Today it’s raining hard for the first time in about seven months. What we call a “storm” here in the Bay Area.

So naturally this morning I was on the freeways, driving up to the Executive Briefing Center at HP between Sunnyvale and Palo Alto. I was there to give a talk for the Institute of the Future, who were hosting a meeting on the theme, “When Everything is Programmable.” I’ve written about this line of thought in my book The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul—and of course it’s something I’ve discussed in my SF as well.

I had a PowerPoint presentation ready for my talk, with the title, “Everything is a Computation.” You can see the slides as a PDF file online. I’ve learned always to post my slides in advance like this, as so often it’s hard to get your laptop working amid the chaos of the rostrum.

My message was that, yes, it’s useful to think of the world as being made up of a lot of interacting computations: physics, biology, psychology, and society. And, yes, if we see the unfolding stream of events as made of computations we can sometimes get a better grasp on how to tweak what’s coming down. But—and this is, I would say, the key fact—naturally occurring computations are unpredictable.

Natural events are orderly enough not to be random, but they’re unpredictable in the sense that there aren’t any shortcut methods that reliably predict what will happen over any longer period of time.

That’s why weather forecasts are only good for a few days out. That’s why technical analysts don’t always win in the stock market. That’s why the legislatures can’t ever really fix things the way they’d like. And that’s why no product design is effective for more than a couple of years.

This isn’t just my crackpot opinion, by the way, it’s a formal argument from computer science. In a nutshell: natural processes are complex enough to be universal computations, and, due to the unsolvability of the halting problem, we know there’s no simple algorithm to predict the behavior of a universal computation on an arbitrary input.

What to do? Stay alert, remember that you’ll be wrong pretty soon, and be ready to change. Trust your instincts…you’ll always be smarter than your machines.

I’ve been painting pretty much this week, working on a large (40 by 30 inch) acrylic painting that I started at Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz about three weeks ago. That day I trekked down there from the parking lot with my painter friend Vernon and got the canvas covered with a light layer—when I’m en plein air, it’s all about getting the composition blocked out, and finding some of the colors, although often, back home, I’ll dial up the colors to match my memories and my aesthetics, which tend to be brighter and more saturated than reality.

[Click to see a larger version.]

It was kind of a big canvas to carry to the beach. A certain amount of blowing sand got stuck to the paint, which is nice, as it adds physical texture and a you-are-there quality. When my mother painted en plein air, she’d often bring home a little baggie of dirt or sand and mix it in with her paint.

I’m calling this one Surf Pilgrim, because there’s a surfer in the foreground with a determined look about him. As usual, you can find out more about my paintings on my Paintings page.

[This little guy showed up to watch me paint. I think he’s called a stinkbug.]

I think I saw the title phrase “Surf Pilgrims” phrase as a graffito on the sea wall near Ocean Beach in San Francisco about fifteen years ago, maybe it was spelled “Serf Pilgrims” there. And then Marc Laidlaw and I used a variation of the phrase, “Stoke Pilgrims,” as the name of a gang of surfers in an SF surfing story, “Probability Pipeline.”

[Frank’s patio.]

We were in Madison, Wisconsin, recently visiting our daughter Georgia and her family. While we there we toured Taliesin, the farmland estate where Frank Lloyd Wright had a house and a school.

[Bassist at a Madison street festival celebrating the hemp harvest.]

It’s been hard to really get cranking with the writing after the trip—times like that, it’s nice to be able to paint and get away from the computer. I’ve just been chipping away at some little things on Jim and the Flims, like fixes and a nice rewrite of my plot outline. I have a pretty good idea of what happens in the next two chapters. I’m hoping to see the Muse this coming week.

[Frank’s fountain. He had a knack for getting a nice standing wave pattern going, you see the same thing in his “Martian Embassy” building in Marin County. He died broke, having spent a lot of money on Asian art.]

I’m not sure if Surf Pilgrim has anything to do with Jim and the Flims—but you never know. I do have some scenes with surfers in the planned “Surf Zombies” chapter that’s coming up later on. And Jim might possibly encounter some beings like surfers when he sets out across the Helaven Sea. The Buddha on a standing wave…

Man, when was the last time I saw a good movie in the theaters? We do like to get out, and there’s a movie house within walking distance from our house, so we hit the theater fairly often. It’s potentially more fun than watching a rental at home.

But…Matt Damon in Informant! — ugh! I’ve always found the Matt to be physically repellent, and to see him play an unbalanced, lying sleaze-bag, wearing a kids-Halloween-costume mustache, in a seemingly endless series of scenes set in beige plastic corporate offices — ugh! The movie is so repetetive and slowly paced that, while watching it, I started wondering if my watch had stopped.

Was that movie with the stupid title even worse? I think so. 100 days of {Dullness}? Oh, wait (500) Days of Summer. Take a not-quite-love story between two completely uninteresting people and shuffle the order of the scenes. Who cares? Over and over the screenwriters have the opportunity to convey some personality and spark during this couple’s conversations—over and over they don’t even bother to try.

But, ah, wait, a ray of joy — District 9. (Are we in a period where most movies will have numbers in the titles?) The best SF movie I’ve seen since Terminator 1. (Well, make that “The best SF movie that my deliquescing brain can remember, off the cuff, after ten seconds thought, having seen since T1.” Maybe Blade Runner was better, except for the dull and gratiuitous violence at the end, so contrary to the spirit of Phil Dick. But I digress.)

The weapons in District 9 kick butt, it’s great how grotty the guns are, with those wild fractal sparks, and that you need a funky alien hand to shoot one. And, as John Shirley remarked to me, it’s quite a feat for a director to get the audience rooting for a gang of aliens who are tearing apart a human and eating him. A sensitive treatment of the difficult topic of prejudice! The main actor is great too, so weaselly and frantic and nervous and, in the end, courageous. Wonderful giant UFO, too. And the Nigerian gangsters are a trip. Bring on District 10!

Rental movies: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman! Memorably cheap special effects that are nothing like the famous poster for this film. The errant husband is hanging out in a back lot saloon with a wonderfully nasty girlfriend (Yvette Vickers, in the role of her life), and a woman’s offscreen voice yells hubby’s name very loud, “Harry!” The saloon’s doors swing open, and in slides—a stuffed cloth hand the size of a cow. “It’s your wife, Harry!” cries Yvette.

It’s so early a movie that they didn’t even have the words “flying saucer” or “UFO.” They keep talking about “the satellite”.

And now for some books…

I recently finished reading Charles Stross’s Saturn’s Children. I read slowly at first, rationing it, but wolfed down the second half in one late-running session of bedtime reading. What a feast! Really the most enjoyable SF novel I’ve read since…I don’t know, since Stross’s Accelerando—which set me on the path to writing my novel Postsingular.

I guess to some extent I’m a pre-selected audience for Saturn’s Children, in that I grew up reading Heinlein and Asimov, and Saturn’s Children is in some ways a take-off on that mode, carried out very wittily and consciously, so that, for me, the book felt like a nut-filled holiday cake stuffed with funny twists and jokes and references.

There’s a joke about the robots believing that the “Creators” (the now extinct humans) lived with Tyrannosaur dinosaurs during the “antediluvian” times—they’re getting their historical info from fundamentalist tracts they’ve unearthed.

The statue of the Maltese falcon appears, described as a “model of an extinct airborne replicator that preyed on other similar avioforms.” And the robots wonder about public bathrooms: “I keep moving, looking for an unoccupied shrine—one of those curious rooms of repose that our Creators installed in all public places.”

There’s some beautiful prose in there, too. “Jupiter is a gibbous streaky horror…while the sun, a shrunken glaring button…”

In recent years, I’d almost forgotten about the old-school SF notion of Earth spawning a civilization that spans our solar system. Stross has his his robot lead character move her physical body around with rocket ship rides, and she carries around her ancestors’ personalities in a “graveyard” box of chips. How quaint that now seems! I guess this is what they call Space Opera.

Obviously the author of Accelerando knows that it might be more plausible that robots would simply email their personalities from world to world, and store their data in a Cloud. But, given that the game is to stay in the mental mode of a Heinlein or Asimov novel, the science makes perfect sense, and I was exhilarated to swim around in it once again. Real machines you can get your hands on!

Wanting more Stross now, I’ve been reading The Jennifer Morgue this week, but it’s tweaked into a different channel—it’s a parody James Bond novel in which Lovecraftian magic plays a role. For the Strossian metahumor, the characters are aware that it’s a James Bond novel, in fact some of them have [spoiler alert] cast a spell so as to force the main character to walk the Hero’s Path of being like good old 007. And there’s yet another level…the book itself is a spell that magicks the reader into being James Bond.

The Jennifer Morgue doesn’t quite scratch my itch in the same way that Saturn’s Children did—but it’s hypnotic fun. Like in Saturn’s Children, the plot is wonderfully intricate. It’s always a joy to find out more about Lovecraft’s monsters. Like reading juicy pop gossip about your favorite stars. “Brad Leaves Angela!” “Chthonian Bones Deep One!”

I have to say that the ending of The Jennifer Morgue is a freaking blast, an insane rising arc of action…like taking off in an ejector seat at Mach 3…a final rush which was, I now recall, characteristic of the Bond novels. And, actually there IS a literal ejector involved here, only it ejects a whole car. Carefully the bonfire wood is stacked…and then WHOOOMP! Stross is a demon, an evil genius, a wicked man.

He has an interesting essay about the cultural meaning of James Bond at the back of the book, and he points out that, truth be told, SPECTRE has won out in the modern world. The biggest criminals of all are never brought to justice—they escape by controlling legislatures, by being “too big to fail,” and by manipulating the financial markets…just like Stavros Blofield might have wanted to do.

On the high-lit front, I just read Nicholson Baker’s, The Anthologist—a really terrific book about a down-at-the-heels poet who’s trying to get it together to write a longish introduction for an anthology of rhyming poetry. It’s written in the first person, with the poet going on and on about his theories on rhyme and meter, larded with gossip about poets of the past, and with the gossamer thread of a love story running through it.

The big deal in The Anthologist is the voice and the poetry of the prose. Here the narrator is describing a book of poems by John Ashbery that he just bought in an (unrealistically) well-stocked airport book store, “…although the poems themselves weren’t heartbreakers, the book made me think of the sound of someone closing the door of a well-cared-for pale blue Infiniti on a late-summer evening in the gravel overflow parking lot of a beach hotel that had once been painted by Gretchen Dow Simpson.”

I love how that description unfolds and unpacks and runs on. To really appreciate it, you have to know that Gretchen Dow Simpson’s paintings used to appear fairly often on the cover of the New Yorker, which Nicholson (and his character) tend rather to fetishize.

More high lit: This summer, I reread all four of John Updike’s Rabbit novels, Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest, assembled into a nice good-sized-print edition of two volumes. And I read his novelette postlude, “Rabbit Remembered,” which, rather chintzily, the publisher make you buy in a separate collection with the off-putting title Licks of Love.

I don’t have the time and energy to describe what I find so great about the Rabbit books, suffice it to say that it’s like wallowing in a giant soap opera that’s also high literature. A secret history of an unknown America. A true modeling of a mind. The whole thing assembled from poetic yet demotic passages tiled together into a seamless whole. And with in-your-face humor that won’t quit.

Like—Rabbit is at the funeral of a woman he had an off-and-on affair with for years. Self-involved in hiw own grief, and meaning (perhaps) to comfort her husband, Ron, Rabbit blurts out something like “She was a great lay, Ronnie.” Ron doesn’t speak to Rabbit for quite some time after that…but eventually Ron—well, read “Rabbit Remembered.”

I see Updike falling out of his chair laughing when he wrote that “great lay” line…like Franz Kafka would do when he’d read “The Metamorphosis” to his pal Max Brod.

Updike really should have gotten the Nobel Prize…in his later years he somewhat touchingly and even pathetically wrote a story about his alter ego writer-character Henry Bech getting the Prize, which reminded me of the impoverished Edgar Allan Poe launching into a very long description of the treasure trove of gold, silver and jewels that his characters unearth in “The Gold Bug.”

Last week I finished doing a major revision on Jim and the Flims. I’d had my character Weena talking in the familiar Phil-Dickian California-speak that I’ve learned to do so smoothly. But if she’s really from 1907, it really makes more sense if she has an old-timey manner of speech. So I’m going through the book, searching for every occurrence of “Weena,” and rewriting all her lines.

I have a slight worry that I’m losing some nice Val-girl zingers, like “Don’t worry,” but those are, after all, rather facile. I think it’s going to be richer and funnier if Weena talks in an odder and more high-falutin way.

Changing the Weena dialog actually took three days, it was a lot more work than I’d expected. What made it more work especially was that I ended up noticing all kinds of loose threads and inconsistencies from the accumulation of reach-back changes I’ve made. But now I think it’s pretty solid. And it is sort of more fun to have Weena talking in this 1900s-style way—at least I hope that’s the era she sounds like. I might reread some of Hinton’s “scientific romances” to check the tone.

The drudge work of doing this long revision threw me off the roll I was on before that, a lovely writing binge, tearing through the Castle chapter and into the Quest Rose chapter, all excited about the higher-degree Mandelbrot sets. It was so nice being on a roll.

I had a couple of days when all I thought about from dawn to dusk was the novel, and I was belting out more than a thousand words a day, and that’s including two or three polish-revisions. I’d almost say those are my favorite kinds of days, when I’m almost in a trance, just thinking about the book all day long, problem-solving, rockin’ it, hitting the curl.

This week I didn’t get to write on the novel at all, I had to write this 6,000 word introduction for a collection of essays about infinity, to be published by the Templeton Foundation, a group interested in promoting scientific discussions that relate to theology.

They were going to have me to write an article last winter, but I wrote an SF story then, “Jack and the Aktuals, or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory,” and the intended publisher freaked out about having an *ack* science-fiction story in their scholarly tome. But the Templeton guys were nice about it, and this spring they told me I could write an intro instead, and they even said it would be okay if I put in a plug for my “Jack and the Aktuals” story online.

I liked this development fine, but then the papers that I’d be introducing showed up at my house, and instead of reading them right away, I kept putting it off, even though I’d said I’d do the intro by mid-September.

So a few days ago, the Templeton guys emailed me, like, “Where’s the intro?” So finally I tore into reading the papers. The good ones were quite strong—some great math ones, papers about physics and infinity, and a few of strong theology papers about God and infinity—written in philosophical jargon just this side of incomprehensibility, but sort of fun to read—like listening to the twittering of alien beetles.

For most people the math papers would be the alien beetle twitters, but for me those are more like hearing jazz that’s switched (over the years since I left grad school) to some new kinds of beats.

Anyway, I actually read all the papers and wrote a six thousand word introduction. I can’t quite understand how I did that so fast. I could never write six thousand words on a novel in just a few days. Of course for my intro, I was partly able to recycle stuff that I already knew from writing Infinity and the Mind, also I was able to drop in quotes from the papers in question. But I did write quite a bit of brand new stuff as well. And it was interesting to be writing about infinity again.

But at the same time, I was in a rush to finish because I wanted to get back to Jim and the Flims. I might be able to use some of that theology stuff in there, too, when Jim meets the god-like spirit of Flimsy herself, in the center of the Helaven sea—remember, I did a painting of that spot a few weeks ago. Anyway, I’ll still be working on the intro a little next week, as there’s still two more late-arriving papers coming in, also I want to improve it a little overall.

And I have something else coming over the horizon in the next few days as well.

I may get a little writing done around the edges in the coming days, I’ll try and keep the embers alive, but I won’t be doing any all-day rockin’ on a roll for maybe a week. But then, ah then, Muse willing, I’ll be carving Flimsy again…eventually getting to the Surf Zombie chapter!