Sterling use (when arguing with me about some revisions to one of our many collaborative short stories). Fatuosity is another danger for established writers.

[Two mayflies in conjugation]

I’m hoping soon to get away from the hype and back to my actual work. Giving the finger to consensus reality. Turning my back on received ideas—even if they come from me.

As I’ve already kvetched in these posts, one thing that’s holding me back from writing at this point is that I don’t feel like working on my new novel, The Big Aha , until I find a path for publishing my last one, Turing & Burroughs. If I don’t get something set up by the end of June, I’ll probably publish Turing & Burroughs via my own line of Transreal Books, just to get it off my back. It’ll be a bit of a blow to my self-esteem to join the ranks of the self-published novelists. But that seems to be the way the wind’s blowing. I heard the other day that the august house of Houghton-Mifflin is bankrupt. Leaving more and more writers scrabbling in the gutter with the literary lepers…

Bringing us to the theme of anti-hype. Somewhere (although I can’t find the exact location) Thomas Pynchon writes that a certain kind of seeker (mystic, writer, or artist) needs an “unwiltable hard-on” of ambition. (Let’s suppose this can apply to female seekers as well, the “hard-on” being, after all, metaphorical—a psychic dildo, if you will.)

In a similar vein, there’s a saying attributed to Rabbi Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who will be?” (Hillel complicates matters by adding on, “If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”)

To some extent, I like to think that, if nobody hates what I’m doing, then I’m not going far enough. But if everybody hates what I’m doing—gosh, maybe I’m on a wrong path. But so far, there’s always been a few loyal friends or fans who approve of what I’m doing. So I continue on, largely unchanged.

And there’s always the bitter SubGenius motto: “F*ck them if they can’t take a joke.”

What about the strategy of trying to bend your work to be a better fit for the market? That tends not to work. You get into playing catch-up ball, to use *ack* a sports metaphor, and your style suffers. Or your style stays the same, but nobody believes your claim that you’ve written a steampunk or urban fantasy or whatever kind of book.

I once heard someone ask William Burroughs why he didn’t “just” write a bestseller to make some money. The old master said that something like the following:

“It’s not possible. People may think they can sit down and write a bestseller, but you can’t do it. A bestseller is written up to the level of a man’s ability. You can’t write down to the reading public.”

[Rudy at the Met]

Whatever else it is, writing is pleasant, addictive, and a path to self-knowledge. It’s just nice to have an excuse for doing it. I always seem to find some kind of project to work on, even if it’s not a novel. So what am I writing these days? Well, I’m polishing up my Journals, 1990-2012, getting them into a format that I can publish via, ta-da, Transreal Books. Ebook and paperback, probably.

So for now I’m puttering around, getting those the half million or so words wrestled into a reasonable shape. It’s passing the time in any case.