There was a cool partial annular eclipse of the sun here in the SF Bay Area last week. It was about 6:30 pm, and the sun was going behind the hill that I live on, so I walked up the street to get a better view. I’d been using the safe method of studying tiny crescents via a pin hole punched sheet of paper projecting them onto a black back of a book. But, wearing shades and walking up the tree-crowned hill, I could suddenly see the eclipsed sun directly with my naked eyes.

And, yes, I know you’re not supposed to stare at it, and I didn’t. But I could see it, via quick, raking side-long glances, the suddenly huge-seeming sun a strange crescent just above the horizon, filtered through the scrim of live-oak trees, archaic, mythical, the horned sun.

The patches of shadow-light cast by the trees and bushes were strangely warped, with each dapple-blog cast into a crescent, with an overall effect like taffy.

It felt like a weird sign, a signal from on high.

Moving on, this is strange time in my chosen field of writing and publishing.

Firstly, it seems like there’s hardly any bookstores anymore. The big chains like Walden, Borders and B&N forced out the older small independent bookstores. Then Amazon ate the business of the chains. And now it seems like Barnes and Noble is the only chain left. So far as I know, the only generalized bookstores fair city of San Jose (urban area population of two million) are three Barnes and Noble outlets. Yes, we have a few textbook, foreign language, Christian, children’s, and used book stores too. But those aren’t stores that would stock any books I would write. Even in San Francisco there’s weirdly few bookstores—none at all near Union Square anymore: Borders, Rizzoli, Cody’s have all vanished. Nothing left to do but “shop.”

[A collage of photos of a model in a Jean Paul Gaultier “ant-dress,” on display at the show of his fashion currently running at the DeYoung Museum in SF.]

Secondly, the publishers seem to be on the skids, at least for me. The once-welcoming Tor Books published eight of my books from 1999 – 2011. But now they’re telling me they can’t afford to publish me anymore. My old fall-back publisher Four Walls Eight Windows was bought out by Avalon, who were bought out by Perseus, and their line of books has been essentially closed down. My new fall-back publisher Night Shade Books took six months to pay me my on-publication advance for my last novel, Jim and the Flims, and who knows when they’ll put out a trade pb edition. Night Shade’s finances are so shaky that they don’t want to buy my new books either.

I think publishers are looking more for the narrow, hard-core genre kinds of things. And that’s never been my style – even when I think I’m going that route. Really, Jim and the Flims was meant to come across as supernatural fantasy, but it hasn’t gotten the traction I’d hoped.

Thirdly, ebooks are starting to matter. One of the complicating things here is that the big publishers have been so greedy about the ebooks. For one thing, they’ve been keeping the prices of ebooks artificially high—I mean, come on, all you’re selling with an ebook is an electronic file. For another, they’ve been offering their authors an unfairly low cut of the ebook profits. It’s hard to even figure out what the publisher’s offer is for many of my books that have been ebook-ified, but these days the standard seems to be 25% of whatever money the publishers actually get. A lot of authors’ think they should be betting 50% or even 75% (which is typical for foreign book sales). See this impassioned rant by thriller-author Joe Konrath.

[Typical New Yorker ice-floe cartoon I found reprinted by the Native American site Blue Corn Comics as an example of ethnic stereotyping which, come to think of it, it is. By the way, in 2012, the cartoon would be closer to current trends if the “benefits” fish were a skeleton!]

So, fourthly, I have an ongoing fear of losing all my publishers. There’s a folk myth that, in hard times, the Eskimos, more properly called Inuit, used to set aging tribe members onto ice-floes and let them drift off towards the midnight sun. You imagine the old person getting a piece of blubber or a fish to take on the floe with them. It’s not clear that this ever actually happened, but there’s an odd resonance to the tale, and I think about it a lot these days.

“Turing and the Skugs”, 40″ x 30″ inches, Oct 2010, Oil on canvas.” Click for larger version.

Adrift like this, and still waiting to sell my latest novel, Turing & Burroughs (but with a couple of prospects still pending), I’ve been unable to get motivated to continue working on my next novel, The Big Aha.

So meanwhile, in limbo, I’ve been building up my new publishing venture, Transreal Books. Sort of like a guy digging a fall-out shelter—just in case. The direct, unmediated access to readers via Transreal Books is nice. Turns out I can sell ebooks myself, and I can even sell printed books online as well.

If the biz really bottoms out for me, I’ll probably be using Transreal Books rather than going around to the truly tiny publishers—not always a pleasant process in any case. As a general (but not invariable) rule, the less someone pays you, the worse they treat you.

The catch with setting up Transreal Books is that I’ve had to put in hundreds of hours learning to use the programs Calibre, Sigil, Dreamweaver and, this week, InDesign. Whew.

In a certain way, I enjoy the programming aspects of this. I used to program a lot when I was working as a CS professor and as a software engineer, back in the ‘90s. It’s kind of like a computer game, really. Addictive, self-destructive, hypnotic. You keep Googling for help, trying things, breaking things, doing rebuilds, and slowly you converge upon the upload and then some sales. Fresh-caught fish on my ice floe.

[My old painting A Square and His Wife, recently unearthed at the offices of Monkeybrains.net, San Francisco’s only independent ISP, now blanketing the Mission with wireless access.]

Drifting towards the great horned sun.

My son Rudy and I both did presentations at the Dorkbot San Francisco meeting. Dorkbot has groups in cities around the world. Their motto: “People Doing Strange Things With Electricity.”

The Dorkbot people managed to to a live streaming video of the show, and the stream is preserved online at ustream.

Rudy the younger started his routine about 30 minutes into the stream, and I came at the end. Rudy younger was talking about his punk-ethic wireless company, www.monkeybrains.net. They’ve put maybe a thousand small parabolic antennas up around the Mission district and beyond, using a surplus Jordanian military infrared laser for their long-haul connection. He unbolted his giant laser from its building-top mount and brought it in to point at the audience, you can see it here. People were flinching. Since it’s infrared, nobody was sure if it was on. A gig per second of unseeable data.

[Photo by Karen Marcelo.]

I taped and made a podcast of my part of show. I was reading a chapter called “Jane and Me” from my novel-in-progress, which has the working title The Big Aha. It’s about the advent of some serious biotech in Louisville, Kentucky, and it’s kind of darkly funny.

You can click on the icon above to access the podcast via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

The space where we had the event was like a ground-level loft, totally full of Bay Area hipsters. The residents of the space had built these weird benches up on the walls. It felt like a Russian Revolutionary meeting of kulaks. Planning our digital revolution. None of the speakers really mentioned politics, though. At this point all that goes without saying. Internally, we’ve already seceded.

The Dorkbot SF organizer has been Karen Marcelo, a key scene-jammer who describes herself as a “bandwidth waster.” I snapped a picture of Karen with the Mondo-era SF superfreak V. Vale, famed for his RE/Search publications. I was reminiscing with Vale about the shock value of his 1989 Modern Primitives which was the first place where many of us saw photos of people with incredibly gnarly piercings and tattoos. Who can forget Sailor Sid’s highly decorated penis? Of course now the modern primatives are baristas in your local café, but Vale led them out of the darkness.

The other speakers besides the two Rudys were the post-art artist Mike Estee, who talked about his cardboard robots, and the post-science scientist Liam Holt who helped build a Syneseizure device that converts images into vibrations in speakers held against your face by a bondage mask. Somehow all the talks fit together.

An epic evening!

I’m still flapping, still trying to get fully airborne on my intended next novel, The Big Aha. But today instead of flapping, I’m playing with my blog. As so often happens here, the pictures have very little to do with the words.

View of my home office from my desk chair, January, 2012, pan made with AutoStich app on an iPhone. Click for a larger version of the image.

I’ve been wondering what advertising will be like in eighty or a hundred years. Nobody reads anymore or even watches a movie. It’s all web nuggets. They don’t “cruise” so much as “harvest” the web. The ads are like viruses, like smart drones, they hound you, they’re targeted to individuals.

In the future, some real work is being done on getting ads into dreams. Particularly if you sleep with your personalized web cruiser on. Maybe you get used to the ads in your dreams, and the ads help you sleep. As it happens, just last night, I kept dreaming I was Googling things in my dreams. How terrible.

Maybe your personal web cruiser can synch the ads you get with with you’re actually seeing in the real world. The ad-mongers might give you fake sense of synchronicity. If they can process your realworld inputs a bit faster than your brain does, and then feed in the kicker maybe ad just a a split second before you see the real thing. And you’re like, wow!

I’m also thinking about the idea that, in the future, we can use quantum engineering to make wacky matter.

The way this works is that computers of the future use quantum computation. Atoms and molecules are always doing quantum computations, even when they’re just sitting around. These computations are in fact rich enough to emulate anything that an ordinary computer could do. If we can just get the hang of how to do it, we can start having computers that are chairs, rocks, air currents, glasses of water, candle flames—whatever.

Okay, suppose that any bit of matter as carrying out a quantum computation, and that we’ve learned to interface with these computations and tweak them.

(Fun option) You dose your surroundings to make them more vibrant, more cartoony, more congenial. Slogan I’ve mentioned before, “Instead of you getting high, your house gets high!” At first it seems harmless and things snap back.

Wild turkeys spotted across the street. Gobbling softly, under their breath.

(Fear option) What if something like a computer virus infects matter, perhaps changing the laws of physics to make our world more congenial for some evil darkside hackers. Or maybe even for some type of aethereal aliens—come to think of it, I used that power chord with the Peng in Hylozoic, so this time let’s keep it more of a near-future actually-happening-in-Silicon-Valley thing, and funner.

(Change option) What if the repeatedly wacked space in some area reconfigures itself—and settles to a new stable attractor. Like that “false vacuum” power chord. Our local spacetime becomes a new domain. Or maybe just the body of one character becomes a new domain.

“What, ME cyberpunk?”

Good scene, with the wacked space. Like the ultimate hungover friend scene. He appears, tottering, and he’s somehow altered the dimensional “signature” of the spacetime in his body. His body has, like, two-dimensional time and two-dimensional space. He slides into your room, coming under your door like a menu to a Chinese restaurant.

And then we get a page or two of this wacked dude describing how it feels to be in 2D time.